Level Of Concern

A long-sleeve men’s T-shirt bearing a depiction of US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) with the caption “Often Disappointed, Always Disappointing.” Image taken from Spreadshirt. I have a short-sleeve version of this design.

For the last few days, all anyone has been able to talk about are the U.S.-initiated strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. At least, that’s how it is currently. Who knows if people will still be talking about them next week; my bet is that they won’t be, at least in the United States. No matter how far the conflict escalates, the fact that we are or were ever involved in the war between Iran and Israel will be memory-holed by most American civilians.

On some level, it’s hard to blame them. Donald Trump is using the tried and true strategy of “flooding the zone.” If so many insane things happen that it’s hard to keep track of all of them, people will have a hard time paying attention to any of them. Therefore, many will decide to check out of politics.

Listen: I’m as sick of politics as many other people. The Facepalm subreddit is now about 85% Trump, whereas it used to have a wide variety of cringe-worthy mishaps. I understand that the United States, as one of the world’s most powerful countries, being in a democratic death spiral is newsworthy. But surely there are some newsworthy events that don’t involve Donald Trump, aren’t there?

As for TourismHell, while it used to be largely about overtourism in European destinations, is now about 70% related to the ongoing boycott of the United States by foreign travelers. And I want to be clear: Foreign tourists are well within their right to travel, or in this case not travel, wherever they like. We’re not exactly acting like welcoming hosts at the moment, at least not at the governmental level. Given the reports of foreigners being detained at customs, including that Australian journalist who covered pro-Palestine student protests, I certainly don’t blame those who decide to stay away. And honestly, a decline in foreign tourism is, practically speaking, the least of our worries at this point.

Even so, the “not visiting the USA” party has gotten a little repetitive, even if I agree that now isn’t a good time to visit the USA. But that’s beside the point. 

Anyway, I said I was sick of politics. And I realize that comparisons to Nazi Germany are pretty much beating a dead horse at this point. They’ve become cliché by now. But I’d imagine the German people were probably sick of politics in 1938. But that doesn’t mean politics were sick of them.

It’s that realization that keeps me glued to the news every single day. I’m here for the chaos, as much as I wish I were not. This could have been avoided, of course, if American voters were okay with a perfectly qualified black woman as President. But we weren’t, collectively speaking, so this is what we get instead.

The strikes on Iran are a serious crime. Trump appears to have contacted Republicans in Congress and not Democrats, but the important part is that he did not receive any Congressional authorization for this act of war. He walked right through any checks on his own power, not that such checks exist when the GOP is determined to delegate their power to Trump. Seriously, I get that they don’t care about democracy or the well-being of the country, but even I am stunned by how little they care about their own power. 

In practical terms, I don’t think this is World War III. At least, not yet. Some would argue that Democrats should saddle Trump with starting World War III in the hopes of tanking his approval ratings, but I’m not certain that will work. And even so, does it matter how low his approval ratings get? We have three and a half more years of him regardless because that’s how the idiots voted.

Yes, tensions will increase in the Middle East. Members of the American military stationed there are likely to face heightened threats to their safety. But none of America’s former allies are likely to join them in this fight. Russia is busy with the genocidal war they started in Ukraine. China has no desire to rock the boat. And India and Pakistan are more concerned with each other than what’s going on in Iran and Israel.

In short, I don’t think this conflict can reasonably be expected to escalate into what an objective observer would call World War III. I simply don’t. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a major “crossing the Rubicon” moment.

If an authorization of military force does eventually pass a la Iraq (which is admittedly doubtful because, again, Congress doesn’t care about their own power) Trump might use a state of war to justify cracking down on protests at home. Our insanely inebriated Secretary of Defense Pete Kegseth has refused to rule out ordering the military to fire on peaceful demonstrators. If he’s not willing to say “absolutely not”, the answer is probably “absolutely yes.”

Moreover, by all accounts, Trump didn’t join the war because he felt Iran was a threat. He joined the war because he was triggered by Elon Musk humiliating him. And that’s incredibly frightening, because it shows how petty and impulsive he is.

Seriously. Who’s to say that he won’t do something even more insane next time his ego takes a hit? I realize that there’s a world of difference between striking military targets (with very few civilians present) in a country that’s long been an enemy of the United States, as opposed to randomly bombing cities in a country that used to be our closest ally. But given that Trump keeps calling Canada the “51st state”, it’s at least conceivable he might actually follow through on these threats.

Of course, I think it’s very likely that this conflict is going to be forgotten by the average American within a month. After a week or two, I don’t think most people will even remember that we struck Iran on June 21 (June 22 local time), even if our involvement in said conflict escalates significantly. It’ll be memory-holed just like mass shootings so often are in this country. And that’s by design.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not convinced that I am. Consider the recent Los Angeles unrest, in which people protested against Trump’s deportations and Trump called in the military. Another Australian journalist (not the same one who got deported while trying to visit friends in New York) was shot with a rubber bullet. It seemed like an enormous escalation at the time, but now nobody’s talking about the Los Angeles unrest anymore, nor the fact that the National Guard was sent in. But guess what?

That was two weeks ago.

Two Democratic lawmakers, state legislators from Minnesota, and their spouses were shot in their own homes in the middle of the night, with one of the couples dying. A few disgusting Senators, such as Mike Lee of Utah and Bernie Moreno of Ohio, spread conspiracy theories and mocked the assassination. As insane a milestone as that is, yet another “crossing the Rubicon” moment if that phrase still has any meaning, most people aren’t paying attention anymore. Guess what?

That was nine days ago.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m deeply concerned about our new involvement in Iran. And I say that sincerely, unlike a certain Senator from Maine. But compared to what’s already happened, and compared to what will surely come next week, it’s hard to give it too much oxygen. 

We’re in for a wild ride, folks.

On Community And Loneliness

It’s no secret that we need community in order to properly function.

Okay, that’s not exactly ground-breaking, but it’s true. The effects of loneliness on one’s mental and yes, physical health are well-documented. According to a report from the U.S. Surgeon General at the time, Dr. Vivek Murthy (back when we still had qualified people in charge before the voters had to ruin it again), chronic loneliness can be as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Think about that for a moment. Being lonely on a long-term basis might be as hazardous as smoking almost a pack of those cancer sticks daily. Even if the smoking rate has declined pretty quickly in America, the loneliness rate has, if anything, risen. There are a number of reasons for that, not all of them unique to the USA.

Today I walked to a nearby park and participated in an exercise class with a handful of other people. Let me tell you: Although most of them were probably at least twenty years older than me, they’re fit. I struggled to keep up with them. Now my arms are a tiny bit sore, but it would be well worth it even if the after-effects were far worse.

Obviously, exercise such as this is good for you. Unless you live in Tehran, that is. But in all seriousness, people who stay active, especially the older they get, are more likely to live longer, healthier lives when all else is equal. Again, that isn’t a revolutionary observation. 

However, what occurred to me more than once as I was lifting weights and jumping over hurdles is how much of a community this exercise class was. You could pay a small fee for each session, but many of the same people go there every week, to the point where they consider one another good friends. And yet somehow, it didn’t feel “cliquey” the way some friend groups do, even when the preponderance of the members are on the wrong side of middle age.

If we are to believe that chronic loneliness is this dangerous for your health, then it might be a reason why the average life expectancy in the USA lags other wealthy nations. Obviously, there are other factors at play here, such as income inequality, a higher obesity rate, and the lack of universal health insurance. Perhaps these factors are interrelated, but the point is that loneliness is not the only reason our health outcomes aren’t what they could be. That being said, I think it’s a significant enough factor that it deserves to be discussed more, particularly in light of the way our infrastructure lends itself to social atomization.

Stock image of suburban tract housing (from iStock). This could be Anywhere, USA, but wherever it is, it’s very hard to have spontaneous community here.

I want to be clear that loneliness is not unique to the United States. Like obesity, it might be worse here, and there might be more systemic factors leading to it than in, say, most of Europe, but there are plenty of lonely people in other countries too. 

Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labour Party gave a controversial address that’s often referred to as the “island of strangers” speech. Now, I’m not going to delve too deeply into this, because it's about glass houses and whatnot. However, while I do not know if this line was meant as a dog whistle, quite a few progressives interpreted it as such.

I read a fascinating article, which I’m going to link here, about the very real issue the Prime Minister brought up; namely, a lack of social cohesion. People aren’t spending as much time with one another as they used to, and many feel lonely or like they don’t know their neighbors as a result. 

This is a legitimate problem, but as the author of the linked article argues, immigration isn’t the cause of it. A national identity can change over time; just because someone is British by choice instead of by chance doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t be considered part of British society. It’s a different world than it was some decades ago.

Rather, the author points out that numerous community centers, locations that might be considered “third places”, have closed in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. A public service union in the UK is quoted as saying that roughly two-thirds of council-run youth centers had closed in England and Wales since 2010, largely due to funding cuts. If Prime Minister Starmer truly wanted to alleviate this problem, he might be wise to push for increased funding for such programs. 

Again, I realize that I’m one to talk, given that I’m from the USA and the problem of societal alienation is likely even worse here. There’s a reason young men outright voted for Trump in last year’s election. And most of the United Kingdom is a pedestrian paradise relative to most of the United States. Car dependency isolates people, particularly those who don’t or can’t drive. 

The latter group frequently includes the elderly. Once your doctor advises you to stop driving and you give up your license, your quality of life is going to drop precipitously if you live in a car-dependent place. Now, no country is perfect about integrating the elderly into society; even the Netherlands, every urbanist Redditor’s favorite country, isn’t amazing in this regard. But not having other transportation options is going to exacerbate loneliness for old people who can’t drive anymore. If you didn’t or couldn’t save for a retirement community during your working years, tough luck. 

And even if you can afford to live in such a place during your “golden years”, it’s mostly other old people you interact with. That seriously hinders one’s chances for intergenerational friendships, which have many benefits.

In any case, note the earlier statistic about youth centers, which are presumably places for relatively young people to get to know each other. They’re withering away in both the UK and USA.

As a current 25-year-old, I’m well aware that a person’s twenties can be a very formative decade indeed. The habits one sets or keeps now will very often matter many years down the line, both in terms of your actual well-being and the habits you keep holding in later stages of life. If you eat healthily in your twenties, you’re more likely to keep doing so in your forties. Again, that’s not rocket science.

I found it notable that the crowd at the aforementioned exercise class skewed on the older side. It could be that people under age 40 were too busy looking for a job in today’s economy and didn’t have time to attend a Saturday morning exercise class. Or maybe it was just this week and it’s not necessarily representative of what happens every week. Sure. It’s possible.

But exercise classes aren’t the only community event that’s mostly older people. Whenever I’ve phonebanked for Democratic candidates, most of the other people on the Zoom call look to be over 60. From what I’ve heard, it’s the same way at in-person civic gatherings. Hell, say what you will about religion, but churches have served as a “third place” before, and as Reddit will love to tell you, nobody under 60 goes there regularly anymore. And church attendance is one institution that’s declined a lot faster in Europe than in the USA.

We’re constantly told that young people are our future leaders. Strictly speaking, this is accurate. But in the age of online socializing and declining community engagement in general, political leaders in the United States and elsewhere haven’t been fostering the policies necessary to make sure today’s young people have community. 

This matters for two reasons. One is that if young people, who’ve already lived through a decade of Donald Trump in some of their formative years, grow accustomed to a lack of social cohesion, that’s going to make us a world of strangers. It will seriously damage the community. In some ways, we’re already there. 

The other reason is that if young people are used to isolation, they’ll eventually be old people who are incredibly lonely. Worse yet, if former Surgeon General Murthy is right about the health hazards of loneliness being as serious as he said they are, many of them might not grow old. 

Let’s not let that happen.

Another Wild Week

A meme featuring characters from “The Adventures of Tintin” lamenting that it’s only Wednesday. Image taken from a Xitter thumbnail.

For those of you who may have already forgotten (or more likely, hadn’t heard to begin with), my birthday was last week. I turned 25. And I actually wrote a deeply existential essay about it in order to celebrate this milestone. 

As it turns out, that essay would end up being appropriate for more reasons than one.

In the early hours of June 12, a plane crashed in India. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, operating as Air India Flight 171, was from Ahmedabad and was flying to London-Gatwick. At least, it was supposed to fly there before crashing into a medical school’s residence hall. There was only one survivor on the plane, and I can’t imagine how much going through something like that must fuck with you. 

I mean, this man literally saw well over two hundred people die suddenly and violently right before his eyes. And he jumped out of a window to escape it. I don’t know how you live through that without permanent psychological scarring.

For a world already questioning the safety of air travel in the last few months, this is only likely to ignite further speculation. For the record, I don’t know definitively how much Donald Trump is to blame for all these aviation incidents the news is reporting on. I simply don’t, and I think we should be honest about that. 

However, what I’m pretty damn sure about is that if a Democrat were President right now (as cliché as that saying has become), the GOP would never let them hear the end of it. Indeed, I shudder to think of what they’d be doing to Biden if he were still in the White House. More on that later.

The following day, June 13, Israel launched missiles at Iran. Apparently Trump gave Netanyahu permission to do this, which makes it even more infuriating to me. “Harris the Hawk, Donald the Dove”...what a joke. The “Genocide Joe” crowd seems awfully silent now, and why shouldn’t they be? They should be ashamed of themselves! I certainly would be if I were responsible for Trump being back in the White House.

For the last several days, Iran and Israel have been trading missile attacks back and forth. Because we’ve been helping Israel shoot down the missiles headed for Tel Aviv, and because the Israeli attacks on Iran (unlike the ones on Gaza) have mostly hit military targets, civilian casualties have thus far not been very high. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still an enormous impact.

A map of live air traffic as of about 24 hours ago, courtesy of r/MapPorn.

Take a look at this map. Planes can’t fly over much of the Middle East because Iraq and Jordan closed their airspace. They also can’t fly over Ukraine for obvious fucking reasons, and haven’t been able to for several years. And of course, they’ve never been able to fly over Tibet due to the risk of depressurization and the fact that if the plane needed to descend to 10,000 feet, it would end up in the ground, as would everyone on it.

I feel horrible for air traffic controllers in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan at this point. They’re probably quite overwhelmed, and who knows how long we have until there’s a crash in the Caucasus thanks to this? We can put the blame at least partly on Trump’s hands if this does happen.

This war is sure to divide the world. Personally, I hate the governments of both Iran and Israel, but I just feel horrible for the civilians on both sides who are going to suffer (and in some cases die) for their governments’ genocidal ambitions. I don’t understand why that’s such a controversial take. 

And then, in the early hours of June 14, we received the news that a state legislative leader had been assassinated in Minnesota, along with her husband. They’d been shot dead in their own house. To those who are afraid to go out for fear of being caught in a mass shooting, well, you’re not any safer at home. At least not if you’re a public figure. 

Now, politically-motivated gun violence is not new in this country. Quite a few mass shootings have been classified as terrorism (which is a strategy, not an ideology). But this is the first time in a very long time that the victims have been elected officials, and I honestly wonder if the Democrats need to invest greatly in security for their candidates and representatives. This truly feels like a “crossing the Rubicon” moment.

And I’m being deadly serious. How many people who might otherwise have been bright, promising Democratic leaders will now rule out entering politics for fear that something like this might happen to them or their families? I’d imagine it’s more than any of us think right now, and that number’s only going to grow as the situation in this country deteriorates. 

In the immediate aftermath of this assassination (because let’s call it what it is, an assassination), Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Bernie Moreno of Ohio literally mocked it on Xitter. While Russ Feingold to Ron Johnson was probably the biggest Senate downgrade of the 21st century, it’s hard for me not to see Sherrod Brown to Bernie Moreno being a strong contender for the number two spot. I could make a naughty joke here, but I’m not going to, because this is no laughing matter.

Senators Lee and Moreno should resign. And if they refuse to resign, they should be expelled. At least, that’s what I would be saying if we lived in a sane country!

In reality, if Lee or Moreno were expelled (which will never ever happen, because their Republican colleagues probably all agree with them that this is funny), they’d both more than likely be replaced with people just as awful. And if anything, that might galvanize Republican voters more ahead of the midterms. I hate to say that, but it’s true. And I really don’t know how we’re going to deradicalize people in this country.

And then Trump had the military parade that same evening. I didn’t watch it; I didn’t want to contribute to its ratings, and quite frankly, I liked seeing him triggered. Images circulated online of Trump sitting at the parade looking exhausted and dejected. Honestly, those are hilarious. They say that only about forty thousand people (splitting the difference here) attended the parade, whereas millions went to “No Kings” protests. (Confession time: I chickened out of attending my local protest.)

Donald Trump looking disappointed. Image taken from the Hollywood Reporter.

In the midst of everything I’ve mentioned, there are still riots in Los Angeles. There’s still a war in Ukraine. There was still the recent G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies at which Donald Trump humiliated the nation he represented once again. On the bright side, Trump mentioned trying for a trade deal with Canada. And I don’t want to be a Pollyanna about anything, but if I was level 10 concerned about the United States invading its former ally before, I might be level 7 concerned now. 

That’s still way too high, of course. And the fact that everyone’s reaction isn’t “Of course we’re not invading Canada, what the hell are you talking about?!” speaks volumes about where we’re at.

And then, of course, there’s the heat advisory in interior Alaska. People are saying that it’s the first-ever heat advisory for Alaska, which is true but misleading. This is the first year that the Juneau and Fairbanks weather stations were able to declare heat advisories, so it’s not surprising that this week’s warning would be the first.

That being said, it’s still pretty alarming. Not only does it serve as further evidence, as if it were needed, that America is failing the whole world through our climate denial and resulting ecocide, but it’s a big problem for Alaskans right now. Temperatures are reaching the low 30s Celsius, or upper 80s Fahrenheit, this week.

Where I live in Massachusetts, a temperature like that is not crazy during the hottest part of summer, even if it’s slightly above average. But as we learned during the 2022 UK heat wave, places are built for a certain climate - Alaska’s homes are meant to keep the heat in. If we’re ever going to meaningfully adapt to the climate crisis, we’ll have to upgrade current housing at northern latitudes to more sustainably cool itself. (Will that ever happen here? Probably not. I know this.)

I honestly don’t know how I stay sane given everything crumbling around me. The craziest part is that in my day to day life, everything looks fairly normal. I don’t live in Los Angeles, admittedly. And I’m a white guy born in the USA, so ICE hasn’t come knocking on my door yet. I’ve traveled abroad twice since Trump took office again and had no problems getting back in, yet. 

That’s the eerie thing. Amidst all this turmoil, so many Americans barely know any of it is going on, because to many, everyday life seems normal. To some extent, I don’t blame people for tuning it out. 

Whether you’re religious, superstitious, spiritual, or none of the above, I think we can all agree. On a philosophical level, humans were not meant to contend with this much chaotic news at any given time. Perhaps social media truly has broken our brains. Like Icarus, we have flown too close to the sun. 

Haze Of Our Lives

It’s been a few weeks since the smoke started.

Now, from the standpoint of proximity to the actual fire, I’m one of the lucky ones. My hometown in Massachusetts was not evacuated, mainly because the actual fires are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The people of Flin Flon, Manitoba, a small town of about 5,000 people, were not so lucky.

Consider this: Two years ago, there were several days during which New York City’s sky was orange due to the smoke. The Big Apple briefly had the worst air quality in the world. In my Boston suburb, it wasn’t nearly that bad, but there were still a few days when we were advised to stay indoors if at all possible. Compared to 2023, Massachusetts air quality hasn’t been awful.

I say this not to minimize the tragedy that’s currently taking place. Several people have lost their lives as a result of these fires. It’s likely that a few orders of magnitude more people will lose their homes by the end of the fire season. I don’t want to be flippant about that.

Nor do I want to be flippant about the reason these fires are getting worse. Yes, forest fires have always been part of the ecosystem, and they are a natural cycle. There’s a reason why many indigenous peoples used controlled burns to prevent fires from reaching the areas in which they lived. Contrary to what Smokey the Bear once said, some fire is good.

As I write this article, I’m lying sideways beside a beach towel beneath the moderately strong sun. This is the same town beach at which I recently spent part of my 25th birthday. My right leg feels pretty tan, and I know intellectually that I might have given it a little too much sun. A mild sunburn is quite likely, and if I didn’t have a swim shirt on, my chest and back would itch like a motherfucker pretty soon.

Like fire, the sun is an essential ingredient of life on Earth. We need it to survive, unless you’re one of those progressive Norwegian scientists who can grow tomatoes in a greenhouse. In all seriousness, too much sun can be very dangerous. Hell, even looking too directly at the sun can cause severe eye damage. That’s no secret.

We keep hearing about how 2024 was the hottest year on record, and that May 2025 was the hottest May on record. And we’re sure breaking a lot of records, aren’t we?

Here’s the thing, though: The current hottest year on record may well end up being the coldest year of the rest of our lives. We will still have cold days and still have some blizzards, but the overall trend is clear to anyone paying attention. That’s why Jim “Senator Snowball” Inhofe, may he rest in piss, was so brutally mocked.

Trends are real, even when they’re inconvenient.

Earlier today, I went on Google Maps and used their air quality layer. Say what you will about Google as a company and their capitulation to Donald Trump on stupid naming disputes, but their maps are pretty awesome, which is why I keep using them. Anyway, I saw that my area of Massachusetts is back in the lime green zone after enduring a couple days of yellow air quality. It was never that dangerous for most people, but it was less than ideal by our standards.

A Google Maps view of air quality in North America and Europe. Hotter colors indicate higher levels of air pollution.

The “usual suspects” were not terribly surprising. Parts of several Canadian provinces (really, parts of all Canadian provinces) are on fire, so it’s no wonder that they have high AQI indices due to the smoke. There are also wildfires out west in my own country. 

Over in Europe, the Po Valley of Northern Italy was in the yellow/orange transition zone. Being an industrial area surrounded on three sides by mountains, that makes sense. But I noticed that the south of France had worse air quality than northern France (which seemed odd to me thanks to air pollution in and around Paris, even if Mayor Hidalgo’s anti-car efforts have been laudable). 

I took to the Geography subreddit and asked why this was. And I received answers.

Some people said that dust from the Sahara Desert blew into the south of France, hindering the air quality there. That struck me as odd - that’s a pretty far distance for sand to be blown. Phoenix, the “perfect” American city, also has this issue with haboobs. Yes, that’s a silly name, but deal with it.

But then more responses trickled in. It was smoke from the Canadian wildfires, they said. Said smoke had traveled all the way from the remote areas of Earth’s second-largest country geographically to some of Europe’s population centers. The winds carried it across the Atlantic, they told me.

This serves as a sobering reminder that we’re all interconnected in this world. The wildfires in Canada affect air quality not just in Canada and the United States, but also a lot further afield. I also remember reading that one reason South Korea struggled with air pollution was because of industrial activity in nearby China. And speaking of China, that country (along with India) is often cited as an excuse by people who don’t want to do anything about our greenhouse gas emissions. 

But here’s the thing. It’s total whataboutism. Whether or not China truly is a climate villain (and I posit that they are not; their renewable energy revolution is palpable, whatever you can say about their government’s human rights record), that doesn’t change our moral obligation to act. We must, in the words of Bernie Sanders, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. If not, the fires are only going to get worse.

Of course, we’re not doing that right now. Donald Trump is President of the United States. He’s not only pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord (which, in all honesty, doesn’t mean much in practical terms since it has no enforcement mechanism), he’s also signed numerous executive orders to drill for fossil fuels on public lands and roll back Biden-era renewable energy incentives. 

Will it completely halt progress toward renewable energy? Probably not. And let’s be honest: Even if Kamala Harris had won, I don’t foresee any new climate legislation being passed with what would still probably have been a Republican Senate. One election wouldn’t have solved this problem. Additionally, it’s not like 1.99°C of warming is “everything’s fine” and 2.01°C is “absolute doomsday” - it’s more nuanced than that. But that’s a topic for another day.

Make no mistake, however: The election of Donald Trump as President was a giant leap in the wrong direction.

That’s the thing about the 2024 election. If it was just about domestic policy, that would be one thing. Gun violence is a massive red stain on this nation, but at least it mostly only affects Americans (the occasional unlucky foreign tourist notwithstanding). But when it comes to the climate crisis, what the United States does carries a massive impact on the rest of the world. Because of Trump, the climate crisis is going to get a lot worse. 

We had no right to elect Donald Trump, and in my opinion, other countries would have every right to invade us if they so chose. 

Yes, the rain may have washed away the smoke for now. But it’s not going to wash away my guilt by association. It’s not all of our fault, but it is all of our responsibility.

Fuck, I hate this timeline!

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 the extent 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.