I can't understand why the former president hasn't been charged, after he was caught, on tape, in his own words, trying to get the Georgia Secretary of State to throw the election to him. What more could it possibly take? Why is he still walking around free? Not only is he making a mockery of the rule of law, the prosecutors are as well. #

Dear YouTubeTV which is constantly nagging me to reactivate their service. There's no way as far as I know to talk to them (they sure talk a lot to me) other than posting this publicly. So -- I would absolutely switch to your service if you had MSG and SNY. I need to be able to watch Knicks and Mets games. That's all that keeps me with Spectrum whose software is nowhere near as good as Google's.#

Drummer and a bunch of other services were down for a couple of hours. They're back now. Still diggin! 💥#

I was out and about this morning running errands and everywhere I went I was the only one wearing a mask. I wanted to ask people if they thought Covid was over, but of course I didn't. I got a few stares which I interpreted to mean they felt judged by me. True. And I by them.#

Today's song: US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam that's who I am. Been hiding out in a rock and roll band." Happy Independence Day!#

A great scene from No Country for Old Men, a movie with a lot of great scenes. The woman says "The coin don't got no say in it, it's just you." The man says "I got here the same way the coin did."#

Trolling is transitive. People who RT trolls are themselves trolls.#

Remember the “people” who annoy you on twitter and elsewhere aren’t actual people, so just block them and get on with it. #

Can you imagine what it would be like if one day we all tried to do stuff with computers and nothing worked.#

I had a dream where the six repub supreme court justices appeared in public naked, to reveal they all had tattoos of Comrade Putin in various places, some with more than others, and larger ones. #

Today's song: Sisters are Doing it for Themselves. #

The problem with the Supreme Court decision is that while the Constitution doesn’t specifically name abortion as a right, in order to implement a ban on abortion a state will have to violate all kinds of other rights that are specifically mentioned in the US Constitution and probably the state constitution as well.#

New version of the reallySimple package adds a reader section to the returned object. The feeder app has been updated. #

Thanks to John Naughton for the praise, esp of my recent 25-minute podcast. We're at those one of those moments when things change radically and those are the best times to check in with some ideas of what needs changing, because you can change things too when the world is falling apart if you keep your head from exploding. I tell you why and I even tell you what to change! 1. Shut down the Supreme Court. 2. Do away with the fillibuster, the Electoral College and the Senate. 3. Then reinstate the court with more justices and term limits of say 10 years. At that point we will actually have representative government and fewer stale old hacks on the court nursing their grievances and taking it out on us. #

Will we come to despise Christianity in the US? I ask this question because up to this last week I felt that Christianity was other people’s problem, not mine. But they’ve captured the Supreme Court, and they’re using it to force their religion on the rest of us. So it’s no longer something that I can be neutral about. It seems that eventually, maybe very soon, we will come to hate Christianity.#

Have you ever saved another person’s life?#

New header image. Pearl Harbor in 1941. #

The monthly ritual is done. Here's the OPML for June 2022. Let's get started on July! 💥#

So why is the court rushing to do it all this crazy stuff at once? They think there's a chance we might wake up and do the easy thing to neutralize them, by adding more members to the court. So they have to get it all in on the off-chance we might get smart. What's next is probably going after the presidential election, to give states the right to override their voters' choices.#

I know 89 percent of you don't care about the NBA, but please don't even think of moving Kevin Durant to the Knicks. I can't imagine where he could possibly go. Maybe somewhere in the midwest like Denver or Dallas. Maybe Phoenix to try to fill the shoes of the great Chris Paul. Maybe he and Russell Westbrook and James Harden could get back together somewhere to finish up their careers. Or maybe the Clippers. I'd like the Knicks to please turn the other way. No he's not welcome in NY. Thank you. I bet he thinks he's going to Boston. That would be a huge mistake imho. Maybe he can play in Europe or China. Durant, no matter how good he is choked twice. He didn't fit in Golden State, and what a fiasco in Brooklyn which anyone could see coming. Maybe he could take a sabbatical or a gap year to see the world. I think he'll be boo'd in every NBA city. I guess I could be wrong about that. Cleveland or Miami might want him.#

New version of davetwitter, an Node package for simplified server-side access to Twitter API. They retired an API a while back, we didn't need it, so I took out the call. #

We've been at war for all these years, without being very conscious of it, and the enemy just took over. We're only beginning to realize we have to fight back now with everything we have. We didn't defend the victories. New generations came along and took for granted that we couldn't go backwards. In fact I'm pretty sure it hasn't sunk in yet for most.#

I bought a relatively cheap office chair that I really liked. Fit me really well, and elevated me high off the floor which is comfortable for me. But yesterday one of the arms on the chair broke off. Just like that. I thought no big deal, I'll get used to it. No. It doesn't work that way. I spend so many hours each day in this chair, the missing arm throws me off balance, sometimes literally. Almost fell off the damn thing a couple of times. I have another much more expensive chair (older) that I hate. I tried using it. No not going to do that. So I ordered a new cheap replacement. Even the littlest things matter it seems. Of course I have to assemble these things and I hate that part. So many opportunities to screw it up (I think that's the problem with the older chair btw).#

The Supreme Court is beneath contempt.#

How we will know slavery and racism are behind us in America: We will teach American children that many of our ancestors, the people who built this country, were slaves. If that rubs you wrong, there's your racism, right there. #

I have a feeling that "web3" is going to be like the semantic web. It was supposed to set the world on fire, for some reason I never understood. How long do you have to wait?#

BTW I always put "web3" in double quotes because it's an illegitmate name and hugely disrespectful. You shouldn't get to self-declare yourself the 3rd coming of something as hugely significant as the world wide web. I don't think we should have used the term Web 2.0, but don't blame me for that one.#

You can blame me for Internet 3.0, the title of a story in 2001.#

Francine Hardaway, longtime friend, writes to say she and her husband built a geodesic in Arizona. They sold it and now it's on AirBnB. Francine also went to Bronx Science, as did I. #

Scienceites have an effectionate name for ourselves, but it's not really printable. Let's see if I can telegraph it. We didn't have a football team, but we did have a math team. We had a computer in the early 70s when I went there, which was amazing. A block away was DeWitt Clinton High School which was all-boys and definitely had a football team. We were under no illusions about who would win if we fought, so they didn't pick on us. Sort of an honor thing, I guess. Anyway we called ourselves (and as far as I know still do) The Science Fa**ots. Maybe they don't say it these days, this was before political correctness. 😄#

Poll: When writing code I'm writing primarily for.. #

Poll: Remove filibuster, electoral college, senate or states?#

Why did Hutchinson's testimony come out today?#

What did Trump imagine he would do if he got to the Capitol? Was there a plan? Was there a team of Proud Boys waiting for him. Would he have presided over VP Pence's lynching? Did he imagine giving a speech to a joint session of Congress? Too bad SNL isn't in season.#

I bet Trump, watching TV in the West Wing, talked with panicked congresspeople during the insurrection, for fun, as they were scared of dying. The next level of rush after “you’re fired.”#

Biden is keeping the seat warm for DeSantis. Unless he steps aside after the November election and lets the next gen of Dems duke it out. I'd like to see the governors of California and Michigan in the mix. #

My blogging ethos came from the Whole Earth Catalog. They moved from technical howto-type stuff to whatever was on SB's mind. If the ideas come from the same mind, and the pub is a product of that person's mind, it's perfect. I remember reading it at my uncle's house in Florida, totally off the grid little geodesic he made himself. I loved the Whole Earth book because it seemed like my uncle. an engineer and hippie. He was another big influence in my path to eclectic, jumping where my mind wanted to go, even if it took years.#

One of the miracles of the web. I sent a question to Heather Cox Richardson, and she responded. Even though I'm not a historian. I love it when the quality of an idea makes a difference, not the qualifications of the person asking the question. #

We should have settled slavery after the Civil War by rewriting the Constitution to take out everything that was there to protect slavery. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln had plans for this before he was assassinated. Instead we left the Constitution virtually unchanged, and as a result a slight variant of slavery rebooted right after the war and has continued since. We have yet to cleanse ourselves of slavery. Until we do that, honestly, we cannot be a country. #

BTW, the best Silicon Valley novel ever imho is Microserfs. After you read the book, it programs you to think you're in the book. Amazing how complete the virtuality is. #

Poll: Who’s the surprise witness in tomorrow’s Jan 6 hearing?#

If you're an expert on something timely and people are annoying you with stupid comments, turn them off. You are not a tutor. They are not sincere. Stop wasting your time and leadership. We need you to focus now.#

Do you think they have a good laugh at the Supreme Court whenever they put something into an opinion that clearly violates the Constitution? Like the evil villain from Austin Powers movies.#

May I suggest listening to yesterday's podcast. It's full of timely stories, and reason to hope that now we will do what we've been putting off since the end of the Civil War. In the podcast I reference Bruce Sterling's talk in Copenhagen in 2009 and Elie Mystal's book about the Constitution which I strongly urge you to get and read or (preferred) listen to.#

An old fashioned general strike may be needed, so that the Supreme Court can feel the power of the country they are fucking with. Shut it down for a day or two.#

A dollar spent today tagging every single Republican with the new abortion situation is worth $100 spent after November. They will find a way to wiggle out of this if they don't get tagged, hard, right now.#

1976: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature Mr Beale and I won't have it."#

As usual the journalism focus is on the horse race. The people insist that the focus be on them. #

Today's podcast: Let's not waste this crisis. We can fix a lot of things that have been waiting since the end of the Civil War. #

George Carlin: "They believe a woman's primary role is to function as a broodmare for the state."#

Little Card Editor was down, but it's back up now. You have to re-log-in. An example of what you can do with LCE. Video demo.#

Should we be asking about Amy Coney Barrett's sexual history or is that off-topic, and if so, why?#

The Constitution is like an operating system. The one we have was designed for slavery. But then a few decades after the Bill of Rights we changed our mind, and decided not to have slavery. It's like going from character-based to GUI. but we never wrote a new OS.#

The first episode of Loot is as good as you'd expect because the star is Maya Rudolph. #

I hate random pieces of software who treat you like a friend sending text messages, so you pick up the phone only to realize oh it's amazon photos who found a photo just like one i took three years ago and have no recollection of. #

It was odd that Thomas didn't include Loving v Virginia in his list until you realize he's in an interracial marriage.#

Video demo of writing a Twitter thread in the Drummer outliner. #

If my mother, may she rest in peace, knew I was going to use her voice, after death, to give orders to, I think she would've kvetched about how her life sucks, and will suck even worse after she's dead, oy. But she probably would have bought more Amazon stock. #

A new feed template. Here's the demo. It displays the reallysimple version of the feed for my blog, in an outline browser. It's good for sniffing around and seeing what's what. #

The US should site license this book. I learned so much from it. #

I'm going to try an experiment, following SCOTUSblog today in my mailbox-style reader.#

I wish sports teams cared more about the fans, and tried to understand what fans get from sports. The last couple of years have been good for the Knicks, not because they got anywhere near a championship, they didn't -- but they had a group of exciting players that we fell in love with. I don't want to follow Quickley or Toppin if they're playing for some other team. I want them in Knicks uniforms, for years to come. In 2012 I wanted to root for Jeremy Lin and his supporting cast for at least two or three years, but Knicks management broke up the team before the beginning of the next season. I guess that like all industries they mainly care what their peers think, and they have narrow and mostly wrong ideas about what the fans care about. #

Marge Gunderson: "There's more to live than a little money."#

How feeder templates work. 💥#

I'm sooo glad to see Al Franken speaking publicly again!#

I got an Echo Studio a couple of weeks ago, now I'm ordering a second. Wonderful product. I love the sound and the feeling of the sound. #

I had broken the mailbox template for the feeder app. It's back. Here's a demo. I'm also making sure that we don't break urls as we go along and I change things. For example, this is a request that changed in two ways. It should still work, getting us a mailbox view of the feed for this blog. I'm probably the only person who cares about this. 😄#

I have the Hello World feed template working. I still have to write docs. I expect to have that tomorrow. Still diggin! #

Adam Singer: "Being friendly/civil with those you disagree with is ultimately the best signal of being a mature and self-aware human being. Holding grudges, fighting forever wars, trying to cancel others is childish & petulant. We move forward faster when more people join the former category."#

The feeder app now has templates that display feeds (of course) using the format implemented by the reallysimple package. Next step is to write a Hello World template and document it. It's not complicated and it's fun. See how the LEGO blocks are fitting together?#

If you're looking for baseball news, I have your site.#

Sarcasm sucks because you'd better be right and more often than not the sarcastichole is full of shit. #

For people who read this blog who don't follow the NBA this all must seem boring, but this is the time of year when the piper gets paid. The chickens have come home to roost and it's now time for the bards to write. To write about the foibles of would-be kings of basketball, such as Kevin Durant. He did the NBA a favor by leaving Golden State. There was no room for both KD and Steph Curry on the same team. This is the year that the idea of the superteam was completely debunked. Perhaps KD should hook up with LeBron and hmm Russell Westbrook and Melo. James Harden, Damian Lillard, Kemba Walker. If there were an NBA team in Pittsburgh I'd say that's where they all should play. Otherwise Sacramento or Orlando. However this is the time of year when my attention turns to the Mets. If all goes as planned you should get a few months of reprieve from basketball.#

Doc Rivers: "We keep loving this country and this country doesn’t love us back.”#

In 1987 my father, Leon Winer, who was a professor at Pace University in NY, and loved my outliners, wrote an article about them that today's #toolsforthought people would like, imho. All I have are JPGs, so I posted them in a thread in Twitter, and in a page on this.how.#

My father was a real outliner user. You know them when you see them. They want to make lists and figure stuff out. Very much into concepts. My mother on the other hand was a NBB or Natural-Born-Blogger. She always had something on her mind and had to tell the world about it. So of course I, their first-born child, wrote outlining and blogging software, all together in one package. My mother once said that I was a good investment. She thought that way too. My father if you can believe it, said every day is Father's Day, thanks to my outliner. #

The next part of the reallysimple project is a mailbox style reader that plugs in like a LEGO block. You want a different kind of reader? It'll be easy to plug it in too. Here's a demo. It's not finished yet, going slowly and carefully. Here's a screen shot. The reader has a lot of interesting features. 😄#

The goal of the reallysimple project is to have lots of devs doing lots of experimentation with RSS at the same time, and having all their work be totally compatible. To start a new developer process that avoids the pitfalls of the RSS environment of the last 20 years. #

Happy 80th to Paul McCartney. ❤️ #

Beatles: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.#

The people who say our democracy is teetering on the edge are a few seasons behind. It's time to design a political party that fits the political system we have. If I said the things we have to do to get back on track, you'd cancel me hard. But we still have to do them. 💥#

Listening to an idea you don't like is good for your creativity.#

A Covid theory... My friend visiting from out of town had Covid. We were together 3 full days. I didn't get Covid. Why? I got my second booster less than a month ago. At the same time I got pneumonia and shingles vaccines. The theory: My immune system was standing by.#

Today I learned that when you fly a fair number of your fellow travelers are infected with Covid.#

BTW, I might be missing something about Julian Assange. Isn't he the asshole who dumped all of HRC's emails and gave the NYT all the ammo they needed to tank her candidacy thus giving us Trump? I could be wrong, there could be two people named Julian Assange. I guess.#

I take note when Joe Trippi forwards one of my posts. Yesterday it was my bit about Ron DeSantis. I think for sure he's running for president in 2024, and if the Repubs are smart, they'll nominate him instead of Trump. He gets a clean slate. He's just dog-whistle-level racist enough to get all the votes Trump got and enough of Biden's to win without having to resort to an insurrection. But he is a solid white supremacist, return-to-slavery type Republican. Won't make even the slightest attempt to win support from blue states or minority voters. All white all the way. At the same time, it's a good bet that by the election in 2024, Twitter will be run to please the MAGAs. Why do I think so? Well, everything Musk says about free speech is just another dog-whistle for the MagaVerse. Joe if you're listening, please tell your friends in the the political consultant sphere that we need to at least start a social network for electing Dems in 2024 and beyond. Don't depend on Twitter being useful in that election. We'll need new ways to organize that go beyond fund-raising and advertising. We need to have a 365-by-7-by-24 connection with voters. Organizing isn't just for elections anymore. #

I finished two series -- Tehran and Gentleman Jack. I would not recommend the first, it got really tedious and kind of bullshitty toward the end. And completely not believable. You'd have to believe that Iran, a country that has been at war continually since the 1979 revolution, wouldn't have the most basic security for its leaders. Gentleman Jack on the other hand is a sweet story, a bit melodramatic, the bad guys are just a little too bad, esp at the end of the second season. But instead of leaving us with a horrible cliffhanger, as most shows do, they have so far ended each of the two seasons with a kiss. If there's a third season I will watch it. I've been saving the new season of Borgen, pretty sure that will be the next binge. #

I got a PCR test. Negative! Whew.#

The rule is I'm not supposed to be smarter about politics than the smart people in journalism. But what if I am?#

It's not radical to say what's true in clear language, it's just good writing.#

Elon Musk half-endorsed Ron DeSantis for president in 2024. DeSantis is a younger, more attractive, ambitious and not quite so openly hostile to non-whites version of Trump. Asked to comment, DeSantis makes a Musk-like joke, he welcomes African-American support (Musk is from South Africa). If this is what Musk means by free speech, well we're free to walk away from a Musk-owned Twitter. Where will we go? Probably nowhere. It's not possible for a service to take Twitter's place, it was formed a long time ago, and morphed into what it is now. I don't think any system will show up where there's a consensus that this is the new Twitter. #

The US is openly white supremacist, but for sixty years has been trying to become less so. That peaked when we elected a black president in 2008. There is a caste system here, and blacks were the bottom rung, and still are, largely, but there has been progress away from that, through laws passed in the 60s, and supporting Supreme Court decisions. All that is turning around. DeSantis, a smoother Trump, will be more careful about arousing his opposition. He will seem to be a likeable Republican and many will overlook his racism, or worse, quietly support it. I have no idea what the answer is, the racism is deeply ingrained in America. #

Trump supporters like this about him: He tells them they are important, but if things continue as they have been going, with elites promoting black people, they will matter less and less. That's the connection.#

I'm still not out of the woods re Covid. My friend who was visiting just tested positive. I did another test, and I'm still negative. #

Maybe Twitter’s users should buy Twitter. Why don’t we all buy enough to tell Elon Musk to take his white supremacist ass somewhere else.#

I had a Covid scare today. A friend who is visiting was staying in a house where someone got Covid the night before they came to my house. We both took Covid tests, and both were negative. So I feel pretty good about dodging this. It's the first time I took a test. I play it very safe re Covid. I have too many risk factors to want to take too many risks, and as far as I'm concerned the pandemic is still raging. In the meantime, if you get Covid, get the latest treatment. I can't imagine why someone who gets infected doesn't, but it happens apparently. #

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once — watched last night, maybe I was too wiped out from a day full of adventure, but I couldn’t stay awake. Not imho a great movie though it received universal acclaim from critics and friends. I will try again. #

More on EEAAO -- I think what we're seeing here is that commercial movies have changed, they have to be action superhero type movies because they have to sell all over the world, and that's basically what the world likes. So they snuck a little "I'm ok you're ok" psychology into it, so it would have appeal for adults, kind of like a Pixar movie, but like The Matrix or Kill Bill instead of Iron Man and the Marvel Universe. It's like we stumbled into an alternate metaverse that wasn't intended for us, the response of its people would be basically OK boomer, time to move on. And it's no accident that the dialog is half English, half Cantonese. Two big markets for blockbuster movies.#

I read on the web that "Yves Saint Laurent Beauté Makes a Daring Step into web3." Oh really. So I went to their glorious web3 adventure only to find -- ooops. If it had worked I am told that I might get a YSL Beauty NFT. "Acting as a recognition token of the community engagement, those 10K YSL Beauty Golden Blocks (ERC721 minted on Polygon with the Arianee Protocol) will unlock utilities throughout the year including a premiere launch, whitelisting for NFT drops and much more." I'm making a note of this here on my decidedly old school tech blog. We have so much to learn from their brave and daring experiment. #

I added a new feature to the reallysimple package. Now it looks for an atom:link head-level element with rel="self" and if it's present, it then adds the href value to the feed object with the name linkToSelf. Here's an example of a feed, Don Park's blog, that has this element, and here's what reallysimple generates. I felt it was good to include this because this use of atom:link is pretty common, and I wanted to make a gesture, that this isn't about supporting any single feed format, rather it's about supporting what's out there and useful. #

I quit smoking 20 years ago today. #

6/14/2002: "It's going to be a light day here on Scripting News. Lots of non-Internet stuff going on." In other words, I was going for a doctor's appointment to check out the problems I knew I had with my heart. They put me on a treadmill, didn't like what they saw, walked me over to the hospital to get an angiogram. Didn't like that they saw. A few days later I had heart surgery, and a week later I was back home, weak as a kitten, with lots of new meds to take, and a non-smoker. I felt like I was in the house of a dead relative, that's how profound the change was. In accordance with Bruce Sterling's observation that you can make big changes when something big happens, a few months later I was more or less recovered, strong as a bull, determined to make good use of the time I had been given. A few months after that I had moved to Boston, was starting up blogging at Harvard, then BloggerCon, podcasting, and a new life. Lesson learned, don't wait for the bottom to fall out before making the changes you long to make. Also it's a lot easier to quit smoking if you're in a hospital for the first week. 😄#

Coinbase ad says crypto is not actually dead.#

Billy Joel wrote a song about Liz Cheney.#

Ted Nelson is fine, I hear, via friends who have his number. 😄#

Ted Nelson was a mentor for all developers of my generation. We studied his book and were both thrilled to find other people thought the same way we were thinking, before we came along, and pissed (a little) that we weren't the great inventors we imagined ourselves to be. I wrote a piece about Nelson in 1995. "He saw the complete picture when I was only getting a glimpse at the parts."#

I saved a PDF of Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. #

The twenty-year review of RSS 2.0 is now officially underway, with the release of the reallysimple package. I know not many people are paying attention yet, but this is the beginning of a new stack of open source feed tools. By the time we get to Sept 18, a nice new barn should be raised, and RSS can begin its second twenty years with some of the broken windows fixed and a fresh coat of paint.#

I was talking with a friend from Brazil, he told me that Brazil had slavery too. I thought it was a uniquely American thing. #

Feeder is a server app that connects to reallysimple via the web. #

Video demo of RSS feeds in Drummer.#

Calling tech products web3 or web5 is a billionaire's way of pissing on everyone else in the usual territorial way. As if to say "we can shit on the biggest open standard ever, and there's nothing you can do." Maybe so, but we don't have to buy what you're selling.#

Why not come up with a Bitcoin where proof-of-work feeds starving people or at least only uses energy from renewable sources.#

BTW, this is what a reallysimplified feed looks like. 😄#

A new Node package called reallysimple that reads feeds and calls back with a simple, consistent JavaScript object. Works with RSS, Atom and RDF feeds. Part of the RSS 2.0 twenty-year review.#

A podcast story of how reallysimple came to be released today. #

I totally agree with this editorial in the NY Post. News orgs have lost touch with what their jobs are. This of course is advice the NY Post should take to heart. Disappointed but not surprised to see other news people dismissing it.#

I uploaded two more of the early Lydon podcast interviews to YouTube this morning: Jim Behrle and Eugene Volokh. It's a bit of a slog. The next podcast has three parts, which means I guess that they have to be merged somehow into a single video. #

No one trusts "open" formats and protocols from big tech companies. For good reason. 😀#