June 2019 Our final Africa safari stop was Little Kulala Desert Lodge, in Sossusvlei, the Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia. We took another small charter flight, from Hoanib Valley Camp – or, rather the nearest airstrip from that camp, which was about two hours’s drive away from the camp itself. Sossusvlei Geluk Airstrip is the usual empty airstrip, just a cleared length of land with one or two sheds. As at our other camps, one of the staff picked us up in a Toyota truck converted for passengers, enclosed but not air conditioned. The weather was another scorcher of a day with bright sunlight, even though it is the African winter. We were accompanied by the pilot of the plane, Graham, who was staying at the lodge overnight. About 15 minutes in, Graham conversed with the driver of the truck, Alfred, in Afrikaans, and then Alfred turned the truck around. Graham confessed that he was supposed to start a beacon on the plane to let his company know he’d arrived safely, and he’d forgotten to do that. When we returned to the airfield, Graham did that thing and then we turned the truck around back toward the camp.

I have to confess, we were road-weary at that point and ready to come home, but we still had four more nights in Africa ahead of us plus 28 hours on planes and in airports. And now as I write this a week after our return, I miss being in Africa.

There were only two things you could do in Sossusvlei that appealed to us: Seeing and climbing the majestic dunes, and visiting the Seasrim Canyon. That’s meant a two-night stay would have been ideal; we stayed for three and so we had some time on our hands. And because of the heat, Kulala Desert Lodge was not the ideal place to sit around and rest. There are other things to do in the area, but they did not appeal to us: Ride e-bikes and fat bikes, or go on a wine tasting. You can also take a balloon ride, but that would have cost $1,000, which seemed like a lot for a short experience. I’ve ridden on hot air balloons twice, once with Julie, it’s wonderful but we weren’t interested this time around.

Aside: I wrote all my other journal entries in Africa, with unreliable or no Internet access. Now I’m home with our lovely, home WiFi. And I can just look things up if I don’t know what they are. The name of the lodge we stayed at? The name of the canyon? Pow! Type in a few characters in a browser and there’s your answer. [Update from 2020: I wrote this journal entry in July 2019, a few weeks after returning home, based on notes on the trip.]

The lodge is laid out similarly to the other places we stayed, with a main building in the center, done up like a giant hut, containing the dining room, bar, outdoor seating, and offices and reception desk. The entrance is in front of that building. Spread out on either side were 23 cabins for guests, which are actually big, furnished canvas tents on platforms, as with Xakanaxa and other places we stayed. The lodge calls the cabins “kulalas,” from an African word for sleep. Because of the number of cabins, service was more hotel-like and impersonal; we enjoyed the family feeling at the smaller lodges we stayed at, such as Xakanaxa and Hoanib Valley, and liked Kulala Lodge less.

The dining room has big plate glass windows overlooking the flat desert plain, which seems to stretch off for miles to the distant mountains. We’d been to several African deserts by then, as well as the Anza-Borrego Desert at home, and each one seemed more austere and barren than the last. The shrubs at Sossusvlei are sparse and many tens of yards apart. There are few other animals there, just some birds and lonely impala and kudu.

The big draw at Sossusvlei, though, are the dunes. They are just piles of loose sand, hundreds of feet high and miles long, marching across the desert. One of the highlights of the visit is climbing one of the biggest dunes, called “Big Daddy.” 130 meters high. It’s strenuous, like walking on the beach but also climbing. The sand fights you on every step. And you’re standing on a relatively narrow path, with a steep slope on either side. The path is wide enough that I was only worried a little bit about falling. I was worried a little more about just getting down. I’d been assured by both tourists and guides that getting down is easy and fun, but I was skeptical; I have a lousy sense of balance and anything involving anything like climbing is tricky for me.

Climbing up the dune you have a long string of hikers both in front of and behind you. It isn’t crowded, but if you’re like me and you move slowly, you’ll be passed a couple of times. Like I said, it’s not crowded, but I got to thinking about the famous photos of climbers lined up to ascend to the summit of Mount Everest, like people waiting to get on a bus.

Despite the crowds, tourism isn’t a problem for the dunes, because every night the wind blows and cleans up the footsteps and repairs the damage. The dunes are like new every morning. That’s the theory at least.

I got about two thirds of the way up the dune and decided I had gone far enough. I wasn’t tired, but I’d spent enough time on the climb and didn’t have anything to prove. Also, I didn’t want to keep the other people on our bus waiting. So I turned to my right and went down the steep slope.

And it really was fun going down. I fell twice, but backwards, on my butt, and the sand is so soft it didn’t hurt a bit and I just popped back up. Both my feet were sunk in sand halfway up to my knees, so walking was more like wading and slow going. After I got about two thirds of the way down, I found a rhythm and the rest of the way down was like gliding slowly. Delightful!

We don’t intend to return to Sossusvlei – we feel like we’ve seen and done everything we want to there – but if we somehow do find our way back I want to do that climb again, and this time go all the way up to the summit and do the walk down properly.

In addition to Big Daddy, the attraction next to the dune is Deadvlei, a white clay pan that’s so dry that nothing lives there. Some trees are still standing, 800 years after they died. We were instructed not to touch the trees, lest they shattered.

After lunch, we decided to skip the afternoon activities, and just sat around the cabin in the heat.

The next morning, we were up early, and off to the Seasrim Canyon, which is about 100 feet deep and the third biggest canyon in the world.

We had the guide to ourselves that morning – and the entire canyon, too. Our guide said most people do the dunes in the morning and the canyon in the afternoon, when it can be excuse-me-pardon-me crowded. But we did not see another soul on the climb down and nearly the whole climb up, with just a lot of magnificent geology to ourselves. By that time we were overwhelmed by magnificent nature and a little burned out on it, but we still had enough awe left in our souls to be stirred, at least a little bit.

In the afternoon I began to get cabin fever, and decided to go for a walk along the dry riverbed that the lodge is built alongside of. It was perfectly safe, and a lodge-approved activity. I walk for exercise in a park at home, and this was similar, only dryer, and hotter, and instead of being accompanied by our dog, I had a fly following me much of the way and trying to land on my face. Festus, our guide previously, said flies there don’t bite; they’re trying to drink water from our faces. That must have been one thirsty fly. Along the route, I realize I did not have any solo selfies from the trip, which is like a violation of international law, so I took a couple. The fly photobombed one of them, landing on my face. A flyless African selfie from that afternoon is now my default online profile pic.

The next morning, we began the long journey home, which took two or three days. The nine-hour time difference and 28+ hour flight time from Johannesburg to San Diego make it confusing as to how much time has actually elapsed. The first step was back to the airfield, where we waited a half-hour in the truck for the “ground pilot” – the airfield’s one employee - to show up and open the gate. We didn’t mind; by then we were used to how things are done in Africa. Prior to our trip, I’d talked to a colleague who’d lived six months in South Africa; she said be prepared for things that should be easy to be difficult, and things you’d expect to be difficult to be easy. That stuck with me in incidents such as the wait for the ground pilot to show up. The plane wasn’t going anywhere; we were the only passengers.

We flew a bit more than an hour to the Windhoek Airport, and were met at the gate by our old pal Antone, who had driven us from Windhoek to Okonjima a week or so earlier. He waited with us to check in, poor bastard – there was a very long line and he had somewhere else to be.

The flight to Johannesburg was a commercial flight, and getting on the plane was the end of our safari adventures, because one-hour commercial flight in Africa is not too different from one in the US or Europe.

We arrived in Johannesburg, breezed through customs, and checked into the City Lodge. We were scheduled to get up the next morning for an 8 am private, guided city tour, but neither of us were excited for that. When we’d had Internet access, I’d checked Yelp and TripAdvisor and Google for things to do in Johannesburg and didn’t come up with much of anything. The Apartheid Museum got rave reviews, but it sounded depressing to me. I wanted to see Soweto, which had been the only place Blacks were allowed to live during apartheid, but Julie wasn’t enthusiastic about that. So we put off the tour until 10:30 am so we could pack at leisure.

The driver picked us up in a town car with leather seats, a far cry from the open, battered trucks we’d been bouncing around in for weeks. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of South Africa, Johannesburg, and its history. The one other place we wanted to see, other than Soweto, was Maboneng, which travel guides billed as a bohemian shopping district.

The driver, whose name was Seabo, offered to take us to Soweto in the morning and then to a native African place for lunch. I said hell yeah, because I was always on the lookout for native foods – nearly all the foods we’d eaten on this trip were European, although nearly all of it was delicious – but Julie said no. I thought for a moment and realized that it was not a great idea to sample street food in an unknown cuisine a few hours prior to getting on a plane for a 28-hour flight. So I passed too. Instead, we went to Maboneng, and Seabo dropped us off for lunch and a bit of walking round.

Maboneng was disappointing. It was crowded and a little threatening, like much of the rest of Johannesburg we’d seen, with a few cheap-looking shops and stands set up selling crafts that looked no different than the kind of thing you’d find at the airport. There were also a few Ethiopian and other African restaurants and a coffee cafe, which would have been tempting to me on another day, but like I said I didn’t want to try any strange cuisines just before a long flight. So we ate at an Italian restaurant/sports bar that was actually very good, and friendly. When we got out the neighborhood looked friendlier too; I even spotted one man who looked local, dangling a big camera from his hand. People don’t dangle big cameras in a dangerous neighborhood. Not for long at least.

Seabo returned shortly after lunch and took us to Soweto.

Soweto, he explained, is home to 1.2 million people, which makes it a respectable city within the city. It has neighborhoods of great poverty – shantytowns and slums made of scrap metal – which, Seabo noted, are all that you see in photos and video of Soweto. There are also middle class homes, and even affluent residences. Even the affluent residences seemed cheek-by-jowl close to each other, and small to me, though Julie said she thought some of them were larger. They had high fences around them, suggesting a high crime rate. And you’d see poverty and affluence very close – a shed or just open air tables selling a hodgepodge of merchandise, just a few steps from a scavenged home. Hand-painted advertisements adorned walls, touting businesses; I noted a lot of building contractors. Businesses mingled with housing. If there were any zoning laws in Soweto, I didn’t see evidence of it.

I saw livestock grazing in empty lots, cattle and goats. In the middle of the city!

Seabo lived in Soweto; he seemed to like it.

Seabo offered to stop to let us out at Nelson Mandela’s and Desmond Tutu’s homes, he seemed disappointed when we didn’t get out. But that street was dense with panhandlers, buskers, and other street people, who seemed aggressive; not violent, but not inclined to take no for an answer. Julie and I were not in the mood to run that kind of gauntlet.

We arrived back at the hotel at 3:30 pm, said goodbye to Seabo – who really was a good guide; we were just bad tourists – and made our way to airline check-in.

All in all I was not impressed with Johannesburg. It seemed to me the kind of place you’d only ever go to if you for financial reasons. Maybe, like Seabo, you were a poor villager looking to make a living. Maybe you’re a millionaire looking to be a billionaire. Or maybe you’re just somebody in the middle.

And then we were on our way home. I barely slept on the 28+-hour flights, watched something like five movies, two seasons of The Good Place, then slept most of the next 24 hours when we arrived home. Several days later I drove a car for the first time in a month; I did not hit anyone or go off the road.

We talk a lot about going back. We went to Africa really on a whim; it felt like a fun adventure. And it was, and we’ve fallen in love with it. Maybe in three years, if we can afford it financially. I’d like to see gorillas and chimpanzees, visit the Olduvai Gorge where the first people on Earth lived millions of years ago, see Cape Town, spend a day each in Windhoek and Swakopmund, spend more time in Botswana, get Festus to guide us around. Africa is a big, beautiful continent with so much to do! 🌍📓

In the early 1980s cable movie channels didn’t have much inventory and they’d play the same movie over and over, multiple times a day. And if you had the TV on for digital wallpaper, you’d sometimes end up watching the same movie a few times over the course of a few weeks.

One of those movies, for me, was called “Dance of the Dwarfs," and I quite liked it. It was a ripoff of “The African Queen,” about an uptight, beautiful woman anthropologist who hires a drunk, down-on-his-luck helicopter pilot for an expedition into the jungle to find a mythical race of monster dwarves. Or dwarfs. The helicopter pilot is played by Peter Fonda.

I have no idea if the movie was any good. I fear not, but I’d like to watch it again to find out – and oho, I see it is uncut and remastered on YouTube!

The co-star was an actress named Deborah Raffin, who I remember thinking at the time was a recognizable B-list star and I now don’t recognize much of anything she was in before this movie. Or afterward.

The movie also featured John Amos in a supporting role.

The preview DEFINITELY looks low-budget, with some cheesy acting and cringey dialogue … but kind of charming?

I remember the scene where she shoots all his liquor bottles. A woman who was adept with a gun was a novelty in movies at that time. To my uneducated eye, she seems to be using a proper shooting stance, not waving her gun around like most movie characters.

I’ll see if I can get Julie to watch the movie with me. I’m not hopeful.

Later: I rewatched it. Not bad.

🍿

I encountered the idea of a “digital garden” Friday and was instantly enthusiastic and spent some time this weekend nerding out about it. Here is the result – the beginning of my digital garden: mitchwagner.com.

A digital garden is a personal website curated by its author, with essays and information about the subject or subjects they’re excited about. Some are wide-ranging and complex and cover a variety of subjects, while others cover a single subject, such as neurology or books,

Here’s a directory of digital gardens. It’s a digital garden of digital gardens!

Digital gardens provide an alternative to chronological streams such as blogs and social media. Streams are great for finding out what’s happening and whats new now. But they’re lousy for organizing information. Also, streams are terrible for longevity. Once stuff gets pushed down off the top of the stream, it disappears. Digital gardens are places where you can organize information and keeping information available over the long term.

Digital gardens can be very simple, just an index page or a Google Doc. Or you can use sophisticated software to create complex, Wikipedia-like documents.

After a while thinking about this idea, I realized that we’re talking here about the old, 90s “personal website.” People back then would create websites devoted to their favorite bands, or hobbies, or just their own lives and interests. Eventually these got swallowed up by Wikipedia, Google and the various social media silos.

Digital gardens are an extension of, and renaming of, personal websites. That doesn’t make the idea less powerful though.

Digital gardens are exciting to me, personally, because they solve a couple of problems that I’ve been noodling about for years. One problem is that I post a lot of stuff to my streams. Some days I post a dozen or two dozen items. Most are ephemeral – links to breaking news articles, some with comments, some without. Wisecracks. Memes. Old ads and photos from the mid-20th Century.

But some of what I post seems like it should be more long-lasting, whether it’s a book review or the journal of our 25th anniversary safari to Africa last year.

A digital garden solves that problem. I can just put up an index page of links to long-lived and notable content, and let that — rather than the blog or my biography — be my home page. I’ll continue with the blog and keep the bio. But the index page will be the main entrance to my site.

Again, this is not a new idea. Gina Trapani has been doing that a few years, and I don’t think she would say her idea is particularly original to her. But it’s still a great idea — and it’s new to me.

The second problem that digital gardens solve for me is that I’ve been noodling about ideas for projects for, well, several years now. Interviews with people I find interesting, software reviews and how-tos. Occasionally I have even acted on these ideas. But I don’t do it often because I don’t have a permanent home for them.

Resources

My digital garden: mitchwagner.com.

Here’s the article that got me excited, and introduced the idea of “digital gardening” to me: Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

How the blog broke the web – Amy Hoy provides a brief history of blogs and social media, and discusses why they’re not great ways to organize information.

Hoy says there were only 23 blogs in 1999? Amazing. By late 2001 there seemed like a million of them.

Maggie Appleton: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden – Apparently the term and idea has been around in various forms for more than 20 years. Not surprising. The internet is a tangled web. Streams and search engines are two great ways to find stuff, but stuff can still be hard to find. That’s not a new problem.

Maggie Appleton’s directory of digital gardeners and digital gardening tools

Maggie’s Digital Garden

Maggie again: A brief overview of digital gardens as a Twitter thread.

A list of artificial brain networked notebook apps – These include a couple of familiar names to me, such as Roam Research and Obsidian. They seem to be a mix of private note-taking apps, Internet publishing tools, and private apps that can also publish to the public web.

This is a take on “digital gardens” that borrows from the philosophy of “zettelkasten.” Put simply, a zettelkasten is a system of note-taking where you write down each idea separately — in its original vision decades ago, you wrote each idea on a slip of paper or index card, though now of course there are digital versions — and then link madly between related notes. Ideas can come from books, articles, thinking, observations, whatever. Zettelkasten advocates say they can come up with fresh insights simply by returning to their zettel and following the links. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who invented the idea, credited his zettelkasten as a collaborator on many papers and books.

You don’t have to use dedicated software for a digital garden. Mine is just an index page for my existing blog.

Second Brain – “A curated list of awesome “Public Zettelkastens 🗄️ / Second Brains 🧠 / Digital Gardens 🌱”

Digital Gardens – Another explainer with a couple of examples. The author says:

In basic terms, [a digital garden] is a different format for written content on the web. It’s about moving away from blog posts ordered by dates and categories, into more of an interlinked web of notes.

One of the main ingredients is bi-directional links between those notes, creating a network of notes, similar to Wikipedia.

I would not say that the notes have to be interlinked, Wikipedia-style. Though they can be.

gwern.net – A very nice example of a digital garden covering a broad range of subjects.

Article: My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks.

June 23, 2019 — Yesterday, we left the camp for our next stop. Festus drove us two hours over those rough desert roads to the same airstrip we’d flown in to. We arrived 40 minutes early so we had time to spend with our new friend. We sat in the same shelter where we’d had our first lunch together three days earlier, and talked.

Festus told us how he found his way when guiding people through through the bush. I thought maybe he’d memorized the features, the trees and rocks and hills and such, like Mark Twain memorized the Mississippi River. He said no, those things change, but the desert is surrounded by mountains and he looked for the relative position of the peaks to figure out where he is. I was reminded of how I found my way around by car when we lived in Boston; the Prudential and Hancock skyscrapers towered over the skyline and were visible miles around. I looked for those two towers and their positions relative to each other and that gave me a first approximation of my position and whether I was moving in the right direction.

The airstrip was just a cleared stretch of flat ground with a few sheds at one end of it, where we sat. The only other people were a young Himba man, wearing Western clothes, who worked as a sort of attendant, along with two of his buddies, keeping him company. I was reminded of a rural gas station in upstate New York that I visited for two minutes to get driving directions one night years ago when I got lost on the way to visit a friend. I thought at the time that I blew through that town in less the five minutes but those three friends had probably been at that gas station for years.

In addition to the three Himba men, the only other denizens of the airstrip were two emaciated, medium-sized dogs who walked slowly through. They didn’t belong to anyone; they were just passing. They came to the door of the restroom and watched with sad eyes while I did my business in there. I am usually leery of off-leash dogs but pair looked so sad I just wanted to give them a bath, take them home, feed them a nice supper of boiled chicken and rice, and then curl up on the couch and watch TV together. One of the Himba men attempted to chase the dogs off by throwing pebbles and shouting at them. The dogs looked like they had been ready to move on anyway. Three more dogs, equally skinny, forlorn and slow moving, came through a few minutes later.

We had a surprisingly moving goodbye with Festus, considering we’d only been together three days. Festus gave me a warm triple handclasp with both hands and looked me in the eye, a traditional greeting he’d taught us. I’m afraid I rushed it; Julie pointed out to me later that I’m just not an emotionally demonstrative person, other than with her. I’m working on that. I hope Festus will remember our conversations and my sincere respect and affection for him, and that he will forget my hurried goodbye.

And we got on the small plane to our next stop, which was actually two flights, one more than an hour to Swakopmund, a small city founded by Germans for mining and other industry, and then we switched planes while the first refueled, to go more than another hour to our current destination, Sossusvlei. Our planes on both legs were Cessna C210s, with two passenger seats for me and Julie, the only passengers, and a couple more seats temporarily removed for our luggage.

I’m getting to quite like small planes. The ride is more interesting, even if it is more likely to be scary sometimes. You chat with the pilot. They give the safety and orientation talk personally and always include the same joke: They show us the airsickness bag and tell us if we use it we should not return it; instead, keep it “as a souvenir” of the airline. For our our first leg, to Soussesvlei, I did the joke before the pilot did. He was chagrined; I’d stepped on his laugh line!

During our brief layover in Swakopmund, the airline parked us inside a small waiting room in a hangar. It was a bit of a transition after our time in the bush, a proper modern waiting room with a sign with the WiFi password. This was my first access to good WiFi in a week and I slurped up email and reviewed it on the plane. I had left an out-of-office message that said I would be out all June and NOT reading email, even when I get back, so anyone who needs anything should email my colleagues or message me again in early July. I am adhering to the spirit of that message; I only plan to read a few messages when I return. The only reason I’m even checking email is to see if anything cataclysmic or wonderful happens. So far there’s been neither, just work and my friends and family rolling on without me. Similarly, I glance at news headlines every few days and am surprised by how inconsequential it all is.

On the leg from Swakopmond to Soussevlei, we had a scenic flight, and the pilot pointed out landmarks from the air, including salt processing fields, two shipwrecks, one of which is now deep inland as the desert advances over the century since that disaster, and the dunes of Soussuslei.

Sossusvlei is a big, dry hot desert. Every time I say someplace in Africa is pretty dry and hot and desolate, we go someplace even more dry and hot and desolate. Geology is Sossusvlei’s big draw, including miles and miles of sand dunes, stretching up to hundreds of feed tall. Like our two previous destinations, Soussusvlei is blistering hot by day, even now, in African winter, though it gets cold at night. It can get up to 50 degrees C in summer.

🌍📓

Apple kicked Epic’s Fortnite out of the App Store for terms of service violations. Fortnite immediately sued.

Thomas Claburn at The Register:

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, filed a lawsuit against Apple on Thursday accusing the iGiant of illegally monopolizing iOS app distribution and app payments.

The game biz earlier in the day announced a promotional initiative called Fortnite Mega Drop to allow Fortnite players to purchase in-game virtual currency and in-game items directly from Epic, at a price 20 per cent below their iOS App Store in-app purchase price.

In doing so, Epic violated Section 3.11 of Apple’s App Store Guidelines, which states that iOS developers must use Apple’s payment mechanism.

“If you’re a U.S. subsidiary of a big U.S. firm and you’re based in Europe, whom do you obey? The European law that says you can’t hand it over because of GDPR or the American laws that say they have extra judicial control and you’ve got to hand it over?"

siliconangle.com/2020/08/0…

James Hamblin MD, writing at The Atlantic:

Have several masks, made to fit well around your nose and mouth. Make them as heavily layered as you can tolerate. After wearing them for a day or so, or in a high-contact scenario, let them sit for a few days in a sunny, out-of-the-way place. Between the effects of time and light, there should be little need for running a washing machine or going through the hassle of hand-washing your masks….

If it sounds like I’m making this up based on best guesses, I am. Everyone is. We would ideally all be wearing surgical masks, and disposing of them frequently, but we didn’t prepare accordingly. So for all their flaws, cloth masks are important: Making them effective enough for use in daily pandemic life means we’re freeing up medical-grade masks for people who really need them, especially in places where they are still in short supply, such as the United States. Health-care workers around the world still need proper personal protective equipment more than a random guy named Gene who wants to go to the store to buy snacks.

Good news for me. I haven’t washed my masks in … well … ever.

Bray walked away from $1 million because he couldn’t stand Amazon’s labor and business practices anymore. Now he’s an outspoken advocate for breaking the company up.

Karen Weise writing at The New York Times:

SEATTLE — Tim Bray, an internet pioneer and a former vice president at Amazon, sent shock waves through the tech giant in early May when he resigned for what he called “a vein of toxicity” running through its culture.

Within a few hours, his blog post about the resignation drew hundreds of thousands of views, and his inbox filled up with requests from journalists, recruiters and techies. Soon, lawmakers on Capitol Hill cited the post. It all made Mr. Bray, 65, Amazon’s highest-profile defector.

But there was more he wanted to say.

In the weeks since, he has aimed his brain power not at fixing a coding problem but at framing a broader critique of the company. In talks and blog posts that have drawn attention inside the company, he has called for unionization and antitrust regulation. Amid “the beating of the antitrust drums,” Mr. Bray wrote in one post, he would like to see Amazon separate its retail business from its lucrative cloud computing unit.

“And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone,” he said.

Cruising the Past & Future of the Retro Shopping Mall

I loved to go to the mall in my 20s. I’d go alone, during the day, get a fast food lunch, see what was new on the science fiction shelves at B. Dalton and Waldenbooks — anything by Asimov, Heinlein, Niven or Zelazny? A new Robert B. Parker? In that era before the mainstream internet and before I got plugged into science fiction fandom, the only way to find out if a favorite author had a new book out was to check in stores.

Then I’d catch a movie matinee. I’d find a spot directly under a light in the theater and read from one of my new books until the movie started.

That was a good afternoon.

I did not know this: Ghislaine Maxwell is the daughter of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, briefly famous as a rival to Rupert Murdoch. Robert Maxwell’s body was found floating near his yacht in 1991.

Maybe his death was an accident. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe he was murdered to cover up … something.

The yacht was named the Lady Ghislaine, for his daughter.

The elder Maxwell and Richard Epstein had a lot in common. They were both parvenus who bought their way into high society and respectability, and who fell to disgrace.

Ghislaine Maxwell idolized both men.

Mark Seal reports at Vanity Fair:

To Ghislaine, her mother, three brothers, and three sisters, Robert Maxwell was Samson, tearing down the gates of Gaza, as he was depicted in a stained-glass window in their 51-room Oxford mansion: a titan of luck, impossible achievement, and unlimited wealth. “If Bob Maxwell didn’t exist, no one could invent him,” Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock would say. Born Jan Ludvik Hoch into a Hasidic family in a tiny village in Czechoslovakia, he was so poor that he and his six siblings had to wear shoes in shifts. He evolved into a warrior, surviving the Holocaust, in which 300 of his immediate and extended family members perished, to join the Czech resistance. When his country fell to the Nazis, he fled to France and joined the British Army, fighting in bloody battles from Normandy to Germany. After the war, he married the daughter of a prosperous British silk merchant, christened himself Robert Maxwell, and bought Pergamon Press, a publisher of scientific journals. It became the anchor of an empire that would, at the time of his death, include hundreds of companies, among them the publishing giant Macmillan and newspapers from The Mirror in London to the New York Daily News. As big as or maybe even big-ger than his rival, Rupert Murdoch, Maxwell was a bombastic, demanding patriarch who dined with kings and presidents and exhibited a bottomless appetite for family, food, fortune, and fame.

Now he was dead, and it wasn’t long before the mighty house of Maxwell was exposed as a house of cards. Maxwell, it turned out, had pledged millions from his company’s pension funds to shore up his tottering empire, exposing his 32,000 employees to retirement ruin and racking up debts of nearly $5 billion. The conspiracy theories multiplied: He committed suicide rather than face his financial crimes; he died aboard his yacht while engaged in sex with a mistress; he fell overboard during his regular postmidnight piss over the railings; he was murdered by British security agents panicked that he had taken possession of tapes that could incriminate the MI6 intelligence service in crime and espionage; he was injected with a poisonous syringe by frogmen sent by his Mossad spymasters to silence him from revealing their secret arms deals.

I configured a new MacBook Pro a month ago. Usually I use Migration Assistant for that kind of thing but this time I started from scratch and moved data and apps over manually.

Three apps that still haven’t made the transition.

• Alfred
• Keyboard Maestro
• TextExpander

All three are apps I previously used daily and would have sworn were essential to my workflow. Apparently not.

I do have an idea for a thing I want to do with Keyboard Maestro – set up a series of palettes to remind me of keyboard shortcuts. But I’m in no rush on that.

Brian X. Chen at the New York Times:

When we buy a gadget these days, we rarely assume that it will endure.

We expect to play a video game console only for as long as companies make games for it. We expect to use a smartphone or a laptop for just as long as the battery has juice or until it can no longer run important software.

At some point, we feel that we must upgrade. We must have the latest and greatest camera. We must have apps that run faster. We must have brighter screens.

Here’s the thing: This is all the doing of marketing professionals, seared into our subconscious. The reality is that consumer electronics, such as your phone, computer or tablet, can last for many years. It just takes some research to obtain tech that will endure. This exercise will be increasingly important in a pandemic-induced recession, which has forced many of us to tighten our spending.

“It’s a matter of buying what you need, not what the company is telling you that you need…. ”

Look for tech that’s easy to repair, particularly replacing the battery. And consider spending more to get the best.

You get an avatar that sits at a table or – for bigger meetings – in a virtual lecture hall, with your own video-captured face on it.

I’m skeptical.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/08/microsoft_together_mode/

Generation Jones is the younger cohort of boomers. We are a separate generation, raised in the recession of the 70s in very early 80s, rather than the prosperous decades following World War II.

We have a different attitude and different pop-culture icons than our older peers.

Jeffrey I Williams writes at the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014:

Generation Jones is an actual thing. It refers to the second half of the baby boom, to a group of people born roughly from 1954 to 1965.

We might be grouped with the baby boomers, but our formative experiences were profoundly different. If the zeitgeist of the boomers was optimism and revolution, the vibe of Gen Jones was cynicism and disappointment. Our formative years came in the wake of the 1973 oil shock, Watergate, the malaise of the Carter years and the Reagan recession of 1982. Above all, we resented the older boomers themselves — who we were convinced had things so much easier, and in whose shadow we’d been forced to spend our entire lives.

The fact that most people have never even heard of Generation Jones is the most Generation Jones thing about Generation Jones.

Not My Generation www.chronicle.com/article/G…

Also, from Jennifer Finney Boylan, at the New York Times last month:

Donald Trump (who is, it should be noted, an older boomer) has been a fraud on so many levels, but if there’s anything authentic about him, it’s his air of grievance. It may have been this, Mr. Pontell says, that made Jonesers vote for him in 2016. Hillary Clinton, to them, was the epitome of older baby boomer entitlement, and if Mr. Trump stood for anything, it was for the very things Gen Jones most identifies with: jealousy, resentment, self-pity.

There’s a word in Ireland, “begrudgery.” Padraig O’Morain, writing in The Irish Times, says: “Behind a lot of this begrudgery lies the unexamined and unspoken assumption that there is only so much happiness to go around. And guess what? The others have too much and I have too little.”

Mr. Jones and Me: Younger Baby Boomers Swing Left www.nytimes.com/2020/06/2…

A friend asked her Facebook friends what was the first movie that they remembered seeing in a theater.

I dug through the IMDB to find some of the earliest movies I remember seeing in theaters and enjoying. They include Doctor Doolittle, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Love Bug and the Jungle Book. They came out in 1967-68.

Also at about that time I remember a movie with Sammy Davis Jr. — I probably had no idea who he was when I first saw the movie, but I recognized him later, in memory. For most of my life I remembered one or two scenes of that movie and how much I enjoyed it but I couldn’t remember the name of the movie or what it as about.

I remembered Sammy was in a castle and that the movie was a comedy. I remembered one scene where he was shouting out a window. Not a lot to go on, but enough for Google:

“Salt and Pepper.” It’s from 1968 and also stars Peter Lawford.

After discovering the body of a murdered female agent in their trendy Soho, London nightclub, groovy owners Charles Salt and Christopher Pepper partake in a fumbling investigation and uncover an evil plot to overthrow the government. Can our cool, yet inept duo stop the bad guys in time?

Here’s the trailer on YouTube:

Sammy Davis Jr. plays Salt and Peter Lawford plays Pepper. Get it?

It’s not a children’s movie, but I expect my Mom wanted to see it and so she dragged my Dad and me and my brothers. I remember my parents hated it and my brothers were too young to get it, but I loved it. I thought Sammy and Peter Lawford were cool. Which they absolutely were, but the movie looks like a turkey.

📓📽

Christopher Bonanos at New York Magazine:

He wrote, too. Starting in our first issues, Glaser and his friend Jerome Snyder, the design director of Sports Illustrated, created “The Underground Gourmet,” becoming very possibly the world’s first columnists covering cheap ethnic restaurants in a sophisticated way. That sounds like no big deal now, but it was a minor revolution in 1968. As Glaser himself would explain when asked, nobody back then bothered to cover restaurants outside the white-tablecloth world, because they didn’t advertise. But as hardcore New Yorkers, Glaser and Snyder knew that a whole lot of us love nothing more than a great Chinatown dumpling joint, or a superior taco stand, or a scoop of perfect whitefish salad, or a bowl of udon. He brought all of those and more to New York’s early readership, and everyone — from the Times on down — soon started doing the same. …

In the mid-1980s, Steve Hindy and Tom Potter, the founders of a new microbrewery, came to him for a logo design. Glaser took a look at their proposed name — Brooklyn Eagle, recalling the defunct newspaper — and, as he told the story, he offered one key bit of advice. “Anheuser-Busch already has the eagle,” he told them. “You’ve got Brooklyn. That’s enough!” Brooklyn Brewery, with its swoop-y baseball-jersey logo evoking both the departed Dodgers and a swirl of beer foam, made its debut in 1988. Because it was a start-up without much money, Glaser took a stake in the company instead of a fee. Today, Brooklyn Brewery is a huge global brand — and, as Glaser told me a couple of years ago, that was the thing that made him financially independent, enough to keep him in taxicabs and then some, enthusiastically sketching, for the rest of his life.

Milton Glaser, New York and ‘I❤NY’ Designer, Dies at 91

Caroline Randall Williams says that as a light-skinned Black woman, her body is a monument to the Confederate legacy.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

June 21, 2019 - Yesterday was busy even by the standards of this trip. Up at 6 and out at 6:30 to the main tent for breakfast and coffee. The coffee is not bad here; it’s not great, but drinkable black.

I chatted with Jordanna, an Asian woman with a posh English accent. I asked where she is from; she said London. If she had said Singapore, I would not have been surprised – Crazy Rich Asians. [Note from 2020: I had just seen the movie a few weeks earlier on the plane over. Only a year later and that pop culture reference seems hopelessly dated.]

=-=-=-

Later at breakfast yesterday we had a conversation with Ross and Agnes, a couple from Atlanta. We talked about the difficulties of bad WiFi – how bad WiFi is worse than no WiFi, because with no WiFi at least you know you have no WiFi, but with bad WiFi you’re endlessly pulling to refresh. [Note from 2020: The Oatmeal did a comic on just this very subject: <theoatmeal.com/comics/no…>]

I was so used to meeting non-Americans – Namibians and Botswanans in particular – that when they asked where we are from, I reflexively nearly said, “The United States. California. San Diego,” which is now my stock answer I told them that and they laughed and said that when telling non-Americans where they are from, they say, “Atlanta. It’s a big city in Georgia. Which is next to Florida.” People around the world have heard of Florida.

Festus, our outstanding guide, took us out for a game drive in the morning, and the highlight of that was finding lions feeding on a zebra. I found it fascinating, but neither thrilling nor disgusting. It was nature.

But the highlight of the day was a visit to a Himba tribal village, a family of about ten people living as their ancestors have probably done for tens of thousands of years. We drove about two hours through the hot desert, flat and khaki colored and featureless like much of it is here in Africa, with the occasional hardy plant. We went through canyons and saw zebras galloping at full speed, despite the heat. That’s how zebras move by default – always at a gallop, Festus told us. The male zebra brings up the rear of his harem. We saw ostriches too.

The village comprises two large rectangular kraals, totaling an acre I guess, made of the same rough vertical wood branches that are standard for those sorts of structures. One is for goats – we saw a few wandering around – and the other is for cattle. That’s mainly what the Himba live on, their diet consists of a great deal of protein, Festus told us later.

There were ten people in the tribe, a man, his wives, a few toddlers and very young children, and a younger man who looked to be about 15 or 16. They were nearly naked, the women with their breasts uncovered. The primary man, who we interacted with mainly, wore leather sandals like flip-flops, a short skirt or kilt made of a blue fabric in front that appeared to be manufactured, appendages that looked like fur animal tails in the rear, a handmade necklace that seemed to be made of leather and maybe bone or wood, and nothing else that I can recall. He and all the people were lean but appeared well-fed and healthy. The younger man wore a T-shirt advertising a brand of beer, in English, that I did not recognize.

Festus said ahead of time that he would introduce us to each person, and encouraged us to use the tribal word for hello – “morro” - accompanied by a firm handshake. We did that, greeting the men and women. I added, “I am very pleased to meet you,” knowing my words would not be understood but hoping my voice would.

The people lived in a few small huts, about as tall as me and maybe wide enough to lie down. [Note from 2020, for those who don’t know me personally – I’m about 5'9"-5'10" – average height for an American man.] The huts are conical, made of dung mixed with mud. There were a couple of smaller hut-like structures on raised platforms about knee or waist height, used for storage. There were two small campfires, one of them with religious significance where the man told us he went to pray each morning.

We talked a bit, translated by Festus, because none of these people spoke English. I addressed my questions and statements to the man directly, occasionally looking to Festus, as I have seen people do when dealing with translators in TV and movies. I don’t have much experience with that myself.

I asked the man what message he would like the rest of the world to know about his people. He was stumped by that, and called to the women for help. Later, Festus told us they have a matriarchal culture – despite being polygamous – and women are very well respected. He asked me in return what I wanted. I said long healthy life and not to get in trouble with my wife. We all laughed at that.

Then he invited us to take a look around and said we were welcome to take pictures.

By that point I was ready to go because it seemed to me that these people’s lives were awful. Living in the hot desert with barely any shelter or clothing, squatting on the ground, eating goats and cattle, in a community of less than a dozen people. But we did not want to be rude, so we looked around a bit and I took a few photos.

They had a large table set up with crafts, many of which they’d made locally, some of which they’d bought, inexpensive giraffe and hippo figurines and jewelry. Some of it was made from PVC pipe. I had previously planned to buy a bracelet and be able to tell people casually I bought it in a Himba village, a primitive tribe in Namibia, but that seemed disrespectful now and none of the items appealed to me or were even in my size.

=-=-=-

But we bought a few things because that was the arrangement. Festus has told us we were expected to bargain, and so we did although it seemed petty to bargain the equivalent of a US dollar or two from people who had so little.

In the first part of the ride back to the camp I was troubled by what I had seen. I’ve grown up seeing images of people who live like the Himba, but to see it in real life was moving. The Himba have less than the homeless in any US city or the people who live in the shantytowns we passed at Windhoek.

I was torn, I told a Festus. On the one hand, I said, I think people have a right to life how they want to live. On the other hand: Not like that.

Festus was silent then and I asked him to tell me if he thought I was wrong. He said no, he agreed with me.

At one point on the drive back to camp we passed a single broken beer bottle on the desert floor. It was the only trash we had seen. Festus stopped the Toyota and hopped out. He crouched down next to the debris and examined it momentarily without touching it, then carefully plucked the pieces one at a time with one hand and deposited them gently in his other hand. I thought it would be good to get out and help but I was enervated by the heat and the scene I’d seen at the Himba village, so I watched.

We drove on mostly quiet on the way back to camp, over a sea of sand, as it got dark out.

Later in conversations with Festus and other Africans, I learned that the quandary I faced in thinking about the Himba is reflected in African policy. The African nations have ceded large tracts of land to the Himba and the Himba get revenue from rent on that land. The camp we are staying at is on land leased from the Himba.

In conversations with Africans later I learned a couple of things about the Himba that made me think differently about their lives. They have a rich matriarchal society and tradition. Social ties are as important to human beings as physical needs. And close social ties are something we Americans lack, leading to epidemic in suicides and to drug addiction, which is a kind of slow suicide. Would it be ridiculous to suggest that Americans are as impoverished as the Himba? [Note from 2020: An exaggeration but not ridiculous.]

Also, the Himba enjoy complete freedom of movement. They can at any moment pack up all their belongings on their back and go elsewhere.

I think it was the same evening that Festus gave a brief astronomy presentation, showing us major features of the night sky using a laser pointer that shot out a solid beam, similar to the one we’d gotten from another guide at another lodge. He talked about red giants becoming supernovae, and showed us a red giant, Antares. He pointed out dust clouds that obscured part of the Milky Way, including the biggest dust cloud, the Coal Sack. We already knew Festus was expert on the local animals, birds, insects and plants, geology, anthropology and centuries of history. Now astronomy too?!

Throughout our stay in Africa I’ve encountered evidence of the wrongness of Western prejudices about indigenous peoples being less sophisticated than Westerners. Festus is a prime example, he’s from the Herrrera tribe and grew up in a simple village, but he is as intelligent, well educated and thoughtful as anyone I’ve met. He seems like a kind and good soul as well. All the guides we’ve had are encyclopedias of knowledge of natural history, with a love of nature and their home country and eager to share that love with tourists. But Festus stands out among even that group for his dedication. I asked him what he does for fun, when he’s not working. He spends time with family, visits a park favored by Africans, watches nature documentaries – he’s particularly fond of Attenborough – and reads natural history. So he’s working even when he’s not. At work, when he’s not shepherding tourists, he trains other guides. The rest of the staff of the camp seem to hold him in high esteem, and after spending only three days with him, Julie and I do too.

One of the waitresses, named Thensia, speaks a click language. She shared a few words with me, it was beautiful and unintelligible. Julie and I asked the staff to take our photo, and several of the younger staffed in jumped in and wanted to take photos with Julie and each other, so we did that a few minutes and everyone had fun. One of the young men planted a kiss on the cheek of one of the waitresses just as I clicked the shutter and everyone laughed. Young Black Africans seem to enjoy photos, we encountered the same thing in the school we visited. Both the children and the staff at the camp crowded around the phone to see the photos when they were done.

Thensia asked me if I had WhatsApp and I said I do, but I hardly ever use it. She watched over my shoulder as I poked around in the app looking for a way to send a message to a new phone number but could not find a way. She told me I had to add the number to my contacts first, and with my permission she snatched the phone from my hand and quickly added herself to my address book. And I sent her the photos.

My point is that she was quite adept with the iPhone; her fingertips flew over the keyboard and icons. Hardly an innocent savage!

And now I have the phone number of a pretty 20-year-old waitress in my contacts list. What could go wrong with that?

[Note from 2020: I just checked my phone. I still have her number!]

(click the images for a bigger view)

Me, Julie and Festus have lunch.

A lion feasting on a zebra.

Lion walking away after feeding on a zebra. Note the bloody jaws and chest.

Part of me thought the last two photos were too graphic to post, but mainly I think they’re just nature.

📓🌍

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night unable to sleep – which I’m doing now at least two or three times a week, it’s just normal now – and I thought did Brexit happen?

I remember it was a really big deal for a couple of years, and then it was imminent and then it was going to be days away and then … nothing. Did it happen? Has great Britain left Europe? Is Great Britain literally drifting around the Atlantic Ocean now, unmoored?

Also, what happened to the murder hornets?

June 19, 2019 — We got our cold weather yesterday, up at 5 am for the morning game drive. Camp Kipwe wasn’t cold. I’d assumed it might be at night, knowing the wide temperature fluctuations you get in the desert and judging by the heavy blankets the resort laid on the bed. But it remained warm all night and it felt like the mid-60s at breakfast and when we set out on the drive. But it quickly got colder as we went across the desert – into a different micro-climate? – and the wind whipped through the open safari truck. We drove for more than an hour down relatively smooth dirt roads, rough dirt roads, and rutted desert landscape – more African massage – until we found a dozen elephants.

Even though we’ve seen literally more than a hundred elephants so far, this was worth it. These were desert adapted elephants, of which only about 600 remain here, with longer legs and broader feet. We got pretty close, a dozen or so yards, and saw a mother with her baby, including breastfeeding, and two immature males play fighting, locking tusks and tossing their heads around.

On the way back we stopped for coffee in the middle of a flat sandy desert plain, nearly devoid of visible life other than ourselves, with irregular notched mountains in the distance. The temperature got up to the 80s or 90s by then.

We were really surprised by this heat. We were expecting more of the same, even colder, temps in the 30s or 40s first thing in the morning, and 70ish in the hottest part of the day. Instead, it’s hot and the sun is bright, the kind of weather that makes you want to stay inside in the a/c bxack home. Fortunately we’re prepared, with clothes for any temperature from 40 degrees to 100 degrees. (After that, clothing won’t help you.)

I wonder what the temperature is at home. No internet means no way to find out.

At lunch, we decided to skip the afternoon activity and just take the rest of the day as a down day. This was a comfortable spot for it. We’d once again been upgraded to a suite, with comfortable chairs. We had a good nap – those 5 and 6 am wake up calls add up, combined with long, leisurely dinners that start at 7 pm. After nap, I had a shower, which was lovely, as our African schedule has allowed me only three or four of those per week.

=-=-=-

We woke up this morning for breakfast at Okonjima Lunxury Bush Camp and were driven to Okonjima Airstrip by Gabriel, the manager of the resort, a South African with a nicer four-wheel drive vehicle than the others we’ve ridden in. He told us that he ran the place with his wife Sarah, a Canadian, who we’d met previously. The staff is, as Julie surmised, all men. He said that started by coincidence, but they kept hiring men and turning away women because that meant they did not need separate housing. Also, no maternity leave, ha ha. Other than institutional sexism, Gabriel was a pleasant fellow, and told us about difficulties running a resort in Namibia. Hard to find supplies, businesses close at lunch, no Internet access, to name three.

We took another small plane, big enough for eight passengers but with the seats taken out and only me and Julie riding. We encountered moderate turbulence over the mountains. I’m doing much better with that; I still don’t like it but my brain continues to function. I keep my eyes open and concentrate on looking at the horizon; I think I read that somewhere. Also, while there are no handgrips in the plane, I gripped the bottom of the seat with one hand, which was helpful. No big deal. We landed at Twyfelfontein Airstrip after 50 minutes, a smooth landing. Our pilot, Nick, bid us farewell.

As was the case at most of our other stops, our guide greeted us at the airstrip. As with most of our other stops, he will be our guide for the duration of our stay. His name was Festus, and over the course of our first few hours together, he revealed an encyclopedic knowledge of natural history, including botany, zoology, geology and anthropology – I was interested to learn from Festus that there had been a recent discovery of a new human ancestor, Homo Namibius, placed between Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus, at about 3.5 million years before present, if Festus recalled correctly. He knows African and Namibian history, and he served us a tasty lunch of beef schnitzel, green salad with feta cheese, and fresh fruit, along with fresh water, with soft drinks available but not requested. The schnitzel, along with apple strudel at dinner, is a byproduct of Namibian’s colonial history, it was a colony of Germany.

Twyfelfontein proved to be another hotbox, and Festus drove us through the desert for two hours in heat I estimate at 90 or even 100 degrees, and me wearing hiking boots and medium-weight cargo pants. The desert is even more austere and beautiful than Okonjima, all khaki and a few hardy plants and animals, with flat plains stretching off to abrupt mountains.

And now we are at Hoanib Valley Camp in Kaokoveld, which is in the middle of the desert, surrounded on several sides by khaki mountains and abutting a broad plain of desert life. The camp is about a half-dozen guest tents, with a big common area for meals and relaxing, with coffee, tea, wine and treats on tap. The food and service are impeccable, as at nearly every place we’ve visited on our trip. We have the Honeymoon Tent, with a big broad king-size bed, linen sheets, a small writing table on which I’m writing this journal entry, and a living area with couch, table and chairs, and front deck beyond, with chairs, looking over the desert. Like Camp Xakanaxa, it’s basically a lovely hotel room inside a tent.

The manager, TJ, showed us around the tent, including the shower, which has a steel bucket in one corner. He said he expected we encountered that arrangement before, but we had not. He explained that the bucket is a water conservation measure. When the shower starts and runs cold, you run it into the bucket. When you add hot water and have the temperature the way you like it, you push the bucket aside and shower normally. The maids come in and use the water from the bucket to clean the floors.

Hoanib Valley Camp has WiFi, and the electricity runs 24x7. The WiIf is slow but functions. I’ve got my iPad plugged in and am uploading photos to the cloud.

(Click the photos for a bigger view)

View from our tent at Hoanib Valley Lodge.

Our shower at Hoanib Valley Lodge. The bucket is for water conservation.

Nice bathroom at Hoanib Valley Lodge.

Our tent at Hoanib Valley Lodge.

These little birds hopped up on the table and begged for treats at Camp Kipwe. The waiter scolded Julie for feeding them. The staff’s attitude at Camp Kipwe contributed to this being not our favorite place in Africa, despite the camp itself being lovely.

Panoramic photo of the desert. That’s Julie next to the truck.

🌍📓

Shaming didn’t work to get men to wear condoms during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, but making condom-wearing convenient and less unpleasant was effective. The same lessons need to be applied to mask-wearing today.

Julia Marcus at The Atlantic:

Public-health professionals have learned this lesson before. In 1987, Congress banned the use of federal funds for HIV-prevention campaigns that might “promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.” As a result, public-health campaigns avoided sex-positive imagery and messaging, and instead associated condom use with virtue and condomless sex with irresponsibility, disease, and death. According to one particularly foreboding poster, which featured an image of a gravestone: “A bad reputation isn’t all you can get from sleeping around.” But those moralistic, fear-mongering health messages often fell flat. Other HIV-prevention campaigns began to adopt a harm-reduction approach, which empathizes with people’s basic human needs and offers them strategies to limit potential dangers. For some men, condoms got in the way of what they valued most about sex: pleasure and intimacy. Not surprisingly, HIV-prevention campaigns that put pleasure and intimacy at the center of their safer-sex messaging tended to work.

When the public-health community talks about harm reduction, we often talk of “meeting people where they are.” A fundamental part of that is, well, literally meeting people where they are. Just like the buckets of free condoms stationed in gay bars, masks need to be dispensed where they’re needed most: at the front of every bus and the entrance to every airport, grocery store, and workplace. Masks should become ubiquitous, but distribution should begin in areas where the coronavirus has hit hardest, including black and Latino neighborhoods. (That black men who wear masks may be at heightened risk of violence is one more grim illustration of why combatting racism is inextricable from public health.) What matters most is that people choose to wear a mask when they are indoors or in close proximity to others—and that choice needs to be rendered as effortless as possible.

The Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks

As he seeks to insert rival Joe Biden’s health into the presidential campaign, Trump has voiced escalating concern about how it would appear if he contracted coronavirus and has insisted on steps to protect himself, even as he refuses to wear a mask in public and agitates for large campaign rallies where the virus could spread.

When he travels to locations where the virus is surging, every venue the President enters is inspected for potential areas of contagion by advance security and medical teams, according to people familiar with the arrangements. Bathrooms designated for the President’s use are scrubbed and sanitized before he arrives. Staff maintain a close accounting of who will come into contact with the President to ensure they receive tests.

Measures to protect Trump from coronavirus scale up even as he seeks to move on

Justine Calma at The Verge:

For the second year in a row, graduation at Paradise High School became a tribute to triumph over disaster. The tight-knit small town — where many seniors have taken classes together since kindergarten — was almost entirely razed by the Camp Fire in 2018. It was the deadliest and most destructive blaze in California’s history. Then, COVID-19 upended the school year, and seniors once again graduated into a world that looked very different than it did when the year began.

For the class of 2020, even the near future is a question mark. The pandemic has already taken over 100,000 lives in the US and no one can predict when it — or the economic collapse in its wake — will end. Temperatures are soaring to record highs, an ominous sign for the coming fire season. Persevering through compounded crises is the new rite of passage for graduates across the US. The town of Paradise, California just happened to have an early baptism by fire….

In some ways, Paradise is a glimpse into what might be a new normal for many of us: a cycle of upheaval, followed by adrenaline-fueled hope, exhaustion, and, ultimately, adaptation….

Eighty-five people died in the Camp Fire, sparked by deteriorating PG&E power lines; 18,804 homes and buildings burned. Roughly nine of every ten Paradise High students lost their homes; [Class valedictorian Katie-Lynn] Chandler was among those whose homes burned. The care facility where her mother worked was also destroyed. She and her mother rent a room in a house from the person who owned the place where Chandler’s mother had worked.

Surviving paradise: Through fire and fear, Paradise, California’s teens take control of their lives

Julie and I are loving the Hulu series “The Great,” about the rise to power of Catherine the Great, 18th Century empress of Russia. It’s funny, appalling, endearing, tragic, bawdy, super-violent and often sad all at once. It’s visually gorgeous, with good-looking costumes and actors. Elle Fanning stands out as Catherine, who seems at first to be a beautiful nincompoop but turns out to have mettle.

The subtitle for “The Great” is “an occasionally true story.” I don’t remember much about Catherine the Great’s history so I can’t tell you where they play fast and loose with the facts.

The actor Nicholas Hoult is great as Peter, the emperor. Not Peter the Great: that was his father, and in this case, the apple fell very far indeed from the tree. Peter is a narcissist and a dope. Peter wants to be loved and feared, but the best he can do is evoking fear and contempt. He’s basically Michael Scott from The Office, if Michael Scott had been boy-band pretty and could have sex with any woman he wanted to, and kill anybody anytime he wanted to. He actually thinks all his power comes from his own merit, and that his people love him.

Of course, Peter is in no way reminiscent of any world leader today.

Sacha Dhawan is also terrific as Orlov. Doctor Who fans will remember Dhawan as the villainous Master on the last season of DW. He’s almost as good in The Great as he was in DW, though I do miss his big, insane grin as the Master. Here he’s a milquetoast.

Other supporting characters and actors are also outstanding.

Casting is colorblind, at least for minor characters. So Peter has Black courtiers, and Dhawan is of course East Asian. Would’ve been nice to see more PoCs in more prominent roles but what the heck.

One of the things that stands out about The Great is the use of language. They do an excellent job mixing contemporary 21st Century English with a seasoning of period language for flavor. (The Apple TV series “Dickinson” tried to do the same, but did it badly – I found myself yearning to hear 19th Century language and music, rather than the contemporary language and hip-hop the show used.) Characters drop an awful lot of F-bombs. And they also say “Huzzah!” frequently, which Julie and I have started to do with each other.

But In actual fact, Russians have never ever said ‘Huzzah!’

Getting ahead at the office when you’re not at the office.

Crises are not a time to negotiate increased titles and compensation…. Jump in and do the work, learn new skills, build your network, and don’t be afraid to fail. When the time is right, the actual promotion will come, either at this company—or in your next job somewhere else.

applied.economist.com/articles/…

These were taken June 18, 2019, in Namibia.

Our cabin at Kipwe Lodge in Namibia.

View from the cabin.

View from the cabin toilet.

The cabin bathroom.

The cabin sitting room.

Another view of the cabin sitting room.

The cabin bedroom.

Driving across the Namibian desert.

Typical of the planes we used when flying between lodges in Botswana and Namibia.

Plaque inside the passenger hut at a Namibian airfield.

A passenger hut at a Namibian airfield. More posh than most we encountered in Botswana and Namibi.

🌍📷📓

June 17, 2019 [Note from 2020: Overlap here with yesterday’s entry. I’m repeating myself.] We arrived at Windhoek in Namibia two days ago, after a commercial flight of less than two hours, and were greeted outside customs by Antone, who put us in an enclosed VW van with air conditioning and car seats. He drove us through Windhoek, a relatively new city 29 years old [Note from 2020: That’s what Antone said. Wikipedia says it’s about a century older], the capital of Namibia and apparently a commercial center as well. Antone told us that Windhoek grew up as a crossroads between other major Namibian cities and for its proximity to mines. Because Namibia is surrounded by mountains, the airport is 38 km out of town. We drove out of town, stopping at a Shell service center that seemed a little sketchy, though it was clean and well stocked and I suspect that if I were to ever find myself living and working in Windhoek, that service center would be a place I’d stop for gas and coffee and a snack and never think twice about it. [Note from 2020: It looked like an ordinary American or British highway rest stop. These moments of sheer normality were dissonant on our trip. Almost everything was so alien.]

It was a 3.5 hour drive to our camp, which was frankly too much.

The Okonjima Bush Camp turns out to be inside the Okonjima Game Reserve, which is owned by the Africat big cat rehab center. We stayed in a spacious private round lodge, with a simulated hut motif and what appeared to be stone walls. The lodge was separated in half by a partial wall, with the bathroom facility on the opposite side of the beds. The shower was open.

Opposite the beds, a picture window with two comfortable chairs overlooked a desert plain, beautifully silver lit by moonlight at night.

A separate round building with a thatch roof was a sitting room, with chaise lounges and an open wall overlooking the plain. The wall had a two-foot ledge separating the room from the outside plain. The sitting room is equipped with a jar of birdseed and a small flock of guinea hens comes hopping over for treats when we come into the room, like the dog and cats at home gathering for feeding.

(Click the photos for a bigger view)

We were feted by the staff for Julie’s 70th birthday and our 25th anniversary. The staff came out and sang in African harmonies and brought champagne and fruit and chocolate. We already had sparkling wine in the car from the travel company, so that’s a lot of bubbly. And we have had similar birthday celebrations from other places we’ve stayed. We met a few nice couples at the lodge, and had dinner with one, Becky and Anthony from Leceistershire, England, who have been on many safaris previously, including to Namibia. We had dinner with them and split the wine.

We had spectacular success on our game drives. On our first morning, yesterday, we went to the big cat rehabilitation center, and learned about the work they do there. We saw a few cheetahs in a fenced in reserve.

In the evening we went out in search of leopards. Danny, our guide, had a handheld radio antenna like a capital “I” with broad top and bottom, attached to a device that looked like a walkie talkie. That was used to detect the cats’ radio collars. We located a big, 12-year-old male sleeping on the side of a large riverbed. We watched a while to see if he would get up but he did not. Still, the experience was interesting and we saw a few other animals and birds and stuff so we were satisfied.

On the way to our sundowner drinks Danny caught another signal and so we abandoned sundowners and went in search of more leopards. And we scored big.

=-=-=-

First we found a half-grown leopard cub gnawing on part of a baboon carcass on the side of the river. Then its mother came from across the river, with another cub about the same age. A brown hyena stalked the smell of the carrion, and came slowly down the riverbed, but thought better of the project when it saw three leopards, and retreated with its fur all bristly to look more threatening. Somewhere along the way, the first leopard cub retreated to the top of a dead tree, taking the baboon carcass with it, and it gnawed on the carcass from up there,sometimes letting it dangle, playing with its food.

This whole process played out over the course of an hour or so, and was very exciting.

This morning we went out and used the same radio mechanism to locate several white rhinos. We tracked them quietly on foot for the last part of the expedition.

Then at 1:15 or so our guide drove us to the local airstrip – why didn’t we fly in there in the first place, rather than drive? Compared with some of the airstrips we saw in Botswana, this was elaborate, with a hangar and a small waiting area, a two-room rectangular structure with glass sliding doors, the interior of which looked like it had been transported from an office building in a big city. It was decorated with flying memorabilia.

Our plane was an eight-passenger prop driven Kodiak, and we got to our next destination in 35 minutes.

Getting out of the plane was quite a contrast. Okonjima was a scrub desert, with lots of thorn bushes and other dark green foliage, much like home in San Diego. Temperatures were about 40 degrees F in the morning – I needed my puffy jacket and hat and midweight pants and wished I had gloves too – to barely 70 in the hottest part of the day.

Our current location, Twyfelfontein, is hardcore desert, a flat plain of khaki colored sand punctuated by hardy shrubs each a few dozen yards from the other, and big piles of rocks dozens of feet high, with mountains off of the distance in every direction like a backdrop. The sun was bright and the temperature topped 90, maybe even topped 100. And me still in my heavy fleece, which I ditched quickly.

We took one of the ubiquitous khaki colored trucks, with comfortable seats mounted in the bed, to Camp Kipwe, our home for the next two nights. The camp comprises the usual cabins with a hut motif, built into stacks of boulders on the side of a hill. I have sworn off of my usual media pop culture references for the duration of this trip, but if I had not done that I would say this place reminds me of the Flintstones, whereas Okonjima reminded me of Gilligan’s Island. It’s beautiful and luxurious here, and we have the suite, at the highest point in camp, with a bedroom and living room, and open walls overlooking the spectular desert vistas. Even the bathroom has specatulcuar views of the desert; from the toilet I can see a beautiful plain.

As ever, the food is delicous, though all we’ve had to eat so far is a couple of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches done up for our late arrival, along with small green side salads.

On a housekeeping note: Apparently we may not have laundry this stop. And us sweating in the heat. I don’t think anyone will be offended. Also, I decided for the first time to convert my convertible pants, which I have resisted doing until now because it seemed like getting the legs back on might be a hassle. Why have convertible pants if you don’t convert them?

Also, no Internet here whatsoever for two days. We’ve had good internet in Okonjma; I got to upload photos to the cloud and update Flickr. OK internet in Johannesburg, as you’d expect at an airport and airport hotel. Bad and unusable internet in Botswana. but now two days without Internet whatsoever.

Sundowner in a few minutes, then dinner. Tomorrow we’re up at 5 am for a game drive and visit to some interesting archeological formations and ancient bushman wall decorations. As with the other places we’ve stayed, other than Chobe, we have a nice long break in the early afternoon to regroup. Then we’re off to our next location the day after tomorrow.

I can feel we are on the downhill side of our African holiday.

🌍📓

June 15, 2019 – Yesterday was a travel day. We had an 11:25 am charter flight from the LLT airstrip [Note from 2020: That’s the Leroo La Tau safari camp, where we stayed for a few days], and could have jammed in a short game drive, packing and breakfast before then, but it would have been too stressful. Instead we decided to sleep in, which turned out to be 6:30 am for Julie and 6:55 am for me. We were done sleeping. Noteworthy because at home we can sleep hours later if we don’t have to get up. We packed, had breakfast and killed about two hours reading and such before we left for the airstrip at 10:40 am.

The resort staff, who adore Julie, packed us bag lunches, which was lovely but more to carry, so we had mixed feelings about that.

A guide named Bones, who provided star lessons two evenings earlier, was our driver and with many heartfelt farewells to the staff, we set off for the airstrip. After three days together it felt as if we were leaving friends, as we had before at Camp Xakanaxa.

We drove along unpaved roads. The Toyota moved slowly and fishtailed on fine white sand like beach sand that buried the road. A few times Bones stopped to shift gears to get us out of a particularly deep sand drift. A couple of times he hopped out of the car to inspect the wheels and undercarriage. We slowed down once to avoid goats in the road, and another time to avoid cows. We arrived at the LLT airstrip, with its only building a structure that looked like a Little League dugout, along with fire protection equipment. The airstrip was just a long narrow rectangle of flat packed dirt a thousand or so feet long. We had been told earlier that sometimes flights were delayed because animals wandered out on the runway, and sometimes elephants dragged brush on the runway, which had to be cleared for takeoff and landing. But none of those things were problems yesterday; our plane was waiting for us, a four-seat prop job with the pilot standing beside it. The pilot was named Myello; he had joined us for breakfast earlier. We climbed in the plane and he warned us that the plane was light and the skies were windy, so we might be blown around a bit. That concerned me; I don’t do well with vertigo; my brain shuts down in panic mode. Myello taxied us to the far end of the runway. He consulted a computer printout folded in his hand. We were sitting immediately behind him in the snug little plane, closer than the backseat passengers to the driver of a car. He held his hand behind him to show me a line of text demarcated with his thumb; I saw Julie’s surname, Brown, with letters and numbers in a row. I looked at it blankly. He gave me a querying look. We couldn’t speak because the engine noise was too loud, and he was wearing a headset. The line of text was clearly an important question, but I had no idea what it was. I smiled and nodded and gave him the thumbs up. He appeared satisfied. He reached the end of the runway, turned the plane around, paused and gunned the engine. The plane lunged forward and we lunged into the air. [Note from 2020: I wonder if bush pilots do that pause-and-then-floor-the-accelerator for dramatic effect?]

The warning about rough skies proved overstated. Our half hour flight was relatively smooth and comfortable. I looked out the window and photographed the desert. The desert gave way to our destination, the city of Moun, which is more of a town of a few tens of thousands of people. I could see houses below us like ordinary suburban subdivisions, but with apparently unpaved roads.

(Click the photos for a bigger view)

Moun has a proper, but very small, airport, with a tower and many commercial planes lined up and a terminal where we were met by a porter and representative of our travel company, who together helped us get our bags checked and get us through customs. The porter disappeared before I could tip him. I didn’t tip the travel company representative, although now I think maybe I should have. [Note from 2020: Tipping was a mystery in Africa. I just gave money to people at random.] The terminal has a bare-bones but comfortable cafe, where we had $5 water bottles, attempted to get on the WiFi, and waited for our flight at a gate that looked more like a bus terminal than an airport, crowded with what seemed to be backpackers, safari travelers like us in khaki and olive green, businesspeople – a couple of them tapping on laptops – and just regular people taking a flight.

Our flight to Johannesburg was a regular commercial flight, same as any intercity hop in the US. Again, our travel agent arranged to have a porter meet us at the gate, who escorted us and helped us with our bags through customs and deposited us at the CityLodge hotel, located inside the airport, where we spent our first night in Africa 11 days ago. By now we felt like Africa veterans, light years beyond the greenhorns we’d been when we arrived. We’d faced down lions and hippos and elephants and the aggressive porters who hang around the airline check-in desks (completely different than the lovely porters who’d met us at the gate when we landed – we’d have another encounter with the check-in variety of predator the next day).

I had been looking forward to returning to the airport hotel, to enjoy a restaurant meal, sleep in a climate controlled room, and use reliable WiFi. But the room was too warm, the food was mediocre at best and the service was slow, and once I’d spent 15 minutes on the Internet I was done with that, though I did leave my iPhone and iPad connected to back up photos to iCloud and Flickr.

We discovered we were able to check luggage at CityLodge until we returned for our final night in Africa before going home in 10 days. For some reason the desk clerk on our first night 10 days ago told us we couldn’t do that. Huh? Julie insisted we buy a cheap duffle at the airport shops for that purpose, and we did. I filled it in part with unnecessary electronics, including a power brick, several electrical adapters that are lightweight but relatively bulky, and a noise canceling headset, also lightweight but bulky and unnecessary until my flight home. Julie checked clothes and a travel pillow and backrest for the flight home. I estimate we cut our travel weight by about 25% and I am delighted by that.

And now we’re on a commercial flight to Windhoek in Namibia, eager to get back to the bush and resume our holiday.

=-=-=-

Anton, our driver, takes us through Windhoek. He says it’s a city of about a half-million people, only 29 years old, built because it’s a crossroads between other Namibia cities. It’s the nation’s capital, and also seems to be an industrial town. Seems relatively quiet for midday. [Note from 2020: Wikipedia says Windhoek was founded in 1840, abandoned, and then founded again in 1890. I remember it felt more like a large town than a city of a half-million.]

=-=-=-

We were taken on a long, 3.5-hour drive from Windhoek to the Afrikats lodge, which was our next destination. The highway is rural between towns, mostly devoid of human construction, flat and well paved and maintained, two lanes in each direction narrowing to one each way. In towns we see construction, a sign of affluence, alongside poverty, people living in shanty villages. We see warthogs and baboons on the side of the road. Once or twice we pass big clusters of shacks and some tents forming bazaars of traditional crafts.

We drive through mountains. In other places the desert is flat enough to see to the horizon.

It is a long drive, much of which we sit in silence.

[Note from 2020: It was a looooooong drive, in an air-conditioned modern minivan, more comfortable than but not as interesting as the Toyota safari vehicles. Later, when we returned to the US, we asked our travel agent WTF she booked us for a drive rather than a short flight – Afrikats has an airstrip a few minutes away. She said the flight would have cost literally thousands of dollars US. So, yeah, the drive was a good idea.

[Also: I was puzzled during the drive by the juxtaposition of prosperity and poverty – new city construction immediately adjacent to squatter camps. A few days later, one of our guides told us the squatter camps were populated with people who were coming to work on the construction.]

=-=-=-

We stopped at a Shell rest area to stretch our legs and wash up. All variety of people there, very busy. We saw several stout middle aged women wearing traditional clothing, flowing print dresses with two-part hats representing animal horns. A skinny man approached Julie to try to sell wooden beads bigger than golf balls. She has difficulty brushing him off.

[Note from 2020: The dresses are traditional women’s clothes for the Herero, a Bantu ethnic tribe of about 250,000 people. The dress is based on colonial German women’s dresses. Photos and more information on Wikipedia: <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here…>]

📓📚

Elizabeth Gilbert is of course the author of “Eat Pray Love” and a writer who until recently I never gave any thought to because I pigeonholed her as a women’s novelist. But I heard her interviewed on two of my podcasts recently, and she seemed wise and smart and likable. And the novel is set in 1940 New York, which is a time and place that fascinates me – it’s the time and place where my parents and aunts and uncles and many of my childhood friends' parents grew up (and then they moved out to Long Island and had us).

And I’ve been trying to read more variety lately, particularly books by women and PoC. So I said sure, why not.

And I’m glad I did.

“City of Girls” is the story of Vivian Morris, a privileged 19-year-old who has been kicked out of Vassar because she is a bad girl. Her parents are at a loss what to do with her, so they ship her off to New York to live with her Aunt Peg, the black sheep of the family, who runs a seedy theater. Vivian, who is beautiful and a brilliant seamstress, gets to work as the theater’s costumer, and immerses herself in the world of theater and nightclubs.

She has a lot of sex. A lot. Gilbert said in her interviews that she wanted this book to be about how someone could be a good person without being a good girl. Vivian isn’t always a good person – she does one thing in particular which is awful – but she tries to be her best, which is all any of us can do, right?

The novel is written in the first person, by 90-year-old Vivian in 2010, writing to a younger woman who has asked Vivian what Vivian’s relationship was to the younger woman’s father. “City of Girls” is Vivian’s answer. She takes a while getting there, and I loved going on the trip with her.

The characters are great, the plot twists are surprising, defying what we have learned to expect from romance (and from action-adventure with romantic B-plots, which is something I read a lot of) and the characters are extremely well-drawn and lovable (except for when we are supposed to dislike them, which we do). The writing style is breezy and witty, and if Vivian sometimes uses language more appropriate to a Millennial or Gen X than to somebody of her generation, well, so what?

Particularly appealing to me, Gilbert fleshes out the worlds of midcentury New York in great and fascinating detail.

The title is “City of Girls” and this is a novel about women; men are peripheral characters, though a couple of them are fascinating.

This novel kept me up late reading one night, which is something that rarely happens to me anymore and I love it when it does.

I expect I will read more Gilbert. But I’ll save Eat Pray Love for last. It still doesn’t seem like my kind of book.

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318…

This morning I talked with a friend who lost his sister to covid Friday. I learned about that on a professional mailing list my friend and I share; another member of the list also said he’d lost a family member to covid.

I then talked with a family member of someone who is close to me, and is very sick and may well pass, well, any minute now. This person had covid a couple of months ago, and we thought they had recovered from it, but now it appears possibly not.

And last night I saw a tweet from someone who lost their mother to covid a few days ago, and is expecting to lose their father to covid any day now.

Please do not leave any condolence replies here. We do not deserve them; we are among the fortunate and blessed.

But please do wash your hands regularly and thoroughly, practice social distancing when you can and wear a mask where social distancing is impractical.

Alaska has airlifted the “Into the Wild” bus out of the Alaska backcountry. Too many tourists made the trek to the location and had to be rescued.

The abandoned Fairbanks city bus that Christopher McCandless lived and died in has been removed from the Alaska backcountry. Photos that went viral on Facebook on Thursday show the bus being hauled out by a Chinook helicopter and then loaded onto a long flatbed trailer for transport to an unknown location.

Cory Doctorow:

When a once-in-a-century public health emergency strikes, some people leap to help. Others leap to sue.

Ifixit published maintenance manuals for medical equipment. Steris Corporation threatened to sue them for it.

Steris, makes sterilizer equipment, is behaving obscenely. This is why we need “right to repair” laws – you have a moral right to do whatever you want with your own property. In this case, that right is literally a matter of life and death.

This is the EU’s interoperability moment – Cory Doctorow

It should be legal for you to buy a third-party service to manage your Facebook feed.

Zoom: Disable Google Hangout on Google Calendar

This has been a stone in my shoe for years; now that I’m sending out meeting invitations more frequently, it’s become a real problem.

The article refers to “Google Hangout,” which is what “Google Meet” was called recently.

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Cisco rolls out new solutions for remote work, learning, post-pandemic

For instance, one solution combines video collaboration hardware and software to offer virtual visitations for inmates in correctional facilities. Another solution uses Wi-Fi and analytics software to monitor social distancing in workplaces."

Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: The technology of Uyghur oppression: How China uses technology to oppress Uyghurs and Kazakhs: While the concentration camps imprisoning 1M+ people are most visible, the entire region “has been turned into an open air prison where technology tracks and controls predominantly Muslim Turkic people while allowing Han people to go about their business largely unhindered.”

The people who are “free” – that is, not interred in a concentration camp – were nevertheless forced to provide blood, DNA, fingerprint, iris and facial biometrics to the security apparatus. The penalty for noncompliance was imprisonment.

Authorities set up a dense network of biometric scanning points throughout the region, points that Han people were typically waved through, while Turkic people had to stop and be scanned – more than 10 times/day.

And while Xinjiang is its own unique horror, it has its roots in the US post-911 counterinsurgency theory (COIN), pioneered by US Army General Petraeus, and in the EU’s “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) programs.

China’s motto: “teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a prison.”

American companies supply tools to China, and those companies sell consumer products in the US, provide funding to universities such as MIT, and collaborate with scientists.

The US can end complicity with the program and put pressure on the Chinese state and companies to end human rights abuses in the region.

Cory: How covid spreads: Research shows covid is less likely to spread outdoors than indoors, long-duration contacts are more dangerous, and “good air circulation is a powerful preventative.” Also, mysteriously, most positive cases won’t spread the disease, while “a small minority [of ‘superspreaders’] will spread it widely; the mechanism for that is unclear.

Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin has a cynical take on yesterday’s surprise pro-LGBTQ decision by the US Supreme Court: The court follows election returns. If the court had overturned LGBTQ protections yesterday, it would have fired up Democrats to win more elections, pass even broader civil rights protections, and encouraged Democrats' belief that Gorsuch is an illegitimate right-wing hack. As it stands now, the court is free to make more decisions like Citizens United, which entrench Republican power.

Quiggins expects “hard neoliberals” on the right “to welcome the fact that this unwinnable fight is over,” but “culture warriors who back Trump will be furious.”

In other words, the court sees the country swinging to the left, and conservatives are shifting from seeking gains to protecting against losses.

Mo Rocca: Sammy Davis Jr. Death of the Entertainer: Sammy Davis Junior loved to perform so much that he once said he wanted to die on stage. He very nearly did, delivering a barnstorming performance just before his death from cancer in 1990.

From the age of three Sammy Davis, Jr. did it all better than anyone else – singing, dancing, acting, even gun spinning.

There Is No ‘Second Wave.’ The U.S. Is Still Stuck In The First One

Mo Rocca: Audrey Hepburn: Death of an Icon: Lithe and elegant, Audrey Hepburn survived girlhood malnutrition in Nazi-occupied Belgium. For the rest of her life, she wore her gratitude for surviving that experience.

Oracle BrandVoice: 4 Questions To Ask SAP During SAPPHIRE: IT teams need to focus on innovation, not deploying and managing on-premises systems. “Companies don’t want a driveway full of tools and car parts.”

After my Mom passed away in 2000, and then my Dad in 2004, I inherited my Mom’s rolltop desk. It’s in my home office. If you’ve ever done a Zoom call with me, you can see it behind me. It’s not my primary desk; it’s just sitting there with piles of stuff on it.

Yesterday I was looking through the drawers of the desk for a Post-It note. The drawers are mostly empty; I don’t use them. The wide drawer in the top center had some USB thumb drives in the front tray, which I’d put in there myself a few years ago and then forgot about them. In the big wide space behind the tray, there were some bills that have been sitting there since before Dad died. Behind those, two envelopes: One was from 1989, containing two tickets to my middle brother’s college graduation ceremony. They still looked new, red and shiny.

The second envelope had a handwritten address on the front, written by a child in pencil. It looked like one of my brothers' handwriting. Interesting! The return address was Harley Avenue Elementary School. That’s the school my brothers and I attended. Even more interesting!

I opened the envelope and found a letter that my brother had written to his future self, part of a class project. My youngest brother was then 9 years old, and he wrote it to himself at 19. I would have been about 15 then. It was 1976.

I took a photo with my iPhone camera and sent it to my brothers for their enjoyment. In situations like this, I marvel at what my 1976, 15-year-old self would have thought about that technology. I was a die-hard science fiction fan then; I would have loved it

The message was unremarkable. I don’t think my brother’s head was in the assignment. He is wondering what the prices will be 10 years in the future, and whether inflation will still be a big deal. Inflation was a big deal in 1976.

My youngest brother and I both had the same teacher when he was in second grade and I was in third, Arlene Kaufman, who of course we called Miss Kaufman. I actually heard from her two years ago on Facebook. Yesterday, I looked her up again on Facebook to let her know about the new find, but she seems to have deleted her account. When I heard from her, she was living in Queens, NY, parts of which were hard hit by Covid. I hope she’s doing OK.

Here’s how I heard from Miss Kaufman (I’m just going to stick with that name) two years ago: A year or so before that, in my random Internet cruising, I came across the cover of an early edition of the science fiction novel Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein. Miss Kaufman had a small library in the corner of her classroom, which contained that edition of that book. It was one of the first two chapter books I read. The other was a biography of Helen Keller. And I loved Red Planet. It awakened a love of reading, science fiction, and Heinlein that sticks with me to this day.

A year after the first post, Miss Kaufman wrote to me on Messenger; she said a former student of hers had forwarded the post to her, and she said she remembered me too. I received the message from her while I was in a hotel room in Florida on a business trip.

I wonder what that must have been like for her. You remember a 9-year-old-boy and you turn around and he’s a 50-something man writing from a hotel room in Florida. I mentioned this insight to a friend recently, who said Miss Kaufman is probably used to it. I guess that happens to teachers frequently, if they are good teachers with long careers who touch many students' lives.

Now that I think of it, regarding the Helen Keller biography: I love history now too. So thanks again, Miss Kaufman!

I never did find the Post-Its. It turned out I did not need them. I used a memo pad instead — from my first job in tech journalism, at Open Systems Today, 30 years ago. They gave me far too many of those memo pads and I rarely have a need for them, so they sit around my office. I photographed that with the iPhone, too, and sent it to my editor on that job, who I recently reconnected with about freelance work.

My office is like an archeological site. I really need to declutter. 📓

Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 1910s. She wore pants, smoked publicly — often on the roof of the White House — kept a pet snake and a dagger, partied all night and slept until noon.

“I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. I cannot possibly do both.” — Theodore Roosevelt

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On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic:

Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee is retiring young – he’s only 99.

Jaffee launched “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and the fold-out.

Marie Foulston and her friends held a pandemic party in a spreadsheet.

The pandemic is rising in red states because it turns out you can’t just ignore healthcare and trust that only brown-skilled people, who are Democrats, will die.

The GOP is trapped in a prison of its own making. To keep the fortunes of the 1% intact, they need to restart American commerce. But doing so will not just murder racialized people who don’t typically vote Republican, but also the GOP’s base: elderly and rural people.

The US has virtually no cyberdefense; it’s virtually all offense.

[Jason Healey on the Lawfare blog:] “There are tremendous risks when a fearsome offense is paired with a weak defense,” because “a more fearsome cyber offense makes it more likely they will get in a sucker punch on the U.S. before Cyber Command can bring its big guns to bear.

NYC community activists are scraping traffic-cam to find evidence of police brutality against Black Lives Matter protesters.

Security researchers find a huge trove of data belonging to customers of “niche dating sites.”

Why the Pandemic Is Driving Conservative Intellectuals Mad. Conservative intellectuals view respect for life and health as symptoms of civilizational decay.

What We Know About the White House’s Secret Bunker Popular Mechanics: “There’s a whole city’s worth of stuff underneath the White House and other government buildings in and around Washington, D.C.”

“Is God Dead?” at 50

54 years ago, Time Magazine put an essay on its cover: “Is God Dead?”

The authors did not mean to claim that religion was irrelevant (which was my interpretation of the question).

The article was far more nuanced than the cover might suggest, but [theologians William Hamilton and Thomas Altizer] were not hedging in their views. It’s tempting to take them metaphorically, to say “death” and mean “irrelevance,” but they were speaking literally. The idea was not the same as disbelief: God was real and had existed, they said, but had become dead.

Jesus Christ was a better model than God for the work that needed to be done by man, of which there was a lot—particularly, for him, within the civil rights movement. He saw religion’s place in the human realm, not in heaven. Altizer took that idea a step further: Jesus Christ had to die in order for the resurrection to happen all those Easters ago, and likewise God had to die in order for the apocalypse to take place.

Today, religion is a far more powerful world force than it was in 1966.

“Nobody would ask whether God is dead [today],” says Rabbi Donniel Hartman, author of the new book Putting God Second. “You can’t understand three-quarters of the conflicts in the world unless you recognize that God is a central player.”

And yet, 97% of Americans professed belief in God in 1966; by 2014, only 63% of Americans “believed with absolute certainty.” And while religious conservatives control the White House, Senate, and judicial benches, the biggest religious affiliation in America is “none.”

The GOP is rolling over its 2016 platform for 2020, with numerous criticisms of the “current President.”

Alexis Madrigal: America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic

Jesus Christ, Just Wear a Face Mask!: There is plenty of evidence that face masks and social distancing are effective and easy methods of blocking the spread of COVID-19 and permitting safe reopening, and no good reason not to use them.

Civil Rights Law Protects L.G.B.T. Workers, Supreme Court Rules

A good day. And Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch led the decision.

Conservative hypocrites who claim to support the literal interpretation of the law are now tying themselves up in knots trying to criticize this this decision, which is based on literal interpretation of the law.

Also, Justice Samuel Alito says it’s a terrible decision because women go crazy if they see a penis.

Supreme Court lets stand California’s ‘sanctuary’ law on undocumented immigrants

A victory for decency and common sense.

Mo Rocca: The Forgotten Forerunners: Three people who changed history, but who you’ve probably never heard of: Black woman Elizabeth Jennings integrated New York public transit a century before Rosa Parks and years before the Civil War; Black man Moses Fleetwood Walker played pro baseball more than a half-century before Jackie Robinson, and Lois Weber was a highly paid, successful and prolific movie director in 1910s Hollywood.

The reality show “Cops” was canceled a short time ago. Should scripted police dramas follow? On the Today, Explained podcast www.listennotes.com/podcasts/…

I know that depiction of police on TV is problematic, but I loved “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue.”

On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: LA schools returned grenade launchers but kept their assault rifles. And a voting machine company won’t give election officials a login to inspect the integrity of their own voting machines. pluralistic.net/2020/06/1…

Mo Rocca investigates sitcom deaths and disappearances, including Richie’s older brother Chuck on “Happy Days,” the two Darrens on “Bewitched,” etc. With Henry Winkler and Sandy Duncan. www.mobituaries.com/the-podca…

Mo Rocca: For a year, JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader was one of the most famous and successful entertainers in the US. He’s virtually forgotten today. The Kennedy assassination ended his career in a single moment, and he never got over it. A surprisingly poignant story. www.mobituaries.com/the-podca…

Bottlenecks? Concerns about a possible shortage of glass vials to contain and distribute the coronavirus vaccine. If and when we get a vaccine. www.reuters.com/article/u…

In a time of quarantine, car sex isn’t just for kids anymore. melmagazine.com/en-us/sto…

But what about love in an elevator?

Trump Hates Losers, So Why Is He Refighting the Civil War—on the Losing Side? www.newyorker.com/news/lett…

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police www.nytimes.com/2020/06/1…

Spike Lee refuses to say Donald Trump’s name on ‘Da 5 Bloods’ press tour, refers to him only as ‘Agent Orange’ www.yahoo.com/entertain…

A serious conversation about UFOs podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0…

UFOs are one of those topics that it’s hard to take seriously because they’re covered in kitsch and conspiracy. But there are those who take them seriously, which means approaching the question with humility. The history, frequency, and consistency of these events point toward something that merits study. But the explanations we force onto them — from religious visitations to aliens — confuse us further. We’re working backward from beliefs we already have, not forward from phenomena we don’t understand.

Ezra Klein talks with Diana Walsh Pasulka, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and author of “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology.” In her book, Pasulka describes how she “embeds in the world of UFO research and tries to understand it using the tools of religious scholarship.”

“There’s something here that’s very strange,” Pasulka says. But she doesn’t know what it is

Klein talks about how society ridicules UFOs and fringe beliefs as a means of shutting down discussion about them. Ridicule can be more effective than outright censorship.

Unbundle the Police www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc…

We require too much of police – solving crimes, controlling traffic, providing psychiatric intervention, controlling the homeless. And many towns depend on traffic citations as a form of revenue (which basically means these towns are funded by armed robbery but sure whatever). Too much of that work is contradictory; it’s unreasonable to expect the same person to take down an armed shooter and calm down a domestic disturbance or provide help to a homeless person.

The solution: Unbundle those jobs and give then to different people.

This solution doesn’t address police corruption. Many police departments seem to see themselves, not as public servants, but as occupying armies subjugating unruly natives.

Julie has picked up a few words of Tswana, one of the two major languages of Botswana. The other major language is English:

Kealeboga =thank you Dumela mma= good morning - different ending if you’re talking with a man vs. talking with a woman.
Re mono fela= we are just here
Re kgobile= we are relaxed 📓 🌍

In the morning at home, I look at the news. Here in Africa, in the morning I look at the gnus. A herd of wildebeest gathers on the plain outside our cabin as the sun rises.

Last night, one of the guides gave us a brief five-minute tour of the African starscape. One thing I keep forgetting is that we are in the southern hemisphere now, so the stars are completely different. Until last night, I forgot to look up at the sky. I can see Alpha Centauri, Antares, the Milky Way and those other places I’ve read about in science fiction books for so many years.

The man doing the star show used a laser pointer that shot out of visible beam of light, so he could easily point out the various stars in their location, as if we were in a planetarium. I did not realize laser pointers could do that. I thought you had to point them at something to display a dot at that location.

It is now about 20 after eight on Thursday morning. In a few minutes we will be leaving for what is billed as a cultural visit to a local village. I have no idea what is in store for us there. But I am looking forward to it!

Yesterday afternoon we saw a Toyota truck go by in the evening game drive, carrying a full load of black people. It was the first time I had seen black people in the back of the Toyota, as passengers, rather than driving. Our guide told us that they were teachers from the same school that we are going to visit today. They look very young, as though they were teenagers and students themselves.

The cultural event proved to be an excursion to Khumaga (khoo mah cha), a nearby village of about 2,000 people. We drove in on an unpaved dirt road, past houses ranging from circular mud huts to plain square brick buildings to small neat houses with proper windows and fences and cars in front that would not have looked out of place in a middle class American neighborhood. We saw some people, but not a lot, men walking in pairs at the kind of deliberate pace you maintain when you’re going to be waking a long way. Children waved to us cheerfully; we grinned and waved back.

We visited a school for kindergarten through seventh grade. A teacher told us briefly about the school. She seemed citified, in a brightly colored floral skirt and blue double breasted jacket that might have been a fleece. Fleeces are ubiquitous here, the resort staff wears khaki fleeces as part of their uniforms. The teacher asked for donations and seemed shocked when we told her, truthfully, that we had not brought wallets or cash. I’ve gotten in the habit of locking my wallet, cash and passport in my room safe when arriving at a resort. We just don’t need it. We’ll arrange a donation later today.

We went into a seventh grade classroom and the children broke into three groups to crowd around the three of us who visited from the resort, me and Julie and a man in his 70s who had previously volunteered at the peace corps, so he was familiar with this kind of place and situation. His wife, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, waited in the Toyota.

My little group of children, mostly boys 11-13 years old, pushed up against me in a circle. They asked me how old I am and marveled at the number (it amazes me too, kids) and admired my hair and shirt and shoes. They asked me what kind of animal is my favorite (our dog and cats at home – but in Botswana I like elephants, giraffes, zebras, gnu and baboons). They told me what they want to be when they grew up, a doctor, scientist, dentist and soldier. They asked me what kind of work I do, and seemed satisfied with the answer. They loved elephants and told me with relish that they can kill you. They showed me a worksheet of what to do and not to do when you encounter elephants. There is an elephant overpopulation problem in Botswana; the beasts trample crops and destroy property. The government is considering reversing the ban on hunting, to reduce numbers. The boys asked me my religion; I said Jewish, non-practicing. I don’t know if that registered. Earlier, the teacher had said the children study world religions and she listed a few, of which Judaism was not one. That’s reasonable; we Jews are few in numbers, just a few million in the whole world, and maybe a child in an African village has no need to know about us.

The kids and I ran out of things to talk about but they cheerfully demanded to be photographed, so we did that. They mugged for the shot and then crowded around the iPhone to see how the photo came out.

Afterward we visited the kindergarten, about 25 children in a one room building with a concrete floor and metal roof. They sat on the floor and colored and greeted us cheerfully. Then we visited a woman who wove baskets; she wore a pink bathrobe, belted carefully to make it look more like a dress.

Tomorrow, which is Friday, will be a travel day. Saturday too. Multiple hops to get from here in Botswana to JoBurg, where we will again spend the night at an airport hotel. I must admit I’m looking forward to a dinner that is not a production number, and going shopping at the airport stores for additional camera accessories. The on a plane Saturday morning for two flights and a road transfer to our next stop, in Namibia. Namibia and Botswana are neighboring countries so hopefully there will be direct flights between them one day.

📓🌍

Leroo La Tau, our current safari camp, is in the Makgadikgadi Pans National Park in Botswana, on the banks of the Boteti River. The resort is on a cliff overlooking a river and plain. We can go out on a deck and see wildebeest and zebras and elephants and stuff. Last night when I woke in the middle of the night, I heard a terrible screeching. It sounded a little electronic. Today I imitated the sound for our guide, Gee. He said it sounded like a jackal.

Gee is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, efficient and friendly, as all our guides have been. He has a restful energy, unlike TS, who was great but who could be a bit jangly. The hotel staff loves Julie, and treat her like a queen, which she deserves! Julie has been trying to learn a few words of Tswana, one of the common languages of Botswana (the other is English). I have followed her lead. We regularly butcher “thank you” and are working on “hello” and “good morning.” There is also “slowly slowly,” which seems to translate roughly to “take it easy” or “mellow out” or “chill.” Also, “we are here,” which seems to have a deeper meaning I have not been able to ken.

I am drinking far more liquor now than I do at home. At home I have 0-4 drinks per month. Here I have been having 3-4 drinks per day. At the end of the afternoon drive we have “sundowners” in the field; the guide mixes drinks and lays out snacks on the Toyota tailgate, or on a little panel that folds down from the front of the truck. I hae gin and tonic. Before dinner, we have more drinks. I have discovered Amarula, a liquor made from local fruit and milk. I’m told it tastes like Baileys, which I have not had in many years. Amarula is delicious. Then we have wine with dinner. I feel like Keith Richards.

The reason I don’t drink Baileys at home is that milk gives me an upset stomach (though I can no trouble with cheese and yogurt, which I love and consume regularly). Here in Africa, though, the milk doesn’t bother me.

And now it’s night and we’re in bed. We can hear water lapping not too far below the cabin. And we can also hear a variety of animal sounds, including a loud grunting that may be one or more hippos just a few yards away.

📓🌍

We’re on a 12-seater Cessna now, on our way from Camp Xakanaxa, where we spent three lovely days, to our next stop, the name of which I cannot remember.

TS, our guide at Camp X [Note from 2020: I’m not going to spell it out] is tall, thin and handsome, with dark black skin and a broad smile. He tells people his name stands for True Story, because he only speaks truth. At other times, he says the name stands for other things. He has a dry sense of humor. He is passionate about being a guide, with a deep knowledge of nature and a strong drive to take us to see the most interesting animals and birds. He finds them by listening to their calls, driving slowly while hanging his head off the side of the truck to watch the ground for leopard or lion tracks, by consulting with other guides on radio, and apparently by extra sensory perception. When he hears over the radio that the other guides have found some fascinating animal, he throws the truck in gear and we careen across the road, bouncing high in the air. A few times I’m completely airborne above my seat. He usually doesn’t say what he’s after, but I know that when we’re moving at that speed it’s something good. Yesterday it was a leopard, which we could barely see when we arrived. That’s just how it goes; game drives are a lot of patience and luck.

TS is opinionated about which animals are worth stopping for – lions, leopards, elephants and giraffes – although elephants are less interesting than leopards, so we do not stop to see elephants on the way to a leopard. I love baboons and monkeys but TS thinks they are a waste of time so we do not stop to see the monkeys. That’s ok; we’ve seen plenty of monkeys anyway.

TS tells us he comes from a small farming village in Botswana, with 35 brothers and sisters from multiple mothers. Many people in the village were unschooled and illiterate; they believe book learning is a waste of time, compared with learning what they need to know for farming.

TS sat next to a group of Italians during lunch, and asked them how to say hello in Italian. Later, after I asked him, he said everybody he knows growing up came from that one little village. Now he meets people from all over the world. The world is an amazing place.

As I thumb-type this, we are in a small 12-seater Cessna, with those same Italians, on our way to the next stop for three days. We loved Camp X and felt a connection to the place and staff there but I’ll be glad to sleep indoors. And wake up indoors too. The tents at CX get cold at night and in the early morning when we get up for our dawn game drive. They give us hot water bottles after dinner, one each, which we carry to our tent in our arms and tuck under the blankets. And the blankets are lovely and warm and the sheets are clean and white. It’s quite cozy – despite how cold it is outside, 40 degrees, I still find myself throwing the blankets partway off during the night.

But it is most definitely not warm when we wake up.

And it’s dark at night too; camp power is provided by a generator and some of the tent lighting runs on batteries. The generator goes off around 10 and goes back on a little before wake up.

The food at Camp X is fantastic. [Note from 2020: True for all our camps.] I’m going to need bigger pants. Meals are served in a big tent; we eat at big long wooden dining tables and real chairs, with china and linen tablecloths and napkins and separate glasses for wine and water, like a restaurant. We serve ourselves from buffet tables and talk with the other guests and guides, who eat with the guests, about what we saw and did that day, although we did get into a brisk political discussion with a few Germans one night. I would have preferred to talk about the game drives. Political discussion is one of the things I’m getting away from.

The German who talked politics asked me, the next night, about my work. I had resolved that for the duration of this trip I would not volunteer what I do for a living, but would tell people when asked. So I did. I think next time I’ll make something up, like “Mafia accountant” or “large animal veterinarian.”

I’m thumb typing this on a 12 seat plane from Camp X to our next stop. 50 minute flight. We just swerved abruptly and I was overcome by vertigo and I closed my eyes. Julie said she saw another plane that we had swerved to avoid

Landing now. I’ll put away my phone.

And now we are at the Leroo La Tau Lodge, still in Botswana, this time on the desert. It’s 1:26 pm, we checked in, got our orientation talk from the manager, and had another enormous and delicious lunch. I brought two sets of pants, one for cooler weather and one for warmer weather. I should have brought bigger pants too.

LLT is designed along the same lines as CX, with huts with thatched roofs. But LLT is a complex of buildings, rather than tents on platforms. We’re told to expect cooler weather here.

This is the Kalahari Desert. Coming in on our 12-seater plane – Clement was our pilot again – we saw small villages of huts and cattle and goats penned in with rough fences, called kraals. On the dirt road to the camp – more bouncy bouncy in one of the ubiquitous converted Toyota trucks – we saw a truck going in the opposite direction, with a middle aged white couple in the cab. The woman, in the passenger seat, had a small dog on her lap. It occurred to me that this was the first time we’d seen animal who was a pet,in a week.

CX and Chobe Lodge were surrounded by electrical wire fences, high enough to stop elephants but let other animals through. We saw baboons on the lawn in front of our cabin in Chobe. A resident hippo wanders around CX, his name is Oscar. We saw him just outside the camp when TS drove us in to the camp on our first day; TS cautioned us that Oscar is not domesticated, he is a wild animal, and hippos are vicious too, and can move fast when provoked, we should stay 30-40 meters away. Not sure how you can do that in the camp, but it was a moot point; we did not see Oscar again.

When we drove up to CX, two managers greeted us with a big smile and a goofy dance. A short time ago that would have made me uncomfortable; I would have assumed it was a residue of colonialism and racism. Now I think it’s just how they do things. One of the managers was a tall, handsome, erect young man named Mox, with deep black skin and a broad smile. Unlike his colleagues, Mox spoke in a British-inflected accent; he told us later that he was educated in a private track in a public school and – he confessed – has an English girlfriend. (“Shocking,” I said, and he was surprised that I said it, but Julie explained that I was kidding. I said it with a deadpan that any American would have recognized I meant the opposite of what I was saying, but that inflection doesn’t translate. We told him that we have absolutely no problem with mixed-race relationships.)

But we did not know any of that when we were checking in. I saw him as another native member of the hotel staff, who likely spent his entire life in Botswana. So I was surprised when he said, as he picked up our bags to carry them off, “Alright alright alright!” Surprising to meet a Matthew McConaughey fan so far from home!

I’ve been thinking here about the legacy of colonialism. At home I had a vague, unarticulated idea that colonialism was unalloyed evil and that it had left a false skin on African culture that would inevitably be sloughed off as colonialism receded in the past. While I’m still no fan of colonialism, I now think the Africans regard the colonial legacy as part of their heritage, just as much as their native roots, and are in no rush to slough off European influences, any more than the English are looking to rid themselves of Roman and Norman influences. In general I have encountered similar attitudes when dealing with people in the developing world. In past decades we worried about American cultural imperialism, but people who live in the developing world seem happy to take what pleases them or is useful from American and European culture, and retain their native traditions where those are pleasing or useful. This also applies to China, which can’t be described as a member of the developing world anymore; it’s a superpower rivaling America, maybe soon to surpass us. [Note from 2020: I’m not certain I agree with my 2019 assessment of geopolitics here and post-colonial culture. I’d only been Africa a week when I wrote it, and less than four weeks total.]

Last night at CK I woke up in the middle of the night and heard animals calling nearby. I turned over in bed in the dark and saw, on the canvas wall of our tent, the shadow of a vast animal moving slowly by. I turned over and went back to sleep.

This evening as we were washing for dinner we heard the sound of two male elephants nearby disagreeing loudly.

🌍📓

William Shatner’s “Get a Life” sketch from Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. dai.ly/xmagzq

I’d never seen it before.

In an interview on Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast, Jason Alexander describes meeting Shatner, when Alexander was starring on Seinfeld and Seinfeld was a hit. Alexander, who’s an enthusiastic Trekkie, was thrilled. www.gilbertpodcast.com/jason-ale…

Shatner told a story about how he had trouble getting work after Star Trek, and hated being typecast. He hated the fans too. Later, Shatner said, he came to appreciate the rare gift of being Captain Kirk. Alexander said he tried to learn from that, even as he was having trouble being typecast as George Costanza.

I’m no William Shatner or Jason Alexander, but I’ve enjoyed some success in life while also sometimes feeling bitter that I had not had more success, or been successful at different things.

Jason Alexander is a mensch.

I literally squeed when I saw a mother baboon carrying her baby. “Oh my god it’s a baby baboon!” I exclaimed in a high pitched squeal like an 11 year old girl. The baby dropped off the mother, stood on his hind legs a wobbly moment, then looked puzzled and fell over. Who would not squee at that?

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Dawn river cruise. Instant coffee from metal camp cups at sunrise, mixed with hot water from a Stanley insulated bottle

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Kasane International Airport, outside Chobe National Park in Botswana, is tiny, but it is clean and modern and efficient. [Note from 2020: Kasane is small, but a proper airport. Many of the other places we caught planes were just airstrips — a grassy field with a long cleared strip, often graded but not paved, to accept small planes.] We’re here on our way to Camp Xakanaxa (pronounced ka-ka-na-ka), in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The plane is a Cessna 208 or 208B Caravan. It seats 12 but we are the only two passengers, along with pilot Clement and another guy, who I think is the baggage master. Other than the road, I don’t see a sign of human habitation from the air.

I watched the ground go by outside the window of our little plane. Dozed off. Woke up. Same. Ground was greener and wetter and swampy. We descend for landing. I see a few houses.

=-=-=-

The Okavango airport is a dirt airstrip with no buildings, just a structure like a Little League baseball dugout with a sign that says VIP Lounge. Good to see irony thrives in Africa. There is no Starbucks.

=-=-=-

TS, our driver, was moving fast and the truck was rocking and rolling over rutted roads. I was daydreaming when suddenly I was knocked off my seat and hit the unpadded metal floor on my ass, hard.

I was uninjured, which was lucky, because that’s how people get permanent, disabling back injuries. On the other hand, had I gotten a permanent, disabling back injury, it would have been a better story than everybody else’s story. Everybody else gets back injuries reaching for paper towels from the top shelf of their kitchen cabinets.

We parked next to two sleeping male lions, and waited a half hour for them to wake up. For the first part of that time there were about four other trucks parked in a semicircle, watching the lions. How would you like to be sleeping in bed and wake up to find 25 people in a semicircle around your bed staring at you while you slept?

TS asked whether he should get out of the truck and wake the lions up. We said sure, and he laughed. Funny guy, that TS. We agreed that taking a selfie with the lions would be a great way to become world famous and score many views and likes on YouTube. Unfortunately you would not be around to enjoy the celebrity.

Internet connectivity here at Xakanaxa is crap, electricity goes out at 10 pm so I’m just going to power down my phone at bedtime so it has maximum charge for tomorrow. Shocking!

📓🌍

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.

=-=-=-

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.

📓🌍

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…

📓📚

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

Ella Jones is Ferguson’s first black mayor.

=-=-=-

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.”

=-=-=-

“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…

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/…

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.

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.

===

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.

===

“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…

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…

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.

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/…

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Anthony_bibliography

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. 🌕

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.

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. 📓

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.

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

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.”

🌕📓

Yesterday I read some of “Storm before the Storm” a history of the fall of the Roman Republic, by Mike Duncan, and “Silver Pigs,” the first in the mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private detective in Imperial Rome. I’ve read that series before but I’ve forgotten most of it so it’s nearly new to me.

I finished re-watching “I, Claudius” Sunday — that’s the fourth time I’ve seen that. Maybe give it another go in ten years?

I listened to the “I, Podius” podcast, which is about “I, Claudius” — possibly the final episode of that, although there seems to be some unfinished business, so there may be at least one more episode.

I bookmarked a few articles about the historical accuracy of “I, Claudius,” for later reading.

Julie expressed some interest in rewatching “Rome,” the mid-2000s HBO series about the rise of Julius Caesar and the Roman Civil Wars.

Also, a few weeks ago, Julie and I watched “Hail, Caesar,” a Coen Brothers comedy about the making of a Golden Age Hollywood movie about Julius Caesar, featuring George Clooney. Julie didn’t care for it but I loved it; I still have 37 minutes to watch.

“Storm Before the Storm” is the earliest chronologically, covering events in the second century BCE. Then comes “Rome,” 1st Century BCE. Then comes “I, Claudius,” later in the 1st Century BCE through the early and mid 1st Century CE. Then comes “Silver Pigs,” a couple of decades after “I, Claudius,” in the late 1st Century CE. Finally, “Hail Caesar” comes along almost 1900 years later, around the time the books “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God” were published, with the movie-within-the-movie covering the events of the early part of “Rome.”

It’s all the same universe, like the Marvel superhero movies. 📚📺📽📓

A young woman ahead of me at airport security was walking with a cane and had a “boot” on her foot – a removable enclosure to immobilize an injured foot.

The security guy asked her if she could walk without the cane, and take off the boot, and put them through the security scanner. The security guy was nice about it; he said if taking off the boot and walking without the cane caused any discomfort at all, she should just leave them on.

The woman said no no no that’s all right and she sat down in a chair and wrestled the boot off, and then hopped through the scanner.

It occurred to me, watching, that this was security theater in the purest form. This exercise was completely unnecessary. I bet if you asked this woman why she was going through this exercise, she would have looked surprised and said, why, it’s the rules. And you have to follow the rules, right?

This woman was given a choice of whether she had to send her stuff through the scanner, and she chose to do it , even though the purpose of this exercise is not supposed to be empty obedience. It’s supposed to be catching terrorists. And this woman knew better than anybody else that she was not a terrorist, and therefore would have been perfectly safe strolling through security without any screening at all!

I don’t say this to criticize the young woman, who seemed perfectly nice and just trying to be accommodating, or the security guy, who was also very nice and just trying to do his job.

I wrote the preceding in my journal a year ago. Re-reading it now, I see that I was wrong then. The purpose of security theater isn’t security. It is empty obedience.

You may well ask, holy crap, Mitch, when did you become such a paranoid conspiracy theorist? I ask myself that sometimes. 📓

When videoconferencing meetings go wrong, you get to see flossing, naked husbands and more.

… I could tell both his dogs were barking frantically but couldn’t figure out what the rest of the noise was, and I was concerned. “Are you OK?” Deep sigh. “We have a parrot, and the parrot has learned to call the dogs. He waits until the dogs come in the room and then imitates my wife. When the dogs can’t find her, they lose their minds.”

Pluralistic: 02 May 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

++ The mistrust epidemic

The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own.

Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.

++ Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes

Coronavirus outbreaks are concentrated in three places: Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes – industries that are built on treating people cruelly, like disposable components.

“Public health has always known the truth. The care of the most margnialized members of society is important for fighting infectious diseases.”…

… the GOP’s emphasis has been on shielding employers whose employers or customers die of coronavirus due to unsafe conditions. These industries are designed to run in unsafe ways and can’t conceive of operating safely.

++ Contact tracing apps could be worse than useless.

Too many false positives and false negatives. It’s like those security warnings you see on websites that are so noisy that everybody just clicks past them and ignores them.

An exposure-notification app that forgets to notify you when you’re at risk AND often notifies you when you are not at risk becomes a worse-than-useless frippery, as well an expensive boondoggle and distraction.

And security defects in those apps could literally increase a population’s exposure to terrorism, crime, election fraud and authoritarian governments.

However, contact tracing can be useful and safe, with the right precautions.

++ Ticketmaster sold a $500M stake to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who ordered the murder, torture and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

++ And a hopeful note from Kim Stanley Robinson.

I watched Britannia, with Julie, and am rewatching I, Claudius.

I just started reading “Silver Pigs,” the first book of the historical mystery series by Lindsey Davis about Marcus Didius Falco, a private investigator in 1st Century Rome. I read many of those books years ago but I have essentially forgotten them so I’m quite enjoying “Silver Pigs.” I did not get through the whole series then, and plan to do so now. I expect it’ll take me a couple of years but that’s OK.

And I just started reading Mike Duncan’s “Storm Before the Storm,” a history of the events that led up to the fall of the Roman Republic.

The Roman Republic rose from an obscure village to the first megacity, conquering Italy and beyond. It lasted 500 years. Think of how long that is – that’s the equivalent of the early 1500s to today. The Republic must have seemed immutable, a permanent fixture of the world, like the land and sky. And then it went away. Potential parallels to today are obvious.

I think of Roman TV shows as being set in the same universe as I, Claudius, like Marvel superhero movies or Star Trek shows. The Claudiverse – or Clavdiverse! Britannia is a series about events that take place entirely offstage during the 11th episode of I, Claudius, “A God inColchester.” One of the main characters of Britannia gets namechecked twice in that “I, Claudius” episode. “Rome” is a prequel to “I, Claudius.” And so on.

Reportedly, when David Milch pitched “Deadwood” to HBO, he went into the meeting with a series in mind that would have been set in ancient Rome. Milch was obsessed with the concept of civil society rising up out of disorder – you can see that in “Deadwood” and his earlier show, “NYPD Blue.” So his idea for a series would have followed two ordinary soldiers in the Vigiles Urbani, the police and firefighters of imperial Rome. According to the story, when Milch took the meeting the HBO executives said they already had a Roman series, which become “Rome,” and so Milch thought fast on his feet and the series became “Deadwood.”

“Deadwood” was fantastic but I want to see that other series. I even have a made-up title for it: “SPQR Blue.” 📓📚📺

I’d realize I was out of apples or coffee, and then I’d go to the store and buy that and maybe two other things and that was my errand.

Related: I miss having apples every day. I now have apples most days but I do not want to risk going to the store often enough to allow me to have apples every day. I’ve been out of apples several days now, but on deadline so don’t have time for a grocery run.

The 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory[Reset]

A vague throwaway line in a European newspaper in January ignited multiple conspiracy theories about a nonexistent link between 5G and coronavirus

People subscribe to theories like this because there are things really going on in the world that would have been unthinkable a short time ago

The best way to combat the spread of a conspiracy theory: Start by listening.

Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times science and health reporter, who has successfully anticipated the pandemic thus far, polishes his crystal ball and looks at what to expect for the next year or two.

• Immunity passports, as people get certified immune and fit to go out in public;
• Start-stop lockdowns, as societies open up, infection rates increase, and then societies shut down again;
• and strategic self-infection – people intentionally infecting themselves in hopes of acquiring immunity.

Afterward, possibly a flourishing of prosperity and progressive policy, as happened after World Wars I and I.

The Next Year (or Two) of the Pandemic [The Daily/The New York Times]

Everyone is in denial about November [Daniel W. Drezner/The Washington Post]

We’re only in the second inning of the pandemic. Getting a little breather now, things are looking like they’re getting better, but most of the crisis is still ahead of us.

And Trump can be counted on to make things worse. That is his biggest liability as a President. Not his numerous character flaws – jerk, crook, racist, narcissist, serial and compulsive liar. No, Trump’s biggest liability as a President is that he’s an incompetent moron. He’s an idiot. Even worse, he THINKS he’s a super-competent genius. And that’s going to be even more obvious in November than it is today.

Last night we watched about 15 minutes of the second episode “World on Fire,” a British miniseries about the Nazi conquest of Europe, told from the vantage point of ordinary people.

Then we turned off the TV.

I loved the first episode of the program and was extremely impressed by it, but somehow we’re not feeling like watching “World on Fire” when the world seems like it’s on the verge of burning.

A big part of my job is – or was – attending conferences. When I learn – or learned – about an interesting-looking conference, I put it in my calendar.

And now that calendar is a view into an alternate universe, one where I continued to work at my previous job, and coronavirus did not happen.

Today in that alternate universe, I am returning from the Open Networking Edge Summit in Los Angeles.

Question for my over-50 associates: How far back does your resume go? I’ve seen tips that experienced job-seekers should only have resumes going back 15 years. Mine goes back to 2003 and I’ll probably keep it that way because I was at that particular company until 2009 – 11 years ago, within the 15-year window.

How about you? How far back does your resume and LinkedIn profile go?

When updating my resume and LinkedIn in February I was a little sad to hit the delete key on the first 15 years of my career, which encompassed local weekly and daily newspapers, time at UNIX Today and Open Systems Today, my first gigs at InformationWeek and Computerworld, and my first 10-month stint freelancing – gone gone gone.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net

Trump plans to murder the US Postal Service, in violation of the US Constitution.

The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…

But Congress has decided not to bail out the postal service, despite Art 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Maybe it’s because without a USPS we couldn’t have a postal vote in 2020?

pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…

The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.

www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/w…

The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.

www.govtrack.us/congress/…

…

The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”

As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman….

The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.

The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love — veterans and rural voters.

www.eff.org/deeplinks…

Also:

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has made election day a statewide holiday, joining the handful of other states that have passed this vital, democracy-protecting law, like Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky and New York.

edition.cnn.com/2020/04/1…

It should be a federal holiday. It isn’t, because Republicans believe that increased voter turnout is bad for their electoral chances.

www.commondreams.org/news/2020…

…

Northam’s new holiday-establishing order also eliminates Virginia’s Lee-Jackson day holiday, which celebrated the traitorous, slave-owning Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who murdered American soldiers to defend their right to treat other Americans as property.

Here’s a campaign to #TakeBackTuesday and establish a US-wide election-day holiday.

www.good.is/take-back…

Also:

Coronavirus death rates in Ireland, which embraced quarantining early on, are half what they are in the UK, whose idiot Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in denial about the seriousness of the threat.

Medical historian Elaine Doyle notes that “as the Irish government was shutting schools, 250,000 people in the UK were gathering for a Cheltenham match.”

Ireland canceled St Paddy’s Day and shut pubs a week in advance. The UK had megaconcerts like the Stereophonics gig in Cardiff.

The Irish government made clear, continuous announcements about the gravity of the pandemic, urging people to stay home and take care. The UK government was virtually silent.

The thing about exponential growth is that early interventions make a huge difference. The UK dawdled for nearly two weeks before taking the lockdown steps that the Irish enacted.

The Tory ideology holds that governments are incompetent. This creates a perverse incentive: when Tories govern badly, they prove their own point. But Tories are supposed to murder poor people to juice the economy, not murder pensioners AND the economy.

Boris Johnson is a vile piece of work: a racist, misogynist bigot and a fool. His unwillingness to take (medical) expert advice (and his reliance on finance-sector advice) resulted in the measurable, deaths of Britons. Thousands of them.

What Cory says about Johnson and the Tories goes for Trump and the GOP too of course.

Minnie is hopping around on three legs and occasionally using the injured one, which suggests it is healing. She’s got her old personality back – active, curious and playful. She even tried chasing one of the cats yesterday.

However, she won’t eat her regular kibble or canned food. We’ve been giving her treats, a little cheese and a lot of rotisserie chicken. She loves that rotisserie chicken.

I put down a bowl of kibble for her to eat a few minutes ago. She sniffed the edges and gave me a dirty look, like, “You are SO getting a one-star review on Yelp for this!”

I’m not worried – yet. We went through something like this when she was a puppy. I’ll keep giving her rotisserie chicken until we run out of that, then switch her back to 100% kibble. If she skips eating two days in a row then back to the vet she goes. 📓

Monotony, frustration over having to wear a mask, being unable to take the dog to the park, or go anywhere around people. And I have so many opinions!

But I am also mindful that there are people out their dying in the most miserable conditions, exposing themselves to contagion to stock supermarket shelves, and medical personnel working 20 hour days without adequate protection. So yeah my problems, while large to me, are small. 📓

We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.

Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.

Jimmy Fallon said in an interview once that when he was growing up, his parents didn’t have friends. They had brothers and sisters and cousins. Says I to myself on hearing that: Holy crap. I thought that was just us. My parents socialized frequently, but it was almost always with people genetically related. Though my Dad did have one or two old friends he grew up with, whom he saw once or twice a year.

Mom was usually not a great cook, but she did a great job with the seder, working for days and putting on the full spread. Mom and Dad seldom drank, but they had a little wine with dinner – Manischewitz and Mogen David, of course! – and laughed a lot. My uncle Nat and Aunt Harriet were the only real drinkers in the family; my parents kept a bottle of vodka in the house for when they came to visit. We told the same jokes every year and never got tired of them.

To this day I am only a social drinker. I like beer and wine and Jameson’s and I went on a martini kick for a few years. But I don’t drink when I’m at home and I can go for weeks and months without having alcohol, and I do not miss it. 🌕

We kept kosher for Passover for the full eight days. The rest of the year we were lax. I like to say that we were pizza-and-chinese-food-on-paper-plates kosher – the foods we kept in the house were kosher, and we kept the proper two sets of plates, one for meat and one for dairy. But we brought in pizza and Chinese food regularly, and when we did, we ate it on paper plates. When I was an adult, it took me some time to get used to eating pizza on regular dishes.

I loved matzoh during Passover, and gobbled it up plain, or with margarine, rendered chicken fat or cream cheese. I never got tired of matzoh during Passover, but I stopped eating it and switched back to bread the moment I could, and never had matzoh, or wanted it, the rest of the year.

For several months, my daily breakfast has been about a pint of a thick “nutritionally complete” liquid, called Huel.

Huel is a powder you mix with water to make a milky liquid, like a thin milkshake. You can add more water to make it thinner, or less to make it thicker. You can use vegetable milk, or mix it with fruit or peanut butter for added flavor. The powder itself can be unflavored, or vanilla, chocolate or berry flavored. I’ve tried all three, and settled on the vanilla as my favorite.

I used to eat a real breakfast every day, fruit and cottage cheese, but when I started Huel in November I needed to get a running start in the morning and keep running all morning.

At that time, I was working with an international workgroup. I’m based in San Diego, which means I got into work when everybody else around the US had already been working for hours and colleagues in the UK were already into late afternoon. I didn’t want to take time out to eat breakfast, even though my body demands it.

When I read about Huel in this article by Nicole Dieker, I said sure, why not. And I liked it and stuck with it.

And I feel fine. I no longer have that morning scheduling pressure but I’ve stuck with Huel. It takes some of the complexity out of the day. And I like it.

Some people, including Nicole Dieker, above, take Huel for two meals a day, but that’s too many for me, because I like to eat. Just not as often as my body seems to need me to eat.

Some people take all their meals with Huel, but that’s not a good idea, because you risk nutritionally deficiencies. Human beings are evolved to consume a variety of foods to get a broad range of nutrients; it’s why your dog and cat are happy eating kibble every day but you’d go nuts if you always ate exactly the same thing every meal.

Huel is one of several “meal replacement” liquids that have come on the market in the past few years. They all have pretty much the same marketing pitch: Eating three meals a day, plus snacks, is a hassle. Meal replacements are designed to replace the fast-food burger you consume at your desk, not the meals you enjoy with family and friends.

Meal replacements are particularly touted for people looking to get off a junk food diet.

Soylent is the most famous of these meal replacements. I’ve tried Soylent and like it fine, but I went with Huel this time around on a whim, because of that article.

Also, Soylent is made with chemicals but Huel is made with real ingredients: Oats, tapioca, flaxseed, sunflower, coconut, peas, rice, etc.

(Yes, I know that those so-called “real ingredients” are ALSO chemicals. You know what the fuck I mean, piglet..)

As Huel notes on its website: A liquid meal made from a powder sounds weird and dystopian, but it’s actually an old idea: Flour is an example of a powder that becomes food, and soup is an example of a liquid meal. Both have been around for thousands of years. Many people have smoothies for breakfast. Huel is just a variation on that. 🌕

Kansas’s Republican-led legislator overturned the Democratic governor’s ban on gatherings during Easter and Passover.

Kansas legislature strikes down governor’s directive limiting size of religious gatherings

Kansas Republicans are claiming religious persecution, which is ridiculous because (1) The law is designed to save people’s lives and (2) The law does not single out any particular religious denomination or indeed single out religions at all. This is settled law in the US and has been for many, many decades.

The Pope and Saudi Arabia are canceling religious gatherings, including the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is a tradition dating back more than a thousands years and literally the holiest thing that a Muslim man does in his life.

Via Cory Doctorow, who says:

It’s another reminder that the right’s claim that it is the party of rational long-termism rather than squishy bleeding-heart reflex is just bullshit.

There’s literally nothing more politically short-term than dooming your core voters to die gasping deaths in a month because you’re afraid they’ll be angry at you on Easter Sunday. Angry voters might not vote for you. Dead voters can’t.

I do not celebrate anybody’s death but it is really hard to remember that when toxic people are fighting for the right to kill themselves and their followers. But even if I were cold-blooded enough to wish death on my enemies, they’ll take their neighbors and innocent children with them.

Remember this the next time you hear someone say the Republican party is pro-life and pro-common sense.

This is why I am a Democrat.

Sure, the Democratic Party is frequently fucked up – you want to complain about the DNCC, Congressional leadership, and the way the Presidential Primary played out, I’m right there with you.

But the GOP is a criminal conspiracy and death cult.

Listening to the Monday microcast with @macgenie and @manton yesterday, I learned that you can use filters on micro.blog to search for text in a post you write, and automatically include that post in a category.

So you can automate micro.blog to search for any post containing the word “beer,” or the beer emoji 🍺, and put that in a “beer” category. Instructions are here.

Additionally, micro.blog uses emoji in lieu of hashtags, which I like. Because emoji are awesome and hashtags are ugly.

Later, in the evening, I set up an automated, filtered category for “best of,” using the full-moon emoji 🌕 for a filter. I chose that emoji for no other reason than that it is a nice emoji, and won’t get in the way of people reading the post.

So now I have a blog category for my best posts, to distinguish them from the daily flow of ephemera.

I’m also thinking of using emoji with IFTTT or Zapier to control cross-posting to Twitter and Tumblr.

One of the things I love about micro.blog is that it manages to be both simple and powerful, which is a rare combination.

And now because this post contains that full moon emoji, it should automatically appear in the best-of category, without my having to do anything about it.

On today’s Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow

Disney horror/comic mashups are appalling/delightful

Daniel “Kickpunch” Björk created an incredible set of Disney Comic/horror movie mashups.

The chemistry of cold-brew coffee

I can’t say I have strong feelings about cold-brew coffee. I like a nice iced coffee in hot weather. But even in hot weather, I like hot coffee.

The crisis is making heroes of IT workers

IT workers are pulling all-nighters and multi-day marathons to set up co-workers for remote work and provision systems for new workflows.

Automating fake PDF signatures

The modern era has many tiny hypocrisies, but none quite so common as the mutual pretense by which you ask me to print, sign and scan a PDF and I pretend that I didn’t just paste my signatures into it."

But some firms shatter this tacit social contract and demand that you really engage in the ridiculous ritual of actually printing, signing and scanning.

Enter Falsiscan, a tool to automate convincing forgeries of this procedure.

gitlab.com/edouardkl…

Falsiscan takes in 27 variants of your signature and then feed these sigs and your PDF to it, with the (x,y) for each signature blank as arguments, and it will produce a slightly off-center, slightly degraded new PDF that looks like you actually signed it.

Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math

Relativity makes no distinction between past, present and future; they are all fixed. In relativity, “now” does not exist.

In real life, though, we know that time flows from past to future and we live in the now. Quantum mechanics agrees with real life.

How to resolve the contradiction?

Gisin thinks he has, using an obscure, turn-of-the-20th Century branch of mathematics.

Gisin’s theory, if borne out, would explain the nature of time, reconcile classical and quantum mechanics, explain whether numbers are real, describe the nature of “now,” and might require physicists to invent a whole new kind of mathematics. Kind of a big deal!

[Natalie Wolchover/Quanta Magazine]

Privileged person problem: When I go to the supermarket, I keep the shopping list on my iPhone. When I’m wearing a mask, Face ID doesn’t recognize me. I have to open my iPhone by entering the passcode a dozen times or more.

I heard about a feature called “Setup Alternate Appearance” for situations where you have an “appearance that can look vastly different.”

I tried it with my mask on this morning. Nope, didn’t work. It said I had something obscuring my face and I should try again.

Joanna Stern has more on the whys and wherefores at the Wall Street Journal. The iPhone needs to see your eyes, nose and mouth. It’ll work for many sunglasses but not all. It supposedly works when men grow and shave off facial hair, and when women wear or don’t wear makeup.

There’s apparently a workaround to the mask problem: masks printed with images of the lower parts of faces on them!

Doctors who’ve been living with this problem for years offer suggestions: Just use pen and paper, bunch up your interactions with the iPhone in batches all at once, tell someone you trust to unlock the phone for you, ir continue typing in your passcode like a savage.

Stern notes, and I can confirm, that you can punch in your passcode and otherwise use your iPhone while wearing thin nitrile gloves on with trivial additional inconvenience. 🌕

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net

Cleveland Plain Dealer’s new owners massacre staff

The owners of the Cleveland Plain Dealer laid off all but 14 of the newsroom staff, then prohibited the survivors from covering the beats they’ve mastered over decades, giving those roles over to the non-unionized staff at cleveland.com. …

Among those affected: Ginger Christ, the paper’s health reporter, who has been stripped of her beat during a pandemic.

This during the largest public emergency in the last 75 years. Peak parasitic capitalism.

The TSA wanted to inspect a 16-year-old trans girl’s genitals

The scanner operator “she told Jamii she must go to a private room, expose herself, and let her ‘feel up in there.’ That is, a TSA supervisor demanded to molest a child.”

When her mother refused, TSA called in the police and top TSA managers. They were eventually released and drove 600 miles rather than flying.

The TSA previously strip-searched a grandmother on Mother’s Day to get a look at her sanitary napkin, and penetrated another woman’s vulva and “falsely told her that she could not refuse the search and abandon her trip and threatened to physically restrain her if she didn’t submit.”

Also:

• The 400-year-old Bannatyne Manuscript may not be the oldest surviving F-bomb. Roger Fuckebythenavele ftw.
• Excellent public domain Zoom backgrounds. Alas, my MBP is too underpowered to use Zoom backgrounds. I have not been moved to buy a greenscreen but these backgrounds may change my mind!
• Monster-themed COVID PSAs.

I think we’ll be cautious and not rush out to any restaurants or crowded social gatherings.

But I think I’ll absolutely take the dog to the park, Lake Murray, where we used to walk every day. Stop and talk to people. Let Minnie sniff out some other dogs. That sounds lovely. With Julie of course if she wants to come. 🌕

Trump and his cronies are investors in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine. Trump has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a possible coronavirus cure, despite lack of scientific evidence, and also despite significant risks to people who take it, and despite its being needed for legitimate, proven medical uses, such as treating lupus.

Peter Baker, Katie Rogers, David Enrich and Maggie Haberman report at The New York Times: Trump’s Aggressive Advocacy of Malaria Drug for Treating Coronavirus Divides Medical Community

Sanofi’s largest shareholders include Fisher Asset Management, the investment company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans including Trump.

Another investor in both Sanofi and Mylan, another pharmaceutical firm, is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. Mr. Ross said in a statement Monday that he “was not aware that Invesco has any investments in companies producing” the drug, “nor do I have any involvement in the decision to explore this as a treatment.”

As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi….

Several generic drugmakers are gearing up to produce hydroxychloroquine pills, including Amneal Pharmaceuticals, whose co-founder Chirag Patel is a member of Trump National Golf Course Bedminster in New Jersey and has golfed with Mr. Trump at least twice since he became president, according to a person who saw them.

Andrew Cuomo is also touting the drug.

Dr. Daniel H. Sterman, the critical care director at NYU Langone Health, said doctors there are using hydroxychloroquine, but data about its effectiveness remained “weak and unsubstantiated” pending the study. “We do not know whether our patients are benefiting from hydroxychloroquine treatment at the present time,” he said.

On the other hand, many healthcare providers are advising use of the drug based on good preliminary results.

Dr. Roy M. Gulick, the chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine, said hydroxychloroquine was given on a case-by-case basis. “We explain the pros and cons and explain that we don’t know if it works or not,” he said.

Doctors at Northwell Health and Mount Sinai Health System are using it as well. At the Mount Sinai South Nassau County branch on Long Island, doctors have employed a regimen of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin “pretty much since day one” with mixed results, said Dr. Adhi Sharma, its chief medical officer.

“We’ve been throwing the kitchen sink at these patients,” he said. “I can’t tell whether someone got better on their own or because of the medication.”