My Best GeoGuessr Plays: Version 1.0

In case you didn’t know, I play a lot of GeoGuessr. It’s my favorite game. And again, if you weren’t aware of how the game works, it’s pretty simple. You’re given imagery from Google Street View and you have to guess where you are. 

There are many clues one uses to play the game. The most obvious one is to pay attention to which side of the road cars are driving on - roughly 70% of the world’s countries and people drive on the right, but knowing which countries drive on the left can really narrow down your guess. Another big one is to look for signage - if you can tell languages apart when you come across a directional sign, that goes a long way to guessing the country or sometimes region.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to be showcasing a few of the most notable rounds I’ve played in which I either recognized a location with insane accuracy or learned a valuable lesson. Here we go.

Google Street View imagery of rural eastern Colorado, USA with the GeoGuessr interface.

In this round I played roughly two months ago, I spawned in a decently arid region. I could tell based on the sprawl that I was in the United States - I believe I saw a “SPEED LIMIT” sign at one point, which is important because Canada’s speed signs say “MAXIMUM” instead. 

The landscape brought to mind the High Plains, and the grain elevators resembled those frequently seen in America’s agricultural regions. Of course, it’s mostly factory farms these days rather than family-owned ones, but that’s beside the point. Very often, the USA is a difficult country to region-guess because so much of it looks the same.

That was not the case here once I saw a sign for “Kit Carson”. Based on my extensive time spent studying county maps of the United States for fun, I happened to know that there is a Kit Carson County in eastern Colorado. I placed my marker there, an act colloquially referred to as “plonking”, and hoped I would get lucky. As it turned out, I did get lucky, because I won the round and, if I remember correctly, the game.

Google Street View imagery of Dublin, Ireland within the GeoGuessr interface.

This one was wild.

As soon as I spawned, I saw that the city looked decently familiar. In fact, it was almost too familiar. Exploring the neighborhood on Street View, I noticed the facade of a building called the “Liffey Trust Centre”, and that’s when I knew the city. There is only one River Liffey.

As soon as I figured out where I was, I audibly exclaimed “Holy hell!” because I had literally flown back home from Dublin the previous day. I’m not kidding. I had walked these streets a mere two days before, including an area of Dublin’s Docklands section. While I did not see the Liffey Trust Centre, which Google Maps tells me is an apartment complex, I was a mere 100 meters away from it at most. 

In all probability, this was just an insane coincidence. Perhaps the game has some way of knowing where my computer has been, but that almost seems doubtful given that my IP address varies depending on what Wi-Fi network I connect to. It is possible that Big GeoGuessr, much like Orwell’s Big Brother, is always watching me no matter where I am. The algorithms know who you are, and that’s not a conspiracy theory - that’s public information. Still, it was pretty insane seeing Dublin on my interface so soon after returning from a trip to that very city, especially considering that urban rounds become a lot less frequent in duels the higher you climb in the rankings.

Google Street View imagery of Burgas, Bulgaria with the GeoGuessr interface.

Here is possibly my most impressive guess to date.

As stated at the start of this post, a truly informed play in GeoGuessr must involve looking at several clues. It’s not always enough to see an Internet domain or national flag. In this case, I saw neither.

The first thing I noticed was a series of austere high-rise apartment buildings that are informally referred to as “commie blocks.” This told me I was likely in Eastern Europe or Central Asia, a hunch that was further confirmed when I saw signs in the Cyrillic alphabet that’s used in languages such as Russian. 

However, the roads were a lot better maintained than what I’d expect in Russia or especially Ukraine. While I’m not great at telling when the street-view imagery was taken, that would have been another clue. For obvious reasons, Google Street View hasn’t updated its coverage of Ukraine or Russia for several years.

My final clue was the vegetation. The trees reminded me of the time I visited Greece some years ago, evoking Southern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. However, the specific type of apartment buildings I saw made me believe I was in a formerly communist country. And the height of said buildings implied a city of some size. 

I guessed Burgas, which is the fourth-largest city in Bulgaria and a semi-popular tourist destination on the Black Sea coast. As it turns out, I ended up plonking less than a mile from the flag, being rewarded with 4,997 points out of a possible 5,000. I can’t even tell you how satisfying that was - that would be the highest single-round score I’ve ever achieved in a duel if not for…

Google Street View imagery of Nuuk, Greenland with the GeoGuessr interface. 

I’d seen images of Nuuk, the only settlement in Greenland that can honestly be called a “city”, and the apartment buildings somewhat resembled motels. The flag painted on what might be a bus stop also jumped out at me - I’ve seen a few people fly the Greenlandic flag in protest against Trump’s threatened annexation of the world’s largest island. (Which, to be perfectly clear, I denounce this one hundred percent.)

As you can see in the image above, an indigenous woman is painted on the side of the apartment complex, and I knew from prior knowledge that most of the Greenlandic population is indigenous. The vegetation (mostly lack thereof) also reminded me of the Arctic.

After that, it was just a matter of locating Nuuk on the map. I felt confident it was Nuuk because nowhere else in Greenland could possibly be that densely populated. As such, I was rewarded with 4,998 points, two shy of the maximum, and felt quite proud of myself.

Overall, GeoGuessr has been an immense asset to my fascination with geography. Sometimes, when you feed a hyperfixation too much, it spins out of control - that’s definitely the case here. 

Thank you for reading. 

Birthday Musings

Today is my 25th birthday, and I’m lost in a cascade of emotions, to say the least.

Some of the facts are clear. I am now closer to thirty than I am to twenty. That is a sobering thought, to be sure. From here on out my metabolism is going to slow down, if it hasn’t done so already. Eventually, once I reach my forties, my 6’3” frame is going to gradually shrink and my posture will get worse. Supposedly my frontal lobe is now fully developed, but people don’t have to stop learning once they reach twenty-five.

I’m going to get a handful of presents. I didn’t request anything in particular besides a cake; once you attain a certain age, birthdays don’t feel as monumental. But this one, my “silver birthday”, is somewhat different.

When I woke up this morning at about 5:30 AM, still recovering from the jet lag I experienced upon my return from Ireland, I came across the horrific news about Air India Flight 171. And I want to be careful talking about this, because it’s a horrendous tragedy. But hundreds of people have been confirmed dead, including all of the 242 passengers and crew. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which was scheduled to fly from Ahmedabad to London-Gatwick, crashed shortly after takeoff. 

At time of writing, we don’t know precisely why this crash happened. Transportation safety boards will review the circumstances and come to their conclusion, and hopefully changes will be made to ensure this doesn’t happen again. 

More importantly for the purposes of this post, it’s made me think about how fragile life can be. One day, you’re here - the next day, you aren’t. 

If you’re lucky, it’ll be after a long life, with loved ones by your bed, passing peacefully in your sleep. Maybe you’ll go quietly with very little pain - to theextent that there can be a “good” way to die, it’s something like that.

Now, I want to make one thing clear: I’m not a particularly philosophical person. I don’t spend a lot of time pondering the secrets of the universe beyond what science can reveal. Perhaps I’m a science enthusiast, because it’s always cool to discover what innovations will be unleashed as long as RFK Jr. doesn’t take them away from us. Even with the increase in obesity (which isn’t exclusive to the United States, even if it’s worse here), it’s not like a third of the population dies before age 5 anymore. 

I’m not particularly spiritual either. That’s not to say I haven’t considered questions of faith and similar matters, what in more technical terms is called philosophy of religion. I’m well aware of the problem of evil, and I have at least passing knowledge of theodicy, the subset of philosophy and/or religious apologetics used to explain away said problem of evil. I do not personally pray or go to church, and in general I live my life as though God’s not real. At least, I’d like to think I live to the fullest.

 Truth be told, I don’t pay as much attention to arguments for and against the truth of religious claims as I used to. I find I’m happier when I don’t give it much thought. 

But this milestone, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day I was cut from my mother’s womb, has forced my hand.

There is what some call the “genetic lottery of birth.” I’m not talking about how where, when, and to whom you are born plays a role in your life’s circumstances. That’s obviously a factor, but it’s not the only factor, particularly in an age when the world is more connected than ever.

Rather, I’m referring to how our personalities end up in bodies. How is a “soul”, for lack of a better word, matched with a body and brain? Even if all that I am, all that might be called a soul, is ultimately a product of this meat computer we call a brain, none of us are privy to how this process works. Does the universe have its own Random Number Generator? Is there any order in all this chaos?

I don’t know. In all probability, none of us on Earth will figure it out in my lifetime. I’m not going to parrot one of those arrogant religious activists who say science can’t answer that, because maybe it can one day. I just don’t know when that day will come. I likely won’t be around to see it.

There’s another matter, which is that of the afterlife. 

I don’t mean to wave away the legitimate reasons many people think there probably isn’t one. Often they point to how traumatic brain injuries can radically change a person’s personality, or how there’s no activity in the brain upon a person’s death. Personally, in the latter case, I don’t see how the absence of evidence is necessarily evidence of absence. Why would a person’s soul have to be physically within their body?

Personally, I don’t know what to believe, or even what I want to believe, with regards to what happens after you die. I’m aware that from a scientific standpoint, it’s very difficult to justify a belief in heaven on empirical evidence alone. And we can have a conversation about whether even eternal bliss would ultimately be less than ideal. Anyone who’s watched The Good Place all the way through (spoiler alert) has probably considered that forever is an unimaginably long time, even if you spend it in the titular paradise.

If I end up in an afterlife, I want something to work toward. It’s said that death is the ultimate motivator; we are incentivized to do whatever we need or want to do now, or at least soon, because one fine morning we won’t be able to. And the world will move on without us, and the people we loved most won’t have been able to hear I love you one last time. 

Again, empirical evidence for an afterlife is incredibly spotty at best. I do not deny that. But there are two reasons I hold out some hope.

One reason is because pretty much every ancient culture came up with something we might consider a religion. Of course, given the many differences between each form of mythology, they can’t all be right about every detail. For all I know, none of them were right about any details. Still, there were plenty of commonalities between many of these belief systems, such as ideas about how the world was created and what happened after you died. And this happened at a time when these civilizations rarely if ever interacted with one another except maybe to go to war. If prehistoric cultures agreed on some spiritual matters, then I think it’s at least conceivable there’s something to it. 

The other reason is because I feel I have to.

I live in the United States, a country where a disproportionate number of people die young. Gun violence in particular is an enormous injustice, a stain on this nation, and even if we were to pass gun control (which I have no serious expectation will ever happen), the children at Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, Robb Elementary, Apalachee High, and so many others aren’t coming back. 

A lot of the media coverage around school shootings centers around the gun control debate (as it should, even if that debate is pretty much over), but what many people don’t fully appreciate is how much these kids missed out on. Their lives were cut incredibly short. In the case of Sandy Hook, it took just minutes of a mentally ill young man’s time to take the lives of twenty literal children, and that just feels so profoundly unfair.

And look: I realize that the world has no obligation to be perfectly fair to us, not remotely. Put more bluntly, wishing it doesn’t make it so. This “argument” for an afterlife isn’t exactly philosophically satisfying, let alone scientifically rigorous. It’s not going to convince any logically mindful person who doesn’t already fervently want to believe. And honestly, I’m not sure I believe it. 

But with how fucked up the world has been lately, particularly the United States, I really hope there’s something else out there. Maybe not eternal paradise, because that might well have its own problems. I just really hope there’s a possibility that somehow, somewhere, things can be made right.

Happy birthday to me, huh?

Destination X: What I Needed

Promotional image for NBC’s “Destination X.” Image taken from IMDB.

Now, I’m not normally the type to watch a lot of TV. Usually, I don’t have the attention span for such shows, a consequence of how much time I’ve spent scrolling through social media. It’s affected all of us, and not in a good way.

That being said, one show seemed like it might be an exception. I received an ad for it on Paramount Plus yesterday, which serves as evidence that the advertisers know, by and large, who I am and what I’m interested in. Of course, that’s not a conspiracy theory - it’s public information. Anyone who pays attention to current events knows how these algorithms work. And yesterday I submitted to them.

At any rate, as soon as I saw a commercial for NBC’s Destination X, I knew I had to give it a watch. I am, after all, an avid GeoGuessr player and geography fanatic. 

The premise of the show is what I’d describe as a combination between Big Brother and GeoGuessr. Basically, ten strangers (though two more contestants are apparently added in the third episode, which doesn’t seem fair) are on this giant bus where the windows are all blacked out. In other words, the contestants have little to no way to tell where they are going. And guess what?

Meme from iFunny with the caption “THAT’S THE POINT!”

The show is hosted by a guy named Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Apparently he was an actor on this obscure show called The Walking Dead. I doubt you’ve heard of it. Anyway, he’s still quite an engaging presence on Destination X, though more on that later.

Now, the first thing I noticed upon searching for this show on Google was that the reviews were pretty middling. As of the moment I searched for it, only about half of Google users liked the show. I’ll admit that at first, I was fairly skeptical that I’d enjoy a TV series that had received such mediocre feedback.

After a few minutes, though, I was in full-on “fuck the haters” mode. Like, seriously. I couldn’t believe so many people disliked Destination X. It’s the perfect show for me, though I’ll acknowledge it might not be perfect for everyone. You need to go into it with a certain mindset.

The cast consists of twelve strangers, all but one of whom live in the United States. There’s one guy, Rick, who lives in Ontario, but he’s apparently originally from Seattle. If he’s one of the people who moved to Canada to escape Trump, I don’t blame him. In all seriousness, of the original ten players, only one could be considered previously famous - Josh Martinez, a former winner of Big Brother.

As an avid, longtime viewer of The Amazing Race, I was eager to check out this travel competition series. That’s a genre I need to search for more members of. According to their cast bios, the contestants are quite well-traveled with the exception of “Biggy”, a dad-gum likable fish out of water from Tennessee. Lots of them have been as far afield as Australia. And you know why I found that shocking upon reading these bios?

These contestants are idiots.

Okay, I’ll admit that’s not the kindest framing. Even if network TV ratings are a fraction of what they used to be, the fact remains that lots of people are watching. The contestants are quite brave for putting themselves out there and exposing their actions (and knowledge, or lack thereof, of European geography) to public scrutiny. I don’t mean to imply that being a public figure in this capacity doesn’t take guts. It does.

If the Facepalm subreddit wasn’t 85% Donald Trump these days, Destination X would be a perfect exhibit for it. I don’t want to spoil too much for readers who might watch, but for people who are as well-traveled as their bios say they are, the contestants sure seem to know very little about what’s almost certainly the world’s most tourist-friendly continent. 

And I know: It’s easy for me to say that, given that I’m obsessed with geography to possibly an unhealthy extent. Maybe I should give these players the benefit of the doubt given that there’s lots of pressure being in front of a camera, not to mention the isolation of being on that blacked-out bus for so long with only each other for company. I don’t want to minimize the fact that reality TV sets are built to break people (again, that’s the point), but I can’t tell you how many times I cringed during the first episode.

Like, it’s no wonder I wasn’t recruited for Destination X. I’d win every single season, and I hope to Arceus that there will be more seasons, because it’s entertaining as hell. I love watching these surprisingly ignorant recruits, including a Coachella grandma, a professional bird-watcher, and an aww-shucks sports bettor, clash over who got which clues to their destination. And yes, I’d bet 100 to 1 that the majority of these players are recruits. 

I guess I should explain how you get eliminated from this show. Well, at the end of every episode, after some people earn clues through challenges and some do not, five players are sent to the dreaded Map Room. As far as I can tell, the Map Room is on the same bus as the contestants’ living quarters. I’ll probably get cancelled for the Harry Potter reference, but this bus must have an Undetectable Extension Charm or whatever it was called in the books. There’s no way the Map Room could fit on it normally.

Each player sent to the Map Room has two minutes to place an X on a map of Europe in a specific location. Ultimately, in the words of the host, they’ve only got to answer one question: Where the hell am I? And whoever “plonks” their X furthest from the actual location must get off the bus, which means they’re eliminated from the competition.

Now, as stated above, this show’s reviews on Google did not inspire the most confidence. But again, fuck the haters. This is amazing.

Seriously, this is the show I needed. After several months spent doomscrolling for hours a day, I could really use a show that’s just intellectually stimulating enough to pay attention to while also being a total hot mess from the standpoint of trashy reality TV drama. Like, it’s a total fever dream. 

The contestants aren’t the only characters here. As stated above, Destination X is hosted by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, a man I’d never seen on TV prior to yesterday, but who ends up being an amazing host. NBC chose perfectly for the role, and I couldn’t laugh harder at how playfully sadistic Morgan sounds when conversing with the contestants. He’s turned Europe into a giant game board, and the players only see what I want them to see. Those are his words, not mine.

Another factor that made me snort was how this show is put together. The production value is through the roof, but not in a way that makes Destination X feel refined or scripted. Rather, the production value is so over-the-top that it loops around to being cartoonish. Whether it’s the host riding in on a motorcycle, or the montages of people donning their high-tech VR goggles and having their vision switched off, it feels so excessive. But again, it’s so breathtakingly entertaining that you won’t care how cheesy it is. I promise.

I can’t tell you how much I needed Destination X. Twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t even know this series existed, and now I’m obsessed. New episodes drop Tuesday evenings (in EST) on NBC, but you can also watch it on several streaming platforms including YouTube TV and Peacock. 

At time of writing, two episodes are available for your viewing pleasure. And I highly recommend you take advantage of them. If you want to watch something related to geography (or just love looking at European scenery in both highly populated and pastoral regions), Destination X is for you. Even if you’re not in the mood for something incredibly intellectual, this is one of the messiest shows I’ve ever seen, in a good way. It’s such a train wreck that you might just love it.

Ireland Impressions

NOTE: If this essay feels disjointed, that’s because it was written over a three-day period and not in one sitting. My apologies.

Hello. Again, it’s been a while. Far longer than it should have been since I wrote one of these up. And there really is no excuse for this - rather, there is a reason.

The way I see it, an “excuse” and a “reason” are two different things. An excuse means you’re trying to dodge responsibility for what happened, whereas a reason means you’re admitting what you did was wrong, you’re just explaining why you did it. But that’s beside the point.

My reason is that I recently traveled to Ireland. This is my second international trip of the year, which also makes it the second international trip since Donald Trump took office. As I wrote this section, I was scheduled to fly home the following day and I’m thankful the airport has U.S. preclearance. If I’m to be rejected at customs, I’ll be denied boarding rather than detained and possibly sent to El Salvador.

In any case, I think I should talk about my trip. 

The purpose of travel, as the immigration agent asked upon our arrival in Dublin, was tourism. It was to celebrate my sister’s graduation from college, so all four of us went. My sister selected the destination based on its literary history, particularly James Joyce (whose most famous work is perhaps Ulysses. More on that later.)

And let me tell you, Ireland is a special place. From the moment the clouds cleared to reveal the northern suburbs of Dublin that lie in the airport’s flight path, I knew I was going to enjoy this vacation. 

Aerial view of some Irish seaside town on the approach to DUB. OC photo taken June 1, 2025.

One of the obvious differences in Ireland is that they drive on the left side of the road. My mother announced she’d take the passenger seat of our rented car, then opened the front right door to reveal the steering wheel. All four of us burst out laughing at that very moment.

As an avid GeoGuessr player, seeing the Irish road signs was quite a treat. The YIELD signs have thicker text than those in America, and the directional signs are bilingual, featuring Irish Gaelic text in italics beside the standard English text. Another way to tell the UK apart from Ireland, of course, is that British signs say “GIVE WAY” rather than “YIELD”. 

Now I’ll talk about some things I noticed in Ireland that, while not exactly culture shock, qualify as notable societal differences with the United States.

I’ll start with the food. For all the talk about how American restaurant food has massive portion sizes, is massively processed, and is therefore massively bad for you, I think I ate less healthily here than I have at home. Of course, part of that is likely because I was on vacation and therefore saw fit to indulge. Additionally, pubs aren’t the only type of restaurant in Dublin, even if they are what the Irish capital is most famous for.

After nearly a week here, what I crave most of all are vegetables. I’m sure there are plenty of veggies if you actually look for them, but I didn’t have too many this week.

And speaking of the portion sizes, it is true that they don’t give you as many fries with your burger as you’d get in the States. However, the burger itself was bigger than most burgers I’ve had on the other side of the pond. The patty was thicker than a hockey puck, and the bun was taller too. It was rather unwieldy to eat, but still delicious.

Again, I’m not naïve to the fact that American food is still worse for you. I’m well aware that the United States is more obese than Ireland on average. But I’ve lived in the USA for my whole life, and your needs as a tourist are generally different from your needs as a resident. 

Of course, like I said above, Dublin has plenty of other restaurants besides pubs. I just didn’t go to many places that would qualify as “other restaurants besides pubs”.

Another cultural difference I noticed was related to renewable energy.

It’s no secret that the United States is not the most environmentally conscious country in the world. Donald Trump is President, and that’s not something that “happened” to us - we, collectively, chose him. At least at that moment in time, there was a preference for a convicted felon and climate denier against a perfectly qualified black woman with more sensible environmental policy, as sad as that is.

The EU is different. As I’m writing this from my hotel lobby in Dublin, it’s very likely that several of the city’s buses have driven by. A massive percentage of these buses, possibly half or more, advertise themselves as producing zero emissions. And I believe it. In addition, when visiting the village of Cong, I was able to spot a gas station. It was priced at about €1.75 per liter, which, if I’m doing my math correctly, equates to over seven dollars a gallon. In the USA, I’ve rarely seen gasoline cost more than $4/gallon. This of course means that gas is taxed more heavily in Europe than it is on my side of the pond.  

Now, I’ll admit that this isn’t really a “culture shock”. After all, in a perfect world, all of us would care about the climate crisis and protecting the environment. But we don’t live in a perfect world. I was pleased to see that the EU is taking significant measures to make things better. And it’s refreshing to visit a place where every politician treats climate change and humanity’s complicity in it as fact.

Another thing I noticed during my time in Dublin was how much it seems to have changed in recent years. While it was my first visit to Ireland, I still found it notable that there were many ethnic restaurants. 

It may not be quite as multicultural as London, but Ireland, once a country that legions of people emigrated from, has become a popular country for people to move to. One day, they should have an immigration museum in addition to their emigration museum. 

I’m not going to say Ireland is perfect in terms of welcoming foreigners. No country is. But when I visited the Guinness factory in Dublin, the exhibit mentioned how progressive the company has historically been. (Admittedly, since it’s the company museum, one shouldn’t take that uncritically). A contemporary employee was quoted as saying that, while a Korean BBQ joint next to a 200-year-old Irish pub might seem disjointed, it works. 

I think that’s an exhibit in how the components of a national identity can change. For much of the last 200 years Ireland was an unattractive immigration destination, to say the least. But that isn’t really the case anymore. Irish national identity now includes people who are Irish by choice rather than by chance. 

Again, I’m one to talk - I live in the USA. But most Irish people (and Brits) probably do not agree with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s controversial “island of strangers” speech. Indeed, the people of Ireland were among the friendliest of any place I’ve visited - more on that later.

Now, in case you didn’t know, there’s quite a lot of interesting places to visit in and around Dublin. One such area is pictured just above - the James Joyce Tower in Sandycove. Admission to the tower is free, though you can purchase souvenirs from the gift shop. The tower is known for being where James Joyce lived for six days, and is the setting for the opening pages of Ulysses. My sister, a major fan of Joyce’s, seemed to be in heaven.

Sandycove, which is not to be confused with one of the most horrific days in American history, reminded me of a combination between Cape Cod and San Francisco based on its geography and architecture. There’s a well-known swimming hole in Sandycove known as Forty Foot, which was featured on The Amazing Race 35. 

While walking around Sandycove and the neighboring town of Dun Laoghaire, I was struck by the realization that if I were ever to move to Ireland, this is the sort of place I’d want to live in. It’s a suburb of Dublin with numerous parks and amenities thanks to its mixed-use zoning. I’m sure it’s among the most expensive places to live in an already high-cost-of-living country, but if you can afford it (a big if), it’s probably amazing. Especially because it’s so close to the city!

Speaking of James Joyce, it was during my visit in Ireland that I learned about Bloomsday. No, that isn’t a typo. Instead, it’s a national (or at least local) holiday held every year on June 16, which is the date on which Ulysses takes place. On that day, particularly devoted Joyce fans partake in celebrations at the novel’s portrayed locations throughout Dublin. Some of the most fanatic Joyce readers even walk the whole way as a form of “pilgrimage”, for lack of a better word.

My main anxiety concerning this trip, other than possibly being detained at customs on the way back into the United States, was the way I would be perceived abroad once people learned what country I lived in. It’s no secret that America’s international reputation is in the shitter, and it’s sadly well-deserved. Domestic issues like expensive health care and gun violence are one thing, but when it comes to threatening Canadian sovereignty and doing nothing about climate change, we had no right to elect Donald Trump. Especially when our economic recovery was pretty good under Joe Biden!

So yeah…considering all that, the Irish people had every right to curse us out at any opportunity. It does not matter that I did not personally vote for Trump - the fact that I still need to pay taxes to his administration is bad enough. 

Fortunately, the anti-American sentiment I anticipated largely did not materialize. As stated above, Ireland’s people are some of the kindest out of the 16 countries I’ve visited. In fact, most of them didn’t even bring up Donald Trump unless I mentioned him first. 

Of course, it needs to be said that I took every measure to preempt any animosity centered around my nationality. For instance, I always said “Boston” before I said “USA” when asked where I was from. It’s my general sense (and a group of Canadian tourists I met in a small yet famous village confirmed) that Boston has a better reputation than most American cities. 

Seriously, even other tourists were quite upbeat. My memory is that I met a group of travelers and asked them where they were from (answer: Ottawa, Canada). I then said I was from Boston and was like, “I don’t know what to say right now…but I hate Trump” or something to  that effect. As I figured, however, they get that a lot whenever encountering American tourists, and one remarked that Boston isn’t a MAGA place. After that, I asked one of them to take my photo in front of the statue of an actor from The Quiet Man.

On the whole, the Golden Rule still applies whenever you’re a tourist, even if you’re an American tourist. You treat locals the way you would like to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot - it’s as simple as that. Don’t tell locals you’re Irish just because your great-great-great-grandfather escaped the country during the potato famine of the late 1840s. In general, Europeans care a lot less about which country’s blood you have, and why shouldn’t they - the last time they got obsessed over that, it didn’t exactly end well.

Oh, and whatever you do, don’t wear a MAGA hat. Truth be told, most Americans who visit Europe probably lean left of center (as the right-wingers tend to think the USA is the best country in the world and why would you visit anywhere else), but if you do support that asshole, you’d be wise to keep it to yourself when you’re in a country that’s far less sympathetic toward Donald Trump. 

If I ever go back to Ireland (and I’m likely to one day), I would want to spend more time on the country’s west coast. I might not visit the Cliffs of Moher, since they’re incredibly touristy (even if it’s for a good reason), but I would always relish the opportunity to drive around those impossibly verdant hills and mountains. Seriously, there’s a reason they call it the Emerald Isle.

If you wish to see photos from this trip, follow me on BlueSky at @snowlabrador.

Trump TV

By all accounts, it’s been a pretty insane couple of days. The FDA announced recently that they would not recommend COVID boosters for people under age 65 unless they were considered to be at high risk. Yes, this is really happening. I’m glad I was able to get an impromptu booster yesterday, and some other people probably will as well. 

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Sewage, promised that if we wanted vaccines, we would still be able to get them. He said this under oath. And yet, he was lying, just like many people warned he was. He’s taking away our freedom of choice, and as a result, there will be many otherwise preventable hospitalizations and deaths. I left a comment on the regulations.gov page, but who knows if that’ll do anything. Still, it’s worth a shot.

In the last week or two, Trump announced that he was going to receive a $400 million plane from Qatar to use as Air Force One. Again, this is really happening. As brazenly corrupt as this is, the most worrying part is that the Qatari jet is almost certainly bugged seven ways from Sunday. It’s literally an intelligence nightmare on par with Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard. At this point, you might as well give Vladimir Putin a Cabinet position - for all intents and purposes, he’s already President.

And to those who say Putin must have something on Trump, I understand why you’d think that, but there’s still a gaping hole in this theory. 

We already know lots of horrible things about Trump given how his first term ended and the fact that he was convicted of thirty-four felony charges. I’m not naïve to Trump’s admiration of Putin and how dangerous that is. But my issue with the blackmail theory is this: What could Putin POSSIBLY have on Trump that’s so much worse than what we already know? And, more importantly: Why is he so scared of that secret coming out when he’s proven to be Teflon Don otherwise?

No. I think it’s more likely Trump simply loves Putin and wants to be just like him. That’s incredibly dangerous, of course, and I don’t want to minimize that. Other countries are going to stop sharing intelligence with us pretty soon, if they haven’t already. And we’re going to see more terrorist attacks.

In the midst of all this chaos and outrage, it would be nice if we had a mainstream media that did its job. It would be nice if they called out the Trump administration for all their horrendous acts, as well as the American public for electing that man not once but twice. But that’s not the world we live in.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock lately, former US President Joe Biden was recently diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of prostate cancer. In my view, it makes the saga last year surrounding efforts to remove him from the race seem even more tragic in hindsight. There have obviously been many questions about how this wasn’t detected sooner - after all, Biden has the best healthcare in the world. 

To be sure, this certainly warrants some discussion in the media. The issue is that it’s all the media is talking about. I’m not going to link to CNN, which has basically become Trump TV at this point thanks to all the “sane-washing” it does, but they’ve been running segment after segment about how the Democrats covered up Biden’s health. As if it’s remotely equivalent to everything Trump and the GOP have done!

Yes, the Democratic Party tried to hide Joe Biden’s decline from the general public. But quite frankly, I don’t care about that anymore. Biden isn’t President anymore, and he’ll never be President again. He’ll be lucky to live out the rest of the year. The point is, he should be politically irrelevant at this point, and he probably would be if the media stopped talking about the cover-up. This could lead into a rant about the Democrats’ age problem, but I won’t go there right now.

Of course, it needs to be said that this is far from the only example of the media sabotaging the Democratic Party. Consider how much they sane-washed Trump during the leadup to the 2024 election. It’s no secret at this point that they desperately wanted to return to the White House for the sake of ratings.

Donald Trump, of course, is a ratings machine. Whether you love him or hate him, you have to pay attention. The idea that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” was basically the modus operandi of his 2016 campaign, and he keeps grabbing your attention with insane threats, such as that to make Canada the 51st state.

Speaking of that particular threat, CNN is totally broken at this point. Or maybe broken is the wrong word - it’s working exactly as they want it to. Again, I’m not going to give them any more traffic through this blog (however small that amount of traffic might be), but I remember that they talked about Trump’s 51st state comments as “Trump eyes territorial expansion.” This is sane-washing of the highest order. 

Honestly, there’s a word for what Trump proposes. There’s a word for forcibly annexing a country with the intent of conquering it and making it part of your own country. The word is invasion.

If you want to know what an invasion entails, look no further than Ukraine. Now, I’m aware that media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a fraction of what it once was. During the first few days and weeks of the war, Ukraine was everywhere. You couldn’t escape the news about Snake Island, or the siege on Mariupol, or the numerous other war crimes Russian forces have committed the last few years. 

Now, of course, this conflict has faded into the background, especially since the October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war against Hamas (and genocide in Gaza) soaking up all the attention. But the war in Ukraine, now well into its fourth year, is still going on, and still just as bloody as ever.

The point is, war is brutal, especially when civilians are targeted like what Russia and Israel are doing. Trump’s proposing doing exactly this to Canada, because they will fight back. Canadians are proud of one thing above all, and that’s not being Americans. It’s hard to blame them when they’ve got universal health insurance and sane gun laws. 

Will Trump actually invade Canada? Who knows. It’s a joke until it isn’t. But it’s incredibly irresponsible of CNN to use the euphemism of “territorial expansion” to describe such an unspeakable crime. 

So, if we have a mainstream media that’s totally in the tank for Donald Trump, what’s the solution? That’s where I come in.

I haven’t been as consistent in writing this blog as I should be, but I’m here to deliver the news as I see it. I might not have a fancy journalism degree, but you don’t need one in order to tell people what they need to know. Your “I Can” is more important than your IQ, isn’t it?

The mainstream media, CNN et al,  is Trump TV. They sanitized everything he proposed, and they continue to do so. Independent, alternative media is the way forward for our country. It’s the only way we’ll convince enough people that they were destructive fools for giving Donald Trump another term in the White House.

Lessons From The Scale

Hello again. It’s me. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Let me just say that it’s been an eventful few weeks since this blog went offline. I felt like bringing it back, though, so here we are. After a rebrand, I’m going to make The Lion’s Lair better than ever before.

Anyway, the other thing that’s different in my life is that I received a sobering health diagnosis. I’m not an old man by any means, but being slightly pudgy has already started catching up with me. My doctor recommended that I lose about ten pounds.

At first, it was a little hard to accept the news. Most people don’t want to accept that they aren’t as healthy as they thought they were. There’s a reason that Sacha Baron Cohen segment with Bernie Sanders, in which Cohen played a man previously oblivious to his horrendously unhealthy lifestyle, was so funny.

When I told my mother about what the doctor’s note said, she talked to me at first as though I were a sick puppy. I’m sure she didn’t mean it this way, but I wanted my other family members to know that I’d rather not be talked to like I have cancer. The fact is, I do not have cancer - at least, I don’t think I do.

I realize that compared to many people who struggle with the size of their waistline, I had a relatively mild amount of weight to lose. I also realize that I'm not at my goal weight yet.However, I want to share my insights anyway. These aren't necessarily revolutionary conclusions that will put scientists to shame - at least, not for many people who’ve lived this struggle. But here's what has helped me the most.

You Get Used To It:

After a few weeks of not eating excessive portions, I get full a little faster than I used to. Previously I might have eaten two or three large plates of food without hesitation, but now my portions are a decent bit smaller. I don’t know if my stomach has shrunk, or if that only happens to people who have bariatric surgery. And obviously, bariatric surgery isn’t recommended for people who are only moderately overweight - it’s a drastic step that, contrary to popular belief, is not an easy way out. I'm by no means depriving myself, of course; any fad diet suggesting to eat extremely little is not to be trusted. The most important reason is because…

It's Not A Diet, It's A Lifestyle:

The word diet, for many people, has the connotation of a temporary restriction on your caloric intake. For better or worse, it doesn't work that way. If you want to keep the weight off in the long term, you need to view it as a permanent lifestyle change.

This doesn’t mean you can never have pizza again. In fact, I’ve noticed that if you allow yourself to indulge once or twice a week, it’s a lot easier to keep these habits up in the long term. If you crave pizza, maybe make it an occasional treat instead of eating it every other night. I’ve personally started only eating dessert on the weekends, if at all.

That's the main reason why fad diets are to be avoided - the changes they suggest aren't realistic to maintain for life. And you want to maintain this for life, for which it's helpful to realize that…

It's Not About What You're Giving Up:

If you are to maintain your lifestyle changes for, well, life, it's best to have a certain attitude. Don't look at your new lifestyle as giving up what you love. The only thing you're renouncing is the extra pounds (or kilograms for non-Americans). In all seriousness, there are plenty of healthy foods that taste delicious. 

One of the hardest parts of losing weight is finding time to cook for yourself, but if you see this journey as an opportunity to find new recipes with healthier ingredients, it'll be far more enjoyable. Sweet potato fries taste at least as amazing when you cook them in the air fryer, and they're a lot better for you than when you get them at a restaurant. It's not about giving things up; it's about finding better ways.

Don't Obsess Over The Scale:

I know. Ironic, right? Before officially starting my weight loss journey maybe two months ago, I often weighed myself every single day. This made it easy to overreact to what basically amounted to a daily fluctuation. This may be controversial here, but I advocate for weekly weigh-ins rather than daily. This way, I believe you'll have a more accurate view of whether you're on track to meet your goal. I'm the sort of guy who likes instant gratification, but this isn't the sort of process that gets you instant gratification. As mentioned above, the weekly weigh-ins also allow you to treat yourself once or twice a week, which is okay as long as you eat healthily the rest of the week (and also makes it easier to maintain the lifestyle in the long term).

Finally, it's easier to eat zero potato chips than one. This is a lesson many of us have learned the hard way, but it's true. Potato chips, like many junk foods, are designed to be addictive. People don’t always think of unhealthy foods as being akin to drugs, but it can be an addiction just like any other. 

Indeed, the difficult thing about a food addiction as opposed to one for alcohol or nicotine is that you need some amount of food to survive. If you’re trying to quit smoking or conquer alcoholism, you can simply quit. It might not be pleasant, which is why I’m glad I don’t smoke or drink in the first place. But food is a biological necessity that you can’t break up from; forging a healthy relationship with it is essential to success.

Again, I'm not pretending to be an expert on everything to do with weight loss. I’m not naïve to the fact that this is a difficult journey for the vast majority of people who attempt it. But this is my personal blog, and I’m just sharing what I’ve observed over the last few weeks.

As of the day I write this post, I’m about 6 pounds down compared to my weight on the morning of my diagnosis. I’m not at my goal yet, but I’m getting there. Say what you will about Andy Grammer’s musical style, but his song “Workin’ On It” has basically become my anthem over the last couple of weeks. 

Different people have different stumbling blocks on this road. I read this AskReddit thread a while back about the hardest part of eating healthily. While some people gave cynical answers like “living in the USA”, the one I related to most was the difficulty of cooking every single meal. But it’s made me more passionate about food, as I become more intentional about what I use as fuel.

The reward is very handsome indeed. At merely 6 pounds beneath my starting weight, walking long distances already seems to put a little less strain on my knees. Family members and a few friends have also said I look a little leaner. I cannot tell you how gratifying that feels and how fervently I wish to remain on this path toward a healthier body. 

Thank you for reading.

Finding Better Ways

Wouldn’t you love a lawn like this? Image taken from the American Meadows website.

Sometimes I go back to a quote from the Australian and American journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks. Even if I didn’t finish her novel Horse, I still admire Brooks a great deal, especially for this one quote about climate change. 

I’m not naïve to the fact that climate change is a crisis. I’m well aware that my country’s President is effectively taking a flamethrower to the planet, and will try to cut whatever green energy programs he can. But there’s one answer Geraldine Brooks gave in this 2022 interview with the New York Times that really stuck with me.

Brooks was asked what subject she wished more authors would write about. Her response was as follows: 

We have to reframe the story of climate change so that it is not only about renunciation and loss, but also about possibility and joy. A wild lawn full of bees and wildflowers is more beautiful and less work than a dull expanse of toxic ChemLawn; a sunlight-powered electric car happens to be a more sporty drive than a gas vehicle, and a pre-owned treasure discovered while socializing with neighbors at the local Dumptique brings more satisfaction than a plastic tchotchke one-clicked on the internet. It’s not about giving things up but finding better ways.

There’s something beautiful about this. Whenever we read or listen to news about climate change, we’re confronted with statistics about what we are losing; species are going extinct, glaciers are melting, entire major cities might become borderline uninhabitable by century’s end or sooner. I don’t mean to minimize the tragedy that these losses are, nor do I believe Brooks intended to do so.

In my personal life, I’ve noticed these “better ways” showing up. For instance, my father now drives a Rivian, an electric vehicle he’s a major fan of. If climate change did not exist, there wouldn’t be such a demand for these vehicles. My hometown still holds a weekly farmer’s market during the warmer months, and it’s a popular gathering place at a time when “third places” are receding quickly. Without minimizing the bad things that will happen (and are already happening) as a result of the climate crisis, we can find our silver linings, as small as they may be.

I can connect this to my personal life. Now, I’m not going to get too specific about what prompted this recommendation, but my doctor recently advised me to lose about ten pounds. I’m not obese by any means, but I would likely be healthier if I were about ten pounds lighter. So that’s my new goal.

In an era when many of us spend hours doomscrolling, you might think I’d be panicking about my diagnosis. But I decided early on that I wasn’t going to spend hours and hours researching potential complications of my condition. 

My reasoning is fairly simple: All that’s going to accomplish is stressing me out more. Losing ten pounds is the best way to ensure my condition does not progress, and knowing what might happen if I don’t lose that weight doesn’t change the objective. It would have no bearing on my success or lack thereof. Therefore, I need to have the right attitude toward my goal.

Of course, no conversation about my weight or efforts to lose it would be complete without talking about American cuisine. Honestly, I don’t need to tell you about its reputation. Fast food restaurants and stores like Dollar General have taken over the country, to the point where that’s what most people think when they hear the words “American cuisine.”

And if you ask me, that’s a shame. Indeed, that’s putting it mildly. Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of preventable death in this country, and our food is to blame. But it’s not just the food itself, but the inequities involved.

You see, Dollar General has a very specific and insidious business model. They build stores in impoverished communities - as the Wendover Productions video linked above mentioned, even many tiny towns with no restaurants have a Dollar General. Their business model is to run local grocery stores out of business by offering low prices. But ultimately, it’s more expensive to be poor. 

Terry Pratchett’s “boot theory” is one of the most prominent examples of this, but it’s also relevant to food, especially in the United States. If you’re affluent, you can afford plenty of fresh, healthy food (and you’re more likely to have time to cook it), a gym membership or home gym, a nutritionist if necessary, Ozempic if absolutely necessary, or bariatric surgery in extreme cases. If you’re poor, that’s much more difficult. Additionally, if you don’t have enough money for healthy food, you might have to purchase food that’s cheap at time of purchase, but in the long run (at least in the USA) you’re likely to incur more health care expenses sooner.

Relevant to the issue of climate change, however, is the amount of carbon emissions that come from transporting food. Some estimates suggest it’s as much as 20 percent of overall food-related emissions globally. That’s why we’re often told we should buy and consume what’s grown locally and in season. But that’s not possible for everyone.

In addition to our reputation for being obese, Americans have a reputation for not caring too much about the environment. In many cases, this reputation is well-earned; we do in fact have a climate denier as President, and he did win a free and fair election. Yes, he really did.

But again: If you’ve got enough money, you can afford to eat expensive, locally-grown food. If you don’t, you can’t, at least not as often. This leads me into my next point, which is that “American cuisine” is a tragedy. Not just because of how famously unhealthy it is, but because of what it could be.

USDA plant hardiness zones in the United States as of 2023. With such a diverse range of climate conditions, shouldn’t we have a more diverse cuisine?

It’s no secret that, as much as many American cities look nearly identical to each other, its natural environment is one of the most varied on Earth. Our national parks, for instance, are famous the world over. And we have nearly every climate type on Earth within our borders.

We probably have the best geography of any country from the standpoint of growing a wide variety of food to feed the population. If you look at the cuisine of many other countries, it’s dictated by the climate, since a country’s climate dictates what can grow naturally there. You can’t grow tomatoes in Norway (at least not outdoors), but you can in California - in fact, they grow in abundance!

With all this variety, with so many climate and soil types that can support so many different delicious, nutritious staple foods, it is criminal that we made ourselves known for McDonald’s. Like, that’s a tragedy.

It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way.

Now, back to my personal life. A few years ago, my family bought an air fryer, and I maintain that’s one of the best three-figure purchases we have ever made. Because we’re all trying to eat more healthily, it’s best to limit our intake of potatoes fried in oil. But lots of us, particularly my father, still crave sweet potato fries.

Here’s the answer: Buy some sweet potatoes. Peel them, then chop them into your preferred size and shape. Put a small amount of olive oil on them, as well as salt and pepper if that’s what you prefer. Toss them in the air fryer for about ten minutes, and voila! They taste at least as amazing (maybe even better with the satisfaction of having made them yourself), and they’re far healthier. 

Incidentally, The Damage Report recently covered a story about how McDonald’s, Donald Trump’s favorite restaurant, has seen a decrease in revenue. Host John Iadarola speculated that this may be because prices at the restaurant have risen. Previously, the main selling point of McDonald’s was that it was cheap (at least, at the point when you eat it), but without that, is it still worth buying Mickey D’s? 

It’s been just under a week since I received my diagnosis and resolved to lose ten pounds, but I already feel like I am more passionate about food than I used to be. Isn’t that funny?

Geraldine Brooks’ quote rings true for me. I’m not giving up oily, greasy sweet potato fries - I’ve found a better way to enjoy them. I’m not giving up the enjoyment of delicious food - I’m becoming more cognizant of what I’m putting into my body. And, though my weight loss journey has only just begun, I think my attitude is important. I’m not naïve to the fact that I should lose weight, far from it. But I’m putting a positive spin on it as much as I can.

It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle. The key word there is life. The changes you make to your habits should be things you can change for life. And to accomplish that, it’s ideal if you don’t look at what you’re giving up, but instead think about what you’re getting in return.

“Americans Don’t Want Walkable Cities”

The title of this essay is an argument you’ll frequently hear from well-meaning people. Both Europeans, who generally live in communities that more closely approximate what Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo calls a “15-minute city”, and Americans, who very often live in car-dependent suburbia, will say this. 

Americans have a reputation for being fat and lazy. And people who say this aren’t entirely wrong, but in some ways you could call this a “chicken or the egg” situation. Are many Americans obese because they protested against walkable cities, or is the lack of walkability (as well as diet-related factors) making us fat and lazy?

I tend to think the latter is closer to the truth. But again, both these possibilities can reinforce one another in a sort of “doom spiral”.

The argument is that because Americans don’t want to walk anywhere, their cities aren’t built for that. Because we’re not environmentally conscious, we like our gas-guzzling vehicles and getting stuck in traffic on the freeway. 

To be clear, the Republican Party in the USA is the only major political party to deny that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, or even that it exists at all. I’m not going to dispute this. However, the problem of walkability (or the lack thereof) isn’t strictly a “left versus right” issue. 

In this essay, I attempt to refute three common arguments that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable.

The first argument, which is probably especially poignant if you’re an American over age 30, is that many people in my country look back on their college years with considerable nostalgia. If you’re from Europe or any other place that has walkable cities, you might find this ridiculous. After all, earning a post-secondary degree is a stressful process that for many involves late-night cram sessions, research papers, and high-stakes exams that can make or break your grade. This isn’t unique to the United States at all.

What is far more unique to the USA, however, is the way we design most of our cities.

Sprawling Detroit suburbs, taken from Reddit.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan. Image taken from Reddit.

Look at these two photos and tell me which looks like a more appealing place to live. Yes, some on the right demonize higher education and avoid sending their children to college on “principled” grounds. But not all of them. Not remotely.

It’s often been observed that when you grow up in an American suburb, you don’t get a whole lot of freedom. Until about age 16, there’s no chance for you to acquire a driver’s license, and until you have one, you can’t go anywhere on your own. Some of these suburbs have been described by Redditors as “luxury prisons”. In fact, some might literally rather live in one of those Norwegian prisons that look like college campuses - at least there, you have community even if you lack freedom.

Anyway, college. While you still have to attend classes, you generally have a lot more choice in terms of which courses to take than you did in high school, let alone middle school. More importantly, the majority of American college towns are built with students in mind, and not all students bring their own vehicles to campus. As such, they need other ways to get around, so the cities have these methods in abundance.

While the stereotypical American suburb inhibits chances to form a community, college is the opposite. There’s a reason Greek life is popular at American universities and why there’s so much emphasis on social events. 

Anecdotally, even as someone who grew up in a walkable suburb by this country’s standards, my parents kept hammering into me that I needed to join some club activities to make the most of the college experience. Even now, I regret not attending more such events due to my autism-induced lack of social stamina. But that’s a story for another day.

Cinderella mascot in front of the castle at Walt Disney World. Image taken from the Visit Orlando website.

Now let’s talk about something else. Although international tourism to the United States is currently in freefall, understandably so, one of the most popular attractions for such visitors (as well as millions of domestic tourists per year) is Disney World. And honestly, I see that as a national embarrassment. It’s far from the most important shame related to my nationality, but it’s still there.

I understand that Reddit is hardly a scientific source, but this thread from last year is just perfection. Disney World, after all, has a monorail connecting many of the parks and very little car traffic. Literally, when I looked up “are there any cars in Disney World” for this essay, most of the top results related to the movie featuring Lightning McQueen rather than parking.

But my point still stands. For many Americans in the middle class, Disney World is the ultimate family vacation. Personally, as someone who went there as a child, I have no desire to go back for a number of reasons. The food’s probably awful, it’s ridiculously humid and pretty hot all year round, and they say the lines for rides are insane these days. And that’s not an exhaustive list. 

Even so, plenty of people spend thousands of dollars on such trips. It’s not just the “Disney Adults” who make loving the mouse their whole identity. On some level, people want to spend time in a place where they don’t need to drive. Half As Interesting, a YouTube channel whose videos are narrated by Sam Denby of Wendover Productions, recently made an excellent video about how this transit does not extend outside of the resort’s boundaries to the actual city of Orlando. 

Disney World isn’t the only domestic tourist destination that’s notably more walkable than most places in America. There are also plenty of small towns all over the country that get seasonal visitors depending on what recreational activities are near it. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but most walkable small towns in the United States are in one or more of three categories.

1: Places built prior to the wave of suburbanization that came to the United States in the aftermath of World War II.

2: Places that get a lot of seasonal tourism, particularly from domestic visitors.

3: Places that have become prohibitively expensive for all but a relatively small percentage of the population to live in.

Of course, as stated above, these three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they frequently reinforce one another, and that leads into my third rebuttal to the claim that Americans don’t want walkable cities.

Corporate greed is very often blamed for many of America’s ills. Our for-profit health care system, for instance, is due to the greed of insurance companies. You won’t see me defending said system on this blog, that’s for sure.

 But not everything is a grandiose corporate conspiracy to swindle us. Sometimes it’s just supply and demand. If more people want a commodity than the amount of that commodity that exists, we should expect that commodity to become more expensive. (Yes, in a perfect world, housing would not be seen as a “commodity”, but rather as a “human right”, but that’s not the world we live in).

As stated above, many of America’s walkable communities, often referred to as “streetcar suburbs”, were built prior to World War II. By the USA’s standards, these are ancient places that existed before the advent of single-use zoning in the country. 

Commercial building beside a home in Roland Park, Baltimore. Like many modern-day “streetcar suburbs”, it’s unaffordable for most Americans. Image taken from the website for Long & Foster Real Estate.

Single-use zoning basically means that a given tract of land can be used for strictly commercial use, or strictly residential use, but not both. This is why so many American cities have suburbs where there are several square miles of homes that all look nearly identical to one another and you can’t walk to anything that isn’t someone else’s house who happens to live nearby. (And even then, if your subdivision has no sidewalks, you’re out of luck).

One of the most prominent streetcar suburbs in the United States is relatively close to me: Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. This sounds like it should be an ideal place to live if you don’t want the hustle and bustle of a densely urban neighborhood, but also don’t want to rely on your car for every little thing. There’s just one problem.

If you go to the Chestnut Hill, MA page on Zillow today, you’ll find that the cheapest real estate available is a one-bed, one-bath condo for more than half a million dollars. And that’s the bare minimum of what you’ll need. Even that’s out of the price range for probably more than half of Americans. Basically all of the single-family homes for sale in Chestnut Hill will run you a million or two, or more. 

Many of the other “streetcar suburbs” are just as costly. On some level, it makes sense that it would be expensive, because such neighborhoods have high demand and relatively low supply. But the fact that high demand exists would seem to imply that many Americans want to live in an area with accessible amenities.

Overall, the narrative that Americans don’t want their cities to be walkable because they’re addicted to their cars is a convenient one. I can understand why many people believe it, and to some extent, some people here are addicted to their cars, and some are too lazy to walk anywhere more than a couple blocks away.

But to act like “car addiction” is universal among Americans misses the point. There are numerous factors that make our cities car-dependent, and keep our cities car-dependent, systemic issues that won’t be solved overnight. Public desire, including those conspiracy theories about “15-minute cities”, is far from the most important factor.

I’m under no illusion that even my relatively progressive home state is going to be as urbanist-friendly as, for instance, the Netherlands within my lifetime. But the myth that everyone in the USA, or even a majority of the American population, wants to live in sprawling suburbia, is just that. It’s a myth. And it needs to end. 

Los Angeles Is Paradise Lost

Let me paint you a picture of a certain city.

Imagine a community situated between the ocean and mountains, both of which provide recreational opportunities for residents and visitors alike. This geography significantly moderates the climate so that it’s warm, but generally not dangerously hot, all year round. For a plurality of the global population, this is considered the ideal climate.

Imagine that this community is highly multicultural. Settlers from Europe, and later immigrants from various parts of Asia and the Global South, have elected to make their homes here. Consequently, the city is home to restaurants featuring many cuisines from all over the world. If you ate out one meal a day and never patronized the same establishment twice, it would take you about 18 years to run out of restaurants.

Imagine that this city’s activities do not stop at dining, either. The city is home to many institutions related to the arts, as one of the “creative capitals” of the world. It’s also among the most high-profile cities in the global film industry, and many celebrities from all over the country (and some from other countries) live there on either a temporary or permanent basis.

If you are moderately informed about geography, you’ll probably have guessed that the city I’m referring to is Los Angeles, California. If so, you are correct. 

Everything I’ve said above is true of Los Angeles. It’s got ideal geography and what many people consider “perfect” weather (droughts and wildfires notwithstanding - we’ll get to that later). People from all over the world have lived there, and the culinary offers are wildly diverse. And of course, it’s home to numerous film studios and other cultural institutions that mean you’ll seemingly never run out of things to do.

Now, if I ended this post there, and the reader had no access to outside information, you’d probably come away with the impression that Los Angeles is the best city in the world. Doesn’t all that sound like paradise?

A beautiful picture of Los Angeles with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background.

Unfortunately, thanks to poor urban planning, it’s more like “paradise lost.”

A very smoggy view of the same city. Image taken from the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles is infamous for its car traffic. As my beloved YouTuber Not Just Bikes always reminds us, there is no solution to car traffic other than viable alternatives to driving. He’s argued that car dependency is bad even if you do enjoy driving - this video explains many of the reasons why.

Speaking of American cultural institutions, one such institution is the late musician Tom Petty (1950-2017). One of his most famous songs is “Free Fallin’”, which contains lyrical references to locations in Los Angeles such as Reseda and Ventura Boulevard. At one point, the song states that “there’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.”

Think about that for a moment. Obviously, this is an exaggeration to some extent - highways normally aren’t built right through backyards. Except sometimes they are.

You see, there’s a little something called “eminent domain” that allows the government to seize homes in order to use land for infrastructure projects. This Amnesty International article talks about how homes destroyed to make room for these highways have historically been in neighborhoods with large percentages of people of color. Even with all the fresh produce that grows abundantly in California’s Mediterranean climate, these disruptions can create “food deserts” for people in their neighborhoods.

We can have a conversation any time about how these highways reinforce racial injustice and how inequity is built into every aspect of this country’s infrastructure. But that’s a topic for another essay.

Traffic in Los Angeles is a nightmare specifically because public transit in the city is so lacking. People lose time in their commutes, but that’s not the only thing people lose as a result of car dependency.

Another casualty of Los Angeles’ less-than-ideal urban planning is its air quality. A few days ago, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was once again ranked as the smoggiest city in the United States. Apparently, it has been that way for many years running. This is, in large part, thanks to the numerous cars on the road. And smog isn’t just unpleasant to look at - it can exacerbate asthma for those living with that condition, cause babies to have low birth weight, and even contribute to lung diseases like cancer and COPD in the long run. 

One band from California, Red Hot Chili Peppers, has been fairly active in the environmental movement. They’ve got a song called “Black Summer” about the 2020 Australian bushfires and climate change more broadly. It’s a beautiful song, as disturbing as it may be, and bassist Michael “Flea” Balzary has stated that after it rains, Los Angeles is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And he might be right about that, except that rain is increasingly hard to come by as the region’s water security takes a nosedive. 

And of course, with the lack of rain, the risk of wildfires increases exponentially. As we saw earlier this year with the fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, cities are not immune to the devastation that such disasters can bring. 

Now, I’m not going to say that climate change is exclusively Los Angeles’ fault. It is true that a significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions are from the transportation sector, and planes and cars generate far more of these emissions than trains and bicycles. That’s no secret. Furthermore, even cities with far better public transit networks, such as those in the Nordic nations, are going to have to deal with the ramifications of the climate crisis. Indeed, they already are.

But the United States is far and away the world’s most massive climate villain. You can argue that many other countries aren’t doing enough to switch to renewable energy (or as Bernie Sanders says, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels). But at least they accept that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

For instance, at time of writing, tomorrow is the Canadian general election. The Liberals, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, are broadly seen as favored, having pulled off a 30-point comeback that few people besides myself thought plausible. But even if the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, were to win a plurality of seats and make Poilievre Prime Minister, Canada isn’t going to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. 

Anyway, look at cities in the Nordic countries. Not only are they far more sustainable, but their climates are far colder. I’m sure that if anyone from Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden is reading this, they’ll contend that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. But lots of people I know would dislike the long, dark winters, even if those countries have very broad social welfare programs.

Ultimately, if there’s nothing else you take away from this column, I want to reinforce that Los Angeles is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of urban planning. It had the potential to be a paradise on Earth, but instead it’s paradise lost. Like Joni Mitchell once said, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot - it shows.

He’s Not Kidding

Seriously. How many times do we have to wonder whether or not he’s joking? How many times do we have to look at his repeated “jokes” about running for a third term and assume that he’s not actually going to do it? 

Put another way, how long do we need to look at the evidence that’s staring us all in the face, like we’re all deer in headlights, and still insist that he can’t possibly get away with that? Honestly, he’s done so many things he “couldn’t” do - that didn’t stop him from doing it!

The “inciting incident” for this article, if you will, was the news that President Donald Trump (yuck) has begun selling merchandise with language on it suggesting that he’ll run for a third term as President of the United States. This is unconstitutional by any reasonable reading of the 22nd Amendment.

Let’s look at the language of that amendment: No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once.

A “Trump 2028” shirt from Trump’s official online store.

Trump has already been elected twice, in 2016 and 2024. As sickening as it is that Grover Cleveland is no longer alone in serving two non-consecutive terms, that’s just how it is. But the Constitution is pretty clear that he can’t be elected again.

That’s a very important distinction, though: Maybe he can’t be elected to a third term, but nowhere in the amendment does it state that he can’t run again. And if he’s running, there’s always a chance he can be elected. A very good chance, in fact, given that he’s Teflon Don.

Of course, Trump is currently ineligible to be President. The Fourteenth Amendment states that anyone who has incited an insurrection against the United States cannot run for President. But the Supreme Court didn’t care - those Republican Injustices (and yes, we should call them “Republicans” rather than “conservatives”) ruled against Colorado when they tried to remove him from the ballot for that reason. And of course, they later ruled in Trump v. United States that Trump specifically was above the law for “official acts.”

Seriously, if a future Democratic President (not that we’re likely to have a future Democratic President) tried to jail political opponents and pass sweeping progressive executive orders to get around Congress, do you think the Supreme Court would be okay with it? Of course they wouldn’t. 

Here’s how it goes: If the President is a Republican, anything is an “official act”, even if it’s something absolutely criminal like invading Canada or building concentration camps. The latter has technically already happened. But if the President is a Democrat, then they can’t so much as wear a tan suit without violating the law.

And that’s before the whole matter of Trump openly defying his own Supreme Court. But at this point, as much as I hate Trump, I have no sympathy for Chief Injustice Roberts when he complains about how his orders aren’t being followed. He had an opportunity to make sure Donald Trump would not return to power, and he not only dropped the ball, he threw it away!

So can Trump run for a third term? Yes. And I truly believe that if he runs for a third term (which elected Republicans want him to do since he’s a giant turnout machine for the GOP), he will be elected a third time. Here’s how it’s going to go.

Trump is going to announce his 2028 campaign right after the 2026 midterms. Of course, this will only be his official announcement, because it’s been clear to everyone with a functioning brain (which excludes half the country) that he’s been running for a third term since the 2024 election.

Democrats will write strongly-worded letters, and Susan Collins (if she’s still a Senator, which I firmly believe she will be because Maine voters are that stupid) will say she’s “concerned” but do nothing to act on that concern. Seriously, that’s how it goes with her - I even have a Susan Collins T-shirt saying “often disappointed, always disappointing”. I’m not kidding.

Ultimately, though, Democrats will not have the power to stop Trump even if they win the House and Senate. Remember that very little of Trump 47’s agenda has actually been voted on by Congress. They don’t matter, and therefore neither do the midterms really matter. Sure, Democrats can order investigations, but what would the investigations really tell us? We all know Trump’s a fascist - we either don’t care or don’t need to be convinced of that.

When Trump files to run, Democratic-controlled states will try to remove him from the ballot. This time, they would seem to have a very strong case against an argument that “two terms means three terms”, or at least that the 22nd Amendment only refers to consecutive terms. 

Yes, a Supreme Court ruling that Trump can be elected for a third term would be a flagrant violation of the Constitution. But so was their ruling that he could be on the ballot in 2024 after January 6. It’s not like the difference is between covertly stealing cookies and getting away with murder.

I think it’s likely that the six (or more) Republican Injustices on the Supreme Court will rule that Trump can run for a third term, he just can’t be elected for a third term. You and I might wonder what the point of running is if you can’t be elected, but that’s beside the point. The Republican Party doesn’t care about logic, and neither do American swing voters.

Now, given the state this country is likely to be in by 2028, it might seem unlikely that Trump would win the 2028 election. Surely the buyer’s remorse will have set in by then, right? 

But I’m not convinced he’d lose. Even with the economy in freefall in 2020 and thousands of Americans dying a day from COVID-19, Trump just barely lost to Joe Biden. And he didn’t have nearly as much power to challenge the results then as he does now. His Republican allies are far more prepared to steal the 2028 election than they were to steal the 2020 election.

More to the point, Trump is a turnout machine. GOP voters are mindless zombies at this point who will turn out whenever he’s on the ballot. If they had to, they’d crawl naked over broken glass in subzero weather just to fill in that bubble. Sure, people might be sick of him by 2028, but I thought they’d be sick of him in 2024 - apparently not. Last year, there were more of them than there were of us. That’s what matters in an election.

If you put a gun to my head, I do believe Trump would win the 2028 election, in which case he doesn’t need to steal it. At that point, the Supreme Court isn’t going to step in. They’ll just say there was nothing we could do just like centrist Democrats often did during Joe Biden’s presidency. 

Some people say that Trump’s mind is going and that he’ll be in no state to run for “threelection” in 2028. But I don’t see it. He lost a lot of weight during his 2024 campaign, and he has the best medical care in the world. And he’s always sounded rambling; that doesn’t mean he has dementia. If anything, given our luck, he’ll probably live to be 100 and never relinquish power until he dies. And even then, Republicans will probably prop him up like that movie Weekend at Bernie’s. 

We will never be rid of the Trump dynasty. The sooner we accept that…well, I wouldn’t say the better. But it’ll be easier to deal with it if we know it’s coming.

How Disney Explains Nostalgia

After some reflection on the subject and the way the Internet (and other digital technologies) have fundamentally changed our lives, I’ve started to think that in many ways, life was better in the past. At least from a U.S. perspective - I can’t speak to the experience of people who live in countries that actually care about their citizens.

By “ancient places”, I don’t mean the time of the Roman Empire, mind you. Instead I’ll talk more about the 1980s and 1990s. Even if I wasn’t old enough to live through that time, it still seems relevant for this purpose, as there are plenty of people still around today who did experience this era.

First of all, I’ve noticed that people are generally less informed about current events than they were in the past. To some extent, this is self-evident; if more Americans knew what the hell was going on, Donald Trump would never have won the 2016 election, let alone the 2024 election. Trump might be the most egregious example of people here voting against their own best interest, but he isn’t the first.

This is no coincidence. With the proliferation of Internet-based news sources, whether they be digital versions of the New York Times, blogs like this one, or conspiracy channels like Infowars, this has jeopardized the ability of physical newspapers to remain competitive.

And when you think about it, why should one go after a physical newspaper? They use paper, a resource that (for now) comes from trees being chopped down. But people being more environmentally conscious is not the chief reason why “traditional news sources” are declining. Simply put, they can’t compete with news sources that can be at your fingertips with no financial cost (though possibly a significant mental health cost).

 America’s “news deserts” are disproportionately located in rural areas of the country. Much like food deserts, places that have limited options to purchase healthy food, news deserts have little to no access to information about events near them. (For what it’s worth, food deserts and news deserts frequently overlap).

It used to be that local politics was something people paid attention to. After all, it’s still commonly said that all politics is local. And I’ll admit that for as much as I follow national (and sometimes international) politics, I barely know what’s going on in my own city. And I’m far from the only one. By some estimates, a third of U.S. news outlets that existed in 2005 had shut down by 2024. And again, rural areas have been hit the hardest by this trend, because they are less likely to have the financial resources to sustain a newspaper.

Speaking of small towns, I recently watched a Wendover Productions video about the proliferation of stores like Dollar General. Now, Dollar General is technically not a dollar store - in fact, since the stuff you buy there breaks every so often, you don’t save much money in the long run. Terry Pratchett was right all along - it is indeed more expensive to be poor, especially in the USA.

But let’s talk about Wendover’s video. When he speaks here at 17:58,  narrator Sam Denby states that “Main Street, USA” is in danger. The stock footage used, perhaps ironically, is of a thriving Main Street in a small American town. 

Once upon a time, these Main Streets were thriving. Nowadays, the only small towns in the USA with thriving Main Streets tend to be affluent areas that 5% or less of the population can comfortably afford to live in, historic locations in New England where architecture has changed little, or places with lots of seasonal tourism. These three categories are not mutually exclusive; in many cases, one of them reinforces the other two.

 Say what you will about Walt Disney as an individual, but I remember watching old Disney movies like Lady and the Tramp and The Fox and the Hound, both of which are set in small-town America. For people of all ages (and not just those cringe-worthy “Disney adults”), these films bring to mind happy memories, and one possible reason why occurred to me recently.

Movie poster for “Lady and the Tramp”. Image taken from the Film Art Gallery.

Movie poster for “The Fox and the Hound”. Image taken from Amazon.

 The Wikipedia article for the former movie states that Walt Disney wanted the setting to be his childhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri. Now, it’s been a few years since I watched Lady and the Tramp, and I’ve never seen the live-action remake. I probably never will. But that’s beside the point.

Anyway, from what I recall, the town featured in Lady and the Tramp (which may or may not be Marceline, Missouri) is a thriving place. There’s lots of local businesses for such a small town, such as a zoo, a dog pound, and of course the Italian restaurant that contains the movie’s most famous scene. I understand that Disney probably took some creative liberties and gave this fictional town (that may or may not be Marceline, Missouri) whatever the plot demanded. 

Now, my Internet’s a bit spotty right now, so getting Google Maps open was a hassle. (Isn’t that another exhibit - if your Internet doesn’t work, you can’t do anything!) But I decided to look at Marceline, MO on that platform and see what it looks like today. Per Wikipedia, modern-day Marceline has a population of about 2,100 - very much a small town. And I want to be clear about one thing: Even if the people of Marceline probably didn’t vote the way I would have liked, I still don’t mean to insult them at all.

Google Street View imagery of Marceline, Missouri. It was taken in June 2023.

On second thought, Marceline doesn’t look like the best example. Given that such a prominent figure of the American entertainment industry grew up there, of course, it may be that it qualifies as a historic town. The town’s elementary school is even named after Walt Disney.

Sure, the buildings don’t look the shiniest, but the shops aren’t boarded up either. There are several restaurants that aren’t just fast food. The hardware store I found is a chain, but it’s not Dollar General at least. By small-town standards in the year 2025 (or rather, 2023, because that’s when the current Google Street View imagery was taken), Marceline’s downtown doesn’t seem too bad.

Another Disney movie that many look back on fondly was The Fox and the Hound. While many will talk about the fractured friendship between Tod and Copper, it occurred to me recently that the movie’s setting is in an idealized rural location. And I’ll explain below why that matters.

Screenshot of “The Fox and the Hound”, taken when Widow Tweed’s efforts to milk Abigail the cow go awry thanks to Tod. Image taken from IMDB.

In today’s iteration of American politics, particularly of some Midwestern states like Iowa and Missouri that have large rural populations, “supporting small farmers” has become a major talking point. Widow Tweed, who takes care of Tod the fox in that Disney classic, is a small farmer who maintains it all herself. She raises her own hens and milks her own cows, leading to the chaotic scene pictured above. 

Needless to say, there’s not a lot of small farms anymore in America. Instead we’ve got Big Agriculture with their factory farms and massive meatpacking plants. Rather than a beautiful pastoral estate like the one Widow Tweed lives on, most farmers today work for a corporate giant. This article from Human Rights Watch, coincidentally published just months before the zoonotic COVID-19 pandemic began, discusses the conditions in greater detail.

The “TL;DR” is that working there is an awfully dangerous job. Lots of workers have chronic pain from the movements they are forced to perform. Many have sinus issues so bad that, according to one worker interviewed, they’re afraid to blow their nose for how much blood will come out. It’s an even more dangerous job than being a police officer in America, which is saying something given that we have more firearms than people. And the workers are disproportionately people of color and undocumented immigrants, because of course they are.

If The Fox and the Hound were set in the 2020s, Widow Tweed’s farm would likely not exist. At a minimum, it would be struggling to stay afloat, taking on plenty of water in the process. Someone should write a modern-day version of it - hell, maybe I’ll try my hand at it eventually. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

I’m not going to say that everything was perfect decades ago. Far from it. But I hope I’ve demonstrated a reason why many people look back on the past, particularly older Disney movies, with rose-colored glasses.

America Is Ready Player One

Cover of “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Image taken from Amazon.

I know. It’s a pretty crazy claim. Real life can’t be the same as a work of fiction, can it?

Yes. Yes, it can. 

I’ll start with my own experience. I realize that this is anecdotal, but I’ll explain it anyway. 

Growing up in a suburban Massachusetts community, I lived close enough to my elementary school that I could walk there easily. My mother would frequently take me and my siblings there on foot (or by car if the weather was less than ideal), and she’d get to hang out with the other parents who were doing the same thing. You could consider the schoolyard a “third place” of sorts.

Those were the good old days, and before you call me an old man, just know that I’m still more than a month shy of my 25th birthday. Got that? Good.

When school let out, it was very common for children to meet at one another’s homes. Again, we lived pretty close together in those days. There was also a nearby park not associated with any school, and I spent many spring evenings on the playground while my older brother played Little League baseball. That’s how my parents and I made friends back then - in person, the old-fashioned way.

I’m not going to deny that some people still have the social stamina and determination to form bonds in the real world. However, saying that “some people know their neighbors, therefore social atomization isn’t a problem” makes about as much sense as saying “some people run marathons, therefore obesity isn’t a problem.” 

The issue at hand is the way things are trending.

You see, when I was a child, I had a Nintendo Wii, on which one of the games I played the most was Mario Kart. I remember it being such a massive deal when I could connect to the Internet and race against random people from all over the world. The limited chat functionality if you were playing against friends (an option I never availed myself of before the service shut down in 2014) seemed revolutionary.

Why did that seem special, though? Simply put, because it wasn’t the default. 

These days, a large percentage of video games are played online - indeed, a great majority of them require an Internet connection to play. I remember when it was such a hassle to set my Wii up for a game of Nintendo WFC Mario Kart, but these days, people are always online unless they actively choose not to be.

I’ll admit that I am guilty of this myself. It’s a beautiful spring day out there right now, but I’m inside writing this essay. Even when I’m on my front porch, I very often have my computer open in front of me to talk to my friends on Discord. And that’s a problem.

Now, I present my thesis: We’re living in a dystopian novel. A very specific dystopian novel.

I’m not normally a defender of Ready Player One these days. In most respects, it’s a sorry excuse for literature. But I’m starting to think that author Ernest Cline was on to something about the modern world, even if that wasn’t his intention.

The year is 2025, and America has gone to shit. It’s just gone to shit two decades early. In the United States today, we have to deal with mass shootings - but events like Columbine or Sandy Hook are only a small fraction of the overall gun violence in this country. We’ve got road rage shootings every day because we’ve collectively lost our patience as a society. People kill each other over the smallest things, aided by the fact that we’ve literally got more firearms than people.

Main character Wade lives in the Stacks, a trailer park outside of Oklahoma City, while the late owner of the OASIS, James Halliday, had a net worth estimated at $240 billion USD. When the book came out in 2011 (and when I first read it in 2015), $240 billion seemed absolutely insane even by billionaire standards. Now, however, America’s shadow President Elon Musk is even richer than that. As for the Stacks, the homeless population keeps on rising. Maybe it’s not as visible and sensational as it is in Ready Player One, but it still exists. Housing keeps getting more expensive, as do other things people need to survive.

In Ready Player One, the plot revolves around an Easter Egg hidden within the OASIS and a competition to find it. Given that the winner is going to receive a sizable share of Halliday’s fortune (or maybe not even a share!), it’s highly coveted.

We see this in real life too. So many Americans vote for Republicans because they don’t see themselves as members of the working class who could benefit from progressive economic policy. Instead, they see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who could benefit from owning the libs. The American Dream, after all, has historically been to get rich and famous.

At one point in the book (and no, I don’t hate myself enough to check what page it is), Wade mentions that people can broadcast themselves to the world whenever they want, doing whatever they want, whether or not anyone is watching. In 2011, Twitch streaming (and YouTube streaming for that matter) was in its infancy. The idea of playing video games for a live audience was, again, absolutely revolutionary.

That’s not the case anymore. To become a popular gaming YouTuber, you basically need to be a streamer; recording your let’s-plays and uploading them later isn’t going to make you popular. And don’t even get me started on SEO and the quest to beat the algorithm, which is what drives people to hire massive production crews. It’s often said that Mr. Beast ruined YouTube, and I’m starting to see why people think that.

It’s not just gamers who constantly want attention. We have people literally risking their lives to be famous, like one Trevor Jacob. Remember him? He’s the YouTuber who claimed engine failure and jumped out of a perfectly good plane just for views, leaving it to crash into the side of a mountain. (On a side note, the video title “I Crashed My Airplane” is just perfect - he did it on purpose).

Runaway climate change, like what happens in Ready Player One? Yeah, it’s happening here too. We’ve even got a climate denier as President yet again. Despite increasingly devastating wildfires every year, the only significant American response has been from the entertainment industry making some TV series about conventionally attractive firefighters. 

And speaking of entertainment, it’s all giant corporations these days. Amazon might not run the world to the degree Ready Player One’s OASIS does, but it’s not far off either. Gone are the days when they merely sold books online. Now they own entire grocery store chains and even an aerospace company that recently gave Katy Perry et al a glorified carnival ride. But there’s also Amazon Instant Video, which lots of people use for streaming TV shows and whatnot.

As dominant as Amazon is, they don’t have a monopoly on peoples’ time and attention. Consider the Walt Disney Company as well. They don’t just make movies from the imagination of one imaginative man with some retrograde ideas about race - not anymore! They’ve got theme parks, cruise lines, streaming platforms, and even entire residential neighborhoods. I’m not kidding about that last one.

One of the most commonly criticized elements of Ready Player One by its detractors is its misogyny. Women, such as Wade’s obsessive love interest Art3mis, are often portrayed as one-dimensional, and plenty of reviewers have taken notice. And then Aech is (spoiler alert) only there so that Wade can say “I’m not racist, I have a black friend”.

We’ve got plenty of misogyny in real life too. It’s not just the United States Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion, either. The “manosphere” of content creators like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan influenced the latest election, and that TV series Adolescence has also drawn attention to it. (And yes: I know Adolescence is set in the UK, not the USA, but I’m sure American schools are, as usual, even worse than British). 

I could go on and on about the parallels between the 2044 described in Ready Player One and the reality of life in 2025-era America. But I think I’ve covered my bases. 

The point of dystopian science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) is that events depicted in the former are supposed to be at least conceivably plausible. Harry Potter, for instance, is no closer to coming true now than it was when the first book was published. That’s not the case for the work of Ernest Cline.

Ready Player One is not a literary masterpiece. Not even close. But in its own sick, twisted, and depressing ways, it predicted the future. And for that, we should appreciate it. 

Trump Didn’t “Steal” The 2024 Election

Donald Trump shaking hands with President Elon Musk. Image taken from Yahoo News.

Before I get into the meat of this article, I want to clarify one thing: I am a leftist. The right wing falls victim to disinformation and “fake news” far more frequently than the left does, and when they do, they deserve to be called out on it. But I also think we should be honest with ourselves and call out falsehoods when we see them.

First of all, let’s talk about the 2024 election. At a time when so many Americans want to move on from the election and are sick of politics, I’m going to relitigate that election again. Feel free to click out of this article if you don’t want to hear about it.

A number of people have said that the 2024 election was stolen from Kamala Harris. Sometimes they cite Donald Trump’s January 2025 statement that Elon Musk “knows those voting machines.” Other times they say something far more easily refuted, which is that the election was stolen because “Harris had much larger crowd sizes.”

I readily concede that the metric of the “enthusiasm gap” is largely obsolete, to the extent that it ever really mattered to begin with. The idea that whoever’s voters are more excited to vote for their candidate could only swing an election decided by the tiniest of margins these days. Given how polarized the American electorate has become, of course, presidential elections are frequently decided by a football stadium’s worth of people - that’s no secret.

But the 2024 election was not. It was a veritable landslide by American standards. Democrats don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. A Republican winning the popular vote had not happened since 2004, which is basically a lifetime ago in today’s environment. 

In terms of the “enthusiasm gap,” it needs to be said that every vote counts the same, no matter how the voter feels about it. Whether you volunteered twelve hours a day for your chosen candidate, or whether you walked into the polling place completely and totally inebriated, the voting machine doesn’t care. All that matters is what bubble you filled in on that ballot.

Where this metric can make a difference is when someone decides whether to turn out or not. Indeed, prior to the election many people speculated on whether the pro-Palestine protestors would stay home and cost Kamala Harris the presidency. Spoiler alert: They did. And they doomed all of us to live in this fucked-up nation.

People might also point to the gap between the campaigns in terms of their ground game. After all, during the 2024 election, Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris employed a veritable army of canvassers in every swing state and plenty of other states as well. Donald Trump, meanwhile, did not. He outsourced every aspect of his ground game to inexperienced outsiders.

Indeed, in the last three presidential elections, the candidate with the better ground game has ended up losing. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was basically run on a shoestring out of some dude’s basement, and he still defeated Hillary Clinton where it mattered. In 2020, the Democrats unilaterally disarmed and ran almost no ground game, whereas the Republicans stayed the course despite the COVID-19 pandemic. While this is commonly cited as a reason why Trump came closer than expected to victory in 2020, he still was not able to defeat Joe Biden that time.

It seems that ground game doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Part of that is because of a shift in culture. I’m 24 years old, on the older side of Generation Z, and I was taught never to answer the door if I didn’t know who was on the other side. If a stranger knocks on your door, that’s seen as rude and creepy, whereas it didn’t used to be. I guess Americans have grown increasingly paranoid in recent years.

It’s the same way with phone calls. Whenever someone calls me on my iPhone, I always check the caller ID first. If I don’t know who it is, I immediately hang up. That’s what most members of my generation, which saw one of the largest swings to Trump in 2024, do. 

Another argument that some liberals trot out is that Kamala Harris had massive crowds at her rallies. Many thousands turned out for her Houston rally the week before the election. At the time, many people believed this showed she had a lot of support in Houston, and she might be able to win Texas as a result.

Knowing what we know now, of course, this is a fallacious line of thinking. Houston is a major city - it’s the fourth-largest city proper in the United States, even if it barely feels like a “city” when you’re driving through it. It’s one of the worst-designed cities in the world. But that’s besides the point.

Despite losing Texas statewide by nearly 14 percentage points, Kamala Harris still garnered more than 4.8 million votes there. Of almost five million voters, it’s very easy to get thirty thousand to fill a stadium. But it takes far, far, far more than thirty thousand voters to win Texas. As it turns out, Harris supporters were just a lot more vocal than Trump supporters.

Then again, I’ve never understood the “shy Trump voter.” Imagine being so ashamed to vote for Trump that you’ll lie to a pollster and tell them you aren’t voting for Trump, then not thinking Maybe I shouldn’t vote for Trump. But there are so many people in this country that there are probably some who think that way. 

This might be hard to believe, but not everyone is as plugged into politics as I and my three readers are. Lots of people passively vote without realizing what one or both candidates wants to do if elected. Now, I think that’s a bad thing - I wish Americans were better-informed. But that’s the harsh reality. 

So here’s what I want you all to take away from my little rant. When people ask me Saclux Gemini, did Donald Trump steal the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election from Kamala Harris?, my answer will depend on what you mean.

If you mean, “Did Elon Musk hack into the voting machines so that people who voted for Harris were counted as voting for Trump?”, then no. At least, probably not. It just seems implausible that Trump, who was out of office at the time of the 2024 election, would have been able to hack into machines that way. Voting machines, as Al Jazeera reported back then, aren’t connected to the Internet. However, if one means “Did Donald Trump and Elon Musk take measures to stack the election unfairly in their favor?”, then my answer is far more nuanced. 

It is true that voter suppression exists in the United States. The 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia was one of the most egregious examples . Brian Kemp, whose image has sadly been rehabilitated in the eyes of many moderates, should never have been allowed to oversee his own election. Now that federal Republicans are trying to pass the SAVE Act and will turn a blind eye at best to efforts at the state level, voter suppression is only likely to get worse.

That’s also to say nothing about the media environment we find ourselves in, which was enabled by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Now that Twitter has become Xitter (pronounced “shitter”), far-right content has been greatly amplified, and that has definitely swayed public opinion. We can have a broader conversation about the GOP-friendly media environment another time, but I see no reason to believe that votes were actually hacked.

Rather, it seems more likely to me that American swing voters were even more gullible than usual. Hey, they’ve made dumb decisions before. Was electing Trump in 2024 really that much of a stretch?

In my mind, the discourse about the 2024 election being stolen distracts from more important things the left should be doing. Honestly, Democrats last year should have remembered this more forcefully:

If he gets more votes, he doesn’t need to steal the election.

The Shitstorm Is Coming And It Might Get Loud

A meme I found on ImgFlip. I think this is from that show “Trailer Park Boys”.

A few days ago, there was a fire at the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence. Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were evacuated from the mansion at 2 AM - if they had not been so swift, the assassination attempt would have succeeded. And yes, I consider it an assassination attempt, because that’s what the perpetrator admitted to. I will not name the perpetrator here; I don’t want to glorify him. 

As happy as I am that Governor Shapiro is okay, I feel pretty certain that political violence is going to greatly increase in this country. It’s easy to get a gun here, but this case demonstrates that you don’t even need a gun to do serious damage. It feels like a “crossing the Rubicon” moment - any candidate who’s an electoral threat to any Republican is in serious danger. There’s no going back from this, even if we one day have a Democratic President again.

A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance and several national “security” officials like Pete Hegseth texted their war plans in Yemen to a journalist from The Atlantic. This leak, which has come to be referred to as “Signalgate”, generated a lot of outrage at first. But at first is the keyword.

You see, it’s been less than a month and almost nobody is talking about Signalgate anymore. Okay, that’s not true - maybe foreign intelligence services are still debating how much information they should withhold from us because we can’t be trusted to keep it secure. But the general public in the United States has almost completely moved on from this scandal.

Speaking of intelligence, let’s look at Director of National Intelligence and Russian asset extraordinaire Tulsi Gabbard. Recently she came under fire for having declared her residency in Texas when she voted in Hawaii.This is the “voter fraud” that Republicans constantly cite as a justification for voter ID laws that are really meant to suppress the votes of those more likely to support Democrats. 

Now, voter fraud is a serious crime, even if it doesn’t take place nearly as frequently as Republican officials would have you believe. That being said, I think it says a lot about the current state of affairs that I don’t really care about this that much. I care far more about Gabbard being a Russian spy. And yet, nobody’s talking about Gabbard’s connections to Putin and Assad anymore.

That’s actually a common thread here: Nobody’s talking about any of this anymore.

The attempt on Josh Shapiro’s life should have been an Earth-shattering story. Instead, it wasn’t just memory-holed - people didn’t talk about it much even on the day after it happened. And you’ve gotta wonder, why is that?

I’ve got a reason. That reason is because it was largely overshadowed by the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

If you’ve been following the news, you probably know his story in general terms. If you didn’t see the news about Garcia, or if you’ve simply forgotten amid the chaos of the last few months, then I’ll summarize it.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an American citizen originally from El Salvador. He was recently detained by the Trump administration’s ICE goons and sent down to a notorious prison in his country of origin. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a rare unanimous decision, ordered Trump to “facilitate his return.” Admittedly, they did not provide a deadline by which this must happen, but it’s still a stunning rebuke considering the likes of Samuel Alito sit on said court.

Despite the 9-0 ruling against him by an otherwise very right-wing Supreme Court, Donald Trump has continued to defy this order. He has refused to return Garcia to the United States. Now, in fairness, Garcia is probably already dead. And if he isn’t, Trump is afraid of what the man will say once he’s back. Either case would result in riots in the United States - at least, I’d hope so.

As disgusting as this case is, it’s not even the most important part of that White House meeting. I think you know which meeting I’m talking about.

Donald Trump talking to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the White House. Image taken from ABC News.

During the meeting between Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Trump dodged the question of whether he’d do anything to facilitate Garcia’s return. Bukele told reporters that he would not return Garcia, and Trump seems to be going along with it. “There’s nothing I can do” is what he basically said.

Let’s talk about that for a moment. Even though Trump has been systematically destroying our alliances with other wealthy democracies, the United States remains one of the world’s most powerful countries in terms of military might. If Trump truly wanted to follow the Supreme Court’s orders, Bukele’s opinion be damned, there are any number of actions he could take. Instead, Trump is going to let the leader of a small country like El Salvador walk all over him.

Trump probably thinks that defying a court order makes him look tough. In this context, though, it makes him look like a pushover. In theory, he has so much power over Bukele if he actually wanted to use it. The fact that he chooses to let Bukele control him makes him look like, as some would say, a pussy.

There’s another moment from that meeting that’s getting a lot of attention. I’ll let Trump say it this time:

"Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."

Now, let’s ignore for the moment how very non-eloquent that quote is. Within the context of what Trump was talking about with Bukele, it’s genuinely chilling.

Trump wants Bukele to build five more prisons in El Salvador for American citizens who disagree with him. 

Is that actually going to happen? Quite possibly if nobody stops him. But if even the Supreme Court isn’t willing to use their own power and instead delegate it all to Trump, can he be stopped at all? It’s doubtful.

Lots of people on Reddit have made Nazi Germany comparisons. Very often, these people are dismissed as alarmists, and sometimes this is for good reason. But make no mistake - I truly believe in a matter of a few months, we’ve gone from 1932 to 1939. Everyone who opposes this administration should be very, very afraid.

Oh yeah, and while everyone else is distracted by the Bukele meeting, Russia launched yet another airstrike on Ukraine, this time the northeastern city of Sumy. As of this writing, thirty-six people have been confirmed dead as a result. Despite this attack occurring as Ukrainian civilians went to church for Palm Sunday, politicians on the religious right here are silent. In fact, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, vetoed a G7 resolution to condemn this strike. This proves that Rubio isn’t actually one of the “adults in the room” - there is no such thing this time.

This gesture should be seen as outrageous, and it is. But it’s more than likely going to be forgotten in a few days when there’s another outrage. Look how quickly “Signalgate” was memory-holed. I’m confident that in a few days, people will have forgotten about Trump’s meeting with Bukele until American citizens are sent to these concentration camps en masse.

Of course, this is a deliberate strategy known as “flooding the zone.” The more crazy shit happens, the less the average person can react to it all, or even know what’s going on. This makes it a lot more difficult to organize a resistance.

Unfortunately, so far it seems to be working.

Cancel The World Cup

One of the opening brawls during a February 2025 hockey game between the United States and Canada. Image taken from The Independent.

Now, I need to get one thing out of the way: I don’t normally care about professional sports. Like, at all. The outcome only really matters to me insofar as if the Boston teams win, the people around me are going to be in a better mood.

That being said, it needs to be said that the World Cup is scheduled for next year. It will be jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. As much as it pains me to say this, I believe that the USA should be stripped of its host status for the event. Here I’ll present some reasons why.

First of all, it’s never been safe to host the World Cup in the USA. Even before Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and reelected in 2024, gun violence has been an enormous stain on the nation. In fact, even before the current set of travel warnings against us due to Trump’s immigration enforcement leading to foreign tourists getting detained, there were still plenty of advisories about the risk of being caught in a mass shooting.

This isn’t hypothetical, either. While foreign tourists have historically rarely been victims of mass shootings, it has happened before. As an example, four Canadian citizens lost their lives in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a music festival. And the massacres have only accelerated since 2017.

Sure, people might say “But Saclux, they held a World Cup in South Africa.” And that’s true, they did. While South Africa has an overall higher crime rate than the United States, there’s a lot of nuance to be had here. Even though I’ve never been to South Africa, I’d imagine that in that country, you know where the dangerous places are and to avoid them. 

In the USA, by contrast, danger is everywhere. The top five deadliest mass shootings in American history were at the aforementioned music festival, an LGBTQ+ nightclub, a university, an elementary school, and a church. Even if Trump were not President, I wouldn’t blame any foreign spectators and/or teams if they don’t feel safe.

Aftermath of the 2024 Kansas City parade shooting, which followed that year’s Super Bowl. Image taken from People.com.

The picture above is from Kansas City after the 2024 Super Bowl. It just so happens that Kansas City is one of the places that is to host a soccer game for the World Cup. But given what happened there just last year, will teams feel safe playing anywhere in America? It’s doubtful, and I don’t blame them whatsoever.

Some people might point out that the World Cup will have a crazy amount of security for both players and spectators. And that’s also true. But if someone crazy enough to attack a World Cup venue is that determined, they can still cause a lot of damage in the security line. 

As horrific as all mass shootings are, they’re not the only reason why the United States should not be allowed to host the World Cup next year. Gun violence happened under Biden too, after all.

Lately, Trump has been detaining foreign tourists left and right. The Salvadoran man whom the Supreme Court ordered Trump to “facilitate the return of”? This illegitimate President is defying that order. To be fair, he’s probably already dead given what we know about Bukele’s prisons. 

It’s not just Garcia, though. There are many cases of detained tourists, including from countries that are our former allies. When Russia did this to Brittney Griner a few years ago, it was shocking and received tons of rightful condemnation. But we’ve grown numb to this as Americans, just as we’ve grown numb to so many other atrocities.

And let me be clear: These detentions we hear about on the news are likely only the tip of the iceberg. It’s probably happened to hundreds or even thousands of people since Trump returned to office. Yes, it probably won’t happen to members of a World Cup team, but is that a risk they want to take? Or, more to the point, do they want to support a country that detains tourists from countries that are supposed to be their allies? 

This is to say nothing of US-Canada relations, which are at an all-time low right now. Trump has repeatedly called Canada the “51st state”, and that isn’t going to happen without an invasion. Maybe he is joking, but should we risk World War III by assuming that? Even if he isn’t serious, this rhetoric is incredibly dangerous, and Canada will never trust us again for anything that requires longer than a four-year commitment.

The invasion threats are a joke until they aren’t.

Of course, if America actually invades Canada within the next year, the World Cup will probably be canceled anyway. Whether or not the United States can host it will be the least of anyone’s worries. Even if the invasion does not occur, it’s going to be a shitshow of epic proportions.

The final reason I’m going to present is not explicitly political - it’s merely practical.

I’m far from the first person to make this observation, but public transit in the United States is absolute ass. This is no secret - we prefer our gas-guzzling cars and getting stuck in giant traffic jams. Maybe not all of us (I for one would love better and cleaner transportation infrastructure), but enough of us that it remains this way.

Most of the stadiums that have held World Cup matches have contained abundant transport links for modes that weren’t car-based. Say what you will about Russia in 2018, but at least their major cities have metros. That is not the case in America.

Two sports stadiums in Arlington, Texas, USA. The stadium in the background is the AT&T Stadium, which is to host several World Cup games in 2026. Image taken from r/CityPorn.

Pictured here is AT&T stadium in Arlington, Texas. It is currently scheduled to host multiple games during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Fun fact: Per Wikipedia, it’s going to temporarily change its name to “Dallas Stadium” in accordance with FIFA’s rules against corporate-sponsored names.

But look at that. As the image’s caption from r/CityPorn said, there is no public transportation in sight. And that’s because none exists in Arlington, Texas. As car-dependent as most of the United States is, Texas takes the sprawl to a whole nother level. The traffic jam out of the stadium is going to be legendary, and it’s going to lead to another deluge of international shame on the United States. As if we needed more shame!

Arlington isn’t the only stadium in the US that’s like this. Even Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, one of the states with better public transportation (which, to borrow a phrase from Not Just Bikes, is like saying you have a better-smelling outhouse), still sees lots of car traffic. There’s a reason why the tradition of hanging out before a sporting event is referred to as “tailgating” in America. But enough about that.

With regards to the transit situation, we can look at one potential silver lining. If FIFA chooses to disregard one random blogger’s advice and host the World Cup in the United States anyway, it’s going to be a mess and an international embarrassment for America. But on the bright side, if enough Americans see how insane we are as a country, we might actually agitate for change, including more walkable cities that have viable alternatives to driving. If it takes a disastrous World Cup to show us that we need to mobilize for a better country, then so be it.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Things I’ve Learned From GeoGuessr

I know I’ve been woefully inconsistent on uploading these. There truly is no excuse, not that many people happen to read these posts anyway.

In any case, one reason I’ve been rather sporadic is because I’ve spent a considerable amount of time playing GeoGuessr. And yes, I know that GeoGuessr is sort of old news at this point, but as someone who adores geography and intends to study urban planning in graduate school, the game still holds magic for me.

For those of you who are unaware, the goal of GeoGuessr is to pinpoint as close as possible to the location you’re given on Google Street View. I tend to play duels, meaning that I have to get closer to the location than the other person. In terms of clues to look for, there’s any number of them.

A map of traffic directions by country. Red countries drive on the right, whereas blue countries drive on the left. Image taken from Wikipedia.

The map above is the most obvious one. If you’ve got English signage and notice cars driving on the left, do not guess the United States or Canada. It is true, however, that many countries that drive on the left were former British colonies. But then, lots of countries, period, are former British colonies. Nigeria, for instance, drives on the right, which has tripped me up numerous times when I thought it might be Ghana.

Another thing I’ve learned while playing GeoGuessr is that lots of important things are standardized between countries. The ISO (International Standardization Organization) exists to enforce such standards, including the two-letter country codes that are found on many Internet domains. And speaking of Internet domains, that’s another clue you need to be on the lookout for when playing this game.

A map of top-level Internet domains by country. Image taken from IONOS.

I will say that when looking at these codes, it reminds me of how much we’ve become a global society. Yes, we in the United States have “leaders” like Donald Trump who are trying to rip us apart and tear up alliances with other countries. And I don’t mean to minimize how serious things are when he’s literally called Canada the “51st state” and has referred to their former Prime Minister as “Governor Trudeau.”

But back to these codes. It maybe, just maybe, gives me the tiniest shred of hope for global unity. Like we all agree on one thing, even if Trump is sabotaging things as best he can.

Speaking of these Internet codes, it serves as a reminder of how rapidly the world has changed in just the last few decades. During my last semester at university, I was honored to take a course in Internet Geography in which the professor illustrated the numerous ways in which this technology has fundamentally altered the way we live our lives. I’d imagine that for anyone under a certain age, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a world without websites and information that can be at your fingertips within seconds.

It’s not just the societal impacts of the Internet that have struck me, but also the absurd amount of infrastructure that has been put in place to keep it running. As of 2015, which is admittedly a lifetime ago in today’s world, the Internet still relied upon undersea cables to transmit data signals. How the hell were they set up?

Speaking of this standardization, every country (or at least, almost every country I’ve played on GeoGuessr) has stop signs and those red triangular signs that tell you to look for oncoming traffic. The latter signs are a key element of the game’s “meta” that might tell you where you are.

For instance, say you have a “50/50” between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Since these two countries’ pastoral landscapes are fairly similar outside cities, one key difference is those red triangular signs that say “Yield” in the USA. If that sign also says “Yield”, then you’re in Ireland - the Republic of Ireland, that is. (The British ones tell you to “Give Way”, which I unironically find rather amusing). 

The obvious thing to look for are road signs. The language on said signs can narrow the country down, but once you get to the higher rankings of the game and they start giving you more difficult locations, you can’t count on having very many road signs. That’s when you start looking for other clues, such as the color of the bollards. (And seriously - prior to playing GeoGuessr, I didn’t even know what a bollard was).

When all else fails, it helps to consider the vegetation and how well-kept the road seems to be. I’ll provide an in-game screenshot.

A screenshot I took from a GeoGuessr game. The location was somewhere in South Ostrobothnia, Finland.

Take this round as an example. Based on reading a few websites dedicated to the game’s meta (such as GeoMetas and PlonkIt), I knew that within the Nordic nations of northern Europe, if you saw a gravel road with lots of pine trees on either side, you would most likely be in Finland. It probably makes me a huge nerd to be 85% sure of the country without even seeing a road sign, but it’s true.

Speaking of Finland, the Finnish language is relatively easily recognizable. It’s considered one of the most difficult languages to learn for a native English speaker, because it’s not related to most other European languages. Nope, not even Swedish. That being said, you don’t really need to know what the sign says to be able to tell languages apart. For instance, the Finnish language has lots of double vowels and very long words, so you can tell it apart from Swedish fairly easily.

That being said, there is a sizable Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, most of whom live along the west coast of the country in the Ostrobothnia region. Therefore, if you see Swedish signage in an otherwise Finnish setting, you would be wise to guess around the west coast.

Another screenshot from a GeoGuessr game I played. The location was on the island of Samar in the Philippines.

Here’s another example. This round felt Southeast Asian with all the coconut trees, rice fields, and motorcycles. Seeing that the people drove on the right eliminated Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and this area seems too rural to be Singapore. Vietnam is not on Google Street View and therefore will not show up on a GeoGuessr duel. Finally, the signage was in the Latin alphabet, ruling out Cambodia and Laos. 

The only remaining option was the Philippines, which I guessed here. I thought the location would be in northeastern Mindanao, near the popular surfing island of Siargao (which was the subject of the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “The Longest Wave”). For the record, the location was actually in the Eastern Visayas island of Samar, though I still guessed closer than my opponent. If you see brightly colored minibuses known as jeepneys, you’re in the Philippines. 

A third screenshot from a GeoGuessr game I played. The location was eastern Colorado, USA.

Finally, when all else fails, you should hope you’ve spent enough time looking at atlases. Given how spread-out everything was, the green street signs, and the grain elevators, I had reason to believe this location was in the Midwestern United States or the High Plains within the same country. But that doesn’t narrow it down much; due to its geographic area and relative homogeneity in its built environment, the USA is the second-worst country to get in GeoGuessr after Russia, which is difficult for similar reasons.

That green sign pictured above saved my sorry ass. I happened to know that there was a place called Kit Carson County in eastern Colorado. Colorado, of course, is well-known for its mountain scenery, but the eastern part of the state is largely on the Great Plains and very agricultural. That’s not the part most visitors go to. 

When I guessed this location, I was only 24 kilometers (about 15 miles) away from the goal. Like I said earlier, you cannot rely on signage to rescue you. But when it shows up, it can indeed be your salvation.

If you’ve read this far, I would like to thank you for doing so. I’m aware that it reads like the transcript of one of my hyperfixations…which, to be fair, it pretty much is. 

As of the time I write this, I am in the Gold II division in GeoGuessr with an Elo of 600 that keeps fluctuating up and down. I’m pretty good at the game, but I’m a world away from Trevor Rainbolt. The thought of playing the game while skydiving hasn’t really crossed my mind. But it has crossed his.

On Nostalgia

Whenever we’re talking about the past, romanticizing it by saying that things were better then, we’re experiencing what’s known as nostalgia. Google’s dictionary feature defines “nostalgia” as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Etymologically, it comes from a Latin word related to “acute homesickness.”

All over the world, there’s a common sense that things were better in the “good old days”. Not everyone holds this view, of course - there are people who continue believing the future’s bright. My mother keeps telling me mine’s so bright I need to wear shades, but I’m far from certain that’s the truth.

The fact is, the people who claim that things were better in the past have a leg to stand on. I wish I could say that they didn’t, but I’d be lying to myself, and you’d be fully justified in clicking out of this article right now.

Very often, the term nostalgia is used in the context of older media, particularly video games and TV shows. Let’s take the example of video games first. Now, I’m not much of a gamer these days, even if my current habits aren’t that much healthier than gaming might be. But I still think this is a worthwhile analogy.

If you want to read a book from decades or even centuries past, you can probably find a PDF online if you’re willing to pay enough money. Hell, you could even locate a physical copy on Amazon, not that it’s ideal to give Jeff Bezos any more money than necessary. Most music you’ve heard of is probably available on Apple Music or YouTube, with the latter covering your bases for what’s not found on the former platform.

Movies? Again, they’re mostly on YouTube (or any other streaming platform you can think of) for a small price. It’s no wonder that lots of movie theaters are struggling to stay afloat, and not just because of the general public’s reduced attention span as a result of short-form content. (More on that later).

Video games are different. As I write this article, the Nintendo Switch 2 was recently announced, even if we will not be able to pre-order it from the United States for the time being thanks to the tariffs. And I miss the days when we didn’t have to worry about the unhinged President of the United States levying tariffs and starting a trade war with our former allies, but that’s the world we live in now. See, that’s an example of nostalgia!

The Nintendo Switch 2 might be backwards compatible with the original Nintendo Switch. I’m not sure if that’s been confirmed or not - like I said, I don’t play video games that much. But if any Wii U, Wii, GameCube, or N64 games are available for digital download or not at all, you can be sure it’ll only be a limited selection of said games. 

In fact, unlike the other mediums I listed above, older video games are far less readily available. A 2023 study found that 87 percent of pre-2010 video games released in the United States “have failed to be preserved in any real capacity.” And that’s a problem. 

From my perspective, the general consensus seems to have become that video games are getting worse as time goes on, not better. I wrote a previous article about this, but that relates to Cory Doctorow’s writings about “enshittification”. Eventually, game developers run out of new ideas. Or, if you’re a socialist who believes everything’s the fault of capitalism, you might argue that it’s become profitable to release the games people will buy rather than being innovative, so that’s what the companies chase after. Indeed, the last part is hardly a conspiracy theory at all.

Microtransactions have infiltrated just about every game released today. For all that people are complaining about Mario Kart World costing $90 or whatever, keep in mind that most AAA games these days cost that much (or more) when you consider all the downloadable content that one can purchase. This stands in stark contrast to the “good old days”, when as soon as you bought a game, you were done spending money on it.

 It really is no wonder that indie gaming has gotten more popular in recent years; titles like Undertale are often considered among the best video games ever made. Is it any wonder that a title using a minimalist, EarthBound-esque design caught peoples’ eyes? It’s not made by a greedy game studio that pursues profit over all else.

So yes…games made before the current age of enshittification are popular, and those who can’t play them still pine for them. But there’s more.

Current politics is another area where people yearn for the “good old days”. Perhaps this is mostly unique to the United States, but I’ve had conversations with family members who have told me that prior to Trump, we weren’t nearly as polarized as we are now. Maybe people were still strongly Democratic or strongly Republican, but you could actually be friends with people on the “other side”. Even if you disagreed with someone on, say, what an ideal tax rate was for the highest-income groups, you didn’t necessarily hate their guts.

I want to clarify, of course, that the current situation is far more the fault of the Republicans than the Democrats. The GOP chose to nominate Trump three times in a row, and they choose to keep supporting him and enabling all his disastrous actions. This is a choice they have made and are continuing to make every single day.

Look, I’m only 24 years old. I was not alive when, for instance, the Columbine High School massacre happened in Colorado. But my mother was, and when I talked to her about how it was covered, she said it was utterly shocking. People probably wondered how depraved one had to be to bring a gun to school and slaughter random people. 

Nowadays, school shootings are just as depraved and horrific as they were then, but they’re not as shocking. I remember finishing a writing session in September 2024 as news broke of another shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’d grown used to hearing about such events. And “only” four people had died; this was not Sandy Hook, Parkland, or Uvalde, which goes to show how depraved my country has become when we’re desensitized to these horrific tragedies. 

Other countries aren’t, of course. In fact, numerous nations (including those who were once our strong allies) have put in place travel warnings for the USA about gun violence. Of course, they’ve now put in place other warnings about how you might be detained and deported to El Salvador; if I were not from here, I’d rather travel to Russia at this point. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

Besides the example of gun violence, there are plenty of non-political instances of nostalgia being justified. Take the platform YouTube, which has become the monolithic platform for posting any sort of video. Unless, of course, you’re breaking the terms of service for the platform, in which case you’re better off on Rumble. 

I’m not going to say there wasn’t plenty of brain rot on YouTube when I was a kid. Annoying Orange was (and if I remember correctly, still is) quite popular. But kids these days have it worse - just look at the series known as Skibidi Toilet. 

It’s often said that Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast and currently the most-subscribed user on the platform, ruined YouTube. Prior to his meteoric rise starting in 2017, you didn’t need so much production value to be successful. YouTube wasn’t totally innocent, of course, but if you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars and a giant production team behind you, you won’t take off. Very rarely does content go viral organically these days, and that’s a shame.

The Internet itself is becoming consolidated. We no longer have so many kid-friendly places for those under 13 who cannot yet use apps like Discord. When I was a kid, Webkinz was a huge deal, but now it’s pretty much obsolete. Instead, Cocomelon and other forms of total brain rot have taken its place. 

I’d imagine that in cities and countries where the infrastructure is less car-dependent, this isn’t as much of a factor. Kids don’t need to hang out online as much when they’ve got good places to hang out in person. But I’m in the US, where the vast majority of our built environment was bulldozed for the car. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 19, though technically I could have at 16 if I’d wanted to. I can’t imagine how lonely American kids are nowadays.

Overall, I would say that nostalgia itself can be unhealthy. It’s important not to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses when it isn’t warranted. Sometimes your preferences change over time and you just haven’t realized it yet. I know that’s true in my case; I keep feeling a compulsion to write fanfiction, but I simply can’t force myself to when I know I’ll be a lot busier again soon.

There’s also the fact that life sometimes loses its novelty as you get older. Supposedly the older you become, the faster time seems to pass. If I am fortunate enough to reach an advanced age, I might find that out for myself. But you shouldn’t spend your life just wishing.

Reflections on Europe

I apologize for my absence. The three regular readers of this blog are most likely wondering where the hell I went after being so faithful for…a week or two.

Well, now I’m answering that question. I was on vacation. In fact, as I write this post, I’m on a trans-Atlantic flight back home. It’s an eight-hour haul with a little over six hours to go, and the Wi-Fi is out. But that’s okay. We human beings weren’t meant to be plugged into the algorithm 24/7.

The reason for my trip was to celebrate my graduation from college. I was allowed to select a destination within reason, and the country I had wanted to visit ever since seeing it on The Amazing Race in 2023 was…Slovenia. 

I traveled with both of my parents. Maybe I’m a little old for that, but whatever. It was and is my first trip abroad since Donald Trump was reelected President in 2024, so I felt rather wary of how I would be perceived. After all, it’s no secret that Americans are persona non grata all over the world, but particularly in Canada and Europe. In specific terms, I don’t know exactly what I should have been afraid of given that Europe has far fewer firearms than my own country.

Even so, I bought a backpack with the Canadian flag on it and used it on this trip. This is a practice known as “flag-jacking” that originated during the George W. Bush presidency after he invaded Iraq. Canadian tourists, after all, have much better reputations abroad than Americans. I did not exactly pretend to be Canadian; when pressed I told people the truth. I just wanted to send a message that I do not approve of my country’s administration.

As it turns out, I may have been overthinking this all along. Most people I met didn’t ask me about my country’s politics. It turns out that Reddit is not real life - who would have thought?

There was one exception. While I was touring the Postojna Caves (more on that later), one of the people beside me asked me if I liked Trump. Needless to say, I gave him a resounding no and asserted that Americans who support Trump generally don’t travel to Europe very much.

So I visited two countries on this trip, Italy and Slovenia. We flew into Venice, which is not worth it. It might be the closest major airport to our next destination, but the city itself is basically a floating souvenir shop. Except that it’s not floating at all, instead slowly sinking into the Adriatic Sea. 

It’s been said before, but very few people actually live in Venice these days. The detractors who refer to the city as “Veniceland” have a point. Once upon a time, it must have been amazing given how much history is in that place. Nowadays, it feels like a Disney version of Italy. In early spring it was already a zoo, and in midsummer it’s probably as crowded as a pandemic-inducing factory farm. The locals would be fed up if there were any locals to begin with. 

After two days in Venice, my parents and I rented a car and drove a few hours northward. The first thing I noticed was just how much less traffic there was. According to urbanist YouTuber Not Just Bikes, countries with robust public transit and walkable cities are (perhaps ironically) also ideal for drivers. The reason is because not as many people there need to drive, therefore those people who do drive want to drive. 

This stands in stark contrast to us Americans, who mostly get our licenses at age 16. In America driving is seen as a right and necessity rather than a privilege. But that’s a subject for another day.

I also noticed that the roads in Italy were in far better condition than those at home. Seriously - I live in one of the most affluent parts of the United States and potholes are common. Even when there aren’t potholes, major roads are still far from even much of the time. The Italian motorways were almost spotless. 

We stayed in the ski town of Cortina d’Ampezzo. I am in fact an avid skier, having partaken in the sport since I was six years old. And let me tell you, it was the polar opposite of Venice.

Despite Cortina’s reputation as a glitzy resort that attracts tons of visitors from all around the world, the town felt virtually free of tourists. There were some, yes, but I saw plenty of locals around too. I even bought a new pair of sneakers at a department store where the employees spoke lackluster English (though it was admittedly still far better than my Italian). There’s something immensely gratifying about going somewhere locals or domestic tourists visit.

The skiing was, in absolute terms, not ideal. At lower elevations of the resort, it was very much slush season. In late March, of course, this was hardly unexpected. In fact, relative to what time of year it was, the upper part of the mountain might as well have been Hakuba. All of this, with minimal crowds!

My favorite memory from this part of the trip will likely always be the cooking class my mother and I signed up for. One of the hotel’s chefs walked us through the process of making ravioli with beet filling. Even if we paid good money to take part in it, the activity still felt like an honor.

Think about it. All of us live in a world of vastly increased globalization relative to how it was thirty, even twenty years ago. It’s a lot more common for Americans to watch Indian movies or South Korean TV shows. Conversely, American retail chains can be found all over many European cities despite some Europeans’ best efforts to boycott them.

Italy is another example of a “cultural superpower.” There’s a reason Italian restaurants can be found all over the world. There’s a reason the peninsula received more visitors in 2023 than all but four other countries. Thanks in part to mass media, most people have at least a cursory understanding of why someone would want to visit Italy. 

There is something almost spiritual about this globalization, and yet it has its downsides as well. Indigenous languages are declining, as are some languages that have official status in one or more nations as many people turn to English as a “default” lingua Franca. Some people say that cultures are all becoming the same…

…which is one reason why the cooking class felt incredibly special. At a time when some restaurants are chastised for mass-producing their food, at a time when much of the produce at my local grocery store was sourced from other countries, the people in and around Cortina have been using fresh ingredients to make their ravioli for hundreds of years. The chef aims to keep this practice alive even in an age when that might become more difficult. 

While many of us rely on AI to do simple tasks, the chef who taught the cooking class did not. My mother and I tried to revel in the manual task of rolling out the dough and painting the edges of each dough circle with water. (That is one reason my mother took up ceramics). What dough could not be used was put in a bowl, where it would be used to make pasta in the near future. No ingredients would go to waste. 

My biggest takeaway from the cooking class was this: Just because something is a tradition doesn’t always mean it’s bad. 

At the end of the class, we got to keep our aprons and were given the recipe to make the dumplings at home. We’ve promised my father that we will make them in the near future. 

We drove to Bled, Slovenia the next day. Now, believe it or not, you can’t drive directly from Italy to Slovenia. Or at least, it takes a lot longer to. The reason for this, I presume, is the mountain range along the border. Unlike the Americans who built I-70 in Colorado, Europeans were unwilling to “pave paradise and put up a parking lot”. But whatever - three countries for the price of two.

Bled is best known for sitting on the shore of the lake of the same name. The lake is probably Slovenia’s best-known tourist attraction; acccording to photos, it’s bright blue whenever it’s sunny out. Of course, the keywords are when it’s sunny out - we hardly got any sun when we were there.

Our hotel, the Rikki Balance, at least had a wonderful view of the lake even without the sun. Supposedly the hotel was named after a Swiss doctor who helped discover the health benefits of the area’s mineral resorts. Lake Bled was a pleasant place to walk around, and we even took a pletna boat to the island in the lake’s center because that’s what you do when you’re a tourist there.

That’s the other thing: Sometimes a tourist activity is popular for a reason. It doesn’t have to be undiscovered to be worthwhile. The place reminded me of Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire, except that the mountains surrounding Lake Bled are much higher.

While Bled isn’t suffering from overtourism nearly to the degree of Venice, I couldn’t help but observe that it wasn’t a place where many people actually lived. Most residents were probably employed in hospitality. 

The other minor gripe I have with Bled is that for a place with as many tourists as it gets, there weren’t too many restaurants. Yes, I understand that might make me sound like an Ugly American™ - and in fact, most US towns of this size have mostly fast food joints. But we had only two days there and ate at the same restaurant twice. Indeed, if you count the hotel’s buffet as a restaurant, there were two such cases in Bled.

Bled does, however, have that famous cream cake. I’m not normally one for whipped cream, but when it was on the menu, my diet went out the window. And it was on the menu everywhere in Bled. (Why shouldn’t it be? It’s a local culinary specialty.) Even if food in Europe is generally healthier than it is in America, I still won’t be surprised if I’ve put on weight this trip.

We spent two days in Bled before driving to the capital city of Ljubljana. Now, in case you didn’t know, there’s a well-known town called Postojna that’s home to some caves. One of the longest cave systems in Europe, in fact! It’s no wonder that plenty of people were there, such an international crowd that the tour guides don’t bother speaking to the guests - instead, we were given audio guides programmed to the language of our choice.

Let me tell you: The caves are well worth visiting. The karst limestone caverns formed over a period of millions of years. When people say they travel to Europe for history, that’s not generally the type of history they think of. And yet it’s somehow even more spectacular than the cathedrals. In the time it took to build the Sagrada Familia, each stalactite and stalagmite grew about a centimeter at most. It really brings to mind how minuscule our existence on this planet is by comparison.

In the grand scheme of things, it was not that long ago that spelunkers risked life and limb to dig some of these tunnels through pitch-blackness. Nowadays, tourists from all over the world can pay to take a train down and safely explore this underrated natural wonder. There was a gift shop at the end, which had a selection of children’s books like The Dragon In Postojna Caves. I bought a sweater that I intend to wear decently frequently.

Finally we reached Ljubljana, our final stop on the trip. As European capitals go, it’s relatively small, with only about 300,000 people living there. The old town, where we stayed, is centered around the Ljubljanica River. And let me tell you: It’s hard to overstate how excellent the location of the hotel was. Thanks, Dad.

Ljubljana is known as the City of Dragons - one of the most notable bridges over the river is called the Dragon Bridge due to the green statues on all four corners of it. Legend has it that the hero Jason of Greek mythology slayed a dragon there. 

Although I’d imagine very few present-day Slovenes actually believe in dragons, the mythical fire-breathing creature still holds significant sway over the capital city’s history and culture. Dragons feature prominently on Ljubljana’s capital and coat of arms. Most of the souvenir shops dotting the old town sell dragon plushies, dragon sweaters, dragon pendants, or even dragon-themed chocolate. I’m not kidding about that last one.

Ljubljana, in my mind, isn’t “becoming” the next big thing in Europe. It’s already there. While it wasn’t nearly the zoo that Venice may have been, early spring is not peak tourist season in the Slovenian capital. According to a waiter at one of the restaurants we ate at twice (which my father claims made the best hamburger he’s ever eaten), in the summer Ljubljana is like Venice. Given that he spends orders of magnitude more time there than I do, I’m inclined to trust his word on that.

In my experience, Ljubljana was somewhat touristy. There’s a dedicated Tourist Information Center near the Dragon Bridge, and many people were taking selfies in front of a cathedral. I even saw some graffiti telling tourists to go home. 

While I’m not trying to minimize the very real negative impacts that mass tourism can have, I will say that I felt welcome. Even when people found out I was American, they treated me well. 

Now that I have a little over an hour before I land at Boston Logan, I want to gather my final thoughts about Europe and Slovenia in particular.

First of all, the café/restaurant culture is very different from what I’m used to. In the United States, many people get coffee at a drive-thru. It’s physically, environmentally, and emotionally unhealthy - that’s no secret. Everyone is in a hurry at restaurants in America. This isn’t the case in Europe, where cafés are a very common “third place” for people to hang out and linger over drinks.

Part of this is because most American cities are not remotely walkable. And even in the more walkable ones like my beloved Boston, restaurants seldom have much outdoor seating. When my local “Irish pub” reopened during the initial deployment of COVID vaccines in the spring of 2021, all the seating was outside. Yes, it was in a former and future parking lot, but I miss outdoor dining in the States. I wish that feature had continued. 

Another thing I noticed was just how green everything was. At the end of March, some buds were poking out, and I can only imagine how colorful Ljubljana must be in May or June. And it’s not just green in terms of vegetation, but also in terms of infrastructure.

You see, every year a city in the European Union is awarded the title of “European Green Capital” for their efforts against the climate crisis. Ljubljana won this award in 2016, and the locals are quite proud of it, as they should be. In the absence of an Internet connection, I can’t tell you precisely how the winner is determined, but I saw very little trash on the streets. And of course, it’s very easy to walk around the compact city - the only vehicles allowed in most of the old town seemed to be the police, presumably other emergency vehicles, and the electric tourist train. 

This extends to the country’s natural heritage. Slovenia’s coat of arms contains the country’s highest mountain, Triglav, and waves to represent its short coastline. Every sane person on this Earth understands that we must protect the environment, but this need feels especially prescient in a country with such natural beauty in such a small expanse. I mean, the place is smaller than the Netherlands, yet it has mountains that were once glaciated, evergreen forests, bright green fields as far as the eye can see, and an Instagram-worthy coastline on the Adriatic. 

As much acclaim as the nature in the United States gets, it’s a lot less accessible to the average resident. America  is massive, and internal transportation is in a sorry state indeed. It’s only likely to get worse under the Trump administration, but it wasn’t great to begin with. Slovenia is far more friendly to people with a limited amount of time - I was only there for four days and feel like I did the country right.

My last observation is that the flag of Slovenia, (which is roughly the same colors as the Russian flag except for the coat of arms in the upper left part of it) was seen frequently. Of the fifteen countries I’ve visited besides my own, Slovenes probably flew their flag more than anywhere but the USA. 

In the US, flying the flag on your property is coded as right-wing. The patriotism, nationalism, or whatever you want to call it is constantly in your face. It’s like people think you’ll otherwise forget what country you’re in. 

By contrast, Slovenia has a lot more things to be proud of. It’s a much smaller country (population only 2.1 million) that’s often overshadowed by its neighbors. They don’t bully people around like America does. Their patriotism is a lot gentler and honestly simpler. I’d even say it’s better. They’re not saying they’re better than anyone else, after all.

I’m sure that Slovenia isn’t a perfect place. If you live in Ljubljana or Bled, I have to imagine that tourism has driven your cost of living skyward. Inflation is probably higher than in the US (for now) thanks to the major war a mere two countries away. 

And yet, as I take myself back to the very pedestrian-friendly streets of Ljubljana, which have been there under several empires prior to the modern-day Republic of Slovenia, I’m convinced that you could do a lot worse.

Overall, I’m very glad I made the trip. As convinced as I am that the contestants on The Amazing Race 35 were paid to remark on how beautiful Slovenia is, that really wasn’t necessary. The scenery speaks for itself, as do the 2.1 million people who are lucky enough to call the country home. As long as you are willing to be a respectful visitor and don’t mind a connecting flight if you’re not from Europe or Dubai, I can’t recommend Slovenia enough. I might describe it as a more budget-friendly version of Switzerland.

All the photos below were taken by yours truly.

“Every Country Has Its Problems”

Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, at his ICC hearing. Image taken from The Guardian.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was recently arrested and sent to the Netherlands to be tried for crimes against humanity during his drug war. Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro is indicted for attempting a coup in 2023. And of course, South Korea’s insane few weeks ended with former President Yoon being held accountable.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is President of the United States again. Let’s talk about why that is.

Whenever I complain about something happening in the United States, it’s very common for well-meaning people to come at me with the following refrain: Every country has its problems. No place is perfect, they say.

Here’s the thing: To a point, I agree with them. There is no perfect country anywhere in the world - even Reddit’s beloved Finland is pretty dark in the winter. 

But whenever someone says “every country has its problems” as a way to dismiss the very real atrocities currently occurring in the United States, atrocities that rarely if ever occur elsewhere, I think they’re very wrong indeed. And I’m going to dissect that claim here.

First of all, let’s consider the case of health care. Famously, it costs a fortune here depending on what you need and how greedy your health insurance company is. Consider that a few months ago, the CEO of such a company was assassinated, and much of the country is cheering on the gunman. People are even donating money for his legal defense. This is despite the fact that many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, in no small part due to these health insurance companies.

The United States does not have universal health insurance like essentially every other wealthy nation does. It’s been said before, but all you need to know about the American healthcare system is that there’s a popular TV series in which the main character turns to cooking crystal meth to pay his medical bills. It’s considered some of the best TV ever made, in fact.

Walter White, a TV character who could not exist without the American health care system. Image taken from Wikipedia.

People have always complained about having to pay medical bills, as they should. But this came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the United States especially hard. And again, this was largely due to the country’s lack of universal health insurance. It’s profitable to deny care to people who need it, after all, and people aren’t going to get tested if it costs too much money for them to do so.

More than a million Americans perished from the virus, and you’d think that would make a pretty good case to make healthcare free. (And yes, it’s not actually free, but it’s paid through your taxes in other countries. Same thing.)

Instead, there are still many lawsuits in place to repeal some or all of the Affordable Care Act. And yes, that’s also known as Obamacare, even though a sizable chunk of Americans don’t know that they’re the same thing. But the ACA was barely a band-aid on the gaping bullet wound that is the American healthcare system, and even that could easily be repealed under the new Trump administration.

Speaking of bullets, let’s talk about another crisis plaguing this country - gun violence. The shootings everyone thinks about are the high-profile cases of school violence like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde…fuck, there are so many. Then there are others that happen in public spaces, including the deadliest of all - the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. Bump stocks were banned after the latter event, but the Supreme Court re-legalized machine guns last year. 

What has happened in terms of gun control? Absolutely nothing! And indeed, Sandy Hook was the end of the gun rights debate: If you were going to write a story about an event that would get Americans to finally give up their weapons, you couldn’t do much “better” than Sandy Hook. 

This stands in stark contrast to other countries. The United Kingdom banned most firearms after the 1996 Dunblane shooting, and Australia did the same after the Port Arthur Massacre that same year. Canada has had a handful of mass shootings, but here’s the thing - most of those guns come from down here. I’m surprised they weren’t already boycotting us even before Trump!

Make no mistake, people still want gun control. A majority of Americans claim to, in fact. And yet, if anything, firearm laws in this country have become more permissive in the years since twenty first-graders and six staff members were gunned down at Sandy Hook. Couple that with the seventy percent or so of Americans who apparently favor Medicare For All, and you should realize something.

So why is that? If the majority of the population wants things to change, why have they stayed the same?

Well, let’s talk about the United States Constitution. It was written to be very hard to amend - in fact, there has not been a new amendment since 1992.

Because we’re so polarized, and because the bar to ratify a new amendment is so high, it’s my belief that we’ll never see another amendment, no matter how much we might need one. I don’t mean to draw a moral equivalence between the Democrats and Republicans here, but the two parties will never agree on anything significant enough to warrant an amendment ever again. 

Some people might wonder why there aren’t any protests. Part of it is the Kyle Rittenhouse precedent - remember how he literally got away with murdering protestors? Then again, I reject the notion that there haven’t been any protests. Remember 2020?

Massive George Floyd protests that ultimately amounted to nothing. Image taken from the Associated Press.

After the most enormous protests in American history, something would need to change regarding police brutality, wouldn’t it? And yet, the most significant legislative response has been to ban discussion of race in classrooms. That’s pretty disgraceful - we’re worse off than we were before the unrest.

Some people say that Europe is more racist than the United States. I’ll admit that I’m a white man, so I’ve never had racism directed at me, but people who claim that the previous sentence is true literally have no idea what they’re talking about.

Let’s talk about Germany, a country that has learned from its past. Symbols related to the Nazis, perpetrators of horrific crimes during the 1930s and 1940s, have been banned in Germany and several other countries. Still, some people say that Europe’s got more racism than America.

I have not spent any significant amount of time in Germany; maybe black people there are more likely to be jeered at, or even called a racial slur. But that’s typically the worst-case scenario in terms of racism in Germany. Nobody fears the police unless they’ve committed a crime.

In America, it’s quite different. Even after the absolutely massive George Floyd protests, over a thousand people are killed by U.S. police every year, and African-Americans are disproportionately targeted. And that’s not the only example; I’ve talked about redlining and its relation to societal apathy in the recent past. 

So what’s my point here? How is this related to the saying “every country has its problems?”

Well, it’s simple. Other countries may have problems, but they solve them. Whether it’s Australia passing gun control after one major mass shooting, or France amending their Constitution to enshrine reproductive rights into law, or literally every non-U.S. country committing to fighting the climate crisis, other countries fix problems when they arise.

There’s a reason we can’t be like this too.

Most Americans might want things to change here. But as soon as they’re told that “things changing” will benefit people of color too, they suddenly dig their heels in. Racism runs deeper here than a desire to improve their own lives, and that’s pretty sad.

We are a uniquely sick country, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better. I think it’s more likely that we limp along until we implode under the weight of our archaic stone constitution, which might as well be toilet paper anyway.

Trump Isn’t Kidding About Canada

A border crossing between the U.S. and Canada. Image taken from the NPR website.

Well, he’s doing it. After repeatedly going back and forth on when he would implement these horrendous policies, United States President Donald Trump (yuck, I hate saying those words again) has begun his series of tariffs on Canada and Europe.

Canada and the EU have, of course, retaliated, as they have every right to. And I greatly oppose Trump’s action, not just because it’s going to make things more expensive for the average American. It reinforces to me that the U.S. had no right to elect Donald Trump due to our oversize impact on other countries.

But as horrific as the tariffs are, as disgusting as this betrayal may be, I want to bring your attention to a post Trump put on Truth Social the other day. Now, I’m not going to link to that post - we shouldn’t give him our traffic. However, embedded in that Truth Social post was a claim that the only solution for the tariffs is for Canada to join as the “51st state.”

For some, it may be trivial to dismiss that as a joke. That Trump’s just bluffing, and he isn’t brave enough to actually follow through on that threat of annexation. However, this is far from the first time he’s asked for Canada to join the U.S. - he’s been saying this nonstop since he was elected again this past November. 

Yes, Trump lies about a lot of things, and some might say that this echoes his plans during his first term to “build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.” Never mind the fact that U.S.-Canada relations are unlikely to ever recover after Trump leaves, if he ever leaves. But that’s beside the point for now.

In his Truth Social post, Donald Trump stated that the border between America and Canada was “artificially drawn.” If this doesn’t send a chill down your spine, I don’t know what will. And there’s only one reason for that:

He sounds just like Putin.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during their infamous 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland. Image taken from NBC News.

Prior to launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has killed countless civilians and turned entire cities to rubble, Vladimir Putin constantly referred to Ukraine as an illegitimate state. In his speech announcing the start of his “special military operation”, he claimed that he wanted to “de-Nazify” the country. He published this essay arguing that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.”

It’s also no secret that Trump wants to be just like Putin. Look how many dictators he admires. Remember when Xi Jinping removed his own term limit and Trump said that “we should try President For Life someday”? Well, I do.

As horrific as the war in Ukraine is, a conflict between the United States and Canada would be even worse. Canada is in NATO, meaning that in theory, the rest of the alliance would need to help defend them if it were invaded. And I believe that America’s former NATO allies would fulfill their obligations under Article 5, since their security depends on it. 

I won’t come close to naming all the horrors that would occur if America invaded Canada. It’s entirely possible - maybe even inevitable - that nuclear weapons would be used by one or both sides. That’s to say nothing of the domestic resistance in the United States. While I cannot speak for every liberal, I know that I would like to defect to Canada if the U.S. launches a full-scale invasion of its former ally. The real question is whether or not they’d have me.

The conflict would be truly worthy of the title World War III, and it would be the end of the United States, as well as possibly the end of the world. 

The question then becomes: Who would stop Trump?

I don’t think there’s any way Trump will be talked down from giving the order if he’s truly determined. He has no conscience to begin with, especially since he doesn’t need to run for reelection - he’ll either be out in four years, dictator for life, or dead. Either way, he’s President right now, and his second term is all about revenge. Trump is going to invade Canada if he thinks doing so will “own the libs” who voted him out in 2020.

So, again, who will stop him?

The generals? I doubt it. He nominated Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense not because Hegseth was qualified (he isn’t), but because Trump was confident he would remain loyal. Project 2025 called for purging the military of generals who would refuse to follow orders, and that purge is already taking place. If the generals defy his order to invade Canada, he can just fire them until he reaches someone who is that insane.

There were adults in the room last time. There are far fewer this time.

Congress? No way. Even after Trump incited a mob to personally kill all members of Congress and overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, the Republicans in both chambers still remain loyal. There is no red line for them. They care about kissing the ring more than they care about their own lives, so they’ll never turn on Big Don.

January 6 Capitol attack. Image taken from Britannica.

The people? Leaving aside the fact that half of “the people” keep supporting Trump no matter what he does, it’s unlikely that the protests would be massive enough to be noticed by those in power. It’s not like the media’s been covering them very much. Besides, as I’ve written about just the other day, our cities aren’t designed for protests.

And let’s be honest: You know as well as I do that even if the protests were as enormous as the George Floyd BLM protests in the summer of 2020, they wouldn’t do shit. Those protests certainly didn’t accomplish anything progressive; if anything this country’s gotten more racist since 2020.

Even in spite of the annexation threats, however, I remain envious of Canadians.

It’s not just that they have free health insurance, or that there are a lot fewer mass shootings (and those that do occur can be blamed on American guns). It’s not just that women in Canada still have the right to bodily autonomy. It’s not just that they have better protections for the environment and LGBTQ+ rights, and it’s not just that they keep supporting Ukraine even as America has pivoted to supporting Russia.

It’s that, unlike how it is in America, I would be proud to be Canadian. 

It’s often said that Americans who don’t want to be associated with Trump pretend to be Canadian when they travel abroad; this practice is sometimes referred to as flag-jacking. Come to think of it, I might do that next time. But there’s a reason why the sane Americans do this - Canada has a far better reputation abroad than the U.S. does.

After all, when 9/11 resulted in the closure of U.S. airspace, Canada took in stranded American passengers. When Europe needed help defeating fascism in World War II, Canada joined because it was the right thing to do - we only joined after we were attacked ourselves. Don’t even get me started on the unjustified wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the former of which some Americans fled to Canada in order to avoid being drafted into. 

When the Canadian hockey fans booed the U.S. national anthem a few weeks ago, I wanted to join them. The nation of Canada reflects my values far more than this hellhole - the great white north has all the natural beauty (and more) with none of the political insanity. As Reddit will frequently tell you, politics don’t run peoples’ lives in Canada the way it does down here.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford (a Conservative) strategizing with Canadian Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney (a Liberal). Such a scene would be unthinkable between a Republican and Democrat in the States. Image taken from the Toronto Star.

Here is my stance on the invasion, which I fervently hope does not happen:

I’m not going to apologize, because to apologize means to expect forgiveness, and I don’t expect that. I just want to make clear, in the strongest possible terms, that I do not support any of these atrocities, even if they’re committed in my name.

If you’re a fellow sane American, the best thing you can do is call your Congressperson and tell them to back Seth Magaziner’s (D-RI) bill, HR 1936, which is literally called the “No Invading Allies Act”. There should be no invading allies. Period. 

Trump might be bluffing. I sure hope he is. But counting on his threats being a bluff would be an even dumber decision than Biden running for reelection. We need to act as if Trump might actually invade Canada, because it sure looks like it.