The Weekend of Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

PARDON ME. Yup. Anyone surprised or outraged that Biden threw a blanket pardon on his fuckup son Hunter must have suddenly forgotten that a convicted criminal (whose pending cases for treason have been shuttled miraculously) is poised to be the leader of the free world next month.

You would’ve done the exact same thing if it was your kid no matter how old or stupendously stupid your kid turned out to be. Moral high ground feels great but it gets beat down like a toddler throwing a tantrum by self interest. If here is anything that disconnects the Left from a swath of the electorate, it is the idea that Dems can lecture the country on integrity and moral indignation right up until their own needs collide with it.

Now? The floodgates have been pried loose.

Biden has received more than 10,500 pardon requests over his four years in office but has only issued 25, a historically low number even for single presidential terms, according to the Justice Department.

• Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) is enlisting colleagues on behalf of Steven Donzinger, an environmental lawyer accused of using fraudulent evidence to win a lawsuit against Chevron, according to a draft letter first obtained by Axios.

• McGovern also is urging Biden in a separate letter to posthumously exonerate Ethel Rosenberg, citing "significant evidence" that she did not engage in the Soviet spying for which she was executed in 1953.

• Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has urged Biden to pardon Assange, also told Axios he also wants pardons for Snowden and drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht — seen by libertarians such as Massie as anti-government crusaders.

• Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) cited Billie Allen, a death row inmate who says he was wrongfully convicted of murder, as well as Michelle West and Ismael Lira, who are serving life sentences for drug-related offenses.

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wants a pardon for indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of killing two FBI agents.

• Several lawmakers have urged Biden to pardon President-elect Trump for his actions related to Jan. 6 and his handling of classified documents. [from Axios]

I’d love it if Biden did a blanket pardon on everyone Trump is targeting. That’s be hysterical.

TAKING IT PERSONALLY. Most encounters that randomly become contentious in modern society come in the form of a bad customer service moment, a bit of traffic rage, a split second decision to be thoughtless and rude. And most of these melees come from people who wouldn’t know you from any other faceless, nameless person on the street. The guy who gets pissed off because you got in the wrong lane and still want to turn left, who honks and yells at through his windshield, doesn’t know you. The woman accusing someone stopping her from simply walking past security in a bank by grabbing her arm of sexual assault wouldn’t be able to name that person unless he had a name tag and knows nothing of his life.

If you find yourself in one of these moments, remember that this angry person doesn’t know you in any way so it makes absolutely no sense to take the battle personally.

The current crop of citizens seem to believe that respect is deserved, that one’s very existence demands respect, that a person’s marginalized status requires respect, rather than the old school notion that respect is earned rather than a right. Polite is the grease that keeps the machine running yet is not a quality one can expect or demand.

I heard recently that the Decent Human Being Test is whether you put your shopping cart back or leave it free floating in the lot after you pack your car with Christmas decorations made by Chinese children and discount frozen waffles. It isn’t illegal or punishable to discard the cart into the wind but it is a sign you simply don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else in the lot. It certainly isn’t a personal offense to casually flip the bird to the world of consumers in the Big Lots lot but it is straight up shitty.

THE HOTEL GRILLPARZER. Chuck’s philosophy (if he could call it that) when it came to his largely inherited staff at the Hotel Grillparzer was not in the same lane as his predecessor. The previous manager, from what he could gather, made sweeping promises about improving the property, fully training the young staff, and providing the appropriate tools for their success but fell short on all of them.

The staff had been through several of these types of managers. They were rightly skeptical of Chuck’s approach and commitment to his ideological bent concerning customer service.

“Be helpful,” he’d tell them. “You don’t have to be nice. You don’t have to be perfunctory. You only need to be helpful. Helpful to guests, helpful to one another, helpful to the cleaning staff. Helpful. Seek out ways to help throughout your shift and the work magically becomes more satisfying and the time moves faster.”

He thought this would be an easy transition but it turned out to be more difficult than he had supposed. He noticed two of his lobby staff, in service of getting a larger line of guests checking in, barking at them and telling them to get in line. Sure, it was helpful to get them in a line but the tone was off. He pulled one of them to the side.

“You know,” he said, “if you just smiled and waved them into a line like one of those guys guiding planes, they’ll comply without you having to order them around.”

“Wave at them?”

“Yeah. Just wave them into place. Maybe say something like ‘Folks. Thank you for coming to our hotel. Welcome. Can I please get you to squeeze into line so it doesn’t become chaos? Thank you so much!’ They hear ‘please’ followed by ‘thank you’ and it feels less like being in an airport.”

“So, be like an airport guide but less like an airport? I don’t get it.”

He sighed.

MORE SUPPLY LEVELS THE FIELD. I feel like Charles Grodin in Dave when I see simple solutions to manufactured complexity. We bitch about housing costs—rent, mortgages, and the headlock that landlords and property owners have on everyone seeking affordable shelter. Simple fix: build more places for people to live. When the demand for housing is far higher than the supply of housing, of course the landlords have all the power to increase rent and gouge the people. More houses equals more supply which equals the playing field some. When you can rent a place across the street for half what the other guy is charging, the other guy will lower his rent because it’s better to rent a place than let it sit empty.

THE BEST WAY TO AVOID ONLINE HARASSMENT. Get off of it. Delete the accounts. If asshats want to harass you then, they gotta do it in person or by mail and most of them haven’t got the sack to show up. Same with being canceled. Can’t be canceled if they don’t have access.

I recently read about a very educated college post-doctorate being excited about her very left-leaning paper on olfactory discrimination in literature. Not a paper for the public but for academia. She got blasted by every fucktard on X.

I recall, years ago, when I was posting anti-George W. Bush stuff, being threatened online by some dude who vehemently disagreed with my take. He kept it up, it got to deathg threats, and I called him out. I told him to meet me at the corner of Irving Park and Lincoln and he could see if his threats had teeth. He never showed. Now, I get to do that because I’m a dude. A young woman being threatened online is a different issue. The kind of shitwad who gangs up on a woman online is of a breed of rabidity that needs to be euthanized.

YOUR JOB HAS BEEN REPLACED. Former Tribune Company search-engine optimization (SEO) director Brent Payne posted “Domo Arigato AI: How AI Replaced 600 Writers at Loud,” a 1,600-word first-person essay about how contentPerfect.AI, a machine-trained program, allowed his Chicago-based SEO optimization and content generation company, Loud Interactive, to vastly cut its freelance expenses.

In the piece, unironically written by AI, Payne outlines how his company axed 600 part-time writers in favor of AI written content. Sure, he (the AI) attempts to outline the ethical dilemmas of replacing human writers with a more affordable model, but he fails to truly grapple with the implications of effectively eliminating the human for the machine in any real way.

Formerly employed journalist turned SubStacker Eric Zorn engaged Payne on an online Tribune board, and Payne offered this up:

If you’re a writer. Your job has already been replaced. Maybe your employer doesn’t know it yet and you still have a job, but you’ve been replaced. Run, don’t walk to a new career. If you’re a journalist. You have 10 years at the absolute most before the AIs/(Large Language Models/robots/cyborgs can do the things you’re capable of doing. Be mindful of this.

In my last days in Vegas, I worked for a Denver-based company that bought and sold personal data to advertisers. My job was to write copy—for video scripts, ebooks, white papers, you name it—as well as hire and train other copywriters and manage their workflow. It was good in that I got to work from home, it was bad in that I feel I was working for someone like Payne. I left that gig as soon as the CEO wanted me to write scripts for an AI in order to replace all the writers I had hired.

Jump cut to Kansas. Hired as a Promotions and Events Director for five radio stations housed in a dilapidated building out in the sticks, it was apparent that the umbrella company, based in Birmingham, was slowly replacing employees with automated systems. When I left, I wasn’t replaced and they haven’t filled that position since.

The internet was a huge disruptor of bidness-as-usual and AI is an even more devastating disruptor. You know what industry is booming in the wake of AI? The service industry. Welcome to the new dystopia where most of us are rendered low wage servants of those who managed to bank enough coin to weather this AI storm.

GO SEE JOE’S SHOW! I finally managed to catch Joe’s MacBeth by the Sea and the Den Theater in Chicago. It’s a hoot. Funny, smart, and great evening of Off Loop comedy. In a world devoid of anything but the worst humanity has to offer, we could all use a laugh and Jane's and his tiny crew serve them up plentifully.

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That’s the Week in Foolish Attention! Thanks for being a reader of my nonsense. Have a great week decorating, going to holiday parties where you drink too much and say things you’ll regret, and make Jesus happy for his sacrifice!