Good morning, friend. Hello. How are you on this Wednesday? I, myself, woke up and successfully peeked at the news without a new fresh insane horror rearing its head. It’s nice to know that you can still sleep for eight hours and not have the world further implode while you’re asleep. That’s about all we got these days.

Storm’s a comin. Maybe 8 inches this weekend. Supposed to sell cookies. Kinda think that might not happen.

Reminder before I get into the shit that you can buy girl scout cookies. Is “girl scout” capitalized? Seems like it shouldn’t be but I think it is? Anyway. Cmon man, the world’s burning. Have a cookie. I am all about Adventurefuls this year.

Just gonna rant today, you can probably skip it. The rant is the penance, it’s my rosary, my whip across my back. It’s therapy and guilt and helplessness.

And before I start, just go donate. You’ll feel better reading this after giving $50. I promise. I mean, just a little bit.

As I was watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the Davos tools last night, I thought to myself that it was nice to finally see a single person in power do something about this catastrophe. Because this, it seems, is the central problem here: there are a 100+ million Americans looking on in horror, wishing something could be done, wishing they themselves could do something other than call their unfeeling congresspeople. And then there is an elite, around the world, who are in positions of power to do something and just… aren’t doing anything. You could put my eight-year-old daughter into Chuck Schumer’s position and I stronly suspect the country would be better off. Every man on the street knows what to do more than that fucker. And I was a Schumer apologist! Less than a year ago! I mean, never a fan, but an apologist.

My subconscious, through all of this, has assumed that we would make it back. I can still imagine a path in my head to make it back. But barely. And I am, I’m not gonna lie, losing hope. Okay, not hope. Optimism. Hope and optimism are two different things, hope is a choice, etc. etc. I still believe that and I will still operate as if we are going to survive this.

But jesus. More and more I have found myself realizing we might not make it back. And the worst is, it’s not even so much because of Trump, it’s because of every other fucker in government. The founding fathers foresaw Trump. They did not foresee the entire government, all three branches, letting it happen. Well, they did. They just knew that meant the end.

This week the DHS funding bill is going through, and Dems do not seem to be unifying against it. Some of the more level-headed ones are, but Chuck? Hakeem? They seem inclined to let it pass. Why? I can’t tell. The whole thing is impossible to decipher. The final text isn’t out (I don’t think), reps aren’t saying how they’ll vote (I don’t think). I have zero idea how to find out what my rep is even thinking. She hasn’t written a single fucking constituent email through all of this, most liberal district in the state. WHY. I THINK she’ll vote no? But I don’t know how to find out. I don’t know whether to yell at her or applaud her. I’m so deep into this but you gotta go deeper, deeper, be a fucking research analyst to even figure out what’s going on.

Dems seem to have decided “it won’t make a difference,” to stop the bill. Because Trump can just take the money from somewhere else. Because someone, somewhere, has deemed ICE “essential operations” of the government. As if you couldn’t challenge that in court, as if what is happening in Minnesota is “essential operations.”

As if symbolic fights and victories mean nothing.

But hey Bill and Hillary might be going to jail in the next month. At least someone is willing to take a fucking stand.

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We are listening to Victory at Sea this morning, the brilliant 90’s Boston slowcore indie band lead by Mo Elliot, who used to occasionally smile or nod her head at me at TTs and the like and it would send me into a spiral and I would be lost for a week. My god, Mo was the best. To the point where, hey, 25 years later I have, this week, completed my years-long effort to acquire vinyl copies of all five of the Victory at Sea albums. Well, okay, The Good Night was never issued on vinyl, I have it on CD. Maybe I can get them to re-issue it. Kimchee was a great label, but like all of us in the early oughts, they really let themselves go when it came to vinyl editions.

The album is Carousel, their second album, which I repatriated from the west coast by purchasing a copy from the Telegraph Ave location of Amoeba records, the OG location, the one I first set foot in in 1988. Man those guys know how to a) write a record description for Discogs, and b) package a record. All-pro at Amoeba, I would expect nothing less.

So I took Friday off in solidarity with this strike happening in Minnesota. It is not entirely clear to me, as I have discussed at length in previous editions, how a CEO of an adtech company is supposed to support a general strike in another state, especially when his company is a small competitor to giant evil monopolies, and turning the system off would just give monopolists more power, news platforms less money, and generally help no one. So I’m just gonna not work, myself. Is it being a schlub if you use a vacation day on a strike? I mean, I’m the boss I don’t need to use a vacation day, I figured actually using one was more of a sacrifice than not? Maybe I should stalk the account team Slack groups and whenever a customer asks some question like “hey could you please pause our connection with demand partner X” I just chime in something like “STAND UP TO TYRANNY! NO KINGS! FIGHT!” That would be awesome. I would be making a difference, right?

It’s (morbidly, depressingly) interesting to think of the entire internet apparatus and its functionality as the global economic order falls apart. How long would adtech keep working? How long would ACH keep working? Google? The blockchain? Would there be exploitive opportunities? Probably, right? It’s weird there was no Star Trek episode where they land on a planet and all the humans have wiped themselves out but ads are still being bought and sold and AIs are still helpfully answering stupid questions that other AIs are asking, and LinkedIn is still chattering away, filled with business and entrepreneurial success. I mean there was an episode where they landed on a planet where only an actual intelligent AI was still running, managing the whole planet quite efficiently. But, ha ha. Who are we kidding. One earth, the A stands for abominable.

What would break first, I wonder. All of our previous suppositions about global conflict involved China or Russia. I doubt anyone’s ever really thought about Internet resilience in the wake of a NATO breakdown. Like it seems safe to say that the Danish and the Dutch would stand in EU solidarity, and the US would lose its access to ASML, the only company in the world capable of doing a certain part of advanced microchip manufacturing, so, you know, no more Apple Silicon or Nvidia chips, even if Taiwan did cling to us and pray we defended them when China invaded. Would all those transatlantic cables go dark? Would my American friends in European jobs all get ejected? Would Apple break into two companies like Underburg did in WWII? Would InterNIC keep working? Would DNS? AWS? Equinix? Would I be able to call Jenna in Barcelona?

Do Americans know they will be maybe losing their LEGO and Wegovy soon? Maybe this is only worrisome to overweight parents.

This is all so stupid.

So, here’s to the people who are standing up. Schumer can fuck off, Jeffries can fuck off, but here’s to the people of Minnesota, an inspiration and guide-book to us all. The local branch of the Teamsters, Canadian PM Mark Carney. That Ford worker. You guys are doing what you can. We need more of you.

That random Ford worker for president.

Being a parent in this shit is so surreal. We are so past the “oh god why did I bring a kid into this world” phase. That was, god, eight years ago now, Trump 1.

Jane had a doctor’s appointment yesterday that she didn’t want to go to, Emma had to drag her. This lead to an X-Ray appointment that she didn’t want to go to, I had to drag her, because Emma is done with it. So I stood in the X-Ray lab with Jane for five minutes while Jane stood still about two feet from where I needed her to stand still, while the X-Ray technician looked on confused and sort of helpless. Not a child-person that guy. Eventually we got some nice clean pictures of her knees, which are fine. Maybe it’s growing pains. Lord knows her daddy had them. Emma and I are both finishing up our rounds of antibiotics, and both of us are still sick, so my mind has convinced me we both have drug-resistant tuberculosis, because in the words of John Green, everything is tuberculosis. Jane has no school again today. I peeked in on her when I got up at the blissfully late 7:30 and she was still sleeping.

We are both so screwed when we have to get up at 6:30 tomorrow.

Country playlist today. All newish stuff except for the John Prine song, which appeared in the turgid post-partum exploration Die My Love that I watched last night that was maybe not a wise move. God bless Dolly Parton, she still has hope and she is trying to give it to us. We should listen.

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Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory

Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory

Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.