Latest Thoughts

With respect to Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s blowout, I can do no better than to quote Martha Wells: “The sense of urgency just wasn’t there. Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.” Two malignant narcissists with more money and power than kindness or good sense want to get into a useless pissing match, well, that’s one more thing I don’t need to pay attention to. I highly recommend not paying attention to it yourselves.

Some people are making a big deal of Trump’s threat there will be “serious consequences” if Musk supports any Democrats in response to their blowout. Yes, the idea of a President threatening a U.S. citizen for their peaceful exercise of their First Amendment rights is troubling, but no, not in the case of Musk. I’m pretty sure he can afford a good civil rights attorney. Afford every good civil rights attorney in the nation, come to think of it. Trump’s talk is useless bluster, as useless as the rest of him.

The Kilmar Abrego García case is revealing people’s profound ignorance of logic. We are being constantly presented with a binary choice between Abrego García being a bad guy who deserves to be in an El Salvadoran secret prison, or an undocumented immigrant innocent who’s being horribly mistreated by the government.

The problem with this logic is simple: that’s not how binary choices work. A binary choice does not ask us to choose between A and B; it only asks us to accept or reject A. The moment you introduce alternatives it stops being a binary choice, and I can’t believe I have to remind people of that.

This is my longwinded way of saying: yes, we mistreated him, denied him due process, and shipped him to an evil and ugly place in violation of our binding promise to him we wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean he’s a good guy or that he shouldn’t be deported or anything else: it only means we wronged him.

García is being extradited back to the United States to face federal charges which, if found guilty of, will qualify him for the express train straight back to El Salvador… and, I have to be honest, I’m fine with that. He’s got a huge amount in his legal defense fund and will have his pick of fine attorneys and all the criminal protections found in the Constitution: if the government convicts him it will only be by the overwhelming weight of evidence, as it ought be. And if, either subsequent to conviction or follow-up immigration court proceedings, he’s ordered out of the country, I’m fine with that, too.

Trump is mobilizing 2,000 California national guardsmen and, it’s said, a detachment of active-duty Marines so that he may “restore order” in a lawless Los Angeles where about two dozen people are actively resisting ICE raids. Mark my words: in the next 24-48 hours the State of California is going to head to federal court to get an injunction against this, as federal law doesn’t authorize the President to take the lead on state-level rebellions.

(Well, maybe it does. See 10 U.S. Code § 12406, which is written so broadly as to arguably be unconstitutional.)

Rather, the Constitution says the opposite: the President is required to support the state governor in putting down the rebellion, which means that without a declaration of rebellion from the state governor there’s nothing for the President to do. But this is a level of Constitutional analysis that a reasonably bright middle school student could understand, meaning it far escapes the President’s meager facilities.

Short version: experience not recommended.

About two weeks ago I lost the ability to stand. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to: I did. It was that my muscles were laughing at me when I told them to move. Having been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, this is the sort of thing that happens sometimes—psychomotor retardation being one of MDD’s major symptoms and all.

After a few days I realized I wasn’t getting better. I talked to my friends and we agreed I’d go into the psychiatric ward voluntarily, without fuss. My good friend Eugene stopped by to help clean my place while I couldn’t, and my physical condition scared him to death. He realized, correctly, I was in a major complex medical crisis.

On Memorial Day he and another friend, Chip, woke me up at eight for an intervention. I was still unable to get up, so the fire department took me to the emergency department where it was discovered my blood hemoglobin level was 4.8 grams per decileter.

Hemo is the chemical that carries oxygen to your cells. A “normal” level is hard to define, human variation and all, but most authorities say a 14 g/dL is normal, below 10 is an immediate medical concern, below 7 justification for immediate blood transfusions, and below 5 simply incompatible with life.

I was at a 4.8 and had been crashing for weeks.

So, I’m still in the hospital right now. I won’t be out for another few days. But I am recovering, and I’m grateful. I’m almost certainly going to have a stew of short-term and long-term damage from sustained oxygen starvation, but right now it looks as if I’ve escaped major neurological or cardiac damage.

My psychiatrist has warned me to be careful. Minor brain damage can do anything from destroy your bladder control to remove your ability to rhyme words that end in “-usy”. I’m going to discover the hard way what my new limitations are. He’s urging me to be merciful towards myself. I think that’s a good idea.

No, we don’t know the root cause (yet). And, to be honest, I’m not going to tell you anyway. It’s not important you know.

What’s important you know:

I almost died.

I’m recovering.

Enjoy every sandwich.

I was eleven when John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China came out and wrecked me for life. Written by many of the same people responsible for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, it has that same rollicking glee, as if it were a movie of unexplored hyperlinks assembled by a brilliant teenager with unlimited creativity and a still-emerging sense of good taste.

In one pivotal scene the heroes pause for a drink in, of all things, the personal mini-bar of the immortal Chinese warlord they’re trying to kill. (I warned you it was that kind of movie.) Here, the friendly wizard Egg Shen reveals he’s brought with him the legendary Six Demon Bag —

“Terrific. Sensational. A Six Demon Bag,” one hero says dryly, unimpressed. “What’s in it, Egg?”

“Wind! Fire! That sort of thing!” Egg declares proudly…

… and we never see it get used again.

Heck of a wasted opportunity, if you ask me.

In the early 2000s I was in graduate school for computer science, and knew in the future I’d want to stake out my own personal domain. I registered sixdemonbag.org, because, hey: there are many worse things to be than an organization devoted to wind, fire, and all those sorts of things.