2020
YouTube is boosting ridiculous conspiracy theories about how 5G is the real cause of coronavirus. But it’s not because people are stupid – it’s because so many ridiculous conspiracies are real, says Cory Doctorow.
In real life, billionaires got rich lying about the safety of opiods, prosecutors and lawmakers covered up for pals like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, conspirators ignored evidence about Flint’s water. Scientific journals publish fake papers, doctors get paid off by pharma companies, and regulators are captured by business.
Compared with real life, antivaxxers, #PizzaGaters and even flat-Earthers don’t look so crazy.
Anna Merlan documents conspiracy theories in her 2019 book, “Republic of Lies,” Cory says, adding:
Merlan describes how conspiracists aren’t ignorant, but rather lavishly misinformed. UFO conspiracists can go chapter-and-verse on aerospace conspiracies, of which there are so. many. including, most recently, the 737 Max scandal.
Antivaxers know tons about opioid coverups and other medical malpractice. People who believe that the levees were dynamited during Katrina to drown black neighborhoods and spare white ones know all about when that actually happened in Tupelo, MS.
Susceptibility to conspiratorialism arises when someone is exposed to actual conspiracies, and trauma.
Apple acquires Voysis for natural language recognition, presumably to beef up Siri - Bloomberg News/ITPro Today
Is Huawei an open source champion now? Huawei? The company joined the US-based open-source patent non-aggression group Open Invention Group, whose members cross-license Linux system patents to one another on a royalty-free basis. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has the story:
Huawei joins major US-based open-source patent protection consortium OIN
“I wouldn’t worry about even getting COVID-19 when COVID-20 is going to be released in a few months and it will support 5G.” - @joshua
Too soon?
Coronavirus cooking: Isolation is teaching us a better way to think about food. - Rebecca Onion at Slate
Isolation is making people less wasteful of food. Maybe.
Even today, we’re still many of us a lot better off than our grandparents.
Consider the Possibility That Trump Is Right On China
And consider that Trump might be right about globalization too.
Nadia Schadlow at The Atlantic:
At least as controversial as Trump’s critique of China is his emphasis on the importance of sovereignty and his insistence that strong sovereign states are the main agents of change. But states are the foundation of democratic governance and, fundamentally, of security. It is the citizens of states who vote and hold leaders accountable. And it is states that are the foundation of military, political, and economic power in alliances such as NATO, or organizations like the United Nations….
Contrary to what critics argue, “America first” does not mean “America alone.” That Trump might be introducing needed correctives to the hyper-globalization pursued by earlier administrations is generating serious cognitive dissonance in some quarters. And the reality is that only one organization in the entire world has as its sole responsibility the American people’s safety. That institution is the U.S. government. Whether led by Republicans or Democrats—or by Donald Trump or anyone else—it should always put the American people first.
I am shocked to find myself agreeing with this article.
Coronavirus hurts Silicon Valley caterers and event businesses
Salvador Rodriguez at CNBC:
Performers, food caterers, event planners, venue owners, models, DJs and others that rely on the tech industry are now staring at blank calendars with no idea of when they will be able to return to their livelihoods.
For much of the last 20 years I went to one or two industry events a month, mostly in San Francisco, the Bay Area and Las Vegas. I can’t imagine they’ll be among the first things to return when sheltering in place lifts.
Today is looking like it was not a great day to cut down on coffee. Tomorrow is not looking great for that either. 
I think we’ll go out to brunch today at DZ Akins, an excellent kosher-style deli just a few minutes drive way. It’s often crowded on Sunday; in a truly wonderful American fashion, this Jewish restaurant fills up when churches let out. But it’s worth waiting for a table.
The weather looks gray, but not rainy, which makes it a good day to visit Balboa Park and check out the museums. San Diego has some excellent museums, surprisingly so for a surfer/tourism town. Again, the park is usually crowded on Sunday and it’s hard to find parking, but worth the trouble.
Jack Butler at the National Review calls Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series a “comforting technocratic fable."
I loved the Foundation Trilogy when I was a boy. I listened to the audiobook of “Foundation” recently and was not moved to continue on. It doesn’t hold up.
Lately I am inclined to see the heroes of that series as badly misguided. Another writer might have even called them villains.
One of the fundamental problems with the premise of the series is that it assumes that human beings don’t have free will.
Asimov was by training a scientist. He was a Ph.D. in chemistry. And one of the fundamental lessons of that science comes from the study of the behavior of fluids. Liquids and gases. Individual molecules behave randomly and are completely unpredictable. An individual molecule in a liquid or gas might move in any direction at any time. There’s no way of knowing.
But if you put trillions of molecules of fluid together, they become completely predictable. Water flows downhill.
Asimov presumed the same thing for human behavior. Individual humans are completely unpredictable. Even billions of humans, the population of the Earth, cannot be predicted. But if you assume the entire GALAXY is settled by humans, billions of Earths, with a population in the TRILLIONS, you have a population that is completely predictable.
That’s the made-up science of psychohistory in Foundation.
But it doesn’t exist. And it would be terrible if it DID exist. As Cory Doctorow points out, if you could know the future for certain, what would be the reason to get out of bed in the morning? Particularly if the future is BAD. If you’re a Jew in Europe and it’s 1928 and you can predict the future with certainty, do you even want to be alive at that point?
That’s one of the problems with the Foundation Trilogy.
The other problem is alluded to in Butler’s description of the series as “technocratic.” Asimov gives us a choice between two lousy forms of government: An empire – in other words, a hereditary dictatorship, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. Or government by bureaucrats. We never encounter a planet governed by a democratic government with a robust civil service that serves the will of the people. Nope.
Indeed, when I look back on science fiction from that period, I see a lot of galactic empires presented as benevolent, and other forms of benevolent dictatorships. You have to wait until Star Trek until you get something truly resembling representative democracy.
And the OTHER problem with the Foundation Trilogy is that it’s just plain old-fashioned. The prose and storytelling style has not aged well. The characters are flat and one-dimensional, and the action takes place offscreen and is described in dialogue.
Nonetheless, when I revisited the first novel recently, I did find charm in the retro-future vision. When Asimov imagines someone from the outer planets visiting the Galactic capital of Trantor, we see Asimov himself: A leading individual in one of the golden times and places of American history, immigrant New York from around the turn of the century to the 1950s. Jews and Italians fled hard lives in the old country and became Americans, and helped build America. My own parents grew up in that milieu; if I had a time machine it’s one of the times and places I would most like to visit.
And the Foundation Trilogy WAS among my favorite books when I was a kid. If I identify problems with it now, that doesn’t take away from my enjoyment then.
Nor does it take away from my admiration for Asimov, who was and is one of my heroes. He was far from a perfect person in his life, but who is?
As Alec Nevala-Lee writes in his recent book “Astounding," a history of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s (recommended), when Asimov conceived Foundation, he was a teen-ager in New York, reading about the news of the Nazis rolling over Europe, and threatening America, with the Holocaust killing people just like himself, his family and friends. He dreamed of a world where he could somehow find assurance that everything was going to be ok.
Julie and I are both easily annoyed today. I came into her office to tell her about something that was annoying me, and before I could say a word she went into telling me about something that was annoying her. That annoyed the hell out of me.
I hope she is not annoyed by my posting this.
Also, I think maybe I picked the wrong historical event during which to reduce coffee consumption.
Private equity is using the pandemic to loot public health facilities, such as hospitals and medical clinics. One example: Firing medical professionals who speak out about unsafe working conditions - Cory Doctorow
LA landlord threatens to evict 300 tenants if they don’t pay rent in full, in violation fo state and local emergency tenant protections. Landlord uses cc instead of bcc, helping tenants organize a web strike. Whoops - Cory Doctorow
Supercut of Fox News hosts insisting coronavirus is no cause concern, a Democratic/MSM conspiracy, etc. Not “ha-ha-weird, nor ha-ha-funny. It’s more ha-ha-Exhibit-A-for-a-future-war-crimes-tribunal” - Cory Doctorow
What did people do before toilet paper?
The ancient Romans wiped their butts with a “tersorium,” a stick with a vinegar- or salt-water-soaked sponge attached, although these may have been used to clean the latrine rather than the person.
Other ancient cultures used small stones, rags on sticks, spatulas, and – for scholars – manuscripts. Yen Chih-Thui, a sixth century AD scholar, said he didn’t dare wipe himself “on the names of sages.”
The Chinese imperial family was using mass produced rice-paper-based toilet paper by 1393.
Inventor Joseph Gayetty introduced the first mass-produced TP in the west in 1857; it was called “J.C. Gayetty’s Medicated Paper for the Water Closet” because they knew how to do product names back then.
By Erin Blakemore at National Geographic.
One month ago today I went to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club general meeting with a hundred or so of my closest friends. Following that, a small group of us had a light dinner and drinks at Hooley’s
This is a historic event for two reasons: It was the-second-to-last time I spent a lot of time in close proximity to a lot of people, prior to COVID-19 ramping up. The last time was as few days later, when Julie and I went out to brunch. A few days after that: Lockdown!
Since then, it’s just been social distancing.
The other reason this dinner is historic is I sat immediately next to someone who later got sick with COVID-19. We were packed onto that table so he and I were very close, nearly bumping elbows. He later spent a harrowing week or two in the ICU unit. He’s recovering at home now – thank goodness.
Fortunately for my and Julie’s peace of mind, I found out about this gentleman’s hospitalization more than two weeks after the dinner, well past the incubation period for myself and Julie. So we’re safe. Probably. I’m trying not to think about how little science actually knows about the spread of coronavirus, and whether that two-week figure might be simply be wrong.
Lots of things I’m not thinking about right now. I am becoming excellent at compartmentalization – part of me plans and prepares for the worst and part of me just tries to live life as normally as I can, working and spending time with Julie and reading my books and walking the dog and not thinking about the awful things that might happen. Nearly certainly will happen to so many people.
BTW, I realize this is extraordinarily self-centered – here’s this guy in the ICU and I’m all whew glad that wasn’t too stressful for me. I’m prepared to mount a LarryDavidian defense of my thinking.
Earthquake. About 50 minutes ago. Just a minor one, no damage or injury that I’m aware of. But it’s the biggest earthquake we’ve felt in a long time. Maybe ever.
Because life needed to get more interesting.
Help me with a thought experiment here. Those of you who identify as Republican or conservative: What are the values you hold most dear? What should our national priorities be? What should be government’s goals?
If you fell into a deep slumber and woke up in the United States 50 years from now what would you hope it would be like? Assume a cultural and political renaissance where everybody comes around to realize that your beliefs were best after all.
And how well do you think the Trump administration and present-day Republicans are doing?
Aside to my liberal/Democrat/progressive friends and family: Just sit on your hands on this one please. Let’s keep our mouths shut and learn some things.