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.
With the nation healthy, tranquil and prosperous, our President turns his attention to thoughtful media criticism.
Trump tunes in to ‘Morning Joe,’ says he sees ‘hatred and contempt’ [Kyle Balluck/The Hill]
Barr Threatens Legal Action Against Governors Over Lockdowns [Chris Strohm/Bloomberg]
Even before the coronavirus crisis began, I thought of the Republican Party as a criminal racist death cult. Really looking to be proven wrong on that one.
McConnell slams brakes on next round of coronavirus aid [Burgess Everett/Politico]
Captain of the “Titanic” says he will not begin lowering the lifeboats until all the deck chairs are arranged just so.
Whole lotta love: Robert Plant gave a big donation to a company that makes PPE [Erica Banas/WMMR]
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
Beware of fake “Someone you came in contact with tested positive for COVID-19” warnings. They’re scams.
Investors that own doctors' groups blew millions on ads to promote “surprise billing” even as they were denying access to PPE, cutting wages and firing doctors.
Every Covid commercial is exactly the same.
The Texas AG threatens to imprison people for warning about the risk of getting Covid while voting.
Covid didn’t escape from a Chinese lab.
Whole Foods is making heatmaps to detect union activity – cheaper than paying people a good wage.
Amazon workers are planning a strike.
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.
How Coffee Became a Modern Necessity [Augustine Sedgewick/WSJ]: “For much of its 500-year history, the drink was viewed with confusion, suspicion and disgust.”
Vintage Season: C.L. Moore and the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction [Eric Rosenfield/Literate Machine]
C.L. Moore was a talented science fiction and fantasy writer whose career spanned the Golden Age of pulp magazines, from the 1930s, and briefly into television. She wrote both under her own byline and in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner. She retired from writing in 1963, and died a quarter-century later. The ferocious demands of making a living writing at cheap pulp rates had burned out her talent and used her up.
Her most famous story is probably “Vintage Season.” Set in the present day, it’s about a man who rents out a house to a group of strange but congenial people who, the man learns, are from the future. The mystery of the story is what these people are doing there, at that time: the man thinks there is absolutely nothing remarkable about himself, his house, his city or that moment. He soon learns differently.
Moore’s husband, Kuttner, died of a stroke in his sleep at age 44 in 1958. A month earlier, a talented writer named Cyril Kornbluth died of a heart attack at age 34 “and there was a palpable feeling among their fellows in the trenches that these men had died from the constant need to produce in the pay-per-word mills, especially through the long crunch of the mid-to-late 50s.
Rosenfield writes:
“I was only twenty-three, then,” writer Robert Silverberg would say later, “but I somehow realized right away that these two men had literally died from writing science fiction and I was afraid that I was going to die too. I had some bad months.”
More writers would fall away over the next few years; Mark Clifton dead of a heart attack in 1963 at 57, H. Beam Piper a suicide in 1960 at 60. Still others quit prose fiction altogether. Isaac Asimov, for example, turned to cranking out nonfiction books at his customary breakneck pace and wouldn’t come back to fiction until the ’70s. Leigh Brackett took up a noted film career, including scripts for Rio Bravo (1958), The Long Goodbye (1973), and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), among many others.
Moore for her part completed the transition to television, writing for Maverick, Sugarfoot, 77 Sunset Strip, and other shows under the name Catherine Kuttner. But in 1963 she remarried a physician and quit writing altogether.
It’d be easy to speculate that her new husband didn’t want his wife writing, but she herself said in a later interview, “Since I don’t have to write for a living anymore, I just don’t have the motivation to resume writing, although I wish I did.” There’s a sense in this sentence that the pressures of commercial fiction had sucked out whatever passion Moore had once had for writing–all that giddy glee in which she’d typed out that first story for fun back in 1933–transforming it into just another job. And when the need for that job evaporated so did the desire to do it.
The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth
Sara Seager is a tenured professor of physics and planetary science who won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2013. Her area of expertise is exoplanets – planets that orbit stars other than our son – specifically the search for a planet that might contain life.
Chris Jones profiles Seagar for the New York Times. She emerges as the very picture of the obsessed scientist: She speaks in an unmodulated breathless tone, never learned to manage money, doesn’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas or holidays, never learned to cook.
It would be easy to pigeonhole someone like Seagar as a soulless human computer. But this profile is only half-focused on her work; the other half deals with her immense grief over becoming a young widow, struggling to raise children alone, and eventually finding friends and connection with people.
vintagegeekculture:
Star Trek art designer Matt Jeffries, with one of his most famous creations: the Klingon battlecruiser.
Bonus: his original, and in my view, far better, design for the shuttlecraft.
KOOL cigarette ad from the 1960s. via
The temperature will probably get up past 90 by Saturday. I am looking forward to complaining about the heat as a break from complaining about the cold.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net:
Denmark is denying bailouts to companies headquartered in tax havens: If you don’t pay taxes, you don’t get to enjoy tax benefits.
Zoom claims it uses AI to stop sexytimes. Zoom won’t let you zoom anybody on Zoom. Or so it says – AI has been terrible at detecting nudity, there’s no reason to think it’s gotten better. And why does Zoom believe it has the right to be sex police?
Cars, not public transit, are correlated with contagion in NYC. I need to look into this further; it doesn’t make sense. I am 100% pro-public-transit, and it absolutely can be made to work even here in suburbanized Southern California. But public transit, like sporting events, religious services, Comic-Con, and other wonderful things, seems like contagion vectors.
94.5% of “small business” money went to giant corporations. Because Trump’s only skill is grifting.
Also, while every President since Reagan has had a terrible record on anti-trust, Trump is the worst. He’s not even trying.
Tales of romance and relationships during the pandemic
Covering Covid [Embedded]
A woman tries dating by Facetime and Zoom, and has stories.
A newlywed couple, married just one year, is quarantined together in a one-bedroom apartment; they’re struggling as he’s an average male slob and she had a terrible fear of death that she was seeking counseling for even BEFORE the pandemic.
A man tells his wife he wants a divorce and then they get locked in together in quarantine, which is awkward.
I loved this episode and am looking forward to the inevitable Richard Curtis movie adaptation.
But it occurs to me that all the stories are about privileged people. Where are the so-called “essential workers” – the Amazon warehouse and Instacart workers? Where are the doctors and nurses? Where are the people who are sick or dying?
P.S. Dating stories from my over-30 single women friends are a guilty pleasure of mine. They’re suffering for my entertainment!
The poop emoji was born in Japan in 1997 and launched a generation of cute poop. This is the cute poop decade.
The poop fad connects with unicorns, unboxing videos, toys, marketing, Apple, the changing role of girls, slime, ice cream, emoji, glitter, Google, and middle-age people’s difficulties having bowel movements.
Unicorn poop: How did excrement get cute? [Decoder Ring]
Cast of Pulp Fiction and Quentin Tarantino, 1994 via
I remember I didn’t want to see this for years because I thought it would be artsy and tedious. Boy was I wrong.
“Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too?” 1970’s campaign via
A paid testimonial from Basil Rathbone. 1960. via
“Kids are murder!” - Sanatogen Tonic Wine ad with a mail-in coupon to receive a sample [1960s] via
Del Cerro hills, from a few minutes’ walk from home. The air is amazingly clear. 📷
Don’t care what the answer is. I’m keeping mine.
Coronavirus will also cause a loneliness epidemic
COVID-9 exacerbates another long-standing and serious pandemic: Loneliness.
Loneliness can literally cause physical illness. People most at risk from COVID-19 are the elderly and disabled, and they’re more likely to be lonely too.
[Ezra Klein/Vox]
Procrastination is Not Laziness
David Cain at Raptitude:
… procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.”
So much here is true for me. Sometimes, when I’m particularly hard on myself, I think I could have accomplished so much more.
And by “sometimes” I mean “often.” Maybe every day.
Why Walking Matters—Now More Than Ever
Shane O’Mara at The Wall Street Journal:
Walking is essential to our nature. Walking upright is one thing that sets humans apart; no other animal does it, but we can’t do without it.
Walking helps the body heal, helps the brain function. Walking, rather than seeing, is how we build metal maps of our environment. And walking protects us against depression.
I walk 3+ miles daily.
How NOT to Wear a Mask [Tara Parker-Pope/The New York Times]
Aaron E. Carroll at The New York Times: “I’m a Doctor. If I Drop Food on the Kitchen Floor, I Still Eat It.” If the dog doesn’t get to it first.
Who’s Right About The Economy? Wall Street Or Silicon Valley?
Brian McCullough, host of Techmeme ride home, talks with TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm.
My $0.02: Wall Street is expecting they’ll be getting fat at the trough of that sweet, sweet government bailout money. Silicon Valley is seeing reality
Remdisivir, a drug that shows promising signs as a potential treatment for COVID-19, was developed using public funds. But Gilead, a pharma company, stands to profit big.
Republicans were right to warn about welfare kings and queens “driving Cadillacs and getting fat on government pork.” These moochers are the wealthy, big-business donors to both Republicans and Democrats.
Gilead, the remdesivir welfare queens [Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic]
“80% of the stimulus tax break will go to 43,000 people” [Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic]
And the morgues.
[NextDraft by Dave Pell]
Sweet Farm, in Half Moon Bay, CA, will let you add a live goat cam to your next virtual meeting. The service is called Goat 2 Meeting. (Via Mike’s List. Thanks, Mike!)
I’m trying to remember when I last had a day off work, and I can’t recall. Weekend before lockdown when I went out to brunch with Julie, maybe? That was more than a month ago.
I’m not working ALL the time. I take a few hours off every day. Indeed, I am actually not currently working very hard at all, though that needs to end very soon and I need to get back to working hard again. Because money.
Still, I do work every day, some more and some less. Every day. And my schedule is unhinged. Like Billy Pilgrim or Doctor Who, I have become unstuck in time. Last night after 10 pm I caught up on email and worked on organizing my to-do list. Not something I would normally do on a Saturday night.
Yesterday was Saturday, right? And that means today is Sunday? [Checking phone] Yes, that’s right.
What does a day off look like anyway, when you work from a home office, most of your work and play both involves staring at screens, and – this is the key part – YOU CAN’T GO ANYWHERE.
I asked Julie and she said: Clean house. We usually have a service come in and do that but of course they’re not coming now and the house is getting pretty colorful.
So I guess that’s what I’m doing. As a self-employed person I can schedule my “weekend” whenever it makes the most sense. So I guess sometime in the next few days I’m taking the day off and helping clean house. Um, yay?
Tell-Tale Tongue, Holloways Brand Pills, 1956 via
Is the Virus on My Clothes? My Shoes? My Hair? My Newspaper? - Tara Parker-Pope on The New York Times
Staying safe when you come in from the big world.
tl;dr: If you’re not leaving the house much, and not coming in contact with infected people, then social distancing, mask wearing and handwashing should be fine. And even mask-wearing is unnecessary if you stay outdoors and can keep your distance.
Julie and I do not wear masks on our daily walks. We live in a quiet suburb, and it’s easy to keep 20 or more feet away from anyone we encounter.
An Austin school district deployed 110 buses equipped with Wi-Fi to neighborhoods and apartments where home Internet is least likely. The idea is the bus parks near students' homes - Andy Jechow on KUT90.5
I’ve done something counterintuitive to ease news anxiety: Turned on news notifications on my phone.
Yes, on.
If the news notifications look like the usual baloney, then I know there’s no crisis requiring my immediate attention.
I used the same principle immediately post-9/11 with the technology available at that time. I had my clock radio tuned to wake me up with news radio. If the first words I heard were “Michael Jackson,” I knew there was no reason for me to rush to look at headlines.
Caleb, a young man whose life is going nowhere, finds escape and purpose on YouTube. First of a new podcast series by The New York Times.
One: Wonderland - Rabbit Hole
The podcast producers are nonspecific about where Caleb’s story ends, but it seems to be far-right extremism. Shocking because he seems like a pleasant young man. And Caleb even supported Obama. Not in a deep or informed way, but Caleb thought Obama seemed like a good guy, and that it spoke well for the US to have an African-American President.
I see my past self in Caleb.
“Rabbit Hole,” a narrative audio series with tech columnist Kevin Roose, explores what happens when our lives move online.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interviews from quarantine with the New York Times Daily podcast and discusses why she voted against the pandemic bailout bill – because it devotes hundreds of billions of dollars to propping up share prices for megacorporations who don’t need it, and not enough to struggling people, who do.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Progressivism and the Pandemic
She uses the phrase “rugged capitalism for the poor and unfettered socialism for the rich,” which she attributes, possibly incorrectly, to Martin Luther King.
AOC’s primary subject is the future of progressivism and the Democratic Party after Sanders dropped out of the Presidential race. She sees support for Biden as minimizing harm rather than necessarily doing good, but is prepared for a better outcome (same for me).
She also discusses the difficult task progressives face – Democrats need affluent middle-class suburban white votes to win elections, but those voters are often put off by the progressive agenda.
Nearly a half century after the OPEC oil embargo almost brought the US to its knees, we’re now the worlds largest oil producer rather than consumer, and Trump is trying to jack up oil prices.
That’s normally Presidential suicide, but Trump is trying to protect the US oil industry.
Oil be back - Donald Trump’s big bet - Checks and Balances
A wise economic strategy for the US would have to carefully balance protecting the oil industry while encouraging clean energy production, such as solar. But Trump doesn’t do subtle – his only move is smashing things with a hammer and grabbing gold and power for himself and his cronies.
In this prophetic science fiction story from 2015, a cooking blogger keeps up a cheerful attitude and makes do while self-quarantining with her family during a global pandemic. Excellent story and a fast read: “So Much Cooking,", by Naomi Kritzer on Clarkesworld.
And from a few days ago, Kritzer follows up: “Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality. Some interesting discussion by Kritzer about the themes she explores in the story, how fans and friends are reacting today, what the author got right and wrong about the pandemic, and how the fictional characters' quarantine struggles maps to reality.
Inspired by “So Much Cooking,” on my next grocery run, I’m going to go out and buy a couple of vacuum-sealed cans of Maxwell House or Chock Full o' Nuts coffee. Just in case the good stuff gets hard to find.
I’m also going to think about what more I can be doing to help neighbors and the community. Confession: So far, not much.
Thanks, Cory.
Julie sent this to me idk why
Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: The health insurance industry is thriving during the pandemic. With Sanders and Warren out of the race, the companies are freely gouging patients and spending on stock buybacks without fear of Medicare for All.
Meanwhile, doctors are getting pay cuts.
Carnival kept sending out cruise ships while knowing it was risky. And the chairman of Carnival is on Trump’s back-to-work council. Rearranging dreck chairs - David Pell on Nextdraft
Armed far-right groups are behind anti-lockdown protests in Michigan and elsewhere. They love Trump and Trump is cheering them on. Martyrdom and dumber - David Pell at Nextdraft.
ME: I have 300+ podcast episodes in my queue. I will never listen to them all!
ALSO ME: This looks like an interesting podcast. I’ll subscribe now!
Comic-Con Cancels 2020 Event, Sets 2021 Return - Erik Pederson on Deadline.com.
Disappointing but not surprising, and the right decision.
John Horton Conway, a ‘Magical Genius’ in Math, Dies at 82.
Siobhan Roberts writes The New York Times’s obit for mathematician and “Magical Genius” John Conway, most famous for inventing the computer Game of Life. Cause of death: COVID-19
Martin Gardner, the longtime mathematical games columnist for Scientific American, said that when the game went viral on the internet, “with addicts programming it at home and at work — one quarter of the world’s computers were playing it.”
Conway’s colleague, Princeton mathematician Simon Kochen, said there are two kinds of geniuses in mathematics and physics, ordinary geniuses. Ordinary geniuses just seem to be people who work hard.
“But then there are the magical geniuses,” he added. “Richard Feynman was a magical genius. And the same always struck me about John — he was a magical mathematician. He was a magical genius rather than an ordinary genius.”
Also:
Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. “He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious,” said Mira Bernstein, a mathematician and a former executive director of Canada/USA Mathcamp, an international summer program for high-school students. “And he didn’t mean that we should be teaching them silly math — to him, fun was deep. But he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.”
People like Conway seem to be to be the truly blessed people in the world. They work hard at what they do, they excel at it, and the work is pure joy to them. We’re all advised to do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life – it will all be play to you – but very few people can achieve that.
I became fascinated by Conway’s game around 1983-84 or so, and wrote a program in the computer language Basic to play it on an early IBM PC. Each turn took a half-hour!
China Police Censor Tales of Post-Coronavirus Renewal.
New York Times journalist Paul Mozur finds signs of a nation opening up on the streets of the big Chinese city of Hefei, population 8 million.
He also finds xenophobia, and police censorship that’s both laughably clumsy, and effective.
Mozur was expelled from China, along with other Western journalists, shortly after.
Some people say we need to open the economy soon and if a few thousand people – or hundred thousand people – die because of it, well, that’s a small price to pay.
People who espouse this view should be asked whether they themselves are taking greater risk to help others. Are they volunteering at a food bank, blood bank, or working front lines in essential retail service?
If not, they should be invited to shut the fuck up.
In any war, there are always chickenhawks – people who, from a place of safety, advocate ruthless sacrifice BY OTHER PEOPLE. I’ve noticed over the decades that these people are never themselves combat veterans. Somehow when it was their turn to stand in front of unfriendly strangers with guns, these brave warriors had other things to do.
Donald Trump, aka “Captain Bonespurs,” is of course the chickenhawk-in-chief.
Dr. Tony Fauci: From One Pandemic to Another - Epidemic.
AIDS activists in the 1980s were surprised to find a champion in a civil service doctor, Anthony Fauci.
And for people who lived through that crisis, the coronavirus pandemic gives them a terrible sense of déjà vu.
Judy Garland and the long history of ‘Me Too’ in Hollywood - Retropod: Judy Garland suffered outrageous sexual harassment as a teen-aged movie star.
Kicked Out of China - The New York Times Daily podcast.
As the pandemic spread, China expelled Western journalists, including New York Times reporter Paul Mozur, as well as reporters for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Mozur talks about the experience, and heightening tensions between China and the West.
Foreigners in China are facing increase xenophobia as the Communist Party spreads rumors that foreigners brought coronavirus in China. Some rumors say it was a deliberate act of biowar by the US Army.
This is an old trick for the Chinese Communist Party. Whenever they fear the legitimacy of their rule threatened, they stir up hostility toward foreigners, particularly the West, particularly the US. And of course Republicans in the US are now borrowing the same playbook.
The Chinese government wants to tell a story to the world that they have gotten the coronavirus under control, through their variety of enlightened autocracy, while democracies are flailing. They are expelling western journalists, who might tell the truth and undermine that story.
Mozur also discusses his grief at leaving China - probably never to return - which has been his home for 13 years.
All praise, no pay - Today, Explained: Essential workers in the food, transportation, and retail industries are being called American heroes. They want to be paid that way.
We had drama. Julie commented at bedtime that she hadn’t seen Vivvie, our slate-gray cat, for about 24 hours. So we spent some time looking around the house for her. I went down in the courtyard, though Vivvie never, ever shows any interest in leaving the house. She’s a timid cat and runs away at any sign of busyness. No sign of Vivvie. I kept my eyes peeled around the yard when I was putting Minnie to bed. No sign of Vivvie. I looked in the spare room and closets. Nothing.
Vivvie did not come to bed with Julie during the night either.
This morning, we looked around some more. Still no sign of Vivvie. Julie was distraught. I was concerned and also puzzled. Sammy is an escape cat. If Sammy was missing that amount of time I’d be sure she’d gotten out. But Vivvie stays put.
Then Julie had an idea: My recliner in the living room. I’d been sitting in it yesterday. What if Vivvie climbed up in there when it was open, then couldn’t get out when I shut it and got up?
And we went to the living room and opened it up and Vivvie SHOT OUT AT TOP SPEED.
We are often in the living room with the dog and Vivvie is wary about the dog so when she got stuck in there she didn’t complain the whole time we were in the room. Or I don’t know maybe she liked it. Cats are weird. 📓
Easter Wishes, 1908 Via
Trump meets “The Honeymooners.” - video
Ralph Kramden for President!
What AOC Gets that Bernie Didn’t - Michael Grunwald at Politico
Progressive pot-stirrer Sean McElwee has some thoughts about what went wrong for Sanders supporters, and how they can get what they want (eventually).
McElwee defies conventional wisdom for progressives by saying progressives need to embrace conventional wisdom — polling, focus groups, and changing the message to suit the district.
He popularized the slogan “Abolish ICE” — even had it as part of his twitter handle — but advises Democratic candidates to be extremely cautious using it themselves, because it’s just not a slogan that will win many elections.
Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.
This article comes at a good time for me; I’ve been disgusted by national Democratic Party politics, discouraged and pessimistic about the future of the US. But now I’m reminded politics is incremental. Getting Trump out of office and keeping Congress would be a big win and it seems very achievable. Winning the Senate and a few state houses would be even better. That would only be the beginning — if Democrats fail to deliver real improvements in people’s lives, they’d be out of power by 2024. But victory in 2020 would be a great start.
Why Aren’t We All on the Same Time Zone? - Patrick J Kiger on How Stuff Works
Time zones are confusing to people who routinely communicate or travel across them, and some people are proposing to put the whole world on one time zone - UTC, which is five hours ahead of Eastern time in the US.
This does not mean that New York businesses would open five hours earlier. A business that opens at 9 am today would open at the same time under the new system, it’s just that the clock would say 2 pm. Everybody would get used to it quickly, say proponents of the change.
I think this is a bad idea, simply because I don’t think there are enough people doing business across time zones to make it worthwhile to change the system for everybody.
However, I have thought for years, that there should be a custom of using universal time for those of us who DO have business crossing time zones. I’ve been routinely doing business across time zones for many years, and even now I still occasionally miscalculate, or propose a meeting time to someone without specifying which time zone I mean.
One of my favorite features of the iPhone is the ability to get notifications for replies to individual email messages and threads.
Police department reminds residents to wear pants while checking mailbox
“You know who you are. This is your final warning.”
“It’ll all be over by Christmas”: Charles Stross predicts a two-year coronavirus economic and political shitshow.
Watch the weird cinematic rabbit hole that is Blade Runner: The Lost Cut - Adi Robertson at The Verge
“Blade Runner: The Lost Cut” is a 20-minute fan film that splices Blade Runner with
… other films that star Blade Runner cast members, plus more films starring those films’ co-stars, resulting in a masterfully edited cinematic rabbit hole where Rick Deckard is hunting down a cast of replicants including Gene Hackman (via The Conversation, one of Harrison Ford’s first films), Steve Martin (via The Jerk, which stars M. Emmet Walsh, who plays Deckard’s boss Bryant), and John Belushi (via The Blues Brothers, which features Ford’s Star Wars co-star Carrie Fisher).
Getting on lunchtime here so I think I’ll be watching this while I eat.
The coronavirus pandemic is heightening the need for “Right to Repair” – eliminating laws that make it illegal to fix the machines you own.
Cory Doctorow writes about two instances: A researcher has released a proof-of-concept for a hack that allows a relatively inexpensive CPAP machine to function somewhat like a ventilator.
Also, several state treasurers have demanded ventilator manufacturers release documentation so hospitals can maintain their equipment during a crisis.
Also on Cory’s Pluralistic.net today:
And more.
(How) American Collapse Resembles Soviet Collapse: Six Ways America’s Collapse is Eerily Like the Soviet Union’s Last Days - umair haque
This article seems more timely now than it was a year ago when it was published.
American collapse is not preordained – we have free will, both as individuals and as a society. But every day Trump remains President and the Republicans remain in power, it’s a day closer .
The Democrats are better. But on a national level they’re still not good. Just not as bad.
‘That Thing You Do’ cast plans reunion fundraiser for coronavirus relief [USAToday]
The Wonders, the fictional group at the center of the 1996 movie “That Thing You Do,” will reunite on Friday for a community watch party of the film to benefit the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund….
Funds raised through the watch party will aid musicians and touring professionals who are out of work because of the coronavirus.
The watch party also will pay tribute to Adam Schlesinger, The Fountains of Wayne musician who died recently of complications of COVID-19. Schlesinger wrote and composed “That Thing You Do,” the song that launched the fictional band ― initially and confusingly called the One-ders ― to brief stardom in the film, set in 1964.
I love this movie. I need to see it again.
Bloomberg News Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife [David Folkenfilk/NPR]
“ … Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.”
Bloomberg was concerned about being locked out of the lucrative Chinese market.
Not a good look, Michael.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic:
Amazon fires tech workers for warehouse worker solidarity.
Southern states are in for the worst coronavirus misery. Poor healthcare and social services contribute to the problem, and the burden will be borne more heavily by PoCs, who are more likely to have chronic untreated health conditions, no savings to allow them to take time off, and no healthcare – which is of course why Republicans are OK with it.
Also:
“… if billionaires need you to go back to work to keep their fortunes intact, then it follows that your work – not theirs – is responsible for those fortunes to begin with.”
And Cory’s doing a charity reading for #podapalooze, reading an hour of his novel “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” – one of my favorite of his novels. It’s is about a man’s quest to build a mesh Wi-Fi network in Toronto. The man’s father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, one of is brothers is a zombie, another is a set of nesting dolls, and his girlfriend has wings.
Via @JohnPhilbin
I’ve always thought that fundamentalists support Trump because they’re idiots who choose to believe he repented from his philandering, lying and other sins. Or as a calculation – Trump himself is an unrepentant sinner, but he appoints conservative judges and supports conservative policies.
Here’s an alternate theory – Trump’s fundie supporters see him as being just like them.
Welcome to the Trumpocalypse [Bob Moser/Rolling Stone]
Maybe the administration would take a bit more care with the coronavirus pandemic if it weren’t loaded with folks who are looking forward to the end of the world…
Trump gets these people and their brutal, zero-sum view of the world — and vice-versa. For starters, the universe is divided neatly into friends, who must constantly prove they’re really friends, and mortal enemies, who must be trampled. Also, of course, the truth that he knows, like the truth they know, is the only truth, even if it’s often subject to revision. And just as the world is out to get them, it’s out to get him. What’s often painted as a marriage of convenience between Trump and the religious right is far closer to a pure love match. When Pence fixes those doe eyes upon his president, he isn’t just kissing up; he means it."
These fundies believe the end times are here, the Rapture is coming, and any day now they’ll be transported bodily to heaven.
… before things start to get really ugly on the earth, with God-sent wars and plagues far worse than COVID-19, they’ll be wafted up to heaven en masse, to live in eternal peace, bliss, and moral superiority while everyone else — including lesser Christians — suffers years’ worth of unspeakably gruesome torments prior to the final, earth-destroying battle between Warrior Jesus and Satan at Armageddon, and the Final Judgment in which Jews and others who refuse to convert are condemned to eternal torture in hell."
Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo really believe in this toxic bullshit. Or they claim to, which is the same from a policy and political perspective. Trump probably does too – this worldview casts him as literally having been chosen by God.
This does not look comfortable to me but Minnie seems to love it. I think it’s because the concrete is absorbs the sun. I patted her two minutes later; she was a very warm dog. 📷
Minnie is back to herself, energetic and cheerful. This morning when she came in she was very excited, and I sat on the daybed with her for a little while and petted and praised her. Much of the time she appears to be walking normally; you have to look closely to see she’d favoring the injured leg. I am optimistic she will not need the surgery and soon she’ll be back to where she was before, or very close, and I’ll be able to take her on our regular, long, 3-mile walks. Although I’m enjoying them alone; without her I can do the walk in 100 minutes or so on good days.
Minnie gobbles treats and cheese and rotisserie chicken with gusto, but turns away from her regular kibble and canned food. She doesn’t even eat peanut butter, which she previously jumped for joy over. She is barely eating since Wednesday. I talked with the vet about Minnie not eating her kibble and canned food, and also got comments on Reddit and Facebook. My conclusion is that Minnie is playing mindgames with me, as she did when she was a puppy, and holding out for better food. So from now on I’m a tough guy; we are back to the normal routine, modified for current circumstances: Glucosamine treats and a cheese ball containing her anti-inflammatory pill in the morning, and kibble in the morning and evening. If she doesn’t eat the kibble, she doesn’t eat. We’ll give that a couple of days and see how it goes. 📓
We watched episode one of “World on Fire,” a big-budget British miniseries about England during World War II, focused, so far as I can see, entirely on regular people, not great generals or statesmen, drawn from all social classes.
Two cast members I recognize: Sean Bean is a shell-shocked World War I veteran, father of a brave young woman and an insolent, obnoxious teen-age boy. It’s a very different role from the last thing we saw him in, the swashbuckling Richard Sharpe adventure stories, set in the Napoleonic Wars 200 years ago, that aired mainly in the 1990s, with two sequels in the mid-2000s. Bean is also famous as Eddard Stark on Game of Thrones, and for a role in the Lord of the Rings movies. We only saw the first LoTR movie and I, at least, was so bored by that that I didn’t bother with any of the others and have nearly forgotten it. This is a very different role than I’ve ever seen Bean in; he’s previously always seemed to be some variation of the dashing warrior, sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain but still basically the same guy. In this he’s a working-class father, psychologically scarred by his own war experience, and now a committed pacifist. He moves stiffly and his clothes are cheap but neat, fitting my image of a certain type of respectable working class British man. And yet in his own way he’s as strong and courageous as Richard Sharpe or Eddard Stark.
The other actor I recognize is Helen Hunt, playing an American journalist in Berlin and Poland as the Nazis begin their march across Europe. The series is set in 1939; HItler is rolling into Poland and still proclaiming that he is only interested in peace; Helen Hunt’s character is a radio journalist, trying to warn the world that Hitler is lying. She’s strong and tough as nails. Also a different role for Hunt than I’ve seen her in; she was a movie and TV star in the 90s, in “Twister,” “As Good as It Gets,” “Mad About You,” and a flawed but interesting movie called “Pay it Forward.” She was gorgeous, and could do sexy and also smart and she was a good actress too. The most recent thing I can remember seeing her in was the HBO miniseries “Empire Falls” in 2005, where she was still recognizably the same actress she was earlier in her career. I loved “Mad About You” and have been bummed that the new miniseries is only available to Spectrum cable subscribers – I’d gladly have paid for it on Apple TV, Amazon Prime or whatever, or even signed up for a new subscription service for the duration, but Spectrum is not available where we are and anyway I will not go through the hassle of switching Internet providers just to watch ONE TV series.
In “World on Fire,” Helen Hunt plays a woman who would have been described at that time as “handsome,” rather than beautiful or sexy. It’s a more limited performance than Bean’s, with a narrower range and more conventional, but Hunt is still very good. Her character is tough, brave and smart, the very ideal of what a journalist of any gender should be.
The series is DARK. I went into it with some vague idea that it might be a period piece like “Downton Abbey,” a fun melodrama that would have some sad moments but that would remain safely inside the TV. But “World on Fire” is, at least so far, a bleak and scary story. The Nazis were some of the biggest monsters history has produced, and in 1939-40 they appeared to be an unstoppable force, rolling effortlessly over Europe and leaving a trail of dead and broken bodies behind them. It must have been a terrifying time to be alive, and the series captures that perfectly.
Although it also occurs to me that the Nazis' sin was that they treated Europe the way that Europe and America treated Africa and Asia. So maybe the Nazis were not so uniquea after all.
I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of this one.
John Scalzi talks about how he did a “reboot” of the classic H. Beam Piper novel “Little Fuzzy." Same story with many of the same characters, Scalzi just wrote his own version of it
“Little Fuzzy” (both the 1962 version by H. Beam Piper and Scalzi’s version in 2010) is the story about a prospector on another planet who finds a race of cute, furry childlike aliens (I think the Ewoks in Star Wars were lifted from Piper’s Fuzzies). The prospector takes it on himself to fight a legal battle to get the Fuzzies declared as people – the equivalent of humans – with all the rights attached thereto. Both the Scalzi and Piper novels are terrific, although the Piper, at least, is problematic because it echoes the White Man’s Burden justification for racism, which lives on in American exceptionalism today, the premise that other races are like children and white people are like their parents, with a responsibility to guide those childlike brown-skinned people into adulthood. Which is a load of crap.
Still, I re-read the Piper Little Fuzzy relatively recently, and I quite enjoyed it; the aliens in that novel really ARE like children. And the Scalzi novel was very good too.
One of my three unpublished novels is a reboot, in its own way, of one of my favorite series of novels, the Cities in Flight series by James Blish. Written in the 1940s-50s, Blish’s premise is the invention in the early 21st Century of a device called a “spindizzy,” which combines a faster-than-light starship drive, artificial gravity, and a force field that can hold in air and keep out radiation. Whole cities on Earth are put in spindizzy globes and flung into space; “gone Okie,” in the jargon of the stories. The hero of the series is John Amalfi, Mayor of New York, New York, which is now a trading ship flying between the stars, with a bridge on top of the Empire State Building. Like all the Okie citizens, Amalfi has had immortality treatments, so he’s hundreds of years old. The series is great fun! But also badly dated, and not one I’d necessarily recommend to new readers today.
In my reboot of the series, I did not make the setting New York or any terrestrial city, both for copyright purposes and because then I’d have to do research and stuff. Instead, I made up a city, Nighthawk, built into an asteroid and converted into a starship. In my story, Nighthawk has fallen on hard times, trapped in orbit around a planet, and the hero is somebody from the bowels of the city, an honest street cop on a corrupt force. I had fun writing it.
Matthew Yglesias explains the argument over the post office bailout [Vox]
No, the post office isn’t failing because Amazon is ripping it off, which is Trump’s stupid theory. People are just sending less First Class mail, and Congress won’t let The USPS go into other lines of business, such as banking.
Yglesias is skeptical that six-day-a-week delivery needs saving.
But given USPS’s popularity with the public, it’s also not really clear why spending money on this would be a big problem other than a principled opposition to having the government do anything at all.
In the immediate circumstances of a collapsing national economy that coincides with a census, a huge surge in people’s dependence on delivery services, and the potential need to convert the entire fall election to vote-by-mail, laying off tons of postal workers seems obviously unhelpful. But unless Congress can reach some sort of deal, that’s the situation they’ll be facing by late summer.
As others have pointed out, having a service that can visit every home and business in America in a single day seems like an incredibly useful thing potentially. One that should not be dismantled. Not useful every day, but useful during an emergency. Such as a pandemic.
Additionally, as Cory Doctorow pointed out earlier today, the postal service disproportionately benefits rural people and veterans, two groups that Republicans are popular with. It continually amazes me how the Republicans continue to shit on their supporters, and the supporters just ask for more.
5 of the 13 things Messy Nessy Chic found on the Internet Monday
100-year-old Bell Telephone ad; restaurant sleepover of World War II; rare 17th Century Parisian apartment for holiday rental (gorgeous!); how you get your hair done in the 1920s for a permanent wave; Harlem fashion boutique (1968) credited with popularizing Afrocentric style for the next decade; mini-dressed hostesses working for British Rail in 1972.
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.
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?
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.
…
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.
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.
It should be a federal holiday. It isn’t, because Republicans believe that increased voter turnout is bad for their electoral chances.
…
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.
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. 📓
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