2020
Trump wants a race war to get himself re-elected
David Pell on NextDraft:
Remember, this is a guy who ran on Birtherism and walls, and has led with Muslim bans, kids in cages, very fine people on both sides, shithole countries, and political enemies described as human scum. When the looting starts, the shooting starts is the brand he ran on and won on in 2016.
I don’t have any useful judgment to share for or against the rioters in Minneapolis. I understand why they are doing it. George Floyd seems to be only the spark that ignited the fire.
I’ve seen discussion that you needed both Martin Luther King AND race riots to achieve the gains of the 60s. King said, look, black people just want equality. They want to live in the suburbs and mow the lawn and have barbecues on weekends and complain about work and how lousy the home team is playing and bring cookies to PTA meetings and do all those other things white people do.
And the riots said: You can have that, America … or you can have this.
How I cynically exploited "Hands Across America"
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.
Talking about “A Canticle for Leibowitz”
📚I found myself thinking about the novel “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” by Walter M. Miller Jr., occasionally for the last week or two. It’s always been one of my favorites. It tells the story about a Roman Catholic monastery that work to preserve knowledge for a thousand years after a 20th Century nuclear war. A major theme is the tension between faith and science.
Two days ago I saw a tweet praising my appearance on the Hugos There podcast, where I talked about the novel, and about Miller, with host Seth Heasley. It was a nice moment.
I quite enjoyed doing the podcast. So I decided to listen to it again and was reminded of things I learned when preparing for the appearance, and have since forgotten.
This 1997 news article about Leibowitz’s death is powerful and terribly sad, particularly the opening.
A Piers Anthony encounter
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
Agenda: Great app, but not for me
I spent some time yesterday fooling around with Agenda, an app for taking time-sensitive notes, such as notes on meetings or notes on projects with deadlines or timelines.
In addition to organizing notes by date, you can group notes together into projects and categories, and add tags to organize them further. It looks like a great app, but I do not have a place for it.
Likewise, I took another look at Ulysses, which I used for years. It’s still a great app for writing and note-taking. But don’t see a place for that in my work anymore either.
I’m fully committed to DevonThink for document management and note taking now. You can live inside DevonThink, or live without DevonThink, but you cannot live with DevonThink. Somebody said that recently about a different app entirely — emacs — but it applies to DevonThink as well.
www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devo…
I was inspired to take another look at Agenda after listening to Rosemary Orchard describe her setup on the Nested Folders podcast.
nestedfolderspodcast.com/podcast/e…
⚙🖥📱
I don’t use ad-blockers because I hate ads
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. 🌕
Dune is a rational space opera, as logical and geometrical as a Sherlock Holmes story, with an irrational occult spirit journey built on top. It needs both parts to succeed. The David Lynch movie attempted the occult part, and was completely uninterested in the rational genre story. 🍿📚
🍿I watched the end of the Coen Brothers comedy “Hail Caesar” yesterday. We’d watched the first part weeks ago but Julie lost interest and I finally had a chance to catch up. I quite enjoyed the movie.
George Clooney does a great job playing cheerful idiots. He makes a lot of stupid faces. He seems to enjoy it and he is very good at it.
Who’s watching Lawrence Welk anymore? My grandparents watched it in the 70s. They were in their 80s then. That’s always seemed like the target demographic. Are there enough 120-year-olds around now to keep the show on the air?
I stopped in at Mystic Grill & Bakery last night to pick up a takeout dinner for myself and Julie. The chairs were down off the tables, indicating that dining service was available. But I only saw one person sitting at a table, and he may have been an employee. On a normal Saturday night at that time there would have been a couple of families there.
Several people came out for takeout, which was good to see. Staff and customers were all masked.
The TV was playing Lawrence Welk. I don’t think that’s significant from an epidemiological perspective
Julie and I watched “Dune” again not long ago. The only other time I’d seen it was in the theatrical release in the 80s. It was fine. I enjoyed it. I had zero expectations, and the movie met them.
A friend said she loved it because it visualized all the settings and characters of the novel. I said it was a terrible movie and the settings and characters looked different from the way I visualized them when reading. She said she didn’t care. Her perspective is valid.
On the It’s the Pictures That Got Small podcast: Dune, with Karina Longworth, Nate DiMeo and Natasha Lyonne.
David Lynch had no interest in the mythology of Dune. He just loved the imagery. It is the ultimate movie do to use for GIFs, or to project on the wall of a bar on the Lower East Side. Or watch in any public place with the sound off.
Karina Longworth: “It only doesn’t work if you it expect to be a movie.”
Lynch’s cut of the movie was five hours. The final cut was a little over two hours. Maybe the director’s cut would have been better?
📷 Two ducks 🦆 🦆 hanging out in the pond, a third duck 🦆 joins them. A brisk discussion of etiquette ensues.
LEEEROY JENKINS!!!!!
📽Last night we watched “Saving Mr. Banks,” about the making of Mary Poppins. The movie stars Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Bradley Whitford, etc. — excellent cast.
“Saving Mr. Banks” takes great liberties with historical reality. In reality, PL Travers, the author of the series of Mary Poppins novels, never cared for the movie “Mary Poppins,” and wouldn’t permit another adaptation for 30 years. When she finally relented, for a stage production in London, she stipulated no Americans could be involved. And she had a much more interesting life than “Saving Mr. Banks” portrays. She was a successful actress and dancer and poet and studied philosophy and lived with Native Americans for a time and studied their philosophy and folklore. She adopted a boy, from whom she was later estranged.
Walt Disney, in real life, was kind of a bastard.
The movie is bullshit and propaganda and I loved it anyway and would gladly watch it again.
Much of the movie focuses on Travers’ childhood in Allora, Australia, in the early 1900s. It was a small town then and it’s no metropolis today, with a population of 1,223.
Patton Oswalt: Joey Pants is the real hero of “The Matrix,” and the computers are trying to be nice.
“There’s a very strong case to be made for [Joey Pantoliano’s character, Cypher], like, ‘No. Plug me the fuck back into this,’ Oswalt said. [Cypher is] one of the freed humans who regrets the decision to take the red reality pill, since the simulation was so much more warm and satisfying than reality.
“‘I’m nude with atrophied muscles, hairless in a jagged wasteland of radioactive slag, or I can be in this world where I have a nice job, where I eat a steak and marry someone,'” Oswalt ranted. “‘Can I just live in this — I am fine with it. Morpheus, who the fuck are you helping?! Why are you dragging us out?! The machines aren’t trying to kill us.'”
He continued from the point of view of the machines: “‘And by the way, you guys fucked up the Earth. We’re doing the best we can for you guys. We could have just let you all die in the wasteland, but instead, we found a way so that you can live.'”
Back speaking for himself, Oswalt added, “People always miss that line where [Agent] Smith (Hugo Weaving) says, ‘You know, when we first did the Matrix, it was just flat-out paradise, and you guys couldn’t handle that and you rejected it.’… Probably the first version of the Matrix, everybody could fly and orgasms lasted three months and you could just eat all the chocolate you wanted. And people were like, ‘No! I want a goddamn cubicle job!’ And the machines went, ‘OK. I guess they want cubicles. Give ‘em that. We tried to be nice.'”
The last typist was kicked out of the Writers Room in New York’s Greenwich Village 10 years ago.
The ribbon has run out on the last typewriter at a Manhattan writers' den.
Skye Ferrante has spent six years at the Writers Room in Greenwich Village, blissfully banging away on his grandmother’s 1929 Royal typewriter.
The 37-year-old writer represented a bygone era, the last typewriter-user in a special room devoted to typists.
“In the event that there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists,” read a sign posted in the “Typing Room” for years.
When Ferrante returned to the Writers Room in April after an eight-month break, the sign was gone and his noisy typewriter was no longer welcome.
“I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off,” said Ferrante, a Manhattan native who’s writing children’s books. “They offered me a choice to switch to a laptop or refund my money, which to me is no choice at all.”
Ten years later, Ferrante is still around, doing wire sculptures, which he shares on Instagram. The Writers Room is still around too, and looks lovely, though I expect it’s on pandemic hiatus.
Did the Black Death lead to the Renaissance?
What does that history teach us about what to expect in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic?
It’s complicated, says Professor Ada Palmer.
Palmer, a historian and science fiction writer and all-around genius, appears in a wide-ranging interview on the Singularity Podcast:
Prof. Ada Palmer on Pandemics, Progress, History, Teleology and the Singularity
The Renaissance was in many ways a terrible time to be alive; Europeans fought many fierce wars and lifespans were drastically shorter than the preceding Middle Ages. Other parts of the world, particularly China, were far more advanced than Europe, and Europeans knew it.
But the Renaissance also produced great art and scientific breakthroughs. Then as now, it was the best and worst of times.
Francis Bacon invented the idea of progress in 1620. There was plenty of progress before then, of course, but until Bacon, people viewed history as more or less the same. They were some places and times that were better to be alive than others. Empires rose and fell. But our ancestors lives were the same as ours and our children’s would be the same as well.
Bacon had the idea of using science to cumulatively improve all peoples lives today and in the future into the future. For that reason, he said science was the best form of Christian charity.
We didn’t see the first breakthrough from Bacon’s insight for 150 years, until Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. But since then he’s been proven right. Refrigeration, the rule of law, medicine and other advances have improved life for everyone, and will continue to do so.
Accepted wisdom today for many people is that one of the advances of the Renaissance was the break with religion and move to secularism. But great scientists like Isaac Newton and Descartes were devout Christians. Newton was deeply immersed in beliefs that we would consider occult.
People today sometimes say that figures like Newton were actually closet atheists, and could not share their beliefs because of censorship and fear of the Inquisition. And it’s true that censorship makes it very hard for later historians to find out what was actually going on. But we can deduce people’s actual beliefs by looking at other things they did say that they believe. And Renaissance intellectuals espoused beliefs that were far more dangerous than atheism. The Inquisition was far more concerned with heresy than atheism. If people like Newton and Descartes were atheists, they would have said so.
Atheism developed as a by-product of publishers making hyped claims in trying to flog translations of the work of the Greek philosopher Epictetus.
People calling themselves “transhumanists” today look forward to the Singularity, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. But we’ve already been through a kind of Singularity, in the 17th Century, when for the first time it became impossible for an educated person to familiarize himself with every book ever written. With the invention of the printing press, books were being published faster than they could be catalogued, let alone read and understood! Until then, an educated person was considered to be one familiar with the total of all human knowledge. After that, we get the idea of specialization.
Poverty is a tax on intelligence. If you’re spending a lot of time worrying about paying bills, you don’t have that intelligence to think about other things. Palmer estimates that if we lift a person out of poverty, we raise their intelligence 25%.
All knowledge is useful, if for no other reason than it’s satisfying to learn things. Even finding out whether giraffes can swim is satisfying.
Humanity is a very young species, and we will get our act together eventually. Until a few centuries ago, it was considered fine and ok for people with powerful patrons to go around murdering people and bragging about it. Now, we believe all people should be subject to the law. That’s a big deal!
Progress comes from everyday people doing small things, more than from geniuses and great men and women doing great things:
The small things that we are achieving that feel small are the way that the civilization-wide big things happen. The more I look at history and zoom in the less it is the geniuses and the people whose names we know that made the world shift and the more it is, in fact, the microscopic – from a historical standpoint – teamwork of everybody. So never feel that the stuff you’re doing isn’t important.