The supermarket is playing XM Radio Worst of the 80s. Pat Benatar. Foreigner. Can Flock of Seagulls be far behind?

I am feeling very good about the presidential election and the direction of the US today.

The Democrats just have to not fuck this up now. Which is admittedly a bar that is usually too high for them to clear.

I’d like to live in precedented times for a while.

I’d like a few decades about which future history teachers say, “We’re not even going to talk about that period. It was boring.”

The 90s were like that. It was lovely. The big news was about a married guy who cheated on his wife with an intern.

I see the fascist New York Times is already going at Harris.

“It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch.”

My friend Meadhbh Hamrick sends a follow-up in email to my post comparing Kamala Harris to the fictional politiian Chrisjen Avasarala from “The Expanse,” a science fiction series set centuries in the future.

Avasarala is a beautiful Indian woman in her 60s, elegantly dressed in traditional styles from that country. Played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, Avasarala is intelligent, fierce, well-educated, honorable, honest, doesn’t suffer fools the least little bit, and swears like a longshoreman.

My friend Meadhbh Hamrick writes:

… women are often (always?) held to a double standard in politics. It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch. Men on the other hand can certainly be “nurturing dad/grand-dad” (Lloyd Benson or Joe Biden on a good day) or asshole (Ron DeSantis or Matt Gaetz), but they also have a third setting: just a guy doing politics.

….

I’ve been a Harris fan for a couple decades. In the late 90s I was randomly in a position to hear her talk to a gaggle of law students. She’s sharp. Some people in California don’t like her because she was so close to Willie Brown and… I get that. But there are a lot worse things you can say about modern politicians. Some people discounted her candidacy in the past because as California AG, she did her job and managed an organization which prosecuted people accused of violating the law. She also took heat for trying to move a capital murder case to life in prison. I’m actually okay with that and when the pundits talk about it, they keep saying it’s a negative.

And yes, she seems to be throwing down an Avasarala vibe, but I’ve been lucky enough to see her talk where she wasn’t campaigning and she did a good job with “option 3: just a person doing a job.”

AOC: Democratic leadership who want to replace Biden have no plan what to do next. None.

The Democratic leaders want to remove Harris as well as Biden, she says.

AOC is disgusted that the leadership is bringing this up now rather than months ago when we had a lot more options and time to plan.

independent.co.uk, thehill.com and newrepublic.com.

The only three Democratic leaders who make sense are AOC, Bernie Sanders, and my own Congressional Rep. Sara Jacobs. As a whole, the national Democratic Party is a bunch of idiots. The Republicans are even bigger idiots, and they’re Nazis too.

On Reddit: “My grandma on Christmas day, 1952. She recently passed and we found this photo of her with a gun as a 17 year old. She was a classy lady so it’s fun to see her as a wild child.” reddit.com

A company that’s supposed to prevent outages caused a big one: A CrowdStrike update crashed Microsoft systems and took down a slew of businesses around the world, including airlines, banks and more. My colleague Diana Goovaerts reports. fierce-network.com

My husband was slowing down. He needed protecting. wapo.st A moving essay by Sally Quinn, widow of Ben Bradlee, about his final descent into dementia.

Occasionally, Bradlee would snap back to his old, fierce self. Is that what we’re seeing with Biden?

I’m regularly checking github for progress on @Mtt’s new Sumo theme for Micro.blog, about which I am absurdly excited.

Hamilton Nolan: “You patsy. We don’t have time for this bullshit”

How Things Work: Labor can become more powerful if unions organize the 90% of American workers who don’t belong. Sucking up to Republicans is not the answer.

Making the Republican Party less hostile to the interests of the working class is a nice goal but if you think that this will be the result of electing a fascist who tried the steal the last election and who famously stiffs people who work for him and who is an egomaniac and who has never supported the electoral agenda of unions and who lies constantly and who is running on a racist platform of demonizing immigrants—you are stupid. You are a patsy if you think this.

Philosopher Alan Watts ponders the nature of consciousness

The Nature of Consciousness:

Let’s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power to dream in one night 75 years worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ And you would dig that, and come out of it and say ‘That was a close shave, now wasn’t it?’ Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of the life that you are actually living today.

Watts also brings to life the cliched observation that we are not separate from the universe. We are a part of it. We did not come into the world when we were born, we are agglomerations of atoms that existed for billions of years before we were born and will continue to exist for billions more after we die. The distinction between “self” and “other” is an illusion.

just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it’s all one.

Our individuality was implicit in the universe from the time it began.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

…

So don’t differentiate yourself and stand off and say ‘I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks and stuff.’ It all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails. You need rocks. What are you going to stand on?

Watts also has a theory of consciousness I quite like: Our bodies do almost everything without consciousness. Consciousness is not involved in circulating blood, digesting food, or breathing (most of the time). Even when we consciously decide to walk or move our hand, consciousness is not involved in the micro-movements. I’m sitting here typing just now, but I’m not consciously making my fingers move. I just look at the screen, and I perceive the words appearing on the screen directly from my brain.

Consciousness evolved to handle the small fraction of tasks that our bodies can’t do without consciousness. We think our consciousness is our entire selves — some philosophers say you are not your body — but that’s wrong. Consciousness is only part of our selves.

The wolves are circling Biden

Obama Says Biden Has to Rethink His Candidacy [politicalwire.com]

Also on politicalwire.com:

President Joe Biden’s political world is collapsing. Top allies have either publicly or privately called on him to step aside. Major donations have fallen off a cliff. Grassroots fundraising is not keeping up with the demands of a campaign that needs to aggressively scale up three months before the presidential election. Members of his own re-election effort have already declared he has no path to victory.

DARPA is launching a program to sift through quantum computing hype

networkworld.com:

“Our opening position is skepticism," stated Dr. Joe Altepeter, the DARPA program manager of the project, in a blog about QBI. “Specifically, skepticism that a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer with a sufficient number of logical qubits can ever be built.”

”We will walk into the room and say, ‘We’re pretty sure whatever you’re doing is not going to work.’ I will bring a small army of scientists and engineers, we will listen to your evidence, and we will double and triple check using our own analysis," Altepeter wrote. “And if we’re convinced the technology you’re developing checks out and you’re onto something big, we’ll tell the rest of government and become a strong advocate for your approach.”

Heartbreaking: This Guy Has No Idea That He’s So Strange And Memorable-Looking That Everyone From His Flight Is Using Him As A Landmark To Figure Out Which Baggage Claim Area Is Theirs [clickhole.com]. I have absolutely done this. I’ve probably been this guy, and I’m OK with that.

The Verge: “Dune: Prophecy hits HBO in November. The series is a prequel to Denis Villeneuve’s films, and it just got a fresh trailer.” I didn’t love the movies but I loved the original books. Sure, I’ll give the series a try.

PoliticalWire: Trump says “God was with me” during the failed assassination attempt. I guess God must have hated Corey Competore.

Competore, 50, was a volunteer firefighter who was shot by the assassin who aimed at Trump. Competore died protecting his family.

CBS Austin: Texans are assaulting and threatening linemen working to restore electrical power after Hurricane Beryl.

HOUSTON – Drawn guns. Thrown rocks. Threatening messages. Houston’s prolonged outages following Hurricane Beryl has some fed-up and frustrated residents taking out their anger on repair workers who are trying to restore power across the city.”

Today I learned that “Dogs Playing Poker” refers collectively to 18 paintings by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, comprising one each in 1894 and 1910, and 16 commissioned in 1903 to advertise cigars. Individual paintings have been auctioned for up to $658,000.

Cats are adorable little angels with fur

Lulu, one of our cats, likes to creep up on me when I’m sleeping soundly at night, put her sweet lips against my ear hole, and meow as loud as she can. She’s got a hell of a set of little lungs. Last night, I incorporated it into a dream and woke up abruptly, thinking I was hearing a human baby screaming in agony and terror.

I did not intend to write four posts about Overcast today

Overall, the latest version of the Overcast podcast player has been buggy for me. This seems like a beta 1 product, not production software.

That said, I credit Marco with quick action staying on top of bugs and customer service. He already has distributed a bug-fix beta.

As I recall, he’s a coffee connoisseur and I hope he has plenty of the good stuff.

I use Overcast for its audio quality rather than its user interface. The audio quality remains first-rate, and I remain a satisfied customer.

No, Facebook. I wasn’t doing that, you idiots. Not even close.

This is the second warning I’ve received in two days, when any fool could see that I wasn’t doing that at all.

Remind me again why I’m still on Facebook? Oh, yeah, it’s because most of my friends and family who are online are there.

One more thing about Overcast

Reading this post it seems if you lose your playlists or podcast lists, force-quitting the app should fix the problem.

I’m pretty sure I tried that last night, but I think the developer changed the back-end afterward.

So far, I’m satisfied with the new version, but I’m also finding it a bit buggy. For example, changing filter settings on playlists doesn’t work until I force-quit the app.

The new version of the Overcast podcast player is completely unusable for me. I have filed a bug report and reverted to the previous beta.

Today’s fashion hate-reads

Sock height is now a “fierce controversy.. No-show socks make you look old. Crew socks are now fashionable. Unless you’re already old, in which case crew socks make you look old too.

This article has it all, including gratuitous Boomer-bashing and a grown-ass man who is devastated that teenagers are making fun of his socks at Disney World.

I take great pride in not caring about socks. As long as they’re approximately the same color, that’s good enough for me.

Also: Carolyn Hax advises a woman who is aghast that her sister-in-law wore white jeans to a wedding reception, when the invitations SPECIFICALLY SAID “festive cocktail attire.” The only person in this letter who is NOT horrible is the woman in white jeans.

If someone asked me to wear “festive cocktail attire” to an event, I would have no idea what that is. I guess that’s a big reason why we never get those kinds of invitations.

Good profile of J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP pick, in the form of a 55-point list at Politico.

TL;DR: Vance is a crackpot conspiracy theorist and LGBT-phobe motivated strongly by a desire to pwn the Libs. Also, he either had a 180-degree change of heart about Trump, or he’s a sociopathic opportunist; in 2016, he said Trump is an “idiot” and might well be America’s Hitler.

I would not bet on Vance surviving long. Trump tried to have his last VP whacked.

55 Things to Know About J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP Pick

Something I noticed re-reading Roger Zelazny's "Doorways in the Sand"

I recently re-read Roger Zelazny’s “Doorways in the Sand,” which I last read when I was a teen-ager. I loved it as much today as I did then. One of my favorite Zelazny books, which makes it one of my favorite books.

In that novel, a character in his 60s is looking back on his life and says that the world goes through one massive change after another—but they happen one at a time, spaced out at long intervals, and after each change life goes back to pretty much what it was before, so you can convince yourself nothing has changed.

Then you look back over the course of 40+ years and the world is completely different from when you were 20 years old.

I glided over that passage when reading it first as a teen, but re-reading it again over the past few months it hit me hard.

In my adult lifetime, we’ve seen the emergence of he Internet, smartphones, the rise of China, the end of the Cold War, Covid, Donald Trump, the fall of the USSR—after each of these events, we could say, “That was a big deal but still our day-to-day lives are not much different than they were before” And yet you put it all together and the world is very, very different than it was in 1981.

This rule does not apply if you or someone close to you is personally affected by any of these global changes. And these changes can affect hundreds of millions of people — that’s what makes them global. But billions of people are not directly affected by these changes. For them, each individual change is a jolt and then life goes on mostly as it has done before.

Meet the thing I've been working on for three months: Fierce Network Research

I’m excited to unveil what I’ve been working on for the past three months: Helping to launch Fierce Network Research, the research arm of the Fierce Network technology news portal.

Fierce Network Research is dedicated to delivering insights on the impact, benefits and challenges of the new era of smart networking for communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises.

We call this new-era networking Smart Cloud. It combines cloud, observability, automation, AI and security to build communications infrastructure essential to global economic and societal transformation.

We’re seeing the entire built world become intelligent — smart transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, automation, healthcare, energy and more. Everything that drives the economy and society is becoming connected, saturated with sensors and using artificial intelligence and automation to make smart decisions that improve productivity and efficiency.

None of that works without Smart Cloud connectivity.

I’m part of the Fierce Network Research team as Chief Analyst, defining the research business’s point of view and taking overall responsibility for its research into the latest global trends.

About me: I’ve been covering enterprise and telco technology for more than 30 years, including leadership positions at Light Reading and InformationWeek. I also helped drive content marketing in a full-time position at Oracle and as a consultant for business-to-business technology companies for the data center, cloud platform, networking and security spaces.

For more information on our current and upcoming reports, go here: It’s time to meet Fierce Network Research

And here’s the website: research.fierce-network.com

I searched the house for my glasses this morning. Eventually, I found them on the ground outside in the backyard, where they had been all night.

I took them off to read the phone while standing in the backyard waiting for the dog to do her business so we could both go to bed. Usually, when I take off my glasses to read, I tuck them into the neck of my shirt. But I wasn’t wearing a shirt, so I tucked the arm of my glasses into the pocket of my shorts, and then I promptly forgot about them. They fell on the ground while I was putting the dog to bed.

Eyeglasses are amazing engineering. They are made of glass and fragile wire, but they’re tough little tanks. I abuse the hell out of mine and they’re fine.

Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like Up In The Air or Michael Clayton, but we don’t know anything about his political judgment.

— Dave Winer @davew@mastodon.social

Republicans: Democrat Party rhetoric is to blame!
Republicans, previously:

Republicans: Democrat Party rhetoric is to blame!
Republicans, previously:

via

“I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing.”

— Roger Zelazny, Doorways in the Sand