the cloud keeps promising my movie collection is safe, then asks me to download it before i can watch it. Read more
the modern arrangement for owning a video is very polite until you ask it to behave like ownership. the file is in the cloud. the cloud is everywhere. the cloud will absolutely need several minutes alone with the file before it can show it to you.
this is why a local library still feels faintly revolutionary. not because i am trying to recreate a server room in my apartment, although any external hard drive immediately develops the emotional gravity of a server room. it is because pressing play should not begin a negotiation.
i like a service that remembers where i was, offers subtitles, and does not make me think about codecs. i also like knowing that the thing i saved is still there if a licensing deal, a redesign, or a very confident progress bar changes its mind.
Mike Huckabee tried to turn cherry tomatoes, seedless watermelons, GPS, cell phones, and USB drives into a geopolitical loyalty test. The inventions… Read more
I reblogged a post fact-checking Mike Huckabee’s claim that people who oppose Israel should surrender a small pile of modern conveniences, including cell phones, car navigation, USB drives, cherry tomatoes, and seedless watermelons. Apparently the produce aisle is part of the diplomatic corps now.
The clip comes from a speech Huckabee gave at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s Atlas Award ceremony in May. He told Israel’s critics, in effect, that rejecting the country should mean giving up everything it had supposedly invented. The list has continued circulating because it is an unusually pure example of a familiar political maneuver: take a complicated history, put little national flags next to each object, and then present grocery shopping as a binding referendum on foreign policy.
There are two problems here. The obvious one is that several claims are wrong. The more interesting one is that even the claims containing a piece of truth do not prove what Huckabee wants them to prove.
the watermelon has declined citizenship
Seedless watermelon. Photo by Scott Ehardt, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The modern seedless watermelon was developed from triploid breeding work by Japanese plant scientist Hitoshi Kihara beginning in the late 1930s. The National Watermelon Promotion Board traces it to Kihara’s research in Japan, and the University of Illinois Extension explains the chromosome trick that makes the fruit mostly sterile.
Israel has absolutely done important agricultural research. That does not cause Professor Kihara to vanish in a puff of patriotic PowerPoint transitions.
the cherry tomato contains a smaller, more annoying truth
Cherry tomatoes existed centuries before the state of Israel. Tomato domestication reaches back through Indigenous agriculture in the Americas; the historical record is complicated, but it is not hiding a surprise origin story in a Jerusalem laboratory. A USDA-indexed review describes the competing South American and Mexican domestication histories, while a scholarly history of the specific Israeli claim found references to cherry-shaped tomatoes going back hundreds of years.
Israeli scientists Nachum Kedar and Haim Rabinowitch did make an important contribution. They bred varieties with better flavor, longer shelf life, and qualities that made cherry tomatoes easier to sell commercially. Hebrew University’s own profile of Kedar’s work emphasizes long shelf life, taste, and disease resistance. That is real work. It is just not the same sentence as “invented cherry tomatoes.”
This is how the myth stays alive: a meaningful improvement gets promoted into immaculate conception because “helped turn an existing crop into a global supermarket product” will not fit on the bumper sticker.
the USB drive has several fathers and would like them to stop fighting
USB flash drive. Photo by Dori, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The USB flash drive is the claim where the corrective reblog also becomes too tidy. Israel’s M-Systems filed a 1999 patent for a USB-based flash disk, and Dov Moran is often credited as one of its inventors. Singapore’s Trek 2000 was the first company known to sell a product under the ThumbDrive name. IBM engineer Shimon Shmueli submitted a competing invention disclosure, and China’s Netac filed its own patent claim. IEEE Spectrum and the National Library Board of Singapore both tell the story as a genuine dispute, not a clean national trophy presentation.
And the object itself depended on Japanese flash memory, the multinational development of the USB standard, semiconductor manufacturing across countries, and years of engineering that do not become less important because one patent arrived first.
innovation is a terrible loyalty oath
Car navigation is the same sort of category error. The underlying GPS network is a U.S.-owned system operated by the U.S. Space Force. Japanese automakers pioneered early in-car navigation systems. Israeli-founded Waze later made an enormous contribution to turn-by-turn, traffic-aware navigation. “Car navigation” is not one invention sitting in a glass case with one flag behind it. It is a stack.
Cell phones are a stack, too. So are computers, medical tests, crops, and nearly every other thing politicians like to assign to a country when they need history to perform a little unpaid public relations.
But suppose Huckabee’s entire list were accurate. Suppose one country had single-handedly invented every object on it, plus the air fryer and the little plastic table that keeps pizza boxes from touching the cheese. That still would not settle a political argument about what a government is doing now. A useful invention is not a moral gift card that can be redeemed against criticism forever.
My phone can contain Israeli technology, American technology, Japanese technology, Chinese manufacturing, Taiwanese chips, and code written by somebody in Poland who has not slept since Tuesday. None of those facts requires me to outsource my conscience to the supply chain.
The most honest version of this story is also the least useful for propaganda: people in different places built on one another’s work, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively, and usually messily. The watermelon is Japanese science grown from an African crop. The tomato is Indigenous American agriculture reshaped by breeders around the world. The USB drive emerged from overlapping claims across Israel, Singapore, China, Japan, and the United States.
Huckabee wanted a shopping list of reasons criticism should stop. What he accidentally assembled was a pretty good argument against treating human knowledge as national property.
Source note: The speech was delivered in May 2026; contemporary context is available from Middle East Eye. Featured image: official 2025 portrait by the U.S. Embassy in Israel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
an ancient mapping service declined one pointless authoritarian branding exercise and discovered that “no” is still a very popular feature. Read more
MapQuest, a website I associate primarily with printing six pages of directions and then immediately missing the second turn, is suddenly the most politically relevant mapping service in America.
President Trump ordered Lake Ontario renamed “Lake America.” Google and Apple changed the label for users in the United States. MapQuest said no, kept the familiar name, and watched people download its app in numbers normally reserved for products they remembered existed before that morning.
MapQuest is now the No. 1 U.S. app after bucking Trump’s ‘Lake America’ renaming
TechCrunch reported on August 31 that MapQuest had reached No. 1 in the U.S. Navigation category, No. 4 among non-game apps, and No. 8 across the entire App Store. The company said usage had jumped to 50 times its normal level. By September 2, the Associated Press reported that it had topped the free-app charts in both the United States and Canada.
MapQuest app promotional screenshot, via the Apple App Store; reproduced for commentary.
the ancient texts foretold this
I remember MapQuest as infrastructure from the era when going somewhere new required a printer, a passenger willing to read aloud, and a solemn family agreement that nobody would mention the missed exit until Dad had finished being mad at the interstate. You did not “reroute.” You performed a three-point turn in a bank parking lot and hoped geography eventually forgave you.
Google Maps made all of that feel prehistoric. Apple Maps arrived later, initially with the confidence of a person who had never personally encountered a bridge. MapQuest remained alive in the background, apparently waiting for the exact moment that declining to participate in a pointless act of nationalist branding would qualify as product innovation.
Map by Phizzy, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
sometimes “no” is a feature
The funny part is that MapQuest says it is not trying to make a grand political statement. General manager Doug Berger framed the decision as keeping the names users already know. This is technically customer service, which now counts as resistance because the baseline is apparently “change the map whenever the president invents a new noun.”
There is a useful lesson here for brands, institutions, and the many Democrats who react to every absurd demand by assembling a committee to determine how quickly they should comply. People are desperate to see somebody say no. It does not need to be delivered from a barricade. It can be a mapping app calmly declining to pretend that one of the Great Lakes received a patriotic software update.
MapQuest also released a tool that lets users give the lake their own joke names. This is both clever marketing and an appropriate response to governance by novelty merchandise. If the federal government is going to operate like a novelty T-shirt kiosk, the least the rest of us can do is make better jokes.
I do not know whether everybody downloading MapQuest will keep using it. Protest downloads are easy, and changing a default navigation app is harder than people admit. But even a temporary surge matters. It demonstrates that refusing to normalize something stupid can be popular, useful, and, most offensive to conventional wisdom, good for business.
Thirty years after helping America get lost with a stack of warm printer paper, MapQuest has found the route back to relevance. It was apparently just “continue straight past the authoritarian branding exercise.”
