Anitra and I have booked a last-minute flight to Toronto, just because the opportunity and some good flight tickets came up. Let me know if you’d like to catch up! We arrive late Boxing Day afternoon, and return to Tampa late New Year’s Day afternoon.
Cue the slow heavy metal music! Click the photo to see it at full size.
Have a safe and merry Christmas, everyone!
From left to right: Joey deVilla, Lyssa Adkins, Alistair Cockburn, Anitra Pavka.
On Monday, Anitra and I were at the Copper Shaker in downtown St. Pete to attend the Agile Social and celebrate the birthday of computer scientist Alistair Coburn, agile coach, and co-signer of the Agile Manifesto. I ended up playing some accordion for the party, and you can read more about it on my tech blog, Global Nerdy.
The Copper Shaker has a great cocktail menu…
…and one of the cocktails I had was the Smokestack (on the menu pictured above, it’s midway through the right column). It’s a Boulevardier-like whiskey cocktail made of WhistlePig rye, maple syrup, Peychaud’s bitters, a maraschino cherry, and maple smoke. The process of adding smoke to a drink made for some great photos, which appear below.
The bartender took out a maple plank and a blowtorch, a sure sign that interesting things were about to happen:
As you might expect, doing this creates maple smoke, which the bartender quickly captured in a glass:
The tricky part is quickly flipping the smoke-filled glass over and then pouring the drink into it. The bartender did this masterfully, in one smooth motion:
The end result was a smooth, smoky glass of joy:
The Copper Shaker is located in downtown St. Petersburg at 169 1st Avenue North, between 1st and 2nd streets. You can find out more about them on their website.
Here’s the dirty little secret of “identity politics”:
👏🏻 All 👏🏼 politics 👏🏽 is 👏🏾 identity 👏🏿 politics. In the end, it’s about people, and who are we but what we do and what we are? When Paul Ryan uses the term identity politics are actually saying “These people do not share my skin color or ancestry, and therefore don’t count.”
Read more about Paul Ryan’s cognitive dissonance here:
And before you state that I’m genetically or ethnically incapable of being able to relate to Paul Ryan’s ancestry, you might want to read this.
First, let me get this out of the way — Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an amazingly great movie, and quite possibly my favorite Spider-Man in either big- or small-screen form (at the very least, it’s tied with Spider-Man: Homecoming in my mind). Go watch it!
Almost every review I’ve seen is positive. Hell, even the Washington Free Beacon (who do both kinds of politics: conservative and neo-conservative!) and Focus on the Family (the worst thing they can say is that there’s a graffiti scene) love this film. But there are two notable negative reviews, and both are expected.
The first negative review is from Seattle Weekly, which is only a little unexpected because disliking something immensely popular is more of a Portland thing. Stay wacky, Pacific Northwest!
The second comes from a more expected source: National Review.
In case you’re fortunate enough not to be familiar with National Review, it’s the “respectable” magazine aimed at conservative super-patriots. I’ll remind you that the best description of a super-patriot comes from a panel in MAD magazine from the ’60s:
The review is written by Armond White, their resident nonwhite-film-critic-who-doesn’t-like-nonwhites (he also hated Black Panther). Here’s how he closes out his review:
The review shouldn’t be all that surprising, as National Review was once considered the conservative bible, and I’ll remind you of the best practical definition of conservatism:
There used to be a lot of scrutiny of American right-wing terror in the 1990s, a lot of which was driven in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing — and then 9/11 happened. After that, the entire national security apparatus was focused on preventing another 9/11, and the far-right went relatively dormant. Then came the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which energized the far right, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. Obama’s victory, coupled with the financial crisis of 2008, and the fallout from the War or Terror, was driving right-wing extremists, and Homeland Security’s Darryl Johnson — a straight-arrow Mormon who’s a registered Republican — wrote a report on it.
The worst conservatives (and wow, is there stiff competition), and particularly the Tea Party and their media cronies, picked up this report and spun it, weaponized it into propaganda, claiming that it was the government trying to punish small-government conservatives, veterans, and Republicans. In response, Homeland Security dismantled the team studying domestic right-wing extremism, and targeted behavior rather than ideology. This left American law enforcement completely unprepared for what’s happening now in the large (Charlottesville, Pittsburgh) and in the small (barbecue Becky and her ilk).
Here’s a Washington Post piece written by the Darryl Johnson I referred to above:
Eight years ago, I warned of a singular threat — the resurgence of right-wing extremist activity and associated violence in the United States as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the financial crisis and the stock market crash. My intelligence report, meant only for law enforcement, was leaked by conservative media.
A political backlash ensued because of an objection to the label “right-wing extremism.” The report also rightly pointed out that returning military veterans may be targeted for recruitment by extremists. Republican lawmakers demanded then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rescind my report. The American Legion formally requested an apology to veterans. Some in Congress called for me to be fired. Amid the turmoil, my warning went unheeded by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security caved to the political pressure: Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.
Since 2008, though, the body count from numerous acts of violent right-wing terrorism continued to rise steadily with very little media interest, political discussion or concern from our national leaders. As this threat grew, government resources were scaled back, law enforcement counterterrorism training was defunded and policies to counter violent extremism narrowed to focus solely on Muslim extremism. Heated political campaigning by Donald Trump in 2016 pandered to these extremists. Now, right-wing terrorism has become the national security threat which many government leaders have yet to acknowledge.
Here’s an excerpt from the article. In this section, Will Fears — a guy with a name so on-the-nose that it’s downright Dickensian — shares his thinking:
Fears told me he had spent most of the past year celebrating the alt-right’s covert domination of the news cycle. He seemed thrilled that Donald Trump tweeted about a so-called migrant caravan, which, like the supposed “white genocide” in South Africa, was mostly fiction. Yet it was effectively promoted by alt-right websites like The Daily Stormer and Breitbart, and now right-wing celebrities like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson were talking about it. “This idea that the alt-right is falling apart and is going to go away, it’s not true,” he says. “The alt-right formulates all these ideas,” he went on. “What Tucker Carlson talks about, we talked about a year ago.”
It was a few days after the massacre of 17 people in Parkland, Fla., and Fears had been considering the spate of school shootings in America. He repeated the rumor, widespread on 4chan and Gab, that the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was Jewish, and so were many of his victims. It’s unclear if this is true. But if it were, it would make no sense to Fears, who, if he believes in anything, believes in the essentially tribal nature of all human beings. Jews, he said, “have a biological need to look out for their own.” He had spoken a bit about what he called the J.Q., or Jewish Question, as successive generations of anti-Semites have referred to the debate over how Western nations should handle the presence of Jews in their societies. “I don’t hate them for it, but I realize that their interests aren’t the same as mine.”
Fears’s views aren’t unique — roughly 22 million Americans call it “acceptable” to hold neo-Nazi or white-supremacist views, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in the wake of Charlottesville in August 2017. Roughly the same number of people, about 10 percent of Americans, said they supported the “alt-right”; about half of those polled said they were against it. Driving around Fears’s neighborhood one day, I saw Confederate flags, and American flags, and sometimes a Blue Lives Matter flag, and the black-and-white “Don’t Tread on Me” flag waving from shiny new trucks. I also saw row after row of McMansions, many of them with swimming pools. There were new S.U.V.s parked in the driveways, and boats: signs of money made and money spent. One former high school classmate of Fears’s described the culture as “wannabe redneck.”
