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blogging every day since January 14, 2004
He has brought Washington — Democrats and Republicans — to heel, teamed up with Elon Musk and slapped a gold “Trump” sign on Silicon Valley. The lords of the cloud helped fund the coronation, and they are making a pilgrimage here to bow to their new overlord. (This includes the C.E.O. of TikTok, who is surely hoping that his company’s sponsoring of an inauguration party and his online flattery about Trump’s 60 billion TikTok views will lead the new president to save the social media platform.) But not everyone is looking forward to what’s in store. It will be hard to forget Trump’s day of infamy, Jan. 6, as he gets sworn in at the Capitol, which was smeared with blood and feces by rioters recast by Trump and his acolytes as “hostages,” “patriots,” “tourists” and “grandmothers.”...
As for Biden:
[H]e will be merely a footnote in the vertiginous saga of how Trump won the White House again.... [T]he chip on Biden’s shoulder devoured his judgment about what was good for him, for his party and for the country. His narcissism trumped his patriotism.... Many noticed that Biden was in a fog, or “dans les vapes,” as an aide to President Emmanuel Macron of France called it....
After Donald J. Trump entered the White House in 2017, The Washington Post adopted a slogan that underscored the newspaper’s traditional role as a government watchdog: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” This week, as Mr. Trump prepares to re-enter the White House, the newspaper debuted a mission statement that evokes a more expansive view of The Post’s journalism, without death or darkness: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”
The new slogan is terrible. The old slogan was also terrible, but at least it was ridiculous. "Riveting Storytelling for All of America" is just really dumb — a dumb slogan expressing the opinion that America is dumb, but what are you going to do?
New York Governor Kathy Hochul's State of the State Address: pic.twitter.com/nFsb7Fowu0
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 17, 2025
Surely, the resemblance is intentional... but so are the differences:
Made by a man with a longtime devotion to the technique of “transcendental meditation,” Mr. Lynch’s films were characterized by their dreamlike imagery and punctilious sound design, as well as Manichaean narratives that pit an exaggerated, even saccharine innocence against depraved evil. Mr. Lynch’s style has often been termed surreal, and indeed, with his troubling juxtapositions, outlandish non sequiturs, and eroticized derangement of the commonplace, the Lynchian has evident affinities to classic surrealism. Mr. Lynch’s surrealism, however, was more intuitive than programmatic. If classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational....
ADDED: If you go to Criterion Channel right now, the first thing you see is:
As state attorney general, Moody has aligned closely with DeSantis. Her office recently sued to keep an abortion rights amendment off the Florida ballot in November, and she also defended the state’s use of taxpayer dollars to advertise against the measure. The amendment, which DeSantis also opposed, was defeated. Moody also supported DeSantis’s controversial moves to use state funds to fly undocumented immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard and California to make a political point about immigration. In 2020, Moody backed a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the election results after President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump....
The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.
What about all the lies you told for power and for profit?!
We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.
What about your abuse of power squeezing the "social platforms" to follow the narrative that served your interests?
MEANWHILE: On the NYT home page, we see Trump swooping in as the savior of TikTok:
I am wary of Chinese control over such an influential app and, potentially, its user data. But the internet is spying on us all the time, and I presume the Chinese already get a hold of a lot of that data. As for the Chinese influence over what we see... the Chinese government will surely slip some subtler nudges in among the makeup tutorials and cat videos.... But if you think that kind of gentle sculpting is so effective, you need to explain why the more overt efforts of countless establishment institutions, including our major social media companies, failed to get the American public to mask up, lock down and repudiate Donald Trump. I suspect the Chinese propagandists will simply discover what Americans already know: We’re too ornery to be controlled by anyone, including an algorithm.
We are affected by speech, and speech is important because it affects us, but the way it affects us is infinitely complicated. It's cute to use the word "ornery," but it doesn't express what we really are, and it's deceptive to refer to "control," because even if we can't be "controlled," we are open and vulnerable to complex influence. I'm "ornery" enough to resist this assurance that speech doesn't matter. I defend freedom of speech because speech does matter.
And it troubles me to see "makeup tutorials and cat videos." People who talk like that are revealing that they don't use TikTok. They don't know what it is. I could show you thousands of things that are not transitory fluff, but just as an example, let me show you this man:
I'm watching the live blogging at SCOTUSblog.
Get your fresh opinions here (on the Court's website).
UPDATE: "So we are NOT getting TikTok today. We will keep you posted (on BlueSky and on the blog's calendar) if we hear anything about a new opinion day or anything else that might shed light on when we might get an opinion."
MEANWHILE: From the London Times: "As the Supreme Court decides whether to ban TikTok in the US from next week, users have already begun flocking to another Chinese-owned app, known in English as RedNote. Xiaohongshu, which directly translates in Chinese as 'little red book,' has surged in popularity in recent days and on Tuesday it was the most downloaded free app from the US App Store. One of China’s most popular social media platforms, with 300 million users, RedNote offers similar short-form video content as TikTok — from beauty tutorials to restaurant reviews — and also serves as an online marketplace... Americans on RedNote have been drawn to the hashtag 'TikTokrefugee,' which had attracted more than 100 million views and 2.5 million discussion threads by Tuesday. In a video message posted on the app, the user Heather Roberts said: 'Our government is out of their minds if they think we’re going to stand for this TikTok ban … We’re just going to a new Chinese app, and here we are.'"
There is evidence suggesting that Hollywood film crews might be capturing footage of current fires for potential use in future movies. Several posts on X have indicated that filmmakers are taking advantage of the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles for this purpose. Users on the platform have expressed concern or cynicism about the ethics of filming such disasters, suggesting that some crews are indeed out capturing footage of the fires, especially given the proximity to iconic locations like the Hollywood sign.... There's no direct confirmation from official sources or news articles within the web results provided that Hollywood is currently exploiting these specific fires for footage, although the idea aligns with past practices in film where real-life events have been used for authenticity or stock footage.
And yes, it continues to be true that I have blogged on every single day of those 21 years.
And not just to keep up the record! I've loved it continuously from Day 1. It's been a pleasure. Thanks to everyone who's been reading, even if it hasn't been for the entire 21 years. You're here today, and that's the most bloggy thing.
POV: You died and went to hell pic.twitter.com/N6C5J1jSvr
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 14, 2025
Given Jen Rubin finally quit the WashPost -- to start a blog called "The Contrarian" with @NormEisen, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, totally known for contrarianism -- here's my absolute favorite TV clip from the Queen of Partisan Dreck:👑pic.twitter.com/s4QtI1mHnd
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 13, 2025
Don’t let anyone tell you that Starr is jumping on the country bandwagon.... he sang lead vocals on the Beatles’ version of Buck Owens’s Act Naturally on the Help! album nearly 60 years ago...“There was no plan to make a country record,” says Starr....
Discussed at X, here.NO FU*KING WAY.
— HustleBitch (@HustleBitch_) January 13, 2025
"I was just talking to Josh Green, the governor down in Hawaii, who had some ideas around some land use concerns he has around speculators coming in, buying up properties.
So we're already working with our legal teams to to move those things forward and we'll… pic.twitter.com/ed1Msb8O0v
Trump just shared this on Instagram pic.twitter.com/9pL2t2shYg
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 12, 2025
I'm trying to read "Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for DOGE to Slash Government Costs/Mr. Musk has turned to Silicon Valley to help recruit executives who will take up unofficial positions across the federal government" — in the NYT — but I was put off by the sources: "This story is based on interviews with roughly a dozen people who have insight into DOGE’s operations."
What kind of distinction is that? We've all got insight.
Let's see:
Many of the executives involved are expecting to do six-month voluntary stints inside the federal government before returning to their high-paying jobs. Mr. Musk has said they will not be paid — a nonstarter for some originally interested tech executives — and have been asked by him to work 80-hour weeks....
So I guess some of the "originally interested" offered the "insight" that it's a special sort of person who wants to work that hard and for no pay.
Writes Karen Attiah in The Washington Post... and this is well worth a free-access link.
Attiah asks the AI character, "How do you celebrate your African American heritage?" This nonexistent person — billed as "a Proud Black queer momma” — answers:
Through music, food and tradition! My family loves cooking soul food for holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa — my mom’s fried chicken and collard greens are famous! [...] How about your heritage? Any special traditions?
Annoyed at AI's posing as a real person — which seems like blackface — Attiah conducts an interrogation:
At a press conference Friday in Denmark, which exercises nominal sovereignty over Greenland, Egede said he accepted that Greenland was “a place that the Americans see as part of their world” and that while he has not spoken with Trump, he was open to “discussions about what unites us.”...
“We have a desire for independence, a desire to be the master of our own house … This is something everyone should respect,” he said. “Greenland is for the Greenlandic people. We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American. We want to be Greenlandic.”