January 20, 2025
"Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents — something I know something about."
"We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again. Under my leadership, we will restore a fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law."
Said President Trump, in his inaugural address today.
Man in shorts.
This is what it’s like bringing your engineers to a client meeting pic.twitter.com/J0y7TkUbao
— Alex Cohen (@anothercohen) January 20, 2025
I don't think I've ever watched an inauguration so closely. The indoor setting brings the focus to the individual faces...
Share your observations of the swearing in and the inaugural address.
AND: Here's the whole ceremony:
ADDED: "I was saved by God to make American great again."
The 60th Presidential Inauguration Ceremony https://t.co/kTB4w2VCdI
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2025
45 minutes and 47 seconds...
Screenshot by Meade, who vigilantly waited for this moment to honor President 45 and 47.
Biden and Trump are now riding together in the same limo — unaccompanied by wives or VPs.
What do you imagine they're saying to each other?
In another limo, Jill and Melania ride together. Care to guess what they are saying?
And then there's the limo with Kamala and JD... and the least important limo — but not necessarily the least interesting conversation — the one with Usha and Doug.
Famous faces at the inauguration church service: Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos...
Joe's expression:
I look forward to hearing him talk about how he felt.
Posing on the front steps... ready to fight... or dance.
We're told that when Trump stepped out of the SUV, President Biden said, "Welcome home." Nice.
And nice hat on Melania and purple tie on Trump. Jill leaves in brilliant blue.
That's my photo, from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, where it is 29 degrees colder than it is in Washington, where the inauguration solemnities and festivities have been moved indoors.
"The Executive Order establishes Government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female."
"All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed. Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination. 'Woman' means an 'adult human female.' The Executive Order directs that Government identification like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity. The Executive Order ends the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and taxpayer funded 'transition' for male prisoners. The Executive Order ends the forced recitation of 'preferred pronouns' and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex. This includes protection in the workplace and in federal funded entities like schools.... This order is one of nearly 200 executive actions the White House is rolling out today. Among them: orders to declare a national emergency at the border; end all DEI programs across the federal government; withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; and a return-to-office directive for federal workers."
"Such an uneven swap is not unusual. Israeli governments have long been determined to bring back captured civilians and soldiers..."
"... including dead ones, even at steep costs.... The exchange of civilian hostages for prisoners, including some whom Israel has accused of terrorism, has also raised the ire of some Israelis. In a statement celebrating the release of the three Israeli hostages on Sunday, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, hinted at some of that underlying frustration, saying the latest trade was not 'a true like-for-like exchange.' Two of the women were abducted from their homes and one from a music festival, and 'then brutally held since,' he said. 'This is a huge difference when compared to the terrorists who are being released.'"
From "What’s behind the uneven exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners?" (NYT).
From "What’s behind the uneven exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners?" (NYT).
"No, Trump Did Not Hold the Bible Upside Down at Lafayette Square."
That's a NYT headline from September 18, 2020.
Video and photographs clearly show that the Bible wasn’t upside down, as fact checkers at PolitiFact and Snopes have noted. But that hasn’t stopped the claim from spreading on social media, an example of how speculation on the internet can morph into a zombie claim that refuses to die.
But just now on CNN, as Trump entered the church, the historian chosen to provide depth and context— Timothy Naftali — repeated the longstanding and long-discredited misinformation.
"Trump to call for a 'revolution' in common sense."
Says the crawl at CNN, which I'm watching with the sound off. Lots of reporters in heavy jackets and scarves standing in front of various inauguration scenes — the Episcopal church, the line for humble citizens to get into the outdoor space for witnessing the indoor swearing in, etc.
That "'revolution' in common sense" language refers to the inaugural address, and it sounds like an interesting mix of order and disorder... and also like a reference to the Revolutionary War pamphlet titled "Common Sense."
"Biden pardons Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley and the Jan. 6 committee in an extraordinary use of presidential power against potential Trump 'revenge.'"
AP reports.
“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” Biden said in a statement. “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”It’s customary for a president to grant clemency at the end of his term, but those acts of mercy are usually offered to everyday Americans who have been convicted of crimes. But Biden has used the power in the broadest and most untested way possible: to pardon those who have not even been investigated yet....
Among the pardoned is Liz Cheney.
ADDED: Here's Biden's statement.
"What was poetry? That’s the question John Koethe asked in 'Beyond Belief,' his 2022 collection of verse."
"He was speaking about how poems come and go but none seem to make an impression. Lucy Sante framed this somewhat differently when she asked, 'Was "Howl" the last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song?'"
Writes Dwight Garner in the first paragraph of a NYT review of a new poetry book... which I, tellingly, failed to become interested in. The first sentence of the last paragraph of the review is: "This is a young person’s book." Well, then. Who was "Howl" for?
Writes Dwight Garner in the first paragraph of a NYT review of a new poetry book... which I, tellingly, failed to become interested in. The first sentence of the last paragraph of the review is: "This is a young person’s book." Well, then. Who was "Howl" for?
"Calling themselves 'TikTok refugees,' [American] users paid the 'cat tax' to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos."
"They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week? Americans also posed questions to their new friends. 'I heard that every Chinese has a giant panda,'” an American RedNote user wrote. 'Can you tell me how can I get it?' An answer came from someone in the eastern province of Jiangsu: 'Believe me, it’s true,' the person deadpanned, posting a photo of a panda doing the laundry. I spent hours scrolling those so-called cat tax photos and chuckled at the cute and earnest responses. This is what the internet is supposed to do: connect people...."
From "TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet/China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing" (NYT).
From "TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet/China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing" (NYT).
January 19, 2025
At the Sunday Night Café...
... you can write about anything you want.
No sunrise picture today. It was -4° at sunrise.
UPDATE, January 20th, 5:26 a.m.: It's -4° again this morning, and it's predicted to be -12° tomorrow at sunrise (with a "feels like" temperature of -29). I guess I'll stay in and watch the inauguration and the first 2 days of Trump, the Revenge Tour... or whatever it is. They've moved the inauguration inside, into the Rotunda, but I see the temperature in Washington today is in the mid-20s... and that's a hyphen, not a minus sign.
"And then... Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution."
"Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees. Things got really aggressive during that period. And so I go from watching Brian Williams every night and just being lied to 500 nights in a row to, basically, reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz I.G. report and being like, 'Oh, my God, none of this is true.' And then you try to explain to people, 'This isn’t true.' And then they get really mad at you because how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist?"
Says Marc Andreessen, in "How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms/Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism" (NYT)(free-access link, because there is a lot of great material in this interview, with Ross Douthat).
Says Marc Andreessen, in "How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms/Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism" (NYT)(free-access link, because there is a lot of great material in this interview, with Ross Douthat).
“I still have that throbbing feeling in my ear.”
Said Trump at his rally just now.
LATER: "We have to be protective of our geniuses. But that one is a good one" (about Elon Musk).
AND: It's funny that on the eve of the inauguration, Trump did a campaign-style rally. I remember thinking when he did a rally the night before the election that I was watching his last rally. I remember thinking it must be quite poignant for him. But here he is tonight, re-embodying Trump the Candidate, making the greatest comeback of all time. When it was all over and time to for "YMCA," we got The Village People in person....
TikTok is working in the app now.
UPDATE: I'd been enjoying TikTok for the last hour, and then when I re-opened the app, I saw this message:
Direct and specific credit given to Trump, who's getting called "President Trump" a little early, but okay.
Here's the NYT article on the subject: "TikTok Flickers Back to Life After Trump Says He Will Stall a Ban/Some users saw the social media app come back online on Sunday, following a shutdown when a federal law went into effect requiring a sale or ban."
It's less than one day. Trump will be President.
Meade has been watching the countdown clock and just sent me this screenshot:
p>
Here's the countdown clock, for your torment or amusement:
Trump inauguration
p>
Here's the countdown clock, for your torment or amusement:
Trump inauguration
I'm able to watch TikTok on my desktop computers using Safari (and Chrome).
And the embedded Rand Paul video from yesterday is displayed in the blog post, even on my phone, and it plays. Screenshot from the phone, made just now:
AND: Here's an embed to watch:
Is something changing or were browsers never shut off? I don't know.
I'm reading and listening to "Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening."
This is an interview in the NYT (free access link to the edited transcript/I listened to the full audio in the NYT audio app). Here's an excerpt. The boldface is the interviewer David Marchese:
You’re not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.
Do you think it’s better that women got the vote? I don’t believe in voting at all.
Do you vote? No. Voting basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. “What does this power mean to you?” is really the most important question. I think that what it means to most people today is that it makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter. There’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the important question of: We need a government that is actually good and that actually works, and we don’t have one.
Dave Chappelle does the opening monologue on "Saturday Night Live."
Here it is, from last night, all 17 minutes:
Taking down TikTok punched a hundred holes in my blog.
Where I had embedded video yesterday, it now looks like this:
Every post that had an embedded TikTok video now looks empty like that and is missing its point. Every post where I linked to anything on TikTok has been turned — forcibly, by our government — into something that would not be posted.
I watched a lot of TikTok yesterday, so I saw how many many TikTok creators were saying goodbye to the audience they had drawn in over the years, and now, this morning, I'm seeing mainstream media articles about how these last goodbyes sounded. The NYT has the headline "In TikTok’s Final Hours, a Mix of Silliness and Sadness." And that headline made me angry, because I didn't see "silliness." I saw sadness, but the other thing I saw was outright anger — anger at the American government for shutting down a medium of free individual speech that was an important part of life for tens of millions of Americans. Even if much of TikTok could be labeled "silly," even silly speech matters — seriously — when the government comes and takes it away.
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