David Pell on NextDraft:
Remember, this is a guy who ran on Birtherism and walls, and has led with Muslim bans, kids in cages, very fine people on both sides, shithole countries, and political enemies described as human scum. When the looting starts, the shooting starts is the brand he ran on and won on in 2016.
I don’t have any useful judgment to share for or against the rioters in Minneapolis. I understand why they are doing it. George Floyd seems to be only the spark that ignited the fire.
I’ve seen discussion that you needed both Martin Luther King AND race riots to achieve the gains of the 60s. King said, look, black people just want equality. They want to live in the suburbs and mow the lawn and have barbecues on weekends and complain about work and how lousy the home team is playing and bring cookies to PTA meetings and do all those other things white people do.
And the riots said: You can have that, America … or you can have this.
On May 26, 1986, millions of Americans across America joined hands for 15 minutes to form a line stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast because reasons.
On the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast: radiopublic.com/this-day-…
I was a daily newspaper reporter and covered the event. I remember I joined up with a group that piled into a school bus and drove a couple of hours to the shore, where the designated line-up point was. I didn’t know anybody on the bus but I joined up with a friendly group. I can’t remember if the drinking started on the bus. We got there early so we piled into a bar and drank some more. Then a few minutes before the designated time, we piled out and joined hands. I think there was singing involved. Then I think probably more drinking.
My article reflected what a wholesome and spiritual experience the whole thing was. In other words, the article was a lie.
📚I found myself thinking about the novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” by Walter M. Miller Jr., occasionally for the last week or two. It’s always been one of my favorites. It tells the story about a Roman Catholic monastery that work to preserve knowledge for a thousand years after a 20th Century nuclear war. A major theme is the tension between faith and science.
Two days ago I saw a tweet praising my appearance on the Hugos There podcast, where I talked about the novel, and about Miller, with host Seth Heasley. It was a nice moment.
I quite enjoyed doing the podcast. So I decided to listen to it again and was reminded of things I learned when preparing for the appearance, and have since forgotten.
This 1997 news article about Leibowitz’s death is powerful and terribly sad, particularly the opening.
I saw these books in the neighborhood Little Free Library. I read and enjoyed them in the 80s when they came out, and haven’t thought of them since.
Piers Anthony is hugely prolific and I read a lot of his work. He fell off my radar in the late 80s but he still seems to be going strong.
I spent some time yesterday fooling around with Agenda, an app for taking time-sensitive notes, such as notes on meetings or notes on projects with deadlines or timelines.
In addition to organizing notes by date, you can group notes together into projects and categories, and add tags to organize them further. It looks like a great app, but I do not have a place for it.
Likewise, I took another look at Ulysses, which I used for years. It’s still a great app for writing and note-taking. But don’t see a place for that in my work anymore either.
I’m fully committed to DevonThink for document management and note taking now. You can live inside DevonThink, or live without DevonThink, but you cannot live with DevonThink. Somebody said that recently about a different app entirely — emacs — but it applies to DevonThink as well.
www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devo…
I was inspired to take another look at Agenda after listening to Rosemary Orchard describe her setup on the Nested Folders podcast.
nestedfolderspodcast.com/podcast/e…
⚙🖥📱
I’m a journalist. I’m fine with ads. They pay my income.
I don’t use ad-blockers to protect my privacy. When it comes to the Internet, I’m just a typical shmo — I complain about privacy invasion but I do very little to protect my privacy.
I use ad-blockers because ad-tech makes the web unusable. Ads and pop-ups obscure the articles I’m trying to read. Which is nuts; it’s like websites are inviting hackers to come in and break their own sites. Ads slow down my Mac until the machine becomes unusable. I have a midrange 2018 MacBook Pro. It is not an underpowered machine, and yet ad-tech routinely slows it to a crawl.
We used to complain about TV commercials, but Internet advertising is way worse. TV commercials limited themselves to their own little time blocks. TV commercials didn’t shout over the dialogue on a TV show, or jump in between the camera and the actors so you couldn’t see the action.
Likewise, in magazines and newspapers, the ads didn’t creep from one side of the page to cover up the article. Nobody in 1973 was ever sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine article only to have an ad cover up the article nagging them to subscribe to the newsletter.
The ad-tech is winning here. I use 1Blocker. It’s just not good enough, and I’m not motivated to shop around and look for alternatives, in part because it does not seem obvious to me that there is anything better than 1Blocker available.
I don’t know what the end-state here is. Maybe the best sites will start to mix subscriptions and advertising, which is a business model refined for print periodicals over the course of a century or more. And the ads will get more restrained, because the subscribers are paying customers.
By the way, here’s a secret of newspapers and magazines in the late 20th Century: The subscriptions didn’t turn a profit. They broke even, paid for the cost of production. The primary purpose of the subscription was to demonstrate to advertisers that there were people willing to pay for the periodical, and therefore these people were worth the cost of advertising too.
The problem with subscription models on the Internet is that there are too many newspapers, magazines and blogs to subscribe to, particularly if you might only want to read one article. This seems solvable, but it’s a big deal for now. 🌕
Sammy is very relaxed 📷
Dune is a rational space opera, as logical and geometrical as a Sherlock Holmes story, with an irrational occult spirit journey built on top. It needs both parts to succeed. The David Lynch movie attempted the occult part, and was completely uninterested in the rational genre story. 🍿📚
🍿I watched the end of the Coen Brothers comedy “Hail Caesar” yesterday. We’d watched the first part weeks ago but Julie lost interest and I finally had a chance to catch up. I quite enjoyed the movie.
George Clooney does a great job playing cheerful idiots. He makes a lot of stupid faces. He seems to enjoy it and he is very good at it.
