Mitch's Blog

Julie received a text message that just said, “Mom I’m sorry.”

It was a wrong number.

Julie did not respond because, she said, every response she could think of seemed cruel. “Wrong number.” “I don’t have any children,” etc.

About 10 days ago a video went viral of Amaurie Johnson, a young African-American man, apparently being bullied by police at a transit station here in La Mesa, a suburb of San Diego where Julie and I live.

Charges dropped against Amaurie Johnson after controversial arrest in La Mesa www.cbs8.com/article/n…

As I understand it, the incident was, sadly, unremarkable. The kind of thing African-Americans have to go through every day. Nobody was injured physically. But coming on the heels of Floyd George’s murder, the incident struck a spark. People protested in La Mesa Village, and the protests turned to riot, looting and arson. Two banks were burned down, and many storefronts were smashed.

This is bonkers. La Mesa is a sleepy little suburban village. The kind of place you go for Sunday brunch and then a little window-shopping in boutiques. And even then, you wouldn’t come from very far to get to La Mesa. It’s a lovely little village but nothing special. Nowhere you expect riots.

We could hear the rioting in our living room window Saturday night. We had no idea what was going on; we thought it was Saturday night traffic on the highway, which is close enough to our house that we frequently hear traffic going by. That’s a little spooky and resulted in my compulsively checking the news every few hours for days.

The rioting spread from the village to the nearby La Mesa Springs Shopping Center, which is just a few hundred feet away from the village. That shopping center is anchored by a big Vons supermarket, where I shop frequently.

Following the riots, the very next morning, the community came together to clean up the village and shopping center, and make temporary repairs. Artists decorated plate-glass windows. I stopped by La Mesa Springs yesterday to see what it looked like.

Yesterday was our first full day really in Africa, when we got out of the airport/hotel complex in Johannesburg to the Chobe Game Lodge in Botswana . This place is posh, with a vaguely colonial style and dozens of staff, smiling and jumping to attention. Indeed, service is both overly attentive and not quite what we wanted.Four or five people serve us at each meal, and yet service is slow and it can be difficult to find someone if you need something. I ordered a rump roast for dinner last night from a gemsbok, a type of antelope. It was delicious, but very tough, and I sawed at it for minutes with a standard table knife, looking around for a server to ask for a sharp steak knife. But there was no one to be found. There had been two separate people there a few minutes ago to take our drink orders, separately and with unnecessary redundancy.

When choosing our meals, Julie pointed out one dish, which was labeled as spicy, and asked how spicy it was. The waitress smiled and said promptly that it is spicy. Julie said, yes, but HOW spicy. The waitress smiled and said it’s “spicy.” Yes, said Julie, but is it VERY spicy. On a scale of one to five, Julie said, where five is extremely spicy and 1 is not spicy at all, how spicy is it? The waitress said, “I’ll have to ask the chef,” and left the table, returning with the answer. “Two.”

Another example: Breakfast yesterday was a buffet of cold food. There was a server at the buffet, a smiling young woman with a “TRAINEE” badge. I asked her if I could get any hot food, and she said no, this was all cold food. The buffets had veils in front of them, I expect to keep out flies, and in some areas when I wanted something it was this young woman’s job to lift the veil so I could serve myself, as I would at any buffet. Flavored yogurt and fresh and canned fruits.

When I got to the table, the waitress brought over our menus. Of hot breakfasts. “B-b-b-b-b-ut,” I said to myself. “The waitress over there just said ‘no hot food.” And why is there a waitress serving at a buffet – doesn’t that defeat the whole “buffet” concept, making it more of a “cafeteria.” Then I realized that the waitress was thinking I was asking if there was hot food at her station, and she answered truthfully. I did not ask her if there was hot food elsewhere, so she did not answer that question.

The whole place is like that. Communications difficulties. But the food has been delicious, and we had very nice sandwiches for lunch, sitting out on a deck while we could see giraffes and elephants not too far away. So, we are having a fantastic time.

We got lucky with an upgrade to our room – a whole suite, two bedrooms and a sitting room. Everything is spacious and beautiful.

I took more than 300 photos yesterday alone. Wednesday evening, the day we arrived, I chatted with a fellow Californian who was taking no photos at all. He and his wife and daughter had been traveling 10 days. He said he’d been on trips with people where everyone was taking photos and he took none, because he figured the photos part was covered and he was free to just enjoy the experience. I endorse this point of view, and you can expect the rate of photography to trickle off as the trip progresses. But for now I am having a great time taking photos.

This is a philosophy I’ve been thinking of for some time actually, how social media makes us observers of our own lives, taking photos or (if you’re like me) thinking of things to say about what you’re doing. So yeah the long term goal for this trip is less photos and thinking of things to say online, and more being in the moment. But for now I’m doing the other thing.

I get the idea this fellow I was talking with worked in tech, like me. But I’d made another rule for myself this trip - if anyone asks what I do I’ll gladly tell them, but I won’t volunteer my work when I’m introducing myself, which is a thing that I’m told is characteristically American in social situations.

Yesterday was very scheduled, and I gather that will be typical of this trip. Up at 5 am for a dawn game drive, get driven around the bush on a flatbed open truck with padded seating for about two and a half hours. It’s cold in the morning, temperatures in the high 40s or low 50s this time of year. We wear light winter coats.

Then it’s back to the lodge for breakfast at 8:30 am.

River cruise at 11 am, then back to the hotel for lunch at 12:30 pm. There’s a choice between eating in the hotel restaurant, which is an enclosed deck, nearly like being indoors, or on an open air deck. We chose the open air deck and feel we chose wisely, with beautiful food and delicious views. I meant to say delicious food and beautiful views, but I like the other way.

After lunch I tried to have a nap but only got in about 20 minutes. Yesterday was the day that jet lag hit me hard. I got about three hours of sleep Sunday, the night before we left California, then only a few minutes of sleep on the 24 hours or so we were in transit. Then I was wide awake at 1:30 am Thursday. I don’t think those days add up, by the way. Traveling for 48 hours through nine time zones gets confusing, like a complicated time travel Doctor Who episode.

I laid in bed until about 3:30, and heard a lion roar not too far from us, which was thrilling. The lion did not sound anti-Semitic in his food preferences, like she would gladly have eaten me. I was glad to be indoors behind thick walls. I got out of bed and sat reviewing photos and writing in this journal - that was the most recent entry before this one – until it was time for the morning game drive.

Even the afternoon attempt at a nap was refreshing, and we were up again for a 3 pm tea. The tea was served by about a half-dozen servers dishing up tea and savory and sweet pastries. Again, too much service – that’s 2-3x the number of people needed to do the job. Or, really, we didn’t need any servers at all; just put out the beverages and cakes and let people help themselves. But instead we had a half-dozen people serving up food.

I let Julie order first, as a gentleman does, and everything she ordered sounded good so I just said “the same” to each. The servers thought that was hilarious; they laughed and laughed.

A few days before we left for Africa, I talked with a friend and former colleague and the conversation turned to our upcoming trip. I had completely forgotten until that moment that this woman I was talking with had LIVED for a time in South Africa. I asked her for tips and she pointed out that we were traveling to third world countries, and we should leave our American expectations about service behind. Things that seem like they should be easy will be difficult (steak knives, hot breakfast). Things that seem like they should be difficult will be easy. We’ve only been in Africa a couple of days but I think I’m starting to understand.

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Chobe Game Lodge, Chobe National Park, Botswana – Lovely surprise at breakfast this morning. The waitstaff came over with a cake and sang “happy birthday” and “happy anniversary” and one or two songs with an African rhythm, all done with African multipart harmonies, one of the women ululating occasionally and little synchronized dance moves. It was all very beautiful and silly and fun.

I had temporarily forgotten that this was a celebration of a milestone birthday for Julie. The birthday itself is October. And also a celebration of our 25th anniversary, which was in December.

I suspect the guiding hand for this and one or two other pleasant surprises, is the travel agent who helped us arrange the trip , Vanessa Hensley at African Portfolio. onsafari.com. So far, we have found working with her and the company to be a fantastic experience – I rate them 7 out of a possible 5 stars.

Julie did about 85% of the work with Vanessa on planning the trip. I kicked in for the final few weeks but mostly my role has been showing up. I’m pretty good at showing up.

River cruise in a few minutes.

I wrote a longer journal entry this morning but I don’t know if I will ever post it. I was cranky at the time. Nothing helps you get over being cranky like cake for breakfast. With occasional ululation.

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Dinner tonight: Buffet style, served on linen covered tables in a clearing over a short boardwalk from the lodge. Marimba band playing one the path a bit of a distance away, far enough to be pleasant but not overwhelming. Thandi was our waitress again, for the fifth time or so. We’re starting to get fond of her. I had steak filet with a pepper sauce. There was a tasty local bread, a distant cousin to naan. I asked the server what kind of bread it is; he said “local bread.” Ah.

One of the foods was ox tail. A woman did not understand what the serverwas saying, so he said “ox,” then stuck out his butt, pointed at it and said “tail.”

I also had poached pair in red wine, for dessert.

Now Julie is packing. I already have, as far as I can. I made a separate pile for things I brought and now regret including three pairs of heavy cargo pants, and two external power supplies for our gadgets. I also wish I’d brought a camera strap instead of the camera holster I did bring, and I wish I’d brought a light knapsack to use as a daybag, in addition to my computer bag, which is good for travel days but too much to bring on drives and boat cruises.

📓🌍

Seen at the supermarket: a woman wearing a mask and tiara.

Consumer reports: How to safely and effectively record video during a protest www.consumerreports.org/audio-vid…

We arrived at Kasane Airport, a small airport outside Chobe National Park in Botswana, yesterday, and when we stepped outside the airport that is when our trip really began. A driver from the resort met us, a dark-skinned black woman wearing a navy medium weight coat and wool beanie hat despite 80-plus degree heat. We loaded aboard our vehicle, which was not the shuttle bus I’d expected, but rather a flatbed truck with high sides and padded bench seats. She drove us about 40 minutes, almost entirely on the park’s rutted dirt roads, to our home for the next three nights, the Chobe Game Lodge inside the park, which is a vast nature preserve on the Chobe River. We had a few minutes to settle in and then we had tea and snacks, then a game cruise on the river, on a flat pontoon boat with about a dozen people. This small group and our guide, a dark-skinned black woman named RB, would be with us the three days of our stay. RB is also the boat pilot, sole deckhand, and bartender.

I’m currently enjoying jet lag at 4:34 am. Wake up call for river cruise in 25 minutes! An hour or two ago I heard an animal roar or growl or trumpet outside the lodge. It sounded big and possibly carnivorous and not a bit anti-Semitic in its food preferences.

Note from 2020: Up until the point we got in that open-air tour bus, the trip to Africa had been very ordinary, just like flying between any two major metropolitan airports anywhere in the world. But when we got on that tour bus, it was a different world. We stopped on the side of the road and looked and wildlife, including elephants. Elephants! Right there on the side of the road! We saw a lot of that over the next few weeks, but it never felt ordinary.

📓

From my travel journal, lightly edited for typoes:

We’ve been in transit nearly 2 days now. And we are almost there.

We left the house at 8 AM on Monday. Our flight was more than four hours from San Diego to Atlanta. I barely remember it now so I guess it was fine. We had a 90 minute connection to Johannesburg. Julie was having a little bit of difficulty with baggage, so we grabbed one of those golf cart things and were chauffeured around the airport in style, coming apparently close to bowling over pedestrians a couple of times, which made the drive more enjoyable. We decided to check our big bags at the gate. We have literally 5 to 10 flights on this trip – I’ve lost count – which makes me worry about checking bags. On the other hand carrying all the bags with us does not seem entirely practical. I’ll worry about this problem when it comes up.

The flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg was about 16 hours. It is a long flight. A very long flight. A very very very long flight. No, it is even longer than that. The longest duration nonstop flight in the world is Los Angeles to Singapore, and that is only 18 hours.

I was not interested in any of the movies on the plane. My brain quickly tired from reading. Prior to the flight, I downloaded every season of The Good Place, and watched more than a dozen episodes. I did not like the first 9 episodes but after that I got into it. I don’t know if I will ever say that about a TV show again, until my next long-haul international flight at least. [Update from 2020: I ended up watching the first three seasons and enjoying them. I’ll catch up with the final season one day.]

I watched “The Dark Knight,” which I’ve never seen before, and is one of those movies that makes me feel like I’m culturally ignorant for having missed. Heath Ledger’s performance was reputed to be brilliant, and it really was. He chewed the scenery admirably. I guess subtle acting is a higher skill, but scenery chewing is a good skill too, and Ledger was great at it. A couple of online articles talked about him having studied various sources, and worked hard to get the Joker’s speech intonation and laugh. None of these articles noted that Ledger was copying the laugh wholeheartedly from Caesar Romero’s Joker in the Batman TV series from the 1960s, Hoo hoo ha ha! Nothing wrong with him doing that, but I’m surprise nobody picked up on it in the articles about the movie.

Other than Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight was dumb.The theme is a very old and ugly one in American pop culture – going back to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and beyond – that law and order and the Constitution are all fine but some threats are so terrible that only a strong man can save us, by operating outside the law. Breaking the law in order to save it. You know, like Donald Trump saving us from illegal immigration. Or every President from Nixon to Reagan saving us from drugs. Or every President from Truman to Reagan saving us from Communism. And the Nazis and Japanese before that. And Communists and gangsters before that. So basically we’ve been in a permanent state of emergency the past century.

So yeah The Dark Knight was dumb. And disturbing if you think about it. As was Batman Begins before that. And yet I want to see The Dark Knight Returns. Because I’m crushing on Anne Hathaway, since The Devil Wore Prada. [Update from 2020: I might have enjoyed the movie more if I was not watching it on a screen barely larger than my hand, on a 16-hour flight.]

We got up and walked around the plane a couple of times, thus missing the entertainment value of deep vein thrombosis.

We arrived in Johannesburg at about 5:30 PM, and were greeted at the gate by a porter with a name card, as arranged by our travel agency. His name was Phumani, and he talked with a couple of the people that we passed him in a non-English language. I asked him what it was and he said it was Zulu, which seemed passably exotic to me.

We checked in overnight at the CityLodge hotel, which is connected to the airport. If you’ve stayed at any airport hotel in the US, this was pretty much the same. And that’s fine.

This morning I was up a bit before six, Julie a few minutes later. I went out to the airport in search of some things I’d forgotten to pack: Toothbrush, razor, TSA lock, USB-A port. [Update from 2020: I have no idea what I mean by “port” here. A hub?] Got everything but the port. The airport had a large and diverse array of shops, including a Woolworth that includes a whole small grocery store.

And then we went to the gates for our final short flight to Kasane. [Update from 2020: That’s Botswana, adjacent to South Africa] We’re waiting at the gate now. After the flight we have a 45 minute shuttle bus to the Chobe Lodge [In Chobe, also Botswana] and that is the beginning of the main part of our trip, about 47 hours after leaving home. The thing about travel to distant locations is that they are very far away.

Lotta people at the airport with their hand out. I am not sure who were supposed to tip and we aren’t so I’ve basically been giving out money to random strangers. Men’s room attendants are a thing here now. They greet you with a big grin and say welcome to my office. The first time I heard it I thought it was clever. The second time I realize it is clever but it is also what they say. A man helped us with the airline checkin, operating the self-check-in kiosk for us. Yes, I know, self check-in but those things can be confusing. He asked for $20 at the end and said he would split it with another guy who also helped us. Then we went to baggage check counter and the second guy tracked us down there and also asked for $20, and became agitated when I said no we already paid the other guy. These guys were not mentioned in any of the tipping guides I’ve read, leading me to believe we may have been scammed. So it goes.

Later, we arrived at Chobe and had ox-tongue dinner.

📚🌍

I fell down an Internet rabbit hole this morning. I received an email from someone signing himself as “Alan Tarica.” It read:

“How do you have nothing to say? Idiots like you need to be exposed for having no critical thinking or meta cognition and no integrity.”

I had no idea what this was about. I thought it might be related to one of my political posts, but experience tells me that it could be about _anything._I’ve been active on social media, blogs and other Internet discussion services for many years, and have received worse insults like that for expressing options about Doctor Who, Star Trek, Apple, and any number of things you’d be surprised that people get worked up about.

I scrolled down a bit and found Mr. Tarica was apparently following up an email he sent me in January 2017 — yes, more than three years ago! — that I never replied to. I don’t even remember receiving the initial email. The initial email contained several links to articles about Shakespeare.

That is the full extent of my correspondence with Tarica. Two emails, both sent by him, unsolicited, with no response from me. Or maybe just one email; I have no record of ever receiving the initial 2017 message from Mr. Tarica

I am not a Shakesepeare scholar and I don’t have anything more than a casual interest in Shakespeare. I struggled through his plays in high school and college. I loved the movie “Shakespeare in Love.” Julie and I have seen a couple of Shakespeare productions over our years together; we loved one, liked one or two more and I vaguely remember another that we disliked although I couldn’t tell you where we saw it, which play it was, or why we didn’t like it (though I vaguely remember it having to do with the production rather than the plays themselves).

I googled “Alan Tarica” this morning and found this article:

The Shakespeare Wars: 150 years of vicious conflict www.jameshartleybooks.com/shakespea…

From which I learn that Tarica is a middle-aged software developer in Bethesda, Md., who believes that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the Earl of Oxford, and that a conspiracy of academics is burying the truth. This is actually a somewhat common theory, dating back nearly 150 years; believers have included Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, John Gielgud, Charlies Chaplin, Charles Dickens and the actor Derek Jacobi.

The conspiracy theorists are known as “Oxfordians,” while people who believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him are “Stratfordians.”

I also found this thread, which started in 2013 groups.google.com/forum/

Alan Tarica apparently likes to send insulting emails to Shakespeare scholars, and people who have even casually mentioned Shakespeare, to get attention.

Alan Tarica is on Twitter as well, where he likes to insult people.

twitter.com/alantaric…

Perhaps he will take notice of me as well?

I find the whole thing charming, reminiscent of an older, more innocent age on the Internet, when the worst thing Internet trolls could do to you was send nasty message. Nowadays, the Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists literally have access to nuclear weapons. For example:

twitter.com/realdonal…

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📷 Baked potato, deli turkey breast, spicy brown mustard. Delicious!

📷 Jacaranda

On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…

Ella Jones is Ferguson’s first black mayor.

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Why do protests become violent?

…police escalation leads to violence. Sending police to protests in riot gear begets riots. Tear-gas begets violence. These are the findings of scholars and blue-ribbon panels alike.

They are roundly ignored by police.

There’s a feedback loop: violent suppression of protest leads to militancy among protesters; this is the pretence for more violent suppression. We know this, we just don’t act on it.

Instead, “We live in a world where trained cops can panic and act on impulse, but untrained civilians must remain calm with a gun in their face.”

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“Dressing up cops like they’re on patrol in Mosul isn’t just a bad policing, it’s also incredibly expensive.” Dressing a cop in military gear costs “more than enough to outfit 55 front-line health-care workers in top-of-the-range PPE.”

=-=-=-

Zoom wants to help the FBI spy on you.

pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…#more-920

I finished reading “Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic,” by Mike Duncan www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/mi…

Duncan, who is the voice of the History of Rome and Revolutions podcasts, traces the decline of the Roman Republic from the mid-2d Century to the mid 1st Century BCE — from around the time of the Gracchi brothers to the death of Sulla.

The Republic was straining as the middle class and poor struggled against domination by a small, wealthy elite. The nation was shocked to find that the normal ways of doing things in government were just customs, easily swept aside by ruthless, ambitious men. The nation faced an onslaught of outsiders seeking citizenship. Citizens and plebs were rioting in the streets. And the nation was in a constant state of war against enemies abroad.

In other words: Rome was nothing like the US today. This was just light reading.

“Storm Before the Storm” was enjoyable and informative, but I can’t say that I learned any lessons that could be applicable today. The book was a lesson in the saying attributed to Mark Twain: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

QAnon believers, united in a battle against what they see as dark forces of the world, reveal where the internet is headed.

The Qanon community is united in the belief that they can use the Internet to make the world better, and build personal connections and friendships

I do not believe the fundamental tenets of Qanon, which are as I understand it that Hillary Clinton, Obama and their allies are part of a conspiracy dating back at least 50 years, which includes a child sex ring operating out of a pizza restaurant.

And I certainly do not believe that Donald Trump is a hero and anointed by our military to save us. Trump isn’t the cure for the disease, he’s the disease’s most prominent symptom.

But real world conspiracies are not that different from what Qanon believes. Pizzagate is bullshit but Jeffrey Epstein was real.

And my own political beliefs today would have seemed completely bonkers and paranoid to myself 25 or so years ago.

www.nytimes.com/2020/05/2…

Democrats control the House, many state Houses, governors’ offices, and the City Halls of major cities. There’s a lot they can do — right now, if they have the will.

1 - Stop giving Trump more police power. Stop working with Republicans to revive the Patriot Act.

sirota.substack.com/p/10-thin…

How ‘antifa’ became a Trump catch-all www.politico.com/news/2020…

Antifa isn’t an organized group and there’s no evidence they’re responsible for rioting but you do you, Republicans.

Triplett’s father, Mose, fought for the Confederacy and then joined the North and fought as a private. After the war, he had “a reputation for orneriness.”

[He] kept pet rattlesnakes at his home near Elk Creek, N.C. He often sat on his front porch with a pistol on his lap.

“A lot of people were afraid of him,” his grandson, Charlie Triplett, told the [Wall Street] Journal.

Pvt. Triplett married Elida Hall in 1924. She was 34 when Irene was born in 1930; he was 83. Such an age difference wasn’t rare, especially later, during the Great Depression, when Civil War veterans found themselves with both a pension and a growing need for care.

Irene Triplett received a monthly pension of $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

She died Sunday from complications following surgery for injuries from a fall, according to the Wilkesboro, N.C., nursing home where she lived.

She was mentally disabled, and lived in the poorhouse with her mother, and later in a series of care homes.

She saw little of her relatives. But a pair of Civil War buffs visited and sent her money to spend on Dr Pepper and chewing tobacco, a habit she picked up in the first grade.

www.wsj.com/articles/…

75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice medium.com/equality-…

The systems that protect bad police. www.nytimes.com/2020/06/0…

Conspiracy theories have been fundamental to American history since the Revolution. www.npr.org/2020/05/1…

Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

John Gruber at Daring Fireball notes this was published just hours before Trump ordered his goons to use tear gas and flash bang to disperse peaceful protesters for a photo opp at a church. “Trump proved Will’s prediction within mere hours.” daringfireball.net/linked/20…

Minutes before the photo opp, Trump proclaimed himself a friend to peaceful protesters. Even as he was doing that, you could hear his goons attacking peaceful protester’s in the background.

KC Short, the Army veteran who organized Saturday’s protests in La Mesa, CA, the San Diego suburb where I live, said he does not condone the looting and rioting that escalated after the peaceful movement he planned. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…

Fans rally around Crazy Fred’s, a comic book store in the San Diego suburb La Mesa (where I live), which was looted in riots this weekend. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…

I shop in the Von’s supermarket in the same shopping center as Crazy Fred’s. I had forgotten the comic store was there.

To be honest, it’s not that hard to protest. It’s not that hard to go someplace. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It doesn’t mean that it’s not critical. But that’s not the hard thing we need from people who care about these issues. We need people to vote, we need people to engage in policy reform and political reform, we need people to not tolerate the rhetoric of fear and anger that so many of our elected officials use to sustain power.

nextdraft.com/archives/…

I’m trying to understand why wearing a mask — which is meant only to protect the most vulnerable among us and slow the spread of the virus to everyone else — has become the political equivalent of wearing a bumper sticker on your face. It makes me weep to think about it: Our one ready-to-hand tool for getting this country back to normal as quickly and as safely as possible has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans. It’s enough to break a true patriot’s heart.

nextdraft.com/archives/…

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…

Trump’s bailout czar, Justin Muzinich, responsible for trillions in bailout money, is getting rich sucking on the public tit. Democrats and Republicans alike love Muzinich because he talks like a grownup but doesn’t let that get in the way of thievery.

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Big data shows which policies reduce police brutality: Training and bodycams don’t work. What does work? Demilitarizing police equipment, and predictive policing to identify abusive cops:

… the overall message is just commonsense. Tell cops they’re not allowed to use violence. Don’t outfit them like an army.. Punish and fire cops who break the rules.

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“Broken windows” crimefighting policies are the new Jim Crow, unfairly targeting black people.

Matt Taibbi: “We have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else.”

Cory:

This is why NYC had to pay $33,000,000 in restitution for one hundred thousand strip-searches performed on people facing misdemeanor charges. These searches don’t merely reflect sadism – they’re also a way of creating new charges, like “resisting arrest.” It’s a twofer.

It’s why cops – correctly – came to understand that the people they were policing hated them and saw them as an occupying army.

Lucky for them, that was around the time military contractors successfully lobbied for a program of low-cost “surplus” sales of military equipment to local law.

That’s when we started to see cops dressing up like infantry on patrol in Mosul. “Dress for the job you want.”

Broken windows was a fraud, and “community policing” (the euphemism for stop-and-frisk) never worked. But it lumbers on as a zombie “fact” whose research was long discredited, claiming Black lives in its wake.

pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…

Old Yellow Stain declared himself a friend to peaceful protesters, and then ordered in flash bang explosions and tear gas to disperse peaceful, lawful protesters so he could get a photo op in front of a church, waving a Bible.

I’m just a nonobservant Jew but I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t say anything about flash bang explosions and tear gas. Correct me if I’m wrong?

“He did not pray,” said Mariann E. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. “He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years.”

www.nytimes.com/2020/06/0…

He quotes AOC: ‪“If you’re calling for an end to unrest, but not calling out police brutality, not calling for health care as a human right, not calling for an end to housing discrimination, all you’re asking for is the continuation of quiet oppression.”‬

www.newyorker.com/news/dail…

In late 2001, after 9/11, I got in the habit of having my clock radio set to an all-news station to wake me up in the morning.

If the first words I heard were “Michael Jackson,” I knew there was no big news that morning. I could just shut off the radio. I didn’t have to rush to the Internet to find out what blew up. I could just get on with my wake-up routine.

There have been far too few Michael Jackson days this year..

While cowering in a bunker and doing nothing, President Tweetie demands other people get tough. www.cnn.com/2020/06/0…

@dave Winer compares Trump to Captain Queeg — Old Yellow Stain.

Hell yeah. Trump in the bunker with the White House lights off, muttering about the antifa – his stolen strawberries.

It’s like the scene at the end of The Stand, where Glen Bateman is in a prison cell, laughing about how foolish he feels to have been be afraid of Randal Flagg, who turned out to be just pathetic.

twitter.com/davewiner…

Let’s just leave Trump in his protective bunker until January, and shut off the Wi-Fi too.

Saturday after another night of rotten sleep I decided I need to minimize going on the Internet after dinner. I picked a bad day to start that.

Good morning! I spilled a little coffee on my hand this morning and the dog licked it off enthusiastically. That’s my girl!

She says she wants maybe a light roast next time.

On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net:

Minneapolis police have flouted reforms.

“[P]olice union boss Lt Bob Kroll kept his job even after he showed up for work with a white power badge on his uniform.”

And Amy Klobuchar declined to prosecute Derek Chauvin when she was the city’s top proseecutor, “giving him license to commit a string of crimes that culminated in the daylight murder of George Floyd”

pluralistic.net/2020/05/3…

I slept in this morning, woke up a few minutes before 10 am and found my phone was lit up with messages from local friends. Last night there was looting and vandalism in La Mesa Village, about 2.5 miles from where we live.

La Mesa, where we live, is a suburb of San Diego, about a dozen miles inland from the beaches. La Mesa Village is a few blocks of restaurants and antique stores and such. The village is the kind of place where you go for brunch on Sunday, followed by a stroll and some window-shopping. Lately it’s gone upscale, with some fancy restaurants.

A few days ago, a video went viral of an African-American man, Amaurie Johnson, 23, getting arrested and apparently subject to police bullying at the Grossmont Trolley Station on Fletcher Parkway here in La Mesa, within walking distance of the Village. From the news:

The nearly six-minute video shows a heated verbal exchange between Johnson and the officer. It also shows the officer forcefully push Johnson into a sitting position onto a nearby bench.

Johnson told 10News at no point did he resist or assault anyone.

“I feel as though people that look like me, um, feel the same way I do and we’re tired of it. We’re tired of having to deal with stuff like that,” he said.

Johnson said he was cited with assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.

www.10news.com/news/loca…

More background here:

www.sandiegoville.com/2020/05/v…

Elsewhere, I’ve seen a long video of Johnson being interviewed by a news reporter. The video I saw is not the news video; it’s a video of the interview shot by another camera. Johnson is sitting in the driver’s seat of a car, with a phone propped up on the steering wheel. We can see him videochatting with a news reporter on the phone. The video I saw was shot from the passenger seat.

Johnson tells a compelling, articulate story that he was just standing around the transit center waiting to meet some friends, when the cop started hassling him for no good reason. I find Johnson’s story believable —. with the qualification that we don’t know what happened before the video altercation with the cop started.

Yes, I know, “we don’t know what happened before the video started” is a thing racists say. Racists say all kinds of bullshit. I’m just saying I want to hear the officer’s story, and hear from the several witnesses to the incident, before making any final conclusions.

Coming on the heels of the apparent murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis just prior, this incident got a lot of attention.

Yesterday, demonstrators started outside the La Mesa Police Department, and later closed off the highway. We could hear the action from the house – police loudspeakers saying “KEEP THE SHOULDER CLEAR,” etc. I took Minnie out for a walk anyway, and then went out myself for the second, solo part of the walk.

Since the pandemic started, I’ve been limiting my walk to a few loops around the neighborhood. The entire neighborhood is on the side of a hill, and I can see the highway from a couple of points along the walk. This was late afternoon; the traffic was moving smoothly on the highway going west, toward San Diego, but stopped going east, inland. I saw more cars than you would expect to see that time of day; I expect they were getting off the highway and traveling on surface streets instead.

I also saw about a dozen people on motor scooters, where I’d usually see only a couple of those every month. Some of them were moving in groups of two or three. I’m pretty sure they were all white people, for what it’s worth. I surmised at the time that they were demonstrators.

It seems to me that if you’re going to a demonstration, and planning to shut down the roads, or at least expect the roads might be shut down, then scooters are a good way to go in and out. From that I surmise this was not their first demonstration. They knew what they were dong.

From what I’m told on message threads from friends – I still haven’t checked the news, or social media, or left the house yet – vandalism and looting started in La Mesa Village after the demonstrations broke up. La Mesa Village is 2.5 miles from where we live. We were oblivious. We watched a movie in the living room last night. The windows were open, and we can hear the highway from the living room when the windows are open. The highway sounded particularly loud last night. We assumed that was just Saturday night. Then we went to bed.

So that’s what I know so far. Everything is fine here for us personally. House is fine – as far as I know; like I said, we haven’t been outside yet. Julie and I and the animals are fine. Later today I’ll go out and see if I can see anything around the neighborhood, or if the neighbors know anything.

And that’s the day so far. I’ve been awake nearly two hours and still haven’t finished my coffee. How is your day?

Look, we all have the right to protest, but that doesn’t mean you can just rush in and destroy any business without gathering a group of clandestine investors to purchase it at a severely reduced price and slowly bleed it to death…. It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off.

www.theonion.com/protestor…

ThreadReaderApp now has beta support for the Micropub Spec so you can publish Twitter threads directly to your blog boffosocko.com/2020/05/2…

Very cool!

Gali Beeri is 37 and works as an executive assistant. Joshua Boliver is 42 and creates visual effects for movies. They both live in New York City and met at a dance class in March, as the city was preparing to lock down. At the time, they made the unlikely decision to quarantine together — after their first date.

www.npr.org/sections/…

What a lovely story.

US anti-vaxxers aim to spread fear over future coronavirus vaccine. A dangerously large numbers of Americans are already reluctant to take an anti-covid vaccine. www.theguardian.com/world/202…

Norway and Denmark say they will reopen tourism between their two countries soon, but will maintain restrictions for Swedes.

Sweden did not impose a lockdown, unlike its Nordic neighbours, and its Covid-19 death toll - above 4,000 - is by far the highest in Scandinavia.

www.bbc.com/news/worl…

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.

nextdraft.com/archives/…

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.

twitter.com/EmInPortl…

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.

hugospodcast.com/podcast/h…

This 1997 news article about Leibowitz’s death is powerful and terribly sad, particularly the opening.

www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-x…

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.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier…

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.

agenda.com

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.

ulysses.app

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…

www.gnu.org/software/…

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.

Who’s watching Lawrence Welk anymore? My grandparents watched it in the 70s. They were in their 80s then. That’s always seemed like the target demographic. Are there enough 120-year-olds around now to keep the show on the air?

I stopped in at Mystic Grill & Bakery last night to pick up a takeout dinner for myself and Julie. The chairs were down off the tables, indicating that dining service was available. But I only saw one person sitting at a table, and he may have been an employee. On a normal Saturday night at that time there would have been a couple of families there.

Several people came out for takeout, which was good to see. Staff and customers were all masked.

The TV was playing Lawrence Welk. I don’t think that’s significant from an epidemiological perspective

Julie and I watched “Dune” again not long ago. The only other time I’d seen it was in the theatrical release in the 80s. It was fine. I enjoyed it. I had zero expectations, and the movie met them.

A friend said she loved it because it visualized all the settings and characters of the novel. I said it was a terrible movie and the settings and characters looked different from the way I visualized them when reading. She said she didn’t care. Her perspective is valid.

On the It’s the Pictures That Got Small podcast: Dune, with Karina Longworth, Nate DiMeo and Natasha Lyonne.

David Lynch had no interest in the mythology of Dune. He just loved the imagery. It is the ultimate movie do to use for GIFs, or to project on the wall of a bar on the Lower East Side. Or watch in any public place with the sound off.

Karina Longworth: “It only doesn’t work if you it expect to be a movie.”

Lynch’s cut of the movie was five hours. The final cut was a little over two hours. Maybe the director’s cut would have been better?

📷 Two ducks 🦆 🦆 hanging out in the pond, a third duck 🦆 joins them. A brisk discussion of etiquette ensues.

LEEEROY JENKINS!!!!!

📽Last night we watched “Saving Mr. Banks,” about the making of Mary Poppins. The movie stars Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Bradley Whitford, etc. — excellent cast.

“Saving Mr. Banks” takes great liberties with historical reality. In reality, PL Travers, the author of the series of Mary Poppins novels, never cared for the movie “Mary Poppins,” and wouldn’t permit another adaptation for 30 years. When she finally relented, for a stage production in London, she stipulated no Americans could be involved. And she had a much more interesting life than “Saving Mr. Banks” portrays. She was a successful actress and dancer and poet and studied philosophy and lived with Native Americans for a time and studied their philosophy and folklore. She adopted a boy, from whom she was later estranged.

Walt Disney, in real life, was kind of a bastard.

The movie is bullshit and propaganda and I loved it anyway and would gladly watch it again.

Much of the movie focuses on Travers’ childhood in Allora, Australia, in the early 1900s. It was a small town then and it’s no metropolis today, with a population of 1,223.

Patton Oswalt: Joey Pants is the real hero of “The Matrix,” and the computers are trying to be nice.

“There’s a very strong case to be made for [Joey Pantoliano’s character, Cypher], like, ‘No. Plug me the fuck back into this,’ Oswalt said. [Cypher is] one of the freed humans who regrets the decision to take the red reality pill, since the simulation was so much more warm and satisfying than reality.

“‘I’m nude with atrophied muscles, hairless in a jagged wasteland of radioactive slag, or I can be in this world where I have a nice job, where I eat a steak and marry someone,'” Oswalt ranted. “‘Can I just live in this — I am fine with it. Morpheus, who the fuck are you helping?! Why are you dragging us out?! The machines aren’t trying to kill us.'”

He continued from the point of view of the machines: “‘And by the way, you guys fucked up the Earth. We’re doing the best we can for you guys. We could have just let you all die in the wasteland, but instead, we found a way so that you can live.'”

Back speaking for himself, Oswalt added, “People always miss that line where [Agent] Smith (Hugo Weaving) says, ‘You know, when we first did the Matrix, it was just flat-out paradise, and you guys couldn’t handle that and you rejected it.’… Probably the first version of the Matrix, everybody could fly and orgasms lasted three months and you could just eat all the chocolate you wanted. And people were like, ‘No! I want a goddamn cubicle job!’ And the machines went, ‘OK. I guess they want cubicles. Give ‘em that. We tried to be nice.'”

The last typist was kicked out of the Writers Room in New York’s Greenwich Village 10 years ago.

The ribbon has run out on the last typewriter at a Manhattan writers' den.

Skye Ferrante has spent six years at the Writers Room in Greenwich Village, blissfully banging away on his grandmother’s 1929 Royal typewriter.

The 37-year-old writer represented a bygone era, the last typewriter-user in a special room devoted to typists.

“In the event that there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists,” read a sign posted in the “Typing Room” for years.

When Ferrante returned to the Writers Room in April after an eight-month break, the sign was gone and his noisy typewriter was no longer welcome.

“I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off,” said Ferrante, a Manhattan native who’s writing children’s books. “They offered me a choice to switch to a laptop or refund my money, which to me is no choice at all.”

Ten years later, Ferrante is still around, doing wire sculptures, which he shares on Instagram. The Writers Room is still around too, and looks lovely, though I expect it’s on pandemic hiatus.

Did the Black Death lead to the Renaissance?

What does that history teach us about what to expect in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic?

It’s complicated, says Professor Ada Palmer.

Palmer, a historian and science fiction writer and all-around genius, appears in a wide-ranging interview on the Singularity Podcast:

Prof. Ada Palmer on Pandemics, Progress, History, Teleology and the Singularity

The Renaissance was in many ways a terrible time to be alive; Europeans fought many fierce wars and lifespans were drastically shorter than the preceding Middle Ages. Other parts of the world, particularly China, were far more advanced than Europe, and Europeans knew it.

But the Renaissance also produced great art and scientific breakthroughs. Then as now, it was the best and worst of times.

Francis Bacon invented the idea of progress in 1620. There was plenty of progress before then, of course, but until Bacon, people viewed history as more or less the same. They were some places and times that were better to be alive than others. Empires rose and fell. But our ancestors lives were the same as ours and our children’s would be the same as well.

Bacon had the idea of using science to cumulatively improve all peoples lives today and in the future into the future. For that reason, he said science was the best form of Christian charity.

We didn’t see the first breakthrough from Bacon’s insight for 150 years, until Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. But since then he’s been proven right. Refrigeration, the rule of law, medicine and other advances have improved life for everyone, and will continue to do so.

Accepted wisdom today for many people is that one of the advances of the Renaissance was the break with religion and move to secularism. But great scientists like Isaac Newton and Descartes were devout Christians. Newton was deeply immersed in beliefs that we would consider occult.

People today sometimes say that figures like Newton were actually closet atheists, and could not share their beliefs because of censorship and fear of the Inquisition. And it’s true that censorship makes it very hard for later historians to find out what was actually going on. But we can deduce people’s actual beliefs by looking at other things they did say that they believe. And Renaissance intellectuals espoused beliefs that were far more dangerous than atheism. The Inquisition was far more concerned with heresy than atheism. If people like Newton and Descartes were atheists, they would have said so.

Atheism developed as a by-product of publishers making hyped claims in trying to flog translations of the work of the Greek philosopher Epictetus.

People calling themselves “transhumanists” today look forward to the Singularity, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. But we’ve already been through a kind of Singularity, in the 17th Century, when for the first time it became impossible for an educated person to familiarize himself with every book ever written. With the invention of the printing press, books were being published faster than they could be catalogued, let alone read and understood! Until then, an educated person was considered to be one familiar with the total of all human knowledge. After that, we get the idea of specialization.

Poverty is a tax on intelligence. If you’re spending a lot of time worrying about paying bills, you don’t have that intelligence to think about other things. Palmer estimates that if we lift a person out of poverty, we raise their intelligence 25%.

All knowledge is useful, if for no other reason than it’s satisfying to learn things. Even finding out whether giraffes can swim is satisfying.

Humanity is a very young species, and we will get our act together eventually. Until a few centuries ago, it was considered fine and ok for people with powerful patrons to go around murdering people and bragging about it. Now, we believe all people should be subject to the law. That’s a big deal!

Progress comes from everyday people doing small things, more than from geniuses and great men and women doing great things:

The small things that we are achieving that feel small are the way that the civilization-wide big things happen. The more I look at history and zoom in the less it is the geniuses and the people whose names we know that made the world shift and the more it is, in fact, the microscopic – from a historical standpoint – teamwork of everybody. So never feel that the stuff you’re doing isn’t important.

How Ben Stiller Will Remember His Father, Jerry Stiller

Coronavirus: The Mask Wars – Science Vs

Scientific studies suggest no conclusive evidence that cloth masks help slow the spread of coronavirus. N95 masks are definitely helpful, but we’re not sure whether the same is true for surgical masks, or homemade cloth masks, or bandanas.

I’m going to keep wearing a mask anyway, when I go out in public, because the difficulty is low and potential payoff is high. Also, social signaling matters.

“Shoe-leather” contact tracing works – Cory Doctorow

The only effective way to do contact tracing is by paying an army of people to do it – the “shoe leather” approach. Contact-tracing apps are at best helpful in automating record-keeping.

It appears that the countries that have done best at containing coronavirus are those where the people trust their government, and that government is worthy of trust. These are two conditions that do not exist on a national level in the US.

I do trust our local, county and state governments in matters like this. Although I may not agree with them, they seem to me to be competent people who are acting in good faith to serve their constituents. The same is not true on a federal level, and has not been for a long time, predating Trump.

HP Lovecraft warned readers to stay away from pulp magazines – Cory Doctorow.

Readers should turn to the Bible and Lord Dunsany instead, said Lovecraft in a 1920 letter to the editor of the Omaha Bee.

I interviewed the science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson, who said he read a letter or essay from some 19th Century person who was denouncing the “boys books” of the time, with their preposterous, ridiculous stories of little boys who run away from home to become sea captains. T

These sorts of books (said the 19th Century literary person) were awful stuff, to be avoided.

Wilson said they sounded awesome to him, and he sought out and read a few, and that became his own excellent novel, “Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century.”

Department of Justice Reopens Spat With Apple Over iPhone Encryption

Daring Fireball:

Saying you want technology companies to make a backdoor that only “good guys” can use is like saying you want guns that only “good guys” can fire. It’s not possible, and no credible cryptographer would say that it is. You might as well say that you want Apple to come up with a way for 1 + 1 to equal 3….

The DOJ is not asking for Apple’s cooperation unlocking existing iPhones — they’re asking Apple to make future iPhones insecure.

On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ This is the first pandemic ever experienced by a society that understands how pandemics work, and other insights from Renaissance historian and science fiction writer Ada Palmer.

++ You can raise a person’s IQ 25% by getting that person out of poverty, as that person no longer has to devote attention to jugging bills all day, Palmer says.

++ Gig economy companies are massive Ponzi schemes. A restaurateur fights back by arbitraging pizza.

++ England’s storks have returned for the first time since 1416.

++ The case for universal broadband.

++ “Platform coops” are gig economy services where the workers own the platform.

“Get your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape!” and 99 more favorite movie quotes.

The 10,000-step rule is completely arbitrary, writes journalist Tanner Garrity at InsideHook. There is zero science behind it. The figure was plucked from the air by a Japanese electronics company trying to sell a new pedometer in the 1960s.

In the mid-1960s, a a Japanese watch company called Yamasa Clock debuted the figure that has been associated with daily step-counts, activity meters and modern wearables like Fitbit and Apple Watch ever since. The young brand’s marketing team named their pedometer Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter.” Something about the number sounded right: it was large enough to feel like a goal, but small enough to feel like an achievable one for the average adult. But Yamasa’s motive was even less scientific than that. The Japanese character for 10,000 somewhat a resembles a gentleman out for a brisk stroll: 万.

5,000-8,000 steps a day seems to be a more scientifically justified goal.

Even knowing all this, I try to do 10,000 steps a day because why not. Often I do not hit that goal. My hard goal is 7,500 steps a day. I’ve done at least that every day since we got back from Africa 11 months ago.

Says Garrity:

Most of all, remember to enjoy the steps you do take. Last week, The New York Times asked New Yorkers to share “the things they achingly miss” during quarantine. I long for my daily constitutional from InsideHook’s office in Midtown to the lower reaches of Central Park. The Heckscher Ballfields are down there and I like to stop and watch the midday games, which are inexplicably comprised of coeds in their mid-20s and guys who look like they taught at NYU in the ’90s. It was going to be my job this spring to find out how they all know each other. I miss scrambling over the schist, knowing the bench that gets the most sun, dodging selfies. It’s admirable to try to improve your physical conditioning each day with thousands of steps — just remember to leave a few hundred or so for the soul.

What We Might Learn From The 1918 Flu Pandemic – Fresh Air – In broad outlines, public reaction to the the 1918 flu pandemic and covid epidemic follow the same course, says historian John Barry – “the outbreak was trivialized for a long time.”

Also, Woodrow Wilson was almost certainly sick with the 1918 flu during the Geneva peace talks. He wanted to argue against punitive settlement with Germany, but was too sick to do so. So, while it’s a stretch to say the 1918 pandemic led to the Nazis, it’s not a HUGE stretch.

Knockoffs – 99% Invisible – Dapper Dan went from street hustler to fashion impresario and has spent time on both sides of American trademark law. In the world of fashion trademarks and knockoff merchandise, it’s hard to tell the legitimate merchants from the outlaws. They’re often the same guys.

Edward Luce delivers a fast but deep read on the Financial Times, about how Trump and his henchmen have bungled pandemic response, unnecessarily killing tens of thousands of Americans — so far! — and destroying America’s world leadership.

“America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.”

Yesterday, Lake Murray was open for the first or second day since the social distancing order became law in California (which was March 20, by the way, so that’s nearly two months now). I went there on my daily walk.

Too many people! Social distancing was difficult, too easy to slip inside the six-foot distance. Only about half of the people were wearing masks. Maybe less than half. You could walk in and out freely but they had park workers set up on the entrance road to keep the parking lot from filling up. According to what I read, they were allowing only 50% capacity in the parking lot, to keep the park from getting crowded.

The photo here doesn’t look crowded but it was tricky trying to maintain a brisk walking pace AND social distancing. Pedestrian traffic on that trail is tricky even under normal conditions because you’re basically trying to manage four or five groups of people, all moving at different velocities: You’ve got people out strolling, often with small children in strollers, who are moving very slowly and not paying attention to their surroundings; there are brisk walkers like me; there are runners; there are adults riding bicycles and other wheeled human-powered transportation; and there are also preteens on bicycles, who rocket along at a million miles an hour not paying attention to their surroundings and occasionally colliding with other objects and people.

I was feeling nervous when I got home, and did not get close to Julie until I’d showered and changed my clothes. I plan to not go back to the park, to resume my daily routine of walking there, for a while, until it feels safer.

In other pandemic news: We got a shipment of paper towels yesterday. We are also stocked up on toilet paper. We are ready to face the apocalypse with clean countertops and butts. 📓

Montgomery Ward, 1960 via

Fred Willard doing opening monologue on SNL, 1978 via

Trans World Airlines (1952) via

Janis Joplin Woodstock 1969

via

Jughead, 1970. It doesn’t require much individuality to be viewed as an eccentric iconoclast in Riverdale.

via

There’s Nothing Like a ‘54 Ford via

Fred Willard, 1978. via

The death cult at the grocery store – Retail workers are being called on to enforce facemask requirements, and they’re facing threats and violence from anti-maskers.

Why Is Facebook So Afraid of Checking Facts? – Facebook refuses to factcheck fake news, based on the discredited social theory of “backfire effects,” which claims that people dig in to false views when faced with contradictory evidence.

Facebook’s belief is based on a 2008 study, since discredited. In reality, when faced with contradictory evidence, people change their beliefs, just as you would like them to do.

So Facebook’s fake news policy is based on fake news.

Hackers who broke into a law firm claim to have dug up dirt on Trump, and will release it in a week if they don’t get $42M ransom

How Facebook Could Use Giphy to Collect Your Data – Giphy already tracks users online behavior, and Facebook should not be allowed to buy it.

Also: In America, healthcare workers can’t find PPE, “essential workers” are pooping in alleyways, but Facebook can afford to drop $500M on animated GIFs.

Coronavirus: The last ‘normal’ photo on your phone

Cory Doctorow: Social media isn’t particularly great at persuasion. But it is excellent at finding small, diffuse groups that are receptive to a message, and targeting those groups.

That’s great if you’re a refrigerator business looking to find people who are shopping for a refrigerator. It’s even better if you’re an LGBTQ kid in a small town, looking to find community.

It’s not so great for society if you’re looking to organize people who might be inclined to believe that a Presidential candidate is operating a child rape ring out of the basement of a popular Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

The reason people are inclined to believe in conspiracy theories is that so many of the trends destroying the US and planet are, in fact, conspiracies:

The opioid epidemic was a conspiracy between rich families like the Sacklers and regulators who rotate in and out of industry. The 737 crisis was caused by Boeing’s conspiracy to cut corners and aviation regulators' conspiracy to allow aerospace to regulate itself.

Senators conspire to liquidate their positions ahead of coronavirus lockdown, well-heeled multinationals conspire to get 94.5% of the “small business” PPP fund, Big Tech conspires to fix wages with illegal collusion while fast food franchises do the same with noncompetes.

And how different is Pizzagate from the real life of Richard Epstein? Also, Donald Trump may not technically be a serial rapist, but he’s certainly a serial sex abuser.

Additionally, conspiracies often make people feel at home, and provide them with status.

And now two points that are mine and by me:

The people profiled in the recent Atlantic piece about Qanon seem lovely. I don’t want any of them making public policy because Qanon is bonkers. But I’d be happy to have any of them as my neighbors and friends.

Also, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m deeply immersed in ancient Rome now, and Qanon reminds me of the mystery cults that thrived in the first century One of those cults became Christianity. So maybe Qanon will go away soon, but don’t bet too much on it.

Also on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: Dr. Seuss coronavirus parodies, including “Oh, the Places You Won’t Go.”

And a Hong Kong ice cream shop is selling tear-gas flavored ice cream, which one customer says is far too tear-gas-like, which reminds me of the Monty Python “Crunchy Frog” sketch.

The New York Times: Rick Jackson, 54, was top editor of The Herald-Times, Bloomington, Indiana. He got laid off “in the parking lot next to the paper’s headquarters. He was also told he would have to vacate the apartment in the same building, where he had been living for 10 months.”

Unable to go to the newsroom, Mr. Jackson started a blog. He called it The Homeless Editor….

He’s living in a Motel 6 now.

Mr. Jackson, who has covered homelessness, said on his blog that most homeless people are not those “who sit on the streets of all our major cities.” Rather, he wrote, “the homeless crowd are much more like me — a person who doesn’t have a single address to call home.”

Jackson is now looking for work. He hopes to stay in journalism.

“There’s something about being in a newsroom where I feel like I’m wrapped in a warm quilt,” he said. “It’s where my home is.”

Hollywood Reporter : CBS All Access is doing a new Star Trek series, based on the adventures of the Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike, with Anson Mount returning as Pike, Ethan Peck as Spock and Rebecca Romjin as Number One.

Also in the pipeline: New seasons of Discovery and Picard, an animated series, “Lower Decks” – I think I read elsewhere that will be a comedy – another Discovery spinoff, Section 31, starting Michelle Yeoh, and a younger-skewing CG-animated series for Nickelodeon.

With all that and The Orville, it’s a good time to be a Trekkie

Stop what you’re doing and watch my weird dog fight a tree. pic.twitter.com/Tam5fBLZBc

— K.B. Spangler (@KBSpangler) May 14, 2020

Losers who use “loose” when they mean “lose.” Makes me lose my shit.

Excitement during the pandemic.

I like that it’s a professional model. Don’t want to use the AMATEUR equipment.

The Saga of Michael Flynn – Politics doesn’t permit nuance. Either Michael Flynn is a hero or a traitor. Either the Justice Department investigation was entirely justified or it was a witchhunt.

The Curse of The Curse – Great episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast: filmmaker Jay Cheel talks about his new documentary series “Cursed Films,” which explores why people think movies like The Exorcist, The Omen, and other horror films were cursed – targeted by demonic forces. Also, special effects artist Craig Reardon and director Gary Sherman separate fact from fiction with the alleged Poltergeist curse. And theologian Brandon Grafius, author of “Reading the Bible with Horror,” describes horror’s Biblical connections.

1. I had long, thick hair when I was a young man and I miss it. For years I’ve wondered if I would look good with long hair today, even though my hair is extremely thin now.

Social distancing gave me an opportunity to find out; I went far longer than usual between haircuts.

The answer is that I look terrible with long hair. I am back to number two clippers all over, for good.

2. For years I have thought that I could just give myself a haircut, or have Julie do it for me, and save us some money. How hard can it be to cut my hair with number 2 clippers, all over?

Turns out it’s actually pretty hard and I will be going back to a professional barber as soon as it is healthy to do so.

3. I have long luxurious ear hair and Julie did not want to trim it out of concern for injuring my ears. It looks awful. But on the other hand it helps keep my AirPods securely in place. 📓

Garry Armacost, was wounded fighting for his country in Vietnam. Now he’s in the fight of his life, against cancer and the bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Garry is a big, cheerful, quiet 75-year-old who lives in San Diego. He needs cancer surgery for his survival. The surgery is complicated, long, done robotically, and requires sophisticated post-operative care.

Garry has had bad experience with post-operative care at the VA, which proved nearly fatal in 2012. Fortunately, Garry’s son, Chris, is a doctor, and arranged for the head of urology at Sharp Memorial to do the surgery.

But the VA has refused the transfer because they don’t want to cover the cost.

“What price do they put on Garry’s life? Apparently not much,” Garry’s wife, Linda, writes in a Facebook post. “We have called, argued, pleaded, tried to talk with the Director, to no avail. We’re wondering if these will be our last days together. It didn’t need to come to this.”

Garry was wounded in Vietnam, and earned a purple heart. He came home, raised a family, and worked a long career for various railroads in the Northeast. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Linda, in San Diego. Linda is active in local Democratic Party politics, which is where I met her.

Please help Garry and his family. If you have any ideas on who to contact and otherwise how to influence the VA to give him the treatment he needs, let me know and I’ll pass the word. You can contact me directly at mitch@mitchwagner.com.

If you work for the VA or know someone who does, please put in a word to get Garry’s transfer approved. Contact your Congressional representative and apply pressure.

Share this post far and wide on social media.

The VA needs to be held accountable to provide care, not just for Garry, but for every veteran. They were there when we needed them – now we need to be there for them, when they need us.

“It may not work for me," says Garry, “but hopefully another vet will have a better outcome.”

🌕📓

Julie gave me my first rona haircut. Fine job and I still have all my ears!

Kiss cam finds the best couple.

via Gfycat