That’s one of the things that confuses the fuck out of me. Why is Trump wholesale pulling us out of the international economy that we created? You can’t just say “China bad” when we literally set the stage for this by moving production to China.

I see no outcome where a new administration snaps trading partners back to thinking we’re reliable. Trump has singlehandedly caused the collapse of U.S. hegemony under the guise of checks notes making us great again.

We’re a failed state. But at least we got some red hats out of China first.

That is some excessively long hair.

CRUSHER: If there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe. Computer, what is beyond the mass energy field?

Despite most people just wanting a good life and to help their neighbours. It’s nauseating, but the people in power have never represented the people I interact with daily.

I don’t believe most Americans are immoral. Granted, I wasn’t around for the 18th and 19th centuries, which is one hell of an asterisk, but we ever-so-slowly course corrected. And then the government went for global hegemony, which no one was asking for.

Oh, I’ve definitely engaged in shenanigans. I don’t really think you’re committing journalism if you aren’t pushing boundaries. Daily.

Sometimes, satire goes completely unnoticed, which is par for the course. Funny what gutting education and critical thinking leads to.

Far be it for me to speak for the admins, but Chris was direct about “in the future.” We’re a small enough instance that prior posts are unlikely to blow up and call attention. Just best practice going forward.

I tend to include a few grafs that nail the thrust of an article, which falls squarely under fair use, and then provide a link to the source (and an archive link).

Speaking of thrusts … at my first paper, I ran an A1 hed on the Israel-Palestine conflict of “Another Thrust Follows Withdrawal.” It was in a rural enough area that no one complained about the obvious innuendo (using “exasperates” sted “exacerbates” in display copy, on the other hand …).

It’s a matter of resources. One copyright-infringement suit, and Beehaw has a significant, likely site-ending problem.

As a journalist, I’m always torn between the right of people to read things they can’t necessarily afford and the knowledge that this is a low-paying field that relies on subscriptions. Squaring those two positions is difficult, but using archive links is the best way to solve access without showing up on a web search with the full text.

A man, a plan, a canal: Fascism.

Wait, that doesn’t work.

Much like Nazism was not adopted by most Germans, Trumpism does not reflect the vast majority of Americans’ beliefs.

One of the first rules of being a strongman is that you flood the zone with the particular brand of shit that inflates your support, such that people start to believe resistance is futile.

Unfortunately, it works.

Anyone paying attention is well aware.

You have to concentrate them.

There’s definitely irony.

People have often asked who my idol is. Easy: Ernie Blake. Ernst Bloch, which was not going to go over so well, so, name change. He founded a ski area and set my life in a direction. He fled Germany in the '30s and became an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.

It’s actually somewhat wild to think about. Imagine us putting Muslims in crucial roles for the War on Terror.

Patton was a run at Taos Ski Valley. Along with Stauffenberg (failed Hitler assassin).

Do you really think I stumbled upon Powderhorn? Another designer said that he saw the sign (apologies to Ace of Base) leaning against to top of Lift 6. I went up the stairs to the founder’s widow’s apartment and asked for it to come down. And here we are.

My parents first went there in the '70s. “Hahnloser … Hahnloser … I know that name.”

Turned out, he’d been in boarding school with my grandfather.

I had a bit more pull as a kid than I should have, knowing that the gate on the backside wasn’t actually locked. One time, I was stopped by workers at the ski area, who asked what the hell I thought I was doing. “Well, Rhoda said …”

“Oh, if Rhoda said that, go all the way to the top!”

Leading to a flat tire at the top of Lift 7. Turns out Civics aren’t exactly meant for lift-maintenance roads. Who knew?

Upper Powderhorn remains the purview of a bar in Scottsdale, Ariz. It was an absurd name to take on, so I gave it to them. I didn’t expect the full-on Powderhorn sign to be in my wheelhouse. And yet … Taos is something of a weird place.

I went to the creamery in Arroyo Seco. Upon hitting the counter, the woman – absent any sort of context – explained with regret that they had no Oreo Malt. I’d not been in four years. I didn’t ask; she simply offered the data. Why the hell one might remember a 14-year-old several years later is an exercise left to the reader.

When I moved there to take on the special-sections editor role, I’d no idea that I was known. I drove to Rhoda’s house one afternoon, just outside of Seco. “Bullshit you came here for a random job,” she said.

I’d not. I can of course wax endlessly about what happened with Ernie and how we started out there … but this is not germane to the story. I was excluded from the requirement that kids at the Kinderkaefig be potty trained. Ernie told staff that “You will take him.”

Now, one might notice that this is not normal. My first memory is of Moonlight Sonata at the A-frame Kinderkaefig, with accompanying soup. Ernie was Bernie.

Working for The Taos News was a bit weird. I was about two decades out from hoping to end up there. It … wasn’t great. I didn’t have a great time there. I was pulled out of watching Obama’s first inauguration to talk with Realtors. And, well, my job came into specific relief. I was not to commit journalism, but rather to please advertisers. Let’s just say that didn’t sit well.

If you want to experience racism as a straight white male, might I suggest Taos? Not being Hispanic wasn’t useful. This aside, it was the sort of thing where one doesn’t realise what’s going on.

And fleeing is the best choice. The U.S. can plant its own fucking trees (which it won’t) while I finally feel a sense of relief on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Perfectly valid sentiment; wrong venue to voice it.

Nasty journalist checking in. “Nasty” simply means “unwilling to ignore objective facts.” This gets more Orwellian by the day. He was just off by 40 years.

Oh, just now? Come on. He ran on dismantling the government, and somehow people thought he was kidding. That, and immigrants were causing all our problems.

I don’t see how we get ourselves out of this peacefully. Despite the party line being that everything will be better for business, what happens when domestic crops are left to rot in the fields because “the terrorists” were deported?

This is a great rundown. I’ve never been in the ecosystem and thus have zero exposure.

But part of me thinks, having done development in noncoding roles and getting zero further compensation for, say, something that could save a corporate giant $7 million a year if fully rolled out, this is just grooming kids for what they’ll be subjected to after going into massive debt for a degree.

I never had kids of my own, but seeing what my stepkids got up to from 2009-2016 (they were 6 and 7 to start), I became very worried about how things had shifted to online interaction. They wouldn’t have their own computers for another couple of years, but I gave them my netbook (remember those?) once I’d gotten a tower built (UPS drop-shipped my old one, and that’s not a euphemism … thank god I had the presence of mind to remove the hard drives).

It’s one thing to play SimCity for hours on end locally, which my parents allowed. It’s something entirely different to foist the whole of the internet on them without having concepts of online hygiene.

“A horse walks into a car wash” is a Vaudeville joke, not an impossibility.