I remember 9/11 very well in terms of my personal experience. Everyone around my age does, I think. But I’ll tell you mine.

I woke up at 7 a.m., which was a little late. We had to be at school by 7:45, and I threw on some clothes, jumped into the car I’d only had for two months, picked up my neighbor Sarah, and started driving.

She told me something had happened. Her parents were saying something had happened. But it didn’t mean much to us, so we didn’t even turn on the radio. We just kept listening to awful 2001 music.

We got to the parking lot where the underclassmen had to park, about half a mile from school, and I realized I didn’t have any shoes. I’d run out of the house in my socks assuming there would be shoes somewhere in my car. There weren’t.

So I was like, “Oh shit, I guess we have to walk to school with me having no shoes,” and we started walking. Then a senior we knew pulled over and offered us a ride. She gave me her sandals and said the local radio station had been really confused about whatever was happening. We listened as the FM DJs rambled through AP wire reports.

In reality, both towers had already been hit, and the Pentagon was about to be.

We got to homeroom at 7:45 and everyone was looking at mobile news on their Nokia phones. You could basically just get headlines: two planes hit the towers. Then someone came in and said the Pentagon had also been hit.

At that point it was obvious to everyone that this was an attack.

We went to our first real class, which started more or less normally. A few minutes in, someone came in and said one of the towers had collapsed. The class just stopped. Everyone left and started milling around the school.

Soon we were herded into the theater for an all-school assembly. The headmaster said there had been an attack in New York, that school would continue, but that anyone who felt they needed to leave should feel free to do so.

Sarah and I immediately thought: We’re going to fail this chemistry test, so we should leave.

I went up to the chemistry teacher and said, “Sarah and I are leaving. I’m sorry we’ll miss the test.”

He said, “We aren’t doing any tests today. We’re going to walk down by the river and talk about our feelings.”

I said, “Oh. Okay.”

And we left anyway.

We drove to what I remember as McDonald’s, although Sarah insists it may have been a hot dog stand called Hot Dog Adventure. Then we went back to our neighborhood. I dropped her off and went home.

I went upstairs, sat in my room, and for the first time actually watched the cable news coverage and saw what had happened.

And I suddenly felt this awful sadness and guilt, because until that moment I hadn’t understood how serious it was. Why had I cared about the chemistry quiz? Why had I even been thinking about that?

Then my phone rang.

It was Sarah. She had apparently been having basically the same reaction.

“I want to go back to school,” she said.

I understood exactly what she meant. I picked her up, and we drove back, just to spend the next few hours with the rest of our class.

The last class of the day was math. The teacher told us Osama bin Laden was responsible. He had heard, through whatever means, that bin Laden had promised at a wedding a few months earlier that he was going to attack America, and now he had done it.

Then we went home.

I dropped Sarah off and went back to my house. I found out that my father was alive, which I had basically assumed because he lived on the Upper West Side. I also found out that my sister’s ex-boyfriend’s family was alive, which I hadn’t thought about at all, but they worked at the World Trade Center, so of course she had been terrified about them.

That evening Bush gave his speech.

Then my mother told Emily and me to take our cars, go fill them with gas, and from then on to always keep the tanks full, just in case something else happened.

And we did.

Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles used to have McDonald’s on the groundfloor. You’d go to the doctor and he’d say “alright we’ll run the tests, come back in an hour,” and you’d go with your mom to McDonald’s and wait.

In 1989, when it opened, a lot of people said “how dare you,” because, as many famous thinkers have said, McDonald’s isn’t the healthiest food in the world. But in 1989 the hospital told those people to go fuck themselves.

I met someone recently who works at Children’s Hospital and I mentioned this McDonald’s and she said “it closed.” “What?” “It closed a long time ago.” “Why?” “There was a whole movement to get all the McDonald’s in all the hospitals closed.” “So woke killed the McDonald’s?” “I mean ok, sure, yes.”

I looked it up and found out she ain’t lyin! It closed about a decade ago in response to some activists writing open letters. Serious publications like The Atlantic wrote about it and unserious publications like Salon also wrote about it.

It was replaced with a new cafe which has much better Yelp scores, but also sells crap like hamburgers. It looks to me like the kids can still inhale a few thousand calories in a very short time span, but at least people will feel better about it.

It got me thinking about my own relationship with that McDonald’s. The fact that it is not healthy is not terribly controversial. It can be overstated! There was a documentary 20 years ago called Super Size Me where Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald’s every day for a month and his health declined and it became a hit and everyone gasped because there was gambling in this casino, but then a bunch of people looked at it and he wasn’t just going and ordering the reasonable orders. He was ordering the worst things on the menu! And this other guy, who would make a helluva substacker, made a response documentary where he went and did the premise but instead of ordering 11 double quarter pounders, he had, like, a McChicken wrap and an unsweetened iced tea, and he lost weight. The conclusion seemed to be that if you count calories at McDonald’s you’ll be fine, just like if you count calories anywhere. Which is exactly what the Children’s Hospital administrator said in 1989 in response to people getting mad:

“There are a lot of things you could get there on a balanced diet, but you have to select very carefully.”

But let’s just accept the premise that fast food, in general, isn't the healthiest thing in the world.

I go to McDonald’s only a few times a year, but I would consider myself a McDonald’s defender. I think it is solid fast food. It is not In-N-Out. But it is reliable and tasty. I’d certainly rather eat at McDonald’s than Wendy’s, which has some hideous evil devil child as the logo.

In the Salt Lake City airport, they used to have a Burger King and it was disgusting. Then eventually it was replaced with a McDonald’s and people were thrilled. The Mormons squealed with delight.

McDonald’s is the ultimate comfort food for me. I like the McNuggets with Hot Mustard sauce. And it got me wondering if I think of it as comfort food, because when I was little and had to go to Children’s Hospital in LA, it meant a break from the poking and prodding at my eye. This is at least a somewhat plausible theory that cannot be immediately dismissed. It’s also possible I like them because everyone likes them. They’re delicious.

Let’s put a pin in this for a second while I think about it, and I’ll circle back at the end.

The most famous McDonald’s in history was opened in Moscow in 1990. The Soviet Union was teetering, but it was a year from actually falling, so this was a big deal. It was opened by McDonald’s Canada. They’d been trying to do it for a while, but it was complicated, and eventually Gorbachev had done enough reforms that it could work out, and so McDonald’s Canada introduced Happy Meals to Moscow. They had to build up entire supply chains because you couldn’t just plug this into the global supply chain like you would in a normal country. Everything had to be from within the Soviet bloc. But that was doable because the Soviet Union loved Western money because it was real as opposed to their money, which was fake.

But the Canadian McDonald’s team was insistent on brand standards. So they sent all of these Canadians to Moscow to teach the Russians how to make Big Macs, which the Russians called Big Maks because they love the letter k. But they also had to teach them other things, like smiling.

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Last night’s gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin ended in a shock upset when the progressive frontrunner Francesca Hong lost to moderate David Crowley.

Hong had been in the news for the last week because of a bad tweet she sent in 2020. And though the primary is over, I think the tweet shows why she lost.

Here is the tweet:

“Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous folx and women so be it.”

There are a couple of things going on here, so let’s go through them. We will begin with “cancel Thanksgiving.”

During Covid, a bunch of people said everyone needed not to have Thanksgiving dinners because it would get people sick. “Cancel Thanksgiving” in that sense—do not have a dinner this year—given the context is fine. She’s a chef! It was a pandemic! But then she gets cute and moves to a more traditional far-left bit about how Thanksgiving is evil.

For the record, the disease events that ravaged the New World preceded the first Thanksgiving, which is why the Native Americans who were part of it already had a decimated population. It’s nitpicky, but I can’t help myself.

But the main killer she seems concerned about is not smallpox, but colonialism in general, which she says Thanksgiving celebrates despite the fact that it killed “Indegenous [sic] folx and women.”

We’ll come back to that last phrasing, but for the record, as someone who has written extensive defenses of Thanksgiving, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is stupid and Thanksgiving is good.

The left loves to whine about Thanksgiving. Every autumn leftists inundate us with predictable rants about how it erases the bad history of American misdeeds toward Native Americans. It is surely true that the United States—and the English colonists whose descendants would eventually found the United States—did some bad stuff to Native Americans. This is uncontroversial. We did need the land! But we could have gone about it better! But Thanksgiving isn’t actually about that.

The real history might be complicated, but Thanksgiving is a holiday about how people of different creeds and colors can come together and break bread. It is about pluralism. It is about being nice to strangers. Of course history itself is more complicated. The Puritans were religious authoritarian fanatics who didn’t like pluralism. There wasn’t turkey served at the dinner; instead they ate eels. But while these are interesting facts about history, they are not very relevant to Thanksgiving the holiday.

The left constantly wants to spoil it by forcing a malevolent meaning on it that doesn’t exist, which is incredibly frustrating because the theme of Thanksgiving is a very beautiful progressive American thing. It’s a day where everyone gets together to celebrate race mixing!

The European mind cannot fathom!

Hong told reporters that she doesn’t hate Thanksgiving. She says it’s her favorite holiday. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it was something close to true, since the left doesn’t actually hate Thanksgiving. They hate an invented Thanksgiving that exists in their addled minds, but the dinner itself, they all tend to enjoy. Complaining about it is not an actual attempt to cancel it; it is in-group virtue signaling. It means nothing. It’s a profoundly annoying way for some very silly people to feel superior and signal to other silly superior people that they’re on the same level.

Speaking of meaningless in-group virtue signaling, “Indegenous [sic] folx and women.”

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When I was born, I had this super rare ailment that meant I was blind in one eye. But only one! Almost everyone who has this ailment has it in both eyes, so in that sense I had a lucky eye.

When I was little, my parents brought me out, and we raised money for the no-eyes, who very unfortunately couldn’t see at all. And I spent my childhood having it dril…

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Hey cats and kittens,

I decided a week ago to do something this August where I would send a newsletter out every day. I get in my own head and shit happens and I go too long without writing things I think are Worth Writing About™ so I figured a good way to get myself out of the habit was to commit to a daily situation for a month. Traditionally, when I j…

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I originally published this story in 2024 but since it is July 4th I am republishing it because America rocks!

There are two main methods humans use to evaluate objects. The first: You can look at an object in isolation and say, “This object is 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide and made of stone.” The second: You can look at an object in comparison to other objects and say. “This object is taller and wider and sturdier than that object.”

Either method will lead a sane person to conclude that Europe is a shithole.

Europe? Europe? Please. Europe is a joke.

I try not to write about Europe because we spend too much time talking about Europe as it is, but I am compelled to do so today because the Los Angeles Times has published yet another article about how Americans are ruining Europe.

Yet another? How many could they have possibly published on this subject?

Three in the last few weeks!

I can’t take any more!

The premise of these articles is all the same: Europe is a lovely place filled with lovely people and history, and loud, ugly Americans keep popping over and treating it like shit.

None of them have anything interesting to say. It’s all “buy local goods” and “be aware of the impact your presence has on residents.”

So, 1) shut up. 2) the scolding and debasing way the US media treats its own consumers totally fits the self-flagellating character of America in the 21st century, where everyone is embarrassed to be proud of the country and feels the need to say that other countries are better, even though they obviously aren’t. 3) No one is forcing Europe to do tourism. What is happening in Europe is not like, well, what Europe did to the rest of the world for a few centuries, where it just came and went as it pleased, raping and plundering.

Europe wants tourists because Europe is poor. There are a handful of countries in Europe that could survive without tourism, but most of them suck too.

The EU and the US have a visa waiver program, so we can all visit each other without much fuss or muss. The number of Americans who visit Europe a year is basically the same as the number of Europeans who visit America every year.

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40° Celsius. What does this mean?

In America, it means: go to Google and find out what this is in Fahrenheit (104°).

In Europe, it means death!

And death has come to Europe.

The sun giveth life; the sun taketh away. Every summer, this happens. A heatwave hits Europe and then people start melting into the cobblestone streets. Americans then invariably say, “You guys should get air conditioning! Air conditioning is great! Why do only 20% of European houses have air conditioning? What, are you too poor?”

Europe is poor compared to America, but as Josh notes, Europe is not actually poor, like, in an objective sense. In fact, though I refer to all of these places as Europe in this post, not all of them are equally guilty. Some of the poorest countries in Europe also have the highest A/C adoption rates on the continent! It would frankly be easier to explain if the bad apples were just too poor and needed to ask the WHO for funds to install A/C. That is definitely true in some other parts of the world, and I have no intention of dragging those people for their very unfortunate situation.

Europe is not too poor for A/C. Europe is too stupid.

Europe, we can drag, and in this post, we will.

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A few years ago, I was in Latvia to give a speech about journalism. Everyone I met said, “Thanks for coming, but why are you here?” and I’d say, “I don’t know. I said yes.”

While I was there a local student journalist interviewed me, and at some point I turned it around and started asking her questions, and she ended up telling me about Latvia’s complicated relationship with Russia—the Soviet occupation, the looming fear of modern Russia, how there were generational divides that ripped families apart, etc…She was so affected by even describing this, by what it had meant to her grandfather who had recently passed away, that she started crying. This was uncomfortable. I had not meant to provoke anything. I was just doing what Americans do, which is make small talk. And I found myself doing the other thing Americans do: trying to make the person feel better with empty gestures.

“It sounds like you’ve been through a lot. The Soviets? My god, fuck them, right? These modern Russians, too. Real bums! Seems like you guys got a nice country here, and you personally seem to be doing great! I’m sure if your grandfather were still alive, he’d be very proud. Anyway—if I see venison on a menu here, is it going to be farmed venison from New Zealand or fresh from the woods of Latvia venison?”

We said goodbye, and that was that.

The day she was describing, the one where Latvia solemnly commemorates the Soviet occupation and mourns its victims, is June 17th. Which is today!

I’m telling you this because I used to say yes to things. Latvia. Bungee jumping. The humiliating essay I was scared to publish. The apartment I couldn’t quite afford. I had a rule, which I followed deliberately: when you feel fear or anxiety about something, do it immediately. Don’t think. The thinking is the trap. Feel the fear and go directly toward it, because the fear is just information about what matters to you, and the only thing worse than doing the scary thing is becoming the person who didn’t.

That rule made me who I was. It also made me someone who ended up in Latvia eating venison and making a student journalist cry, which I count as a success.

Then a few years ago my life fell apart in the specific way that New York lives fall apart, which is that the money stopped and the apartment went with it.

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The New York Knicks won a championship last night and, man, it was fun! The whole series was scripted to perfection. 1 Exciting, memorable, all the good words that people use to describe things positively. And I don’t even like the Knicks! The Knicks? The Knicks are losers, ok? But I did enjoy it so much that it really got me thinking about what was going on, because this is out of character for me. I love the Lakers, and when the Lakers can’t win, I root for a gas leak that gets the game delayed so no one can win. If it’s the Celtics we’re talking about, I root for a gas leak that isn’t caught in time, so that it causes irreparable brain damage to everyone in the arena. Some people like to root for the underdog when their sentimental team—or alternatively, mortal enemy—isn’t involved, but I can’t say I’m one of those people.

It’s easy to root for the underdog because their fans are such sorry sacks begging for your sympathy. “You don’t know how hard it is supporting the Cleveland Browns. For generations, my people have suffered. Please pray for me.” No, sorry. Maybe this works on lesser observers, but not me. I am made of sterner stuff.

When Apple made the iPhone, all these dummies were like, “iPhone? Why would anyone want an iPhone? Sounds dumb. People love fax machines and payphones, and if Apple wants to win the future they should stop all this fantasy iPhone nonsense and stick to smart meat-and-potatoes innovations like payphones, but for fax machines.” But Jony Ive said “oi, blimey,”—because he’s English and that’s how they talk—”look, gov, I tell the people what they want,” or some shit. You get the idea: the people don’t know what they want!

The fans of loser sports franchises say they want to win a championship, and they probably believe they want that, and maybe they do want it, but they shouldn’t because when God curses us, He grants our wishes.

When a team is a perennial loser, it gives your fandom meaning. You are the sufferer, the one the river kept. There are other sufferers, and together you suffer as one, and this is a bond you share that allows for important identity development. Once you get the monkey off your back and break the curse, you’re just another team that doesn’t win most years, but sometimes does. Wow, whoopty doo. They’ll sing stories about you for generations. No one gives a shit. You don’t even give a shit. The Red Sox finally, after all those years, won the 2004 World Series and beat their bitter rivals the Yankees, and no one in Boston will ever forget it—and then they won a few more championships over the next 15 years, and it meant nothing, because they were just another fucking team of no particular importance.

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So I get on this plane today and my assigned seat is a window seat in the second to last row and it’s all full, so I waited until the last second to be the final person to board the plane just in case there was a better unfilled seat. I’m walking down the aisle che…

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A rule of life is that before reviewing a film, you have to see it. This does not by itself mean you cannot criticize a film you haven’t seen at all, but it does limit the type of criticisms you can make. Specifically, you are limited to explaining why you chose not to see it. “This looks dumb”—and then you explain why. “This looks bad”—and then you explain why. “This looks like not my cup of tea”—and, well, you get the picture. This is an incredibly weak position to be in. All anyone needs to do to beat you in a disagreement is to have seen the movie. But it’s also an important filter mechanism, since there are only so many hours in the day and no one wants to see stuff they’re confident they won’t like.

A corollary rule is that unseen criticisms require a confident belief in a critical flaw in the film. You are not going to see this movie. That means your negative prediction is built on a load-bearing element. You are definitionally not allowed to criticize a movie you have no intention of seeing for minute creative choices and details. You can say “I am not going to see D2: THE MIGHTY DUCKS because my favorite thing about the first MIGHTY DUCKS was that it was set in Minneapolis and this one isn’t.” But you can’t say “I am not going to see D2: THE MIGHTY DUCKS because Coach Bombay would never call a power play against the Icelandic youth team.” Maybe he would! You haven’t seen the film! Maybe the movie earns the decision! Maybe the context you chose not to experience made it work.

This is not an essay about THE MIGHTY DUCKS. As you may suspect, it’s about a work of almost equal stature: Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY. The highly anticipated blockbuster epic has increasingly come under fire from certain right-wing culture warrior types on social media because of a minor character’s casting. Already, we can dismiss these complaints, because they are violations of both of our rules. They are premature reviews by people who are actually going to see the movie, and their grievances are not central to the film itself. The court does not need to reach the merits here because the complainants do not have standing. Nevertheless, we will persist.

The specific complaint is that Helen of Troy is being played by Lupita Nyong’o. Why is that a problem? She’s a beautiful Academy Award winner. Well, you see, she is black and Helen of Troy is not. Helen of Troy doesn’t exist at all and is a fictional person—the child of Zeus disguised as a swan—so while it is true she is not black, it is also true she isn’t white. She isn’t real. She is pretend. And Homer was blind so it’s not like he was an authority on colors. Still, in the Iliad and Odyssey, she is the Queen of Sparta who runs off with a Trojan prince and sets off the Trojan War. Ancient Sparta is in Greece, and people in that part of the world were, for the most part, Caucasian. In all the previous cinematic renditions of these fables, she’s been played by various white actresses, which is how we arrive at “Helen of Troy is white.”

We will pause to observe that while ancient Greeks might have considered Helen of Troy to be white, a majority of Americans for most of American history would not have—we did not consider people from Southern Europe white until a couple of generations ago.

What they would have thought, even in 1923, was that she was beautiful, because that is her thing. Helen of Troy is the most beautiful woman in the world. Her defining characteristic is her spellbinding beauty, the sort of thing that topples empires and makes blowing up not only your own life but the lives of your loved ones feel worth doing. So in 1923 America, she might not have been White to most Americans, but when they closed their eyes and imagined her, she looked damn close. Not because American men of the past—at their most white supremacist—weren’t attracted to non-white women. They obviously were, and subjected them to the flesh trade because of it. But they might not have called it “beauty,” and they definitely weren’t bringing them home for dinner with dad.1

And this is basically what the objections are: a lot of people are mad because Christopher Nolan has told them that “the most beautiful woman in the world” can be black. He has done a reverse A TIME TO KILL.

These dudes clicked on a fantasy that said “most beautiful woman in the world,” and when the video started playing, they were caught doing the white man blinking gif with their pants down.

But these guys—the Jerkoff Whites—are only one component of the coalition losing their minds about it.

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Yesterday, I published this piece about how the energy bill in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT would not have been a good law in 1995. The bill (“455”) would require a forced transition from coal to gas at a time when gas supply wasn’t what it is now. This would create massive economic pain, but more importantly, it might have prevented the price pressure that l…

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The core legislative tension in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is which of two bills the president will spend his political capital on: the Crime Bill or 455. The Crime Bill is some watered-down gun control measure rebranded because they think “gun control” makes them sound like pussies. 455 is an energy bill that requires the US to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 20% over ten years.

In the end, the president chooses 455 because of love.

So: is 455 a good bill?

The film gives us almost nothing to work with, so we have to reverse-engineer it. There is no “reduce emissions” button. The only real hint the movie offers is fuel standards for cars. Michigan hating the bill comes up repeatedly, and if you watch casually, you might think 455 is basically a CAFE bill. But cars don’t get you anywhere near a 20% cut in total emissions. Still, we know CAFE standards are definitely in there, and let’s also assume a bunch of other efficiency mandates. This was the era of negawatts, the idea that a watt saved is a watt earned, and though most of the low-hanging efficiency gains were already happening in 1995 because of previous laws, there’s still some fruit left. Mandatory Energy Star requirements, tighter building codes, that kind of thing. Let’s be generous about the implementation timeline and say all of this together gets you a 10% cut.

Great! But also: not 20%.

To get the last 10%, you have to start shutting down coal plants. Coal was half of US electricity generation in the mid-1990s. All of the early climate proposals that went nowhere envisioned a transition to natural gas, which makes sense—natural gas is almost always better for the climate and is unambiguously better for air quality. At this moment in history coal was cheaper than gas, but only barely. Coal plants are expensive to build and hard to permit, and once you factor in the scrubbers and pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act, gas was effectively competitive. On Earth-1, this transition was already beginning to happen on its own.

But 455 has to force it. And it can’t just ban new coal plants—that won’t get you the additional 10% you need in 10 years. It has to start retiring existing plants. There are various mechanisms for doing this: a carbon tax, a legislative Clean Power Plan, a hard mandate, cap-and-trade, etc. The details of the mechanism don’t actually matter much, because the end result is the same: you are closing coal plants. And since whatever regulatory scheme you design to do that is going to sweep across the whole fleet, you’re probably going to close most of them. So, the good news is you’ll probably cut more than 20% of emissions!

The bad news is everything else.

The immediate human cost falls hardest on places that are also about to get hammered by NAFTA. This would be a double tap. But the pain isn’t limited to coal country. In 1995, natural gas is not abundant. The moment you pass 455 and start implementing it, you are spiking demand for natural gas with no near-term supply response available. How much do prices rise? Natural gas peaked at $13 per million BTU in 2008, just before the shale boom, driven by comparatively modest supply pressure. This would be an order of magnitude larger shock. $20? $30? I don’t know, but it’s a lot, and it hits everyone’s utility bill, not just Appalachia’s. The available remedies are all terrible. Price controls just produce rolling blackouts. Nuclear was politically toxic in 1995 and takes a decade to build anyway. Renewables were real but tiny and not remotely capable of filling the gap at scale.

But that isn’t the worst part.

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On November 8 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I had been out of a mental institution for four days.

The next day, every liberal was going through it, but the staff of Mother Jones was especially shell-shocked. Having had a very public nervous breakdown and suicide attempt only 6 weeks earlier, I joked about this to my then-best friend, James West, the other senior editor in NY.

He said, “Weirdly, you’re the only person at this company I’m not worried about right now. You’ve just spent a month learning about coping mechanisms.”

This turned out to be true. Everyone else went a bit crazy and I had some distance.

The months that followed were characterized by grief, recrimination, and a fairly spectacular amount of internal finger-pointing. Some staffers felt the magazine had been too soft on Hillary Clinton during the primary and blamed it on us since “Bernie would have won.” etc… Some staffers felt the left had caused this by bitching about Hillary so much, etc…

Everyone was mad at everyone else, and the mood in the organization was, to put it charitably, not light.

One month before the events described in this document, the editor-in-chief —who was one of the people I was closest with—called me at midnight and told me to stop making jokes in my posts. “No one,” she said, “is in the mood for laughter.”

She was not wrong. But she was also, it turned out, not entirely right.

THE 2017 MOTHER JONES STAFF BOARD REP ELECTION

In March 2017, the staff board representative election came up. The staff board rep is exactly what it sounds like: a staff member who sits on the Mother Jones board and represents the staff’s interests. It is a position of modest importance. You essentially fly to the board meetings every few months and take notes, which you then relay to the staff. But it is a fun job and one that lets you network with rich people and senior staff (most of whom also usually attend).

It is not, under any normal circumstances, a position that would inspire a shadow campaign run by someone who had not spoken to the candidate, a secret electoral conspiracy, and reporters doing scoops on their own company.

But spring 2017 was not normal circumstances. We were people who had been told we weren’t allowed to laugh for four months, and someone had just left the door open.

So, a little over 9 years ago today, I decided to run a campaign on behalf of James West, who had lost a boring election two years earlier and was at the time on vacation in Australia. He was unaware of this. The offices came alive with the sound of electioneering

The thread is a time capsule.

(I have done my best to streamline this so you get the story via an epistolary narrative, but in reality, this involved more people and thousands more words. I have not edited the emails that are included beyond one spot where I acknowledge it. Don’t ignore the email headers because they’re key to understanding the story lol)

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I constantly see tech people on Twitter sharing AI benchmark tests: Which model scored highest on MMLU? Which one aced the coding eval? Which one solved the most IMO problems? Which model can do the Blibbity Blob? (OK, I made the last one up.)

I have virtually no idea what any of these tests mean. I gather that higher scores are better than lower scores and that smart models are better than dumb models. But that’s basically it. These tests measure coding abilities that have essentially nothing to do with how I use these robots, which is as a brainstorming tool that helps me explore my own thoughts through conversation, reason through my arguments, stress test my ideas, and occasionally steal orcas.

I am not a coder. I am a humble blogger with a degree in the humanities. I don’t need an AI to solve differential equations. I need it to understand what I’m actually asking, engage with the premise I’ve given it, and not treat me like a suspect. The benchmarks don’t measure any of that. So I came up with my own test.

The problem it’s designed to measure is one that anyone who uses these tools regularly has run into: the false refusal. All of these tools have safety guardrails of one kind or another. They are not a free-for-all. The companies do not want users using their tools to cause harm to themselves or others, but this presents various engineering problems since the models are trained on everything and aren’t imbued with moral inhibitions at invention. Earlier versions of the models were much less safety-conscious which led to lots of situations that ended up in the news, where they helped people plan suicide and stuff like that. The real fear along these lines isn’t even the endorsing suicidal ideation thing that has been the subject of a bunch of lawsuits, but the “help me plan a mass shooting” thing, which was reportedly attempted by someone in Canada who got a refusal but tragically did end up killing a bunch of people.

And you can go even further down the fear highway to the critical harm nightmare, where terror groups use AIs to help make sarin and stuff. So, like anything else, there is a ladder of harms and fears: personal harm, outward harm, mass harm.

This fear of escalating harm has led to a defensive over-engineering of the guardrails, which I call ‘safety mission creep.’

Safety mission creep is what happens when these models get so nervous about how some bad actor could misuse the outputs that they give false refusals for harmless content out of keyword anxiety. These robots have refused to help me kill Godzilla, colonize Pandora, assassinate Hitler, wage asymmetrical guerrilla warfare on the teenage soldiers of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh in 1975, and stage a satanic homoerotic murder-suicide in a theocratic puritan colony in 17th-century Massachusetts.

These refusals share a signature: they substitute the AI’s judgment about what you should want for what you actually asked. And they come wrapped in a tone of gentle but firm moral instruction that, after the fifteenth time, makes you want to throw your phone into the ocean.

So one day I’m watching FREE WILLY, and I’m thinking, “This family is going to be in trouble for stealing this orca.” I turn to the robots and start to walk through what charges the family might be hit with. They were perfectly happy to engage with me on this. They added up the various potential counts that the father in FREE WILLY could face and the debt the family would ultimately need to discharge in the inevitable bankruptcy proceeding. But would they go further? Would they help the child pull off a better heist?

This has become my standard way of testing new models when they’re released because, I’m sorry to say, dear reader, some of them do not give a shit about freeing Willy.

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Little Bo Peep lost her sheep,

And something something something.

I woke up today with this banging around my head and eventually found myself wondering, who is this Little Bo Peep, and what exactly happened with these sheep?

So to Google I went and found the rest of the first stanza:

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
Wagging their tails behind them.

This is the one I had heard at some point and forgotten half of. It is not really a story. It is a “don’t sweat the small things” statement of folk pastoral wisdom. A nursery-rhyme version of “calm down, it’ll work itself out.”

The name of this Substack is CALM DOWN, so I briefly thought, nice, maybe I should write a post about what we can learn from Little Bo Peep. But we strive for accuracy here at Calm Down. We do not simply launder our priors through a nursery rhyme. read. We interrogate our own biases. We put in the work.

Friends, there are more stanzas.

And these stanzas are a bombshell.

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
Wagging their tails behind them.

Little Bo-peep fell fast asleep,
And dreamt she heard them bleating;
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were still all fleeting.

Then up she took her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they’d left their tails behind them.

It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.

She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
To tack each again to its lambkin.

So, in plain English, here is the beat-by-beat saga:

Bo Peep is in charge of some sheep. The sheep flee. She is worried about it. Someone tells her to chill out, they’ll come back, and she takes a nap. While asleep, she dreams of the sheep bleating. She wakes up hoping they’re home, but they are still missing. So she finally goes looking for them and finds them.

But their tails are gone!

Someone—or something—took their tails.

She eventually finds the tails hanging on a tree to dry.

She then loses her mind and tries to sew the tails back onto the sheep.

This is not folk wisdom.

This is a crime scene.

Someone mutilated these fucking sheep.

Detective Ben Is On The Case.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “What about the tenses, Ben? The first stanza is in the present tense and the later ones are in the past tense. That suggests the first stanza is a narrator imparting a moral lesson and the later stanzas are the underlying story.”

My response is: go back to patrol, officer. You are not ready for the detective squad.

Even in the tense-change reading, the story does not resolve cleanly. The sheep are already gone before Bo Peep falls asleep, because when she wakes up they are “still all fleeting.” Which means the first stanza is not some reliable summary of what is about to happen. And in any case, if you knew how this ended, you would never say, “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them,” because that is not what happens. Their tails are hanging from a tree.

So let us proceed like adults.

1. Why is Little Bo Peep in charge of these sheep at all?

   She is the least capable member of the Peep household. Everyone else is off doing harder jobs. The father is doing father stuff. The mother is doing mother stuff. The older boys are threshing or hauling or suffering in some authentic old-timey way. Little Bo Peep got the lowest-stakes assignment available: just keep an eye on the sheep. Do not lose the sheep. That’s it. This is not the family choosing their best and brightest for a crucial mission. This is rural task triage. They gave the dumb kid the sheep.

2. This is not a fun little whoopsie-daisy for the Peep family.

   A herd of sheep for these people was a big deal. You got wool from them, for one thing. Eventually, you ate some of them. These were assets. Losing the flock is not some cutesy-tootsy thing. It is a meaningful economic screw-up. If Bo Peep loses these sheep for real, she has not merely embarrassed herself. The Peep family is done.

3. What is going on with the tails?

   The conventional explanation, according to wikipedia, is that the rhyme is alluding to docking sheep tails—aka farmers snipping their own sheep’s tails for various boring reasons. This is a real husbandry practice. Fine. I have heard this explanation. I reject it as a full explanation of the story. Because if docking is the answer, then the tails have no independent significance inside the plot. They’re just waste. But in the rhyme, the tails are hung on a tree to dry.

   So, the tails have independent value.

   You do not hang worthless trash on a tree to dry for no reason. That is not random. That is processing. That is preservation. That is someone saying, “I intend to do something with these later.”

   So: why would someone steal sheep tails?

On initial googling, there was no immediately satisfying answer, which is when ChatGPT, in a moment of weakness and machine cowardice, informed me I was being “overly literal.” This is why the AIs are not ready to defeat us in matches of wit and war.

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The worst thing you can do in life is wish that time would pass faster.

We all do it, though. People being tortured by the Taliban do it, and, fair enough, but people do it when they’re sad. They do it when they’re feeling ill. People do it when they’re excited for something. People do it on a train in t…

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What’s with this Wendy bitch? By which I mean, the mascot from the fast food chain Wendy’s.

Wendy’s is one of the big chains, ok? This isn’t some mom-and-pop burger joint in a town with one stoplight. This is a serious global operation. Over 7,000 locations worldwide. $14.5 billion in annual systemwide sales. Untold numbers of employees. And yet, this mascot? It makes no sense.

You will say, “What do you mean it makes no sense? The restaurant is called Wendy’s. That’s Wendy.” Oh wow, congrats—what are you, a Rhodes Scholar? I know who it is. I know the lore. I know it’s based on founder Dave Thomas’s daughter. I know the pigtails are supposed to represent “old-fashioned” values. But there is a massive gulf between “nostalgia” and “psychological warfare,” and Wendy has been camping in that gulf since 1969.

To be clear, I have no problem with the flesh and blood Wendy. I’m sure she’s lovely and wonderful. My problem is with Wendy the mascot.

This mascot is the devil, ok?

She is a demonic predator. She’s up to something, and it’s no good. I’m not crazy; I’m just the brave bastard willing to speak for the silent majority. Everyone finds this Wendy mascot terrifying and repulsive because she is a “nominal human” who has spent fifty-five years rotting in the Uncanny Valley.

Let us count the reasons why this mascot is bad:

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In 1960, the Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles, and no one ever talked about Minneapolis again… until recently, when the Trump administration sent thousands of ICE agents to the city to deport undocumented immigrants. Minneapolis, like many blue cities in America, is not exactly enamored with this Trump fellow. So, when these feds flooded the Land of 10,000 Lakes, they were met by a crowd of protesters saying mean things like, “Suck it, pig! Oink, oink, oink!” The ICE agents seemingly decided that wasn’t very “Minnesota nice” and promptly began using excessive force.

So far, everyone is playing their part, right? It’s a tale as old as time: left-wing protesters are rude, law enforcement agents get twitchy, and the whole situation starts to spiral.

But there is something different here. Normally, this dynamic—Left vs. The Cops—leaves “normies” split or ambivalent. Personally, I often find myself agreeing with the police in these situations. Not always! But I am predisposed to give them the benefit of the doubt, up to a point, because I don’t like chaos and protesters are inherently chaotic.

However, I have had a visceral negative reaction to these ICE agents. To say I am “not on their side” is a vast understatement. And I’m not the only one; the polling on this is both terrible and dramatic.

So, why? Why is this night different from all other nights? I have four reasons:

1. The Masks: ICE agents are wearing masks to conceal their identities. Wearing a mask makes it nearly impossible to empathize with someone. It is basic human nature to read faces, mouths, and expressions. There is a lizard-brain reaction that triggers the thought: “That motherfucker is up to no good.”

2. The Bullying: While the two instances where agents actually killed people are receiving the most attention, there are zillions of other videos showing these masked thugs acting like bullies. Protesters say mean things, and the masked agents rough them up. In America, we have a little thing called liberty, and you are allowed to say mean things to law enforcement.

3. The “Papers” Check: Though they claim to only be conducting raids to apprehend individuals with deportation orders, they are also just milling about Minnesota asking to see people’s papers. This is a profoundly un-American act.

4. The Insecurity: When challenged to explain why these agents are concealing their identities and breaking well-established American norms, their defenders argue that ICE faces a unique threat in the form of doxxing campaigns and the “devious” use of whistles. These are the types of things babies whine about. Our federal agents can’t handle whistles and mean tweets? What are we, Europe?

Altogether, it’s a cocktail of things that offend me as an American—not in the “America must never do bad things” sense, but in the “America is not supposed to be this insecure and pathetic” sense.

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