Mitch's Blog

Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app. X is shrinking too but Threads is growing.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S Truman

I spent a few minutes on the Democratic Socialists of America website, paying particular attention to their platform. Much of it is aspirational and utopian and entirely agreeable. This is the world we’d like to see in 25, 50 or 100 years, not necessarily tomorrow.

However their singling out of Israel of all the nations of the world for criticism sets off a bright, blinking red light for me. I’m fine with people criticizing Israel — I am highly critical of it myself, as are many Israelis — but when a political organization or candidate criticizes Israel exclusively without also criticizing countries like Saudi Arabia and China, with which the United States also has strong ties, I strongly suspect that candidate or organization of anti-Semitism.

The DSA says Israeli and American officials who committed genocide against Palestinians should face criminal prosecution. I have no objection to that. But the DSA says nothing about Palestinians who commit atrocities against Israeli civilians. That’s a big red anti-Semitism flag for me.

Both major political parties in the US now have powerful anti-Semitic wings. I’m sure this is fine and will be no problem at all.

If you want to respond to this post by pointing out terrible things Israel did with US support, go ahead, but you’re missing the point.

I updated the template for my newsletter to set the maximum width for the body to 600 pixels, so the newsletter doesn’t stretch alllllllll the way across a widescreen. I had Claude do the code and it appeared to get it right in one shot, which is too good to be true.

If you’re reading this in the newsletter and the formatting is funny, please let me know. And if the newsletter is so badly formatted that you can’t read it, well, I hope my attempt at mental telepathy is working.

This is cool: The cast of “The Pitt” will do a live table reading of the first broadcast episode of “Star Trek” to celebrate the show’s 60th anniversary and benefit the Writers' Guild Foundation. Noah Wylie will play Kirk, and other cast participating include Katherine LaNasa, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Shabana Azeez and Ayesha Harris

We missed the San Diego Carnivorous Plant Society Sale and Show. It was last weekend. Darnit!

In other news: San Diego has a carnivorous plant society. Is it a society of carnivorous plants?