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Constitutional Failure and the Best Ramen I've Ever Eaten

July 20, 2025


Hello, again. I just got home from North Carolina, where I spent time in a beach town and couldn’t help but look at the transportation infrastructure and wonder if it could be better. But also, I spent a lot of joyful time with family, so who’s to say if it was a good vacation? LFG.

Constitutional Failure

A piece in Washington Monthly arguing that the United States is in a state of constitutional failure — not merely a crisis — went around earlier this month, and I think it has a fairly accurate assessment of where our federal government is. I also think New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has been especially persuasive in writing that the American government’s failure and descent into bald immorality is because Republicans decline virtue and embrace cruelty. An excellent example of his work along these lines is the recent newsletter in which Bouie cast Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s absurd pronouncements about Donald Trump as the antithesis of Frederick Douglass’s conception of good self-governance.

Keeping that in mind, a fun thing to do is to read the Declaration of Independence line by line and consider how the Trump presidency has an uncanny resemblance to King George’s rule over the American colonies. As far back as 2017, MAGA Republicans got mad at people or organizations quoting the Declaration because they thought those words were accusations against Trump.

All of these are fueled by Republicans’ utter inability to see value in the collective good which results in their tendency to embrace the Code of the Sith.

Which reminds me: Neocon lion Bill Kristol is apparentlyfartherleftthan the average congressional Democrat right now on a significant number of issues, but I still don’t trust him, especially since within the past decade he’s on record writing: “No objective evidence Empire was ‘evil.’ A liberal regime w meritocracy, upward mobility. Neocon/reformicon in spirit,” and, “I was rooting for the Empire from the first moment.” If you think Palpatine is misunderstood, or that he has the right ideas about governing a complicated state, I’m not likely to trust your other opinions.

Another Way to Explain American Conservatism

From @m01r4.bsky.social on Bluesky:

the proposition of conservatism is that some people are property. where they disagree with each other is which people are property. some conservatives believe anyone who isn't white is property, some conservatives believe all women are property, pretty much everyone believes children are property. conservative objection to queer books in classrooms essentially boils down to a property dispute-- you have borrowed my child while i was at work, and your returned it to me broken. this is why parents are seen as a relevant factor in trans rights. transition is viewed as, essentially, a property crime against owners. children are the property of their parents until either they marry a nice man and settle down (women) or until they are old enough to become conservative (men)

Republicans Crashing Out Over Trump’s Epstein Denials

I loathe that this is at all a thing, but apparently Donald Trump’s insistence that everyone move on from seeing more info about Jeffrey Epstein is making key cheerleaders in his base question their support of him. The Guardian has a rundown of various posts and flailing and cope from influential right-wingers who are losing their minds because they centered their entire political outlook on the belief that prominent Democrats are hiding a pedophile ring that flowed through Epstein, and yet their God Emperor Trump is saying publicly to move on from Epstein entirely.

What’s particularly wild is that Trump doesn’t seem to understand just how foundational this issue is to his supporters. Earlier this month, YouGov published a poll saying a strong majority of Republicans support releasing all government documents about Epstein, and 50% of Republicans believe the government is covering up evidence it has about Epstein. At the same time, YouGov found only 7% of Republicans believed Trump was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Epstein. But that was also before the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was among the people who wrote Epstein a letter for the financier’s 50th birthday, in 2003, and that Trump’s letter concluded with the line, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has since sued the WSJ, ostensibly on the theory that he can bully them like he has other news organizations recently. Discovery should be delightful.

All that said, I’m interested to see if this affects Trump’s ability to command total fealty from fellow Republicans moving forward.

“Citizenship by Descent”

Because my mother was born in the Philippines and was a Filipino citizen when I was born, I can go to a consulate and claim Filipino dual citizenship. Because my father’s grandparents were born in Ireland, he can go through a process to claim Irish dual citizenship. However, because my father did not have Irish citizenship when I was born, I cannot claim Irish citizenship by descent.

After looking up this information for myself, I wondered if I could identify any trends in Americans seeking citizenship of other countries.

Take a look at this chart showing Google search trends in the United States since 2004 for the term “citizenship by descent”.

Here’s the chart for the trend over the past five years.

What I notice is a significant bump in late 2016 when Donald Trump was elected to the presidency the first time. Activity picked up again in January 2024, and spiked in late May 2024, which I believe corresponds to polls showing Trump leading Joe Biden. The biggest spike in the term’s history came when Trump won the November 2024 election, with mini-jumps after the inauguration in January 2025 and again when Trump declared across-the-board tariffs in April 2025, and has remained at elevated levels since.

I don’t have hard evidence this is why the term has surged, but it sure looks like a pattern of people looking to get the hell away from a fascist government by exploring the most direct ways to cheaply claim citizenship from another country. I don’t know if it will have a demographic impact, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if it does, given that the people who would leave likely would be people who disagree with MAGA politics and fear being subject to a government that builds and celebrates concentration camps, among other atrocities.

Explaining to Tech Bros Why Fascism Is Bad for Them

Mike Masnick, on Techdirt, has a clear and compelling explanation for why fascism is bad for innovation.

Here’s the thing about fascism: it never ends well. Not for the countries that embrace it, not for the people who live under it, and definitely not for the entrepreneurs who think they can ride the tiger.

Every authoritarian regime in history has eventually turned on the business community that initially supported it. The oligarchs who think they can control the dictator always end up learning the hard way that the dictator controls them.

I’ve Got Another TV Show Idea

Previously, I suggested a Star Wars TV show focused on Wookiees. A show idea I’ve been kicking around for almost three decades is an animated production of “Ender’s Game”. The 2013 movie was a commercial and artistic failure, and I believe a major reason is that casting child actors is difficult business that grows more difficult with every added child actor in a production, on top of the decision to fit the events of the novel into only one film.

Thus, animation would allow for adult actors to play the children and potentially cut down on production costs dramatically, while a 12-episode arc would provide enough time to flesh out the novel’s plotting and themes.

All that said, the novel’s author, Orson Scott Card, is a notorious bigot, so actually making this show probably would not be worth the effort.

The Nationals Are Not a Serious Ballclub: Redux

Earlier this month, the Washington Nationals fired their general manager and manager, in acknowledgement that the organization’s rebuild isn’t going as well as upper management had hoped. They have some great young core players in MacKenzie Gore, CJ Abrams, and James Wood, all acquired in the Juan Soto trade, but if these firings signal a reset, it’s unlikely those guys will be on the next excellent Nationals team.

Back in 2022, before the Nationals traded Soto, I said trading their young superstar would mean they were not a serious ballclub. The trade has worked out about as well for the Nats as anyone could have reasonably imagined, and yet here we are. I’ll repeat one more thing I suggested in that piece: What if they had simply kept the core stars from their 2018 and 2019 teams? Bryce Harper and Trea Turner are core pieces of an annual playoff team in Philadelphia. Max Scherzer has had health issues that have reduced his availability, but until last season, he was great when he did pitch. Soto has been one of the 10 best players in baseball this entire time. Anthony Rendon and Patrick Corbin (signed as a free agent after the 2018 season) have been disasters, and Stephen Strasburg’s career functionally ended after the 2019 season due to injury.

Add it all up, and I think my assessment back then still holds: So long as they didn’t have the most bumbling front office in baseball over that time period, simply re-signing the stars would have made the Nationals the NL East version of the San Diego Padres: Expensive, yes, but also competitive annually and a threat to win it all if a couple young players broke out or some savvy depth signings turned out much better than expected.

It’s Really Hard to Measure Moving Objects in the Physical World

Since MLB used automatic ball-strike calls in the All Star Game, I think the consensus now is that it will be instituted in the majors soon enough. That said, I wonder if it makes sense to only allow challenges on inside or outside calls, because that’s where the zone is fixed for every player. High and low calls will necessarily be imprecise because an operator will be setting the lines for every batter, and even if there’s some sort of process that gives the veneer of precision, it will still amount to an estimate, just like a human calling the zone behind the plate. It’s the baseball equivalent of putting lasers on the line-to-gain chains in football, which would make zero sense because the initial placement is an eyeballed estimate.

Even given the precision promised by high-speed cameras, it’s worth understanding that it’s really hard to measure moving objects in the physical world in real time, even in relation to fixed points, like home plate. To this point, every sports fan should watch “Subject to Review”, the ESPN 30 for 30 short about the Hawkeye system used in tennis.

How the NHL’s EBUG Rule Could Be Applied to Baseball

Continuing thoughts on baseball rule changes, the NHL recently announced it is revising the Emergency Backup Goalie rule, which allowed teams to essentially bring in randos off the street to play goalie in case both rostered players got hurt. The rule was always bizarre and though I get it’s a specialized position, I’ve long thought teams should’ve been forced to simply have a skater strap on the pads in an emergency. The new solution of hiring a permanent emergency goalie who doesn’t really count toward roster limits is just another roster expansion, so fine, whatever, good times.

Anyway, how does this apply to baseball? I can’t find where I saw it suggested, but the principle of bringing in a guy off the street might actually make more sense for major league teams. Right now, in blowout games, it’s become common practice to put a position player on the mound to toss pitches at 60 miles per hour rather than use an actual pitcher whose arm could be saved for competitive situations. My preference is that if games are at a double digit run differential at the end of the sixth inning, the losing team can choose to end the game before they hit, but if we’re not going to do that, why not have an Emergency Blowout Pitcher on call for every game?

Presumably, there are multiple guys in every team’s locale who finished pitching in college the year before, didn’t get any pro offers, and could make themselves available a series at a time for this purpose. Let Henry College Pitcher put on a uniform and see what he can do against major league hitters with his mid-80s heater and loopy curve. It’d be less of a farce than 75% of the position players on the mound who are simply there to go through the motions without getting hurt.

Movies The New York Times List Missed

The New York Times published a list titled “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century” and you may have seen people sharing their choices of the top movies. It’s OK to like different things from other people, so it shouldn’t matter much what this particular group of voters say about the “best” movies in a given time period. That said, the NYT plays a role in canonizing popular consensus, and so I feel comfortable being a crank about two particular aspects of the list.

First, documentaries got short shrift. As someone who thinks “Hoop Dreams” is arguably the greatest American film ever made, and not just the greatest movie of the 1990s, it’s deeply disappointing that “Free Solo” and, especially, “OJ: Made In America” weren’t included. Those are just the ones that I’ve seen and jumped out at me. I saw other people posting about “Fog of War” and “How to Survive a Plague”, too.

Then there are the children’s movies (or “children’s” movies). As best I can tell, the ones included on the NYT list are: “Spirited Away” (9), “WALL-E” (34), “Up” (50), and “Ratatouille” (73). Quibble about some of the PG-13 movies, but I’m setting those aside as not quite children’s movies.

I appreciate all of the included movies and totally understand why they got votes, but I also appreciate them in inverse order of their ranking. “Spirited Away” is a whole thing where I think I get what it’s doing, but, as with all the other Studio Ghibli movies I’ve seen, I don’t connect with it on a story or emotional level. This might be my American-ness.

For the Pixar movies, the first 45 minutes of “WALL-E” is brilliant, but it falls apart and becomes a very ordinary — even saccharine — cartoon once we get to the spaceship. “Up” has a lot more going for it, but, similarly, I think the amazing first sequence about Carl’s life with Ellie has inflated the entire movie’s reputation. I have nothing bad to say about “Ratatouille”. Great movie!

All that said, the best children’s movies of the 21st century were left off entirely, including better Disney movies. “Toy Story 3” is a masterpiece. As is “Inside Out”, my pick for best children’s movie of this period, and I’m a little surprised it didn’t get more love from the panel because of its formal experimentation and surprisingly heavy themes. If you’re looking for movies as influential as they are great at telling a story, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was the popular breakthrough for a new era of stylized animation playing out today, on top of being a blast to watch and re-watch.

What about live action? I’ll hold up “Holes” as a movie that goes waaaay harder than it had to. The Henry Winkler scenes kind of stink (if you’ve seen it, I hope you’re chuckling), but what we have here, otherwise, is a Disney-produced prison drama aimed at kids, directed by the same guy who made “The Fugitive”, starring a young Shia LeBouef, with Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, and Tim Blake Nelson. It’s serious drama for kids! Other live action movies that are some combination of influential and delightful such that I wish the voters had included them: “Napoleon Dynamite”, “School of Rock”, “Paddington”, “Paddington 2”, and “Elf”.

A Succinct Explanation of Chatbot “Search”

From Katie Mack:

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re ‘right’ it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all. When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

Travis Kalanick Needs to Read a Damn Book

From the man who, as CEO of Uber, touted bus routes as cutting-edge transportation technology, comes, “I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics.”

That’s right. Travis Kalanick is proclaiming to the world that he believes he is prompting general-purpose off-the-shelf LLMs up to the edge of making breakthroughs at the highest levels of science and math. This is wrong for many reasons, only one of which is that even if, say, ChatGPT were capable of such a thing that non-specialists like you, me, or Kalanick would be able to understand and validate such breakthroughs. Never mind that — to repeat, because we all ought to remind ourselves of this constantly — LLMs do not actually “think” or “reason” or “discover” anything because “they are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically.”

A Summer Footwear Recommendation

Just get the Tevas. You know the ones. Probably called the Universal sandal. Bright straps, muted straps: doesn’t matter. Just get the Tevas. There are very simple reasons they’re the best. First, they’re practically indestructible. Second, they will feel fantastic on your soles. Third — and this is possibly the most important factor — they have a strap on the heel. If you’ve resisted or never considered wearing sandals with a heel strap before, this will be a game-changer. Did you know that if you don’t have that heel strap, your muscles are working in different ways to keep your sandal on your foot? It changes your relationship to walking in sandals.

Finally, some people are Chaco enthusiasts, and some people will go to the mat for Birkenstock sandals. If you’re one of those people, vaya con Dios, but I still recommend you get the Birks with the heel strap and if you get a Chaco, realize that in many models the straps go over the foot in kind of a weird way that rubs my outer foot funny and while I see the vision I also despise the models with a dedicated big toe strap.

So, just get the Tevas. They’re probably cheaper, too.

(Worth saying explicitly: I’m not paid for this rec, and there are no affiliate links. I’m recommending Tevas purely because I care about you.)

The Best Ramen I’ve Ever Eaten Was in Charlotte, North Carolina

A while ago, I learned that Futo Buta had closed less than a year after the chef/owner passed away unexpectedly. I’ve had great ramen bowls in San José, San Francisco, Denver, and elsewhere (I’ve never been to Japan, for what it’s worth), but Futo Buta, located near uptown Charlotte, was the best. There’s no use explaining what alchemy made its bowls so excellent because it’s a combination of excellent ingredients, preparation, and everything else going on in my life all the times I went there.

But a big takeaway that I’ve carried with me in the decade since I first visited Futo Buta, which I knew intellectually but afterward fully embraced, is that great cuisine is possible anywhere. There are socioeconomic reasons why you probably won’t find great barbecue in the middle of an expensive city (Is there an appropriate and affordable location for the smoker? Does zoning allow someone to work the heat 19 hours a day?), and a few types of food are particularly location-dependent for the highest-quality (sushi), but there’s nothing inherent to, say, Boston that precludes production of great barbecue. Or pizza. Or falafel. Or ramen.

I know people who swear the best pizza they’ve ever eaten was in Portland, Oregon. You can find people saying the best barbecue is in Syracuse. The best ramen I’ve ever eaten was in Charlotte. Maybe the best thing in the world is near you, and you just have to try it.

Bet You Can’t Do This

I made a TikTok video to demonstrate how certain body movements are privileged by our brains. That is, it’s really hard for most folks to rotate their hands in opposite directions at the same time.

I Have a Problem With the Metaphor You Are Using

The term “line in the sand” usually means setting a hard boundary for what is acceptable. But if you think about the metaphor for even a second, it doesn’t make much sense. I suppose it conveys an immediacy, that the one drawing the line is doing so at the moment, but there’s also the notion that a literal line in sand can be brushed away just as easily as it was drawn; there’s nothing permanent about it. I think about this whenever I see the term used in the wild.

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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.

(Photo by David 29 Sunset. Delicious, but not from Futo Buta.)