Chris X Edwards

I have voted in every presidential election I have ever been eligible to vote in. On Saturday, I cast my first vote for president.

And here in the wild places of Michigan (as John Oliver highlighted) I got this delightful "I voted" sticker which it turns out reflects a lot of my feelings about this election.

But first, there is so much to unpack.

Let’s start with this ridiculous Maga talking point: Democrats are bringing in foreigners who will presumably vote for Democrats. To which I say why can’t Republicans simply appeal to those immigrants on their merits with good policy sense? Could it be the unhinged xenophobia and racism? That’s not an immigrant problem — that’s a Republican problem.

This Magaland fear of importing foreigners is beyond un-American. It is fatuous. Foreigners can not vote. Magahats believe, however, that an illegal foreigner can vote in the same way they showed up in the country — illegally. Uh huh.

As a former (mildly - 8 USC §1304e) illegal immigrant let me tell everyone exactly how this works. Generally people come to the USA for dollars. They do not give a single shit about anything else. They are certainly not going to explore ways they can fill out more complicated forms in the presence of government officials who jeopardize their freedom and those dollars. It makes no sense on first principles and this never happens. For all practical purposes it is not a thing.

But but but!, say Maganerds, here’s a case where a Chinese national voted illegally!! Oh my! So obviously it is "A Problem". In fact, because this freak occurrence has happened, Magafriends have elevated it to The Problem Of All Problems. I’m sorry but this is like believing that the biggest threat to the USA is Indians aboard container ships taking out critical bridge infrastructure. That also happened exactly once and deserves to be taken a lot more seriously than one Chinese kid voting.

And that container ship accident was an accident. I’m a little weirded out to not hear a follow up about the motive for the Chinese kid voting. Was it an unfortunate ESL cultural misunderstanding mistake? I used to work in a factory that printed PhDs for people to hang on their office walls in China and even at the PhD level, English to Chinese is a tough conversion and I can all too easily suspect simple prosaic confusion. Several times in my life, I have been handed a stack of forms by university officials and told to complete them all or Bad Things will happen. The only alternative to that obvious explanation is some kind of bizarre Chinese performance art.

But if this is the case to be made that filthy swine foreigners are illegally voting in American elections, I’m relieved and satisfied that for all practical purposes, it is not happening.

For a very large number of Americans to justify some very Hitlerific nonsense and demonizing foreigners, something is very amiss.

Just like all four of my grandparents — who all spent several years of their lives actively trying to kill as many as possible — I’m obviously worried about Nazis too. You know, like all sane people. But I have to confess that (because it is so obvious) repudiating odious failed political ideologies from 20th century Europe can be overshadowed in my mind by something more personally aggravating — the hypocrisy.

Apparently Maga needs an outgroup; while the OG Nazis went with Jews, and gays, Maga goes with foreigners and, uh, gays. Ok, fine. Obviously everyone hates those vermin who didn’t have the good manners to be born in the USA.

Obviously. Except…. Hang on a sec… Uh, isn’t Dear Leader’s mother a filthy immigrant from the filthiest shithole archipelago in the entire world? Yes, true. And isn’t his wifebot unit a Slovenian? Just saying. I’m pretty sure he’s had two foreign wives. (Three if you count a bromance with Elon Musk.) Can you imagine if every Magalad imported two foreign wives? Chaos and barbarism! Lock up your pets! Ok, fine, Dear Leader is "special" and gets some exemptions. (Like being the only devout Bible enthusiast — a Bible publisher in fact! — who doesn’t want to talk about the Bible! Now that is a miracle!)

Surely the rest of the Maga faithful faithfully shop American when looking for wholesome women. But, astonishingly, no! JD Vance’s wife was the daughter of Indian immigrants — apparently her Telugu-speaking mother also worked at the same San Diego PhD factory I did. Well, fine, but that’s technically an American wife, right? Obviously I think so, but some Magafriends question the Vances' commitment to the whole hateful xenophobia agenda. Do JD’s in-laws eat pets? Because I have pet owning family members in San Diego who need to know!

The parents of Marco Rubio’s wife are from Columbia. Though good ol' boy Bobby Jindal was born in Louisiana, his wife was born in India. And what about the Hypocrisy GOAT? Oh yes sir! He is the undisputed hypocrisy champion precisely for over-the-top exploits like marrying serial US cabinet official Elaine Chao — who was born in Taiwan. The people of Kentucky must be so proud of their champion hypocrite — well done, Mitch McConnell!

It is not hypocrisy that I think it’s beneficial when Americans marry foreigners. And unlike the 37% of 2016 voters who would rather have a beer with Hillary Clinton, I would prefer to join the 45% of voters who would prefer to have one with Donald Trump. No, that’s not hypocrisy, my friends — n.b. Trump does not drink beer.

But those are easy cases of hypocrisy. What about the tricky subtle stuff? The big one I get caught up on is Magaland’s simultaneous obsession with xenophobia and crime. For example, here’s an article (which I’m not even going to bother reading) on The Heritage Foundation’s website titled "Secure America’s Borders and Reduce Crime". Obviously these are the big concerns over in red hat country.

Well, it turns out — as some of you already know who recall my review of Bryan Caplan’s book on immigration — that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born populations. Shocking, right? Here’s some recent research from Stanford expanding this to include the last 140 years. They say facts like these which I have yet to see contradicted:

Is this because immigrants are smarter and harder working and therefore harder to catch? Obviously if you say that 100% of illegal aliens commit the crime of being illegal, sure, that will pad the stats the other way, but that’s not really a good faith representation of the criminality of the economic migrants out picking your food.

What this means is that you can either be interested in reducing crime or reducing immigration — but mathematically not both. Pick one. Given these trends, if you let more immigrants in, then the crime rate must necessarily decline. If there is one note of consistency in these contradictory policy objectives it is the craven fear.

Fear that those of us who don’t own guns will take theirs. Fear that they’ll have to use those guns. Fear that some foreigners will offer a better value to their employer. Fear that they need to return to the good old days for any hope of being "great".

I have never really been too concerned about Donald Trump’s hypocrisy in the same way I don’t worry about the hypocrisy of tornadoes. I’ve said since 2016 that the only policy position you can be pretty sure Trump will consistently apply is enthusiastically firing people. Every other policy objective a voter may have is total wishful thinking if you think at some time in the future Trump will still be aligned with it. Nobody has any idea what crazy direction he’ll turn.

A president who is mercurial and chaotic can cause substantial damage. What does bother me from a policy standpoint are two main things. First is destabilizing the goose that lays the golden eggs: a predictable well regulated environment of fairness and trust that sensible capitalism and markets can make long term plans around. Trump has expressed a desire to do reckless things like fire all the experienced government employees, impose massive regressive tariffs, vindictively tamper with important institutions like the Federal Reserve, etc.

Magabros just fault the liberal media for spreading these rumors. The liberal media is definitely anti-Trump, right? Like that super leftist libtard hippy, Michael Bloomberg, right?

Fiscally I identify as a TheEconomistist — which is someone who respects The Economist and believes that what it says about complicated shit is probably as sensible as anything. And when The Economist says Trump is a wrecking ball, well, I take that seriously.

And tons of normal anodyne non-partisan news sources are showing measured reservations of Trump. Here’s the AP and Reuters.

And democracies around the world are cringing. For example, from Deutsch Welle we see Germans — who are pretty good at spotting Nazis — being nervous about Trump getting elected.

Clearly a lot of credible somewhat fiscally conservative economic sources are fearful of Trump destabilizing the US and its economy in ways that will be difficult to repair.

The other serious problem with Trump — which now is pretty obvious to those not in his cult — is that he has been very destructive to the entire project of democracy. Thanks to Trump there are now people in the USA who are having a hard time understanding why having their favorite guy simply control everything with absolute power is a bad idea. I guess they never had a chance to talk to my antifa grandparents.

The people who are in Trump’s thrall have no way to hear any evidence that he was properly voted out of office. If this is not scary to you, you may be in this cult.

Bernie Sanders put it well in a recent video:

This situation is grave enough that if you’re an American and not doing all you can to stop this kind of autocratic thinking, then you are American in name only.

Maybe you are a woman, and/or someone who likes them, and you’re not keen on the normalization of https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/trump-says-hell-protect-women-like-it-or-not/ [Trump’s misogyny]. Or you don’t need Trump telling you what you can and can’t do with your own body — "like it or not". For me, I’m blown away by the hypocrisy of calling immigrants "rapists" while losing court cases where he is accused of sexual abuse etc. Stacking the Supreme Court with unpopular anti-choice toadies is a serious injury to the government that will take a long time to heal.

I sympathize with real Republicans who are conflicted about voting Republican. But hey, I didn’t get to vote for the candidate or party I wanted to vote for either. I had to vote for Kamala Harris. Sometimes preserving democracy is important enough to go out of your comfort zone to suppress anti-American despotism. Here is a list of a zillion prominent Republicans who repudiate Trump. A lot of them were stupid to go along with him in the first place, but at least they finally snapped out of it.

Whom would I have preferred to vote for? Astonishingly, neither major candidate paid any attention to what is likely the most important issue of our time. Bernie Sanders again…

So if, like me, you are concerned about the environment a vote for Trump isn’t just one of the two politicians who don’t care about the issue. It is a real endorsement of doing nothing and hoping you’ll die before your descendants come to openly hate you for your apathy.

I usually do my best to see both sides to an issue. I like that Trump’s not really religious — those of us who have studied the Bible are certain he is not. I like that he makes religious hypocrites look like fools. I like that he chaotically took a wild swing at the mortgage interest deduction (which strikes me as a bizarre welfare handout for mortgage originators). I’m impressed with his luck. I’m impressed that he is so brazen and mostly says what’s on his mind. I kind of like that he called Liz Cheney a "radical warhawk" (perhaps conflating her with her father, who certainly is one). I like how while being nearly incoherent with statements like that he still forces some macho bros to think a bit more carefully about the woes of traditional Republican war frenzy. I think that paying consenting adult entertainers to have sex with you should not, in principle, be illegal. I like that Trump is a non-drinker.

However, that’s it. That is all I can say about the guy that is not negative. I never watched his reality show which sounded like a waste of time to me. I never respected his business acumen which I consider kayfabe. I actually read "his" stupid book and fundamentally disagree with its sophomoric premise. Call me a snob but selling gold sneakers and faux emperor coins and scammy "luxury" watches and other ridiculous tat seems beyond gauche, c’est vulgaire.

He doesn’t even drink alcohol FFS!

Just to rub our noses in crapulent stupidity here is Vance, no slouch when it comes to hypocrisy, showing the Magaholics what the conceptual difference is between the two candidates.

Trump is a mean-spirited, hate-filled, abusive, callous, tone-deaf, impulsive, mendacious, divisive, anti-intellectual, hypocritical, insensitive, hubristic, xenophobic, tawdry grifter. He may be the GOAT of narcissists.

That’s pretty bad but, amazingly, it gets even worse. Trump has made suggestions that he would be comfortable using the military to deliver retribution to his political enemies. When his supporters defend this they must resort to the kind of logic that says something like, "Well, at least he’s not really good at following through with anything so you’re probably fine." I’m sorry, but that’s a little too insane for me.

Why am I even writing this? Why am I even giving this clown any oxygen? Well, that retribution thing really rubbed me the wrong way. Regular readers may recall that I have a creative voting strategy. This means — especially now that I live in the swingiest of swing states — that I get mailings intended for the Magahoard. And this one really is a challenge to my commitment to pacifism.

First, I’m going to just skip the raging hypocrisy of Dear Leader previously claiming that early and mail-in ballots were all fraudulent.

Second, yes, it turns out that your voting participation is a matter of public record. That can come as a bit of a surprise to people. I hadn’t really considered it. As the flier says, whom "…you vote for is secret." True. But it is also true that for reasons related to keeping people from voting twice, or letting ineligible people vote, there is a public list of who did in fact vote. Ok, that’s a bit weird but I’m an assiduous voter, so fine, no problem. You should be an assiduous voter too.

The insidious thing here is that the flier seems to be saying that because they know you’re a registered Republican, if you do not show up to vote, it’s an affront to Dear Leader and the Maga faithful may have some vindictive "consequences" in store for you. At the very least, the town’s Magabusybody (pictured?) will be shitposting on Facebook about you.

And to that, I will quote my favorite AI Taylor Swift-ish song: Eat a bag of MAGA dicks.

(Taylor Swift — real or fake — is not usually my scene, but I’ve lately been trying to buff the stats of patriotic memes. Driving the algo is probably the real "election" these days.)

Listen up Maga asshats - I did vote. And I voted as hard as I could fucking vote to immediately flush that orange shitball from the national consciousness. If that’s a problem, if you’re not happy with that and you’d like to send someone round from the local Maga Gestapo office to have a little chat with me, I’ll be here, in my swamp, humming a catchy AI Taylor Swift song, and waiting for you. Looking something like this.

It is now the future and we have positronic brains and flying cars. Oh my! That’s nice, but what cool tech gadgets caught my attention in 2024? What technology is actually useful to me? What are this year’s technology marvels? What have those tech wizards in Silicon Valley cooked up that is really impressing me these days?

For 2024 the Chris X Edwards Award For Technological Excellence goes to the inventor of this rake.

I live in a giant beech-maple hardwood forest. When the leaves fell recently it was kind of like a ton of bricks but much heavier.

Since I was a kid I have hated raking leaves but it turns out I hate the sound of leaf blowers even more. So, I picked up this rake as kind of an impulse buy not realizing at the time what a profound leap the state of the art in leaf removal had made.

But wow, I am astonished! This rake is incredible.

Remember the good old days (before the incessant sound of 24/7 leaf blowers) when you raked with a rake? If you can then you’ll remember that the majority of time was spent on this…

That is text from the patent for this rake, US6009697A.

Sure enough this design is astonishingly good.

I raked at least a volume of leaves that could fill a bouncy castle and the number of times a leaf got hung up on the rake was zero. It never happens. Astonishingly, the efficacy of the raking action is not degraded at all. This makes raking so much more tolerable. It’s now way down on the list of most dreaded chores — not far off of sweeping with a broom.

So who is the heroic inventor of this amazing technology? Well the rake itself had the patent number embossed on it. I kind of have to wonder why because when I searched for the patent I was expecting to see "True Temper" or The Ames Companies. But no — it was Harry S. Billardo of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (further specified: "Individual"). He had applied for the patent in 1997 and waited two and a half years for it to be granted. Then he got the customary 17 years of protection. I am speculating here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the manufacturer of the rake simply waited until the patent expired in 2017 to start manufacturing them. If so that’s pretty awful to retard progress like that. Oh well, better late than never. If Harry’s still alive, bravo and congratulations!

BONUS

The runner up for the 2024 Chris X Edwards Award For Technological Excellence is this double wheeled wheelbarrow.

I was vaguely aware that there is some debate about when wheelbarrows were invented, but I can believe that it was non-obvious for quite some time because putting two wheels on one was not obvious to me all of my life. And yet now that I’ve used one, I can tell you that it is infinitely better! It is so much more stable that you can put more of your energy into moving the load rather than balancing it. One of my favorite tricks to do with it (empty) is grab one handle and walk it somewhere with, say, a shovel in my other hand. As with the rake, I’m not sure if these things have been available for decades and I’m just now discovering them but they’re new to me. And recommended!

Apparently the sun has been going crazy recently and the aurora borealis has been putting on quite a show in places I would not have expected. I lived in Alaska for years and never saw them. It seemed strange that at only about 46 degrees latitude it would be possible to see them but it turns out that they form a kind of ring around the magnetic north pole. And the magnetic north pole is actually in Canada right now meaning that indeed it can be possible to see the northern lights in the continental US. I managed to figure out the best time and go out and have a look. With our very low levels of light pollution (basically none) here’s what we saw in the sky over our house.

Note also that we still have stars in our sky.

I was tipped off by this forecast.

It was quite spectacular and we decided to take the canoe out on the lake to get a wider view than our normal dense forest. Quite a show! The photos are ok given how tricky this can be to photograph.

Here are some photos that some neighbors on our lake took two days ago.

If you want to see the northern lights, no need to go to Norway, Siberia, or Alaska. Check the space forecast and come for a visit to the wild forests of Michigan.

UPDATE 2024-10-13

Apparently the northern lights were recently visible quite farther south than usual in many places. While it is extraordinary, we seem to be at the peak of an 11 year solar cycle. According to this article, the prominent aurora will be making appearances until 2026.

And: https://xkcd.com/2997

When I lived in Switzerland I enjoyed some extremely gracious hospitality. However, I did try to make myself useful. One day my host asked if I’d help out with the grass cutting. Sure! No problem. He went into the shed and came out with… a scythe. I was thinking, ok, he must be organizing some rustic Swiss antiques so he can get at the lawnmower or something. But no. He handed it to me, and after an awkward moment asked, "Do you know how to use eine Sense?" We were not talking about a little suburban lawn. This was a big field that had been growing for at least a month. I was taken aback. "You want me to mow this field with this tool?" He smiled. "Ja, ja. This is the best tool. You will like it!"

He showed me how to use it and I got to it. And damn if he wasn’t right — for cutting grass a scythe is the best tool!

Besides being a great way to keep fit, scythes reward people who like sharpening things. They must be sharpened about every 5 to 10 minutes. If that doesn’t sound high performance, you can think of it needing to be sharpened every 10 to 20 thousand cuts. Fortunately it takes only a few seconds.

When we moved into our wilderness house this year, there was an overgrown lawn in our clearing. I have actually always used a reel mower every time I have had a yard, but looking at this one, I could see it was covered in difficult long grass and wildflowers and I knew the right answer was a scythe.

Unfortunately, scythes are weirdly expensive. Nonetheless I ordered a Fux Gartensense (from here). Fux — an alternate spelling of Fuchs, meaning "fox" — is an Austrian brand that’s been making tools, no doubt sycthes in particular, since 1540. Apparently high in the Alps they never got the memo that people don’t use scythes any more. Thank goodness!

I love my scythe and I think it does a great job. What I really love most about it is not being part of the problem. What problem is that? Well, there are many to choose from, but my observant nature forces me to focus on a specific one. If you live in Suburbia, USA in the summer you will be tortured by the sound of internal combustion lawn mowers All The Time. From early in the morning to late at night. It never fucking stops. It really wears on me. In Buffalo my neighbor had a badly tuned lawnmower (clogged carbs or air filter, something like that) which would operate with a horrible gasping arrhythmic pulse. That nightmare was only once a week, but every other minute was ruined by someone else’s.

When my new neighbor’s lawn care professional stopped providing service in our area, they called and asked whom I hire to mow the lawn. I thought it might be fun to go try my scythe out on their yard which has gone without mowing for quite a while now. I went over there and silently knocked down their prairie.

Here’s what it looked like before.

And here’s what it looked like after.

The main part down to the wood pile took about 90 minutes. I spent another 30 minutes hacking down the worst of the overgrowth down by the lake, but I was getting tired by then so no golf course lawn there. I know it looks like there are a lot of clumps that are not cut. I kept coming back to redo a section only to find it was just piles of grass stalks. The scythe leaves them in neat rows for pretty easy raking — but I did not do any raking!

Here is a short time lapse video I made today which gives a rough idea of what using a scythe can look like.

Nothing to do with a low power ARM computer this time. This is the real deal. I picked this quarter kilo about 50m from my house in our personal raspberry glade.

And yesterday I was stuffing my face with blueberries I found deep in the forest.

June was a month of pretty harsh weather. The worst on this planet in fact. The season of the year where the air is thick with clouds of frenzied piranha bugs seems to be mostly behind us now. I think the really insane mosquitoes here are what biologists call univoltine — meaning they just have one brood a year. However it is still not completely safe — I did get my wrist mauled by a black fly yesterday. That did involve 45min of rummaging through the ground foliage for berries with exposed DEET-less skin, so perhaps somewhat preventable.

I mention these seasonal details for long term planners who might one day be interested in visiting our rather beautiful swamp forest.

Keep in mind that we do not have any sharks or alligators at any time of the year!