🔗 Congress Pushes DHS for Details on ICE’s New Facial Recognition App:

In their letter the lawmakers ask Noem questions about the app’s legality, including ICE’s legal basis to use the app to conduct biometric searches on people outside ports of entry; the databases Mobile Fortify has access to; any agreements between CBP and ICE about the app; information about the usage of the app, such as the frequency of ICE searches using the tool and what procedures ICE officials follow with the app; the app’s accuracy; and any policies or training to ICE agents on how to use the app.

“To ensure ICE is equipped with technology that is accurate and in compliance with constitutional and legal requirements, the Committee on Homeland Security is conducting oversight of ICE’s deployment of the Mobile Fortify application,” the letter says.

I’m glad they are pushing Noem et al. on this, but the accuracy (or the lack thereof) of the tool is beside the point.  Even if this app were 100% accurate and never generated any false positives, it is a blatant invasion of privacy and ought to banned outright.

I am sure there will be a lot of eye-rolling “Oh good—a strongly worded letter” responses about this inquiry, but this is exactly the sort of pressure that is needed across the board. 

Sufficient? Certainly not, but it is absolutely necessary. The crooks and cronies that staff the Trump regime are fundamentally lazy and small-minded, and they need to be endlessly hassled about everything they are trying to do. It feels asymmetrical when they have their goon squads out kidnapping and killing people, but I think the asymmetry is the point here.

And I have to say 404 Media is really doing outstanding work.

Beardy Star Stuff, via Mastodon:

A part of all this is a shift in how we think about these spaces and the people in them. As we extend empathy, build relationships and solidarity, we transition from passive observers to active relationship builders.

• I defend my neighborhood.

• I defend my neighbor (who is someone I actually now know and have shared a meal with in my home)

• I check on my neighbor

• I actively walk/patrol my street with a neighbor/partner

This is active neighborhood/community citizenship and democracy.

That post comes toward the end of his thread about the need for and some mechanisms to start building community connection and action for mutual aid and resistance in the face of worsening socio-political conditions here in the US.

The whole thread is great and worth reading. The reason I pulled out this particular post from it is that what Denny says here about knowing our neighbors, making and making real connections with them, and looking out for one another seems like one of the most important things we can all be doing right now. It is not only a way to not feel powerless; it is a critical building block for any other kind of political action.

I went to the bakery/pastry shop in town this morning as is my normal routine on Saturdays. I got three pastries and a bagel—everything, toasted, with scallion cream cheese. While paying for it, the family group chat lit up with a bunch of logistics discussion about the rest of the morning, and I ended up completely forgetting the bagel, which was still going through the toaster.

Realizing my mistake only when I got home, I went back 20ish minutes later. Not only did they still have my bagel, it was even still slightly warm.

There’s a lot of awful, shitty stuff going on in the world and while I don’t want to ignore all of that, I am trying to follow my own advice to not lose sight of the nice things in the midst of all of it.

🔗 These Go To Eleven • Bix dot Blog:

In some sense and to some degree, this is why the television adaptation of Station Eleven speaks to me as deeply as it does. It’s undeniably dystopic for the world to endure a decimating global pandemic. Yet the entire premise of the show is that both community and art allow that dystopic era to become, slowly and with work, something else. That whataver happens, there is the capacity for and possibiltiy of renewal, but only if we confront the trauma and only if we do it together.

Yes! I distinctly remember while reading Station Eleven, feeling somewhat disoriented that things were not worse for the survivors. Wait, no zombie hordes? No Thunderdome? I kept waiting for something or someone to attack, because that is waht always happens in these stories.

To be clear, the future presented here is not great and there are plenty of threats in the post-catastrophe world, but Bix is absolutely correct here—the story Station Eleven tells (in both the book and the TV series) does a great job of depicting a different way of dealing with a bad future.

I have felt for a while now that telling a story of the future where everyone is fighting and everything is terrible is like shooting fish in a barrel. It is shortcut for seeming profound, insightful, and realistic. “Look—don’t you see how dark the heart of humanity is?” YES WE ALL SEE THAT. We get it, because we have been beaten over the head with it for decades now.

What we need are more stories like this, where—as Bix notes—we can start to get an inkling of how things could be different.

I am tired of struggling to remember what albums I’ve listened to and (more importantly) which ones I liked and want to return to. This problem came up again this morning when the 15yo was asked “What was that one album we listened to and liked?” and I had no idea which one he was talking about. 

Granted, he didn’t give me much detail to go on, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered, as I am absolutely terrible at remembering these albums even just a few days after I first listen to them.

I am hoping that writing a quick synopsis and opinion of each album as I listen to it will help me remember them better. If nothing else, it will start building me a growing collection of mini-reviews. I’ve done six so far today, and it really has not take that much time or effort to knock out a few sentences on each album.

And can I just say that Album Whale is kind of perfect for this purpose? I do sort of wish that I could push (or pull) these posts into my main blog, but it’s not the end of the world if I can’t, and TBH I have been finding myself kind of leaning away from having all of this crap all wired together and automated. 

Everything does not need to be in the same place, and trying to get it working that way is often more trouble than it’s worth.

Last night as I was walking out of the place where my kid goes for his cello lesson, I noticed this old phone on the wall:

Out of curiosity, I picked up the receiver. Unsurprisingly, there was no dial tone. As I had the receiver in my hand, though, I noticed the label in the center of the dial where it lists the phone number:

Rotary phones were still quite common when I was a kid. I even still had one in the first apartment I moved into after college; I had taken it from my parents’ house and it still said “Property of Indiana Bell” on the bottom. I eventually got rid of it because my long-distance calling card (remember those?) required keying in the card number on a keypad. I would have to wait for a operator and then read my card number off to them, and one of them finally said to me “You know you can just buy a touch-tone phone, right?”

But the old 2L-5N exchange naming convention had, as far as I know, already been entirely phased out by the time I was old enough to be aware of phones and phone numbers. Even the earliest phone numbers I remember were of the 7-digit (plus 3-digit area code for long distance) variety that is still around in the US. 

That was the late 1970s, and the only reason I even know about this older format is from hearing it on reruns of old black-and-white TV series from the 1950s and 60s, e.g., Della Street picking up the phone and asking to be connected to Klondize 63-whatever on Perry Mason. 

So this phone has presumably been hanging there on the wall for well over fifty years at this point.

I will admit there is part of me that wanted to just grab it and take it. Probably no one would notice, but that would be a pretty crummy thing to do. Maybe I need to go back todY and ask someone there if I can have it.

🔗 Astronaut medical issue on ISS forces early return for space station crew | Reuters:

Jan 8 (Reuters) - A “serious medical condition” with a crew member aboard the International Space Station has led NASA to bring the astronaut and three crewmates back to Earth months earlier than planned, the first such emergency return in the orbiting laboratory’s 25-year history, senior space agency officials said Friday.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in a short-notice press conference in Washington told reporters that he and medical officials made the decision to return the astronaut, whom he did not identify, because “the capability to diagnose and treat this properly does not live on the International Space Station.”

Yes, yes—patient privacy and all that, but I’ve seen too many goddamned sci-fi/horror movies that start this way and JESUS H CHRIST 2026 I DO NOT NEED THIS.

🔗 Mad Max: An Australian Road Fable for an Ultraviolent World - Reactor:

The Mad Max films have so powerfully influenced cinema’s collective vision of the dystopian near future that it’s hard to speculate how we might imagine the future without them. Even stories that don’t explicitly show a Mad Max-style future, with the lawless wastelands filled with violent roving gangs and so on, will often contain a hint that those elements are out there somewhere, or have existed in the past as a necessary step between tearing down an old world and building a new one.

Sure, plenty of other films, both before and after, have contained the same elements: extreme violence driving reasonable men over the edge, the charismatic psychopathy of amoral sadists, the fine line between civilization and barbarism, the suffocating paranoia of impending societal collapse. But the Mad Max films combined those elements with a striking aesthetic and tone that have never stopped guiding how we conceive of a bleak near future.

A few days ago, I was thinking about how, while many people have a very specific and set idea of what societal breakdown will look like—chaos, death, roving gangs fighting over dwindling resources—no one actually knows if that is true. It is all, like so many things these days, based on what we have seen in movies and TV shows (and increasingly, video games).

And what’s funny about that is that all of these bleak depictions of the future can largely be traced back to a very small handful of sources. For a while now, I have thought that the single biggest influence on our shared vision of a bleak future has been Blade Runner, with its vast factory/cityscapes, perpetual darkness and rain, and megacorps. TBH I think its influence in that regard outstrips its qualities as a film.

(And yes, I know you think it’s the greatest film every made, but I don’t and I don’t feel like fighting about that on the internet. Don’t @ me).

But yeah—I think maybe Mad Max has been even more influential, especially Mad Max 2, known over here as The Road Warrior. I can’t even begin to count how many works have used its template of resource scarcity and violent bands roving the wasteland as their vision for the future. For a good chunk of the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed like every third tape on the video store shelf was some post-apocalyptic desert setting with Our Heroes on the run from leather-clad mutants or warlords.

I guess my broader point here is that, yeah, maybe that’s what the future will be like, or maybe it will be a rain-soaked, neon-lit cyberpunk megacity run by all-powerful corporations. But maybe—just maybe—it will be something entirely different.

The thing about works of fiction like Mad Max and Blade Runner is that, while they may be set in the future, they are commentaries upon and reflections of the present, or of the present when they were made, which for both of these films is now more than forty years old. Great movies though they may be, I feel like it is well past time to come up with some different visions and stop accepting that the future these works depict is the only choice we have.

🔗 Crude Ideology - by John Ganz - Unpopular Front:

Trump announced, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” The oil executives might blanch a little at the spending billions of dollars part. Fossil fuel analysts have pointed out the extremely high capital expenditures—tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars— would be required to increase production through Venezuela’s neglected infrastructure. American capitalists have been very reluctant in recent years to undertake any type of big capital expansion, let alone one in a very unstable and uncertain part of the world. The decline in oil prices makes a big capital investment even iffier for Big Oil.

Trump’s picture of what US oil companies look like, want, and can do is—like everything else in his pickled and deteriorating brain—completely stuck in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

“It’s about the oil” is a pretty common, understandable, and entirely justifiable response to any US military adventurism like this. In this case, however, I think it is only true in a sort of tangential way.

🔗 That’s just how media discussions go:

They say this is a weird thing about the discourse around this show, but I’d say this is how the discourse is around every piece of media these days. I continue to think that social media warps our minds by rewarding and therefore encouraging extreme takes. You either loved something or your hated it, nuanced options like, “I didn’t like all of it, but there was enough there for me to enjoy” doesn’t exactly pop off on socials, you know?

Yep, my going-in assumption for most social media takes and discourse like that is that it’s all about the engagement.

Even if people aren’t doing it intentionally—and I tend to think many (most?) of them aren’t—it is really hard not to be pushed in the direction of more extreme opinions by the structure of the big social media platforms.

🔗 ‘Quite Achievable’ For Whom? • Bix dot Blog:

Is it more important to evangelize that everyone run as much of their own shit as humanly possible, or more important to evangelize the ways in which they can get off extractive silos by choosing more ethical services that do various aspects of the hard work for them? For that matter, is it more important to be out there building the more ethical services that would do various aspects of the hard work for them?

Bix is exactly right here, and I think at least some of the answer maybe lies in those of us who do know how to do it (and have the time and resources to invest in doing it) figuring out ways to help those who don’t know how to do it or aren’t able to do it.

Maybe that means starting up a small server or instance or domain where some of your friends and family can post. Maybe it means a community co-op that builds this stuff for a slightly larger group of folks and figures out ways to do community outreach. Maybe it means organizing a low-key workshop at your local public library. Maybe it means a hundred other things I’m not thinking of, but someone else might.

Regardless, we need to get past this “Just go out and do it!” mentality, of which I am occasionally guilty myself.

Long-term, I feel like most of this stuff—online publishing and communications, for lack of a better bucket—ought to be treated more like a public utility. I’d say it should be like the public library, where there are friendly, helpful people whose job it is to get you connected to the thing you’re looking for and it’s all free, except (at least here in the States), that concept is increasingly under threat. And anyway, saying what it ought to be like gets us into the usual how-do-we-get-there-from-here conundrum. Yeah, that’s what it should be like, but it’s not, so what do we do about that?

What the US did in Venezuela this past weekend is morally, legally, and strategically indefensible, and what the Trump regime has been saying about it in the aftermath is ludicrous and offensive. But what they are saying and the reality of the situation are two wildly different things.

The Venezuelan government is still there. The administrative state is still functioning. There is no meaningful US troop presence in the country, and while there has been an off-shore naval build-up, it is nothing close to what would be required to actually take over the country in any meaningful way.

And let’s not forget… none of the clowns, fools, cretins, and crooks in the Trump regime has the attention or capacity to plan anything on the order of a full-scale takeover of a country. What they know about taking over a country comes from what they have seen on TV and in movies; if they can produce something that looks like that, then they can say they have done it. More importantly, Trump can say he’s done it and it makes him feel like The Big Man.

The risk is not so much that the US is going to launch some full-scale regime-change operation like Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather that their fumbling about will destabilize the country and eventually the entire region.

Digby wrote  on her blog earlier today:

But I think we do have to take seriously the idea that there is a movement a foot in the Republican Party that’s eagerly following the Stephen Miller line that says America is a superpower and we take what we want, just like the imperial powers of the 18th and 19th centuries. They see a fight for resources and technology — oil, “rare earth minerals”, AI etc., and the need for a huge military buildup to back up their ambitions.

They are rapidly throwing the old order into the garbage — the idea of a laws based international order, guaranteed by institutions and formal diplomatic and military alliances is rapidly becoming a relic of the past. You can see people accepting the idea that there is no need for even a pretense that might doesn’t make right anymore.

That’s it, right there. A bunch of puffed-up idiots think they have world-changing powers, and they’ve all come up in a fake-it-til-you-make-it hustle culture.

Again, I want to emphasize that none of what I’m saying here is intended as a defense of what they’re doing or an attempt to say it is not a big deal. As I said at the outset, what they’ve done and how they are talking about it is indefensible.

The thing is, as much as I think that advice is correct, I hate the context in which Professor Shukichi is giving it. Maybe he’s right, but he is also the one forcing Noriko into marriage, and she has just told him she doesn’t want to do it, that she already has everything she needs.

It’s a really fine line between making the best of your situation and toxic positivity, huh?

 🔗 The Case for Blogging in the Ruins:

Diderot’s project was fundamentally about building infrastructure for thinking. He wanted to create a shared repository of human knowledge that anyone could access, organized in a way that invited exploration and cross-referencing. He believed that structuring information properly could change how people thought.

He was right.

270 years later, we have more information than any civilization in history. But aside from Wikipedia, we’ve organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability.

Joan is right. Read the whole post.

Then go start your own, and stop turning all your thoughts over to extractive industries. Get a notebook and a pencil, and write what you’re thinking there. Start a blog. Write it there.

Don’t know how to do any of that? There are plenty of options; they all take time and work, but everything worthwhile takes time and work.

And there are plenty of us who have done it and can help you figure out what will work for you.

You are not powerless, and you are not alone.

The thing where my car won’t remote-start while it is plugged in so I have to trudge out in 13F weather at six in the morning to unplug it so that I can remote-start it to warm it up is annoying.

This is not a complaint about EVs, btw—I love my EV!—but more about designers not thinking things through.

It is in the same category as flush door handles designed by people who have apparently never lived in a place where that sort of thing gets frozen shut on a daily basis, or screentime controls built by people who never had kids.

Having grown up a white kid in Indiana in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I still feel like I am hard-wired to love Led Zeppelin, and I basically don’t think they ever made a bad song. Go ahead—say “Carouselambra”—I dare you. I will fight you and you will lose.

So I would be pretty hard-pressed to say what their best song is. “In the Evening” would be near the top of my list, probably, and “Over the Hills and Far Away”, too.

But if you absolutely forced me to name one song I like the best, I think I might actually go with “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”.  That song fucking rules.

🔗 Everything is possible and nothing is pre-ordained:

Surely, we tell ourselves, there was something different about those heroes of the past. They were made of something that we aren’t. Bolder, flintier stuff. Couldn’t be us. The only stories we believe about ourselves are tales of nihilism and presumptive failure. That social movement business works somewhere else, but we’d surely muck it up. In our towns, you see, all the existing activists are annoying and all the strangers are either hateful or apathetic. We tried solidarity once, and it failed. Or we never tried it, because we knew it would fail. It’s harder now, you see. We have billionaires. And phones. Have you heard about he phones? Everybody’s glued to them.

Don’t give up hope. 

Keep trying, even if only a little bit is all you can do.

And don’t listen to the people insisting that we are powerless, that there is nothing we can do, that everything is corrupted and broken.

I posted recently about how AI-generated hero images on blog posts are a particular pet peeve of mine.

Today, I ran across a particularly egregious example:

I spent a bit of time searching, and I am 99% sure this is not actually a real XKCD comic. I had to spend some time searching, because Mr. Yu did not provide any credit info for the image. If I am wrong and this image is real, my apologies, but then I have questions as to why Yu didn’t credit the image creator.

 So while my search was not entirely exhaustive, I am pretty certain this image is not the work of Randall Munroe. Instead, it seems like Yu has used some LLM to generate a comic that looks exactly like an XKCD strip to trick us all into thinking it is real.

My question for Mr. Yu, then, is why the hell I should bother reading anything else he has to say. Literally the largest and most prominent thing in his post is fake. It is intended to deceive the reader of the post. And I do mean intended, because it’s not even like Yu just did a search for images that might be applicable to his post; no, it seems like he deliberately created one that rips off a well-known artist.

Maybe the rest of Yu’s post is great? I have no idea, because I didn’t bother reading it, and I didn’t bother reading it because I don’t trust a guy who puts some bullshit like this right up at the top.

I just finished watching Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 film Tokyo Story, which somehow I had never seen before.

It is just as good as everyone says, and I find myself wanting to binge a bunch of his other films. Fortunately for me, such a binge is totally possible thanks to my Criterion Channel subscription.

One thing I have heard pretty frequently about Ozu as a filmmaker is that he was a minimalist. Granted, I have only seen one of his films so far, but I don’t buy it. Sure, he barely ever moves the camera and does not rely heavily on editing, but there in nearly every one of his shots, there is a ton going on in the frame.

Even if you don’t include the work the actors are doing, nearly every single one of Ozu’s shots is filled with layers and depth. There is something happening in the foreground, something happening in the middle ground, and something happening in the background, and it is all held together by the lines and angles of the space he has created around the scene. Instead of the camera and the editing creating the movement, the framing and mis en scene itself does it by guiding your eye around the screen and linking all the various components together.

I feel like it is an entirely different film language than what we are use to. The naïve take on it is that there is nothing happening or that the film is static and slow, when it is actually the opposite. I love it and I could watch this stuff all day.

Hasumi rejects the notion of style itself, both for its formalism (reducing Ozu to set formal effects) and for its refusal to see that Ozu—as well as cinema itself—can never be reduced to generalized patterns or rules of filmmaking.

— from the introduction to the English translation of Shiguéhiko Hasumi’s Directed By Yasujiro Ozu

That part about trying to reduce cinema to a set is generalized patterns almost perfectly sums up my complaints about what has come to be the dominant form of American film criticism these days, i.e., guys talking on YouTube about movies.