Today's podcast is entitled We Are Deep In Fascist Shit. This is what no one wants to talk about. Even MSNBC is switching away from it. Our last chance imho is to create a new Democratic Party where the only thing we all have in common is we believe in the rule of law. Until we can reboot our democracy, create Marshall Plan for ourselves, and do it quickly, with every hand on deck, we're going to where India is now. We are probably the last hope. So no it doesn't matter what anyone said 10 years ago, it doesn't even matter what they said yesterday. What matters is that we create a big enough a movement now to be noticed when the government shuts it down. As I said earlier, things are so bad now that Trump might not even have to cheat to win. And then we are lost. Far more lost than we are now. We don't want to look at this, I get it, but we have to. We have to support each other, not fear each other. We might not have another chance, but if we're going to survive we can't keep going the way we're going. #

A couple of days after my father died in 2009, I was at the house in Flushing, we were all sitting around the kitchen table and there was a knock on the door. I answered it. It was a rep from Verizon wanting to know if we wanted FIOS. I said yes! Yes! We do! So I signed them up. Went back to the kitchen and we realized how weird it was, after many years of putting up with shitty DSL, just after he dies, all of a sudden there's the FIOS guy. We figured that it was probably the first thing Dad took care of when he got to the afterlife, order FIOS for the house. He would have loved it. My dad was a real internet activist. I often wonder what he would think of American politics of 2020. I know he would have hated Trump. But Sanders? I don't know. He really liked Hillary Clinton, and as far as he was concerned Israel could do no wrong. His first born son (me) did not agree with all of that, though he might have been surprised that I came around to HRC in 2016. #

I thought the best point made in the debate last night was from Buttigieg where he said what torture it would be to have to endure a campaign of Trump versus Sanders. Up to that point I hadn’t thought of it that way but it’s true, can’t imagine how exhausting that will be.#

Maybe Facebook, Twitter et al have better business models because they allow users to write on a level playing field with the pros. #

The last few days there's been a change on MSNBC. The only show I regularly watch, Ari Melber, has opened the last two shows with a recital of the number of delegates each of the candidate has. I'm sure Sanders supporters hear that as good news, but I hear a lecture, get with the program dear MSNBC user, this is where we, and you, are going. I suppose after Super Tuesday this might be inevitable, but it isn't yet. Anyway, no matter, I'm not going along for the ride. I think we're deep in fascist shit in this country, and there's no sign of us digging out. I don't like Sanders. He yells slogans, and every attempt to get him to talk about his ideas in any detail just gets more slogans. I can't read his mind, but all evidence says he's as shallow as Trump. I wouldn't worry about death camps with Sanders (as I do with Trump), but I also think there's a very good chance we lose with him. Even with a perfect candidate it's a long shot because Trump is cheating. But with Sanders, he might not have to. So count me out, I'm not going along for this ride. I'll put my time between six and seven every night to better use. #

Change notes for Little Outliner v1.8.9. New Tools menu. Get my tweets command. Defends against multiple instances of LO2 open at the same time. #

Does RSS need a song? Maybe this one. #

How about a puppy playing with an ice cube?#

If your strategy is that young voters will take you to victory there's a problem with that because young voters don't actually vote.#

Why didn't the NYT when it started on the web in the 90s try to do what Wikipedia has done? I have to admit, I didn't think of it at the time either, to me the function of a news org was to start fresh once a day. But this was always part of the potential of the web, create a base of info at the same time as flowing the new stuff. That's actually where we went with LBBS in the 80s. Did you know I was doing BBS software then? I was. Today I wish we had software that made it easy to build an index as we go. It's always in the back of my mind. I remember when we were publishing books (also in the 80s) we learned how to do indexes of paper books. The same approach would work for blogs or news. #

Senator Kennedy, I am the actor they hired to play the DHS secretary. I say nice things about the president, and that's about it.#

Maybe when Coronavirus comes to our town we should all just get it, and take our chances. Get it over with quickly. If you die, you die. Then we can go back to committing suicide in all our other ways.#

A drum I keep beating: When a campaign wants to break through, start doing good now, don't wait until you're elected. Now there's a chance to do just that. Use your advertising, rallies, interviews and debates to sound the alarm for coronavirus. Demand that Trump protect the citizens. Explain what Trump has done to put us at greater risk. Explain how a real government functions for the benefit of its citizens. PS: Puerto Rico.#

Video demo of a feature coming soon in LO2, probably tomorrow. You can load in all your tweets for the day. Makes it easy to use Twitter as a place to record ideas that then flow through your outline.#

We’ve been working on news on the web for 25 years, and given the bandwidth of the network, the power and capacity of servers, and the incredible devices we carry with us, that news on the net is such a miserable experience. Clearly something is very wrong. #

I've long felt that the niche occupied by Heroku is under-explored. It looks like Glitch is going there. Good. #

Since socialism is going to be a big "issue" for the foreseeable future, let me offer two pieces I wrote on the subject. First, The world is socialist in 2011. "Ayn Rand's philosophy might have worked in an agrarian society when people lived far apart, and couldn't pool their resources. When there wasn't much technology, so there wasn't much point in trying to fight disease or keep the trains running, because there was no medicine or trains." And Health care is socialist in 2017. "We don't know who will get sick, or when. So rather than take a risk that you'll be the one who gets the expensive disease, we pool our resources to pay a share of what the treatment would cost each year." I put "issue" in quotes because it isn't a real issue. Everything is socialist, it has to be, there is no other way. So it's redundant to say someone is a socialist. We all are. #

Is it any wonder that the presidential nominating process has become a weekly reality show, in every way. #

Ladies and gentlemen, Rush Limbaugh!#

Maybe the NYT was always this stupid, and we were too young and stupid ourselves to notice?#

I just finished Long Strange Trip, a documentary about the Grateful Dead. Beautifully done. I went to a lot of Dead shows, going back to the early 70s, on both coasts and in Madison, but never considered myself a Deadhead. I liked a lot of other bands. But I keep coming back to the Dead. Their songs are anthems for my life and work. I think we should play US Blues at baseball games and Fourth of July picnics. That's the America I come from. And of course the incredibly versatile slogan of this blog is from Touch of Grey. That one line is full of so much meaning, but yet so are many lines from many Dead songs. #

Maybe Twitter should offer the option of no-replies on a message by message basis. You can RT my post if you want, but I'm not interested in spam. #

!!Con 2020 -- The joy, excitement and surprise of computing. #

I watched the MSNBC segment where Chris Matthews and Joy Reid talked about the disaster that Sanders is as a candidate. I thought it was fine. I think they should do more of that. I want to hear what they think out in the open instead of between the lines. #

Also I'm not sure Anand Giridharadas is right. We've been through this before. Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, John Anderson, Barack Obama. All these candidates had Sanders-like pitches. I'm transformative, they said. When I am president, everything will change. Problem is if they actually believe it and are elected, they and we are fucked. They turn out most definitely not to be transformative. The United States is a huge ship and it takes a lot of compromise and time to get it to turn. Giridharadas points out that Sanders is the son of a Holocaust survivor, well, so am I, and I don't like Hail Mary passes unless that's the only option left. This is not a normal election, and Sanders is way too risky. We need to get solidly off the path we're on, bringing as many people as possible along with us. Then let's go for a Sanders-like candidate, maybe when AOC is old enough to run for president. #

Loyalty to Trump is, today, an issue for people who work in the US government. Soon it will be an issue for everyone who lives in the US. You will have to sign a loyalty oath. We're way past the time when anyone should be working just for themselves.#

Today I learned that Sanders will be the presumptive Democratic Party nominee in eleven days, unless something happens to shake that up. If you don't believe it, read this piece. #

This piece is so chock-full of smarts, it should be a Twitter thread.#

I just saw pictures of a friend's teenage sons in current passport pictures. I've been following their travels via Facebook for years. They were always boys, but now you can see the men. There's a gravitas in the outward view. Thought. These boys were raised to be men. What a great word, raised. I don't think I was actually raised myself. Maybe here and there. Fed. Sometimes cared for. Mostly left to figure it out for myself. #

I thought Sanders' speech was good tonight. I was surprised. I think this may be the first time I've heard him give a speech. Previously I'd only seen him in debates, where he's a prick. Sorry, that's what I see. Even so, he really never has had a negative campaign run against him, and it'll be too late for all of us when the Repubs do. I can't imagine his past is not filled with lots of really awful stuff. #

I buy too many domains. Latest: textonrails.com. #

Doc posts a monster thread from LO2 to twitter. Here's the thread, and the outline. I just made a small change to the reader so that when you click on a tweet node, it opens the tweet in Twitter. #

Joe Trippi: "Here’s an idea. Why not hold House hearings on what every American should watch for and be on guard against in terms of how Russia or any other foreign actor tries to influence our election? Or maybe a network do a one hour special? No one knows what meddling means."#

Meddlers enhance divisions. Start with a crack, and grow it. Look at how Bloomberg is being invalidated. He's a powerful force in Democratic politics. In whose interest is it to undermine that? They have to be investing in that. The meddlers, whoever they are.#

2019: Instant tech bootcamps for journalism.#

A new version of LO2, v1.8.8. This is the first one that can publish twitter threads. Also fixes to keystrokes. Here are the change notes.#

A short podcast explaining the new version of LO2.#

We need to view the government as a system, and unsentimentally fix the broken stuff, while preserving and enhancing the best core ideas that define America.#

After all the dust settles, the question Bloomberg asked about starting businesses, that's micro-targeted at me. Yes, I have started businesses. And I've built networks of software with millions of nodes.#

A thread I tweeted from a test version of LO2.#

Here's a screen shot of the outline the thread came from.#

Video demo of the Tweeted Threads feature, probably coming out tomorrow, 2/20/2020, a magical day. #

How journalism covers presidential politics. Gotcha, gotcha, horse race, gotcha, horse race, horse race, gotcha, gotcha, horse race, gotcha, gotcha, horse race, horse race, horse race.#

Every so often I hear of people who want to change RSS. There is a mechanism for that, it’s like amending the Constitution, but much easier. Create a namespace. Put your new or redefined tags there. I created a namespace for my additions, documented here.#

For tomorrow night's debate. It's 2021, you're president, there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court. You appoint a qualified judge, the Senate refuses to confirm. They'll wait for a Repub president, says the majority leader. What do you do?#

Andrew Shell did a voicemailcast about his work with rssCloud, which plugs into RSS 2.0 feeds, and maintains backward compatibility with my implementation which I no longer maintain. He has to do really horrible things to run my software to be sure his stuff still works with it. His philosophy is mine. I really have very little influence on what other people do, sometimes they seem to not listen to prove they don't have to listen, and over time all our work gets erased. But Andrew definitely is a charter member of the soon-to-be-famous No Breakage Club. #

Update on Concord work. I've been trying to fit a more powerful keystroke capturer under Concord's keyboard handling code, but I'm not ready to debug the resulting code, which would basically be turned inside-out. The problem is that none of the JavaScript key handlers (that I've found so far) will decode an existing event, they have to actually capture the event itself and call back to the app. Maybe there's an exception. If such a toolkit exists, that would make the systematization of Concord's keystroke handling simple enough to attempt. The goal is to have all combinations of option, shift, cmd (or cntrl) be handleable by the outliner. #

MORE II refcard from the late 80s. We used to include these in our products, a quick summary of all the keystrokes the software responds to. I'm glad to have this online now.#

I updated the copy on the Is RSS Dead page. I still really dislike the concept of pairing RSS with that word. But this site gives me a chance to say concisely what RSS is. Things like RSS are useful forever. Live or die isn't even a question, it's a standard, an agreed-to way to make things that are compatible. It's gives users maximum power. It's kind of a miracle that it exists. I question the motives of anyone who promotes the idea that it doesn't. #

NYPD is political, kind of a terrorist organization. Even NYC mayors are terrorized by them sometimes. Not kidding about this.#

I've been chatting about breakage with Dave Gandy, the founder of Font Awesome. I recorded a 15-minute voicemailcast to Dave, with a very small slice of my experience with breakage in tech. Dave is now a member of the No Breakage Club. Up until now I thought I was the only one. They learned the hard way by shipping a version of their product that basically broke everyone. It broke me. Squared the complexity of using FA, which ideally would require zero thought, it should "just work" as it did when I first adopted it in 2013. Now they're putting the pieces back together, and I'm guessing it will work. It doesn't always, sometimes you're stuck forever supporting both versions. At least if you care about your users. Not sure where this will go, but it's nice to have a friend on the frontier. In the cast I talk about Python's breakage, it came with v3.0. #

BTW, as I mention in the cast, the new Concord, the one I just released, includes the latest version of Font Awesome. Since they're now a member of No Breakage Club, he's a friend, and it's worth helping him get the very latest stuff out there. #

The term No Breakage Club has four hits on Google before this piece was posted. #

A couple of LO2 user tips. 1. Keep your tab list neat. Close files. They're easy to re-open and 2. Change the title of files to make the tab display more esthetic and usable. #

Here's a screen shot of what my tab list looks like. This gives you an idea of what you can do. #

Yesterday I released a new version of Concord, the outliner core of LO2. This broke the then-current release, v1.8.6. After a report by Andy Sylvester, I quickly released v1.8.7, which works with the new Concord. The problem was that the name of the CSS file changed. The result is that the outlines looked pretty horrible. To get the latest version reload the page. If that doesn't get you 1.8.7, here are tips for getting the browser to do a full reload.#

In this election there are two sides. One side believes in the rule of law, the other doesn't. Everything else, to be settled later, once the rule-of-law is re-established.#

I just released a new version of Concord, the first since 2013. This is the core outliner of LO2. Native file format is OPML. #

Podcast here. And there's an outline. #

When Jon Stewart went on CNN to plead that they give a shit. It's hard to watch because it was 2004, and it's gotten so much worse since then. Makes you realize that we wouldn't be in this mess if we had journalism instead of this garbage. Also fascinating that everyone thought he was joking, but everything he said was serious. The "news" was and is an emotional release.#

Someday you'll tune into Maddow and it'll be like this.#

It's great that Bloomberg is spending huge money on good advertising that correctly positions the Dems vs Trump. But it's only half the job. The other half is organizing the electorate so we are always mobilized and ready for action.#

Questions for all Democratic candidates, esp Bloomberg. Do you feel the president is above the law? If you are elected, will you use the new powers Trump has taken for himself? What will you do if Trump refuses to leave?#

I don’t miss Obama. When I see Obama I think of how we lost the war and he didn’t put up a fight. I think of how he let McConnell terrorize us without trying to organize us. I think history will judge him a failure. PS: This is btw why Biden has no chance.#

Something I learned a long time ago. Telling a nasty asshole bully troll what you really think of them might be satisfying, for a moment, but you end up with all the nasty shit in your heart and it doesn't go away. It's hard to hold back, but you must.#

There was a moment when I, not a member of the Dean campaign, could post directly to their home page on Iowa Caucus night in 2004. Not by hacking, but permission. It was quite a moment. #

We can remember Obama the way we remember FDR or JFK, he was dreamy, and he did the ACA, and dug us out of a depression, but in the end the US lost under Obama. We now know that for sure. Whoever leads us next, if we're lucky enough to have that be in 2021, that has to be someone who accepts the US as it is, not as it was. #

Even if Biden were 30 years younger, even if he were a great candidate who inspired love and trust, the fact that he came from the Obama presidency means he could not get elected. #

This is my new anthem when someone asks or tells me about what Trumpers think or believe.#

I think we've had just about enough of Lisa Murkowski.#

35.3% said Klobuchar would finish third in New Hampshire. Not bad. The number one answer was fourth or lower, at 45.4%.#

Braintrust query: I have a JavaScript app running in the browser. I want it to quit when another copy of the same app is opened in another tab. I used to do this with a localStorage value. Set it to a random string of 25 characters. Periodically compare the string in localStorage with the one I set at startup. If it's different I know another copy of the app is running, and I (used to) exit via window.close. This no longer works. There's an error from the browser, "Scripts may close only the windows that were opened by it." So is there no way for an app to quit on its own without a user interaction?#

This is weird. If you do a Google search for What makes a weblog a weblog? it links to a page on blogs.harvard.edu that's a Miley Cyrus fan blog. It was last updated in 2008. Anyway, the original piece, intended to last for a long time, is still present, even though Google doesn't know about it. Written in 2003, by yours truly, it was an attempt to put a marker down. This is what we were doing way back when. To the future, you know how it turned out. We had no idea.#

New site: IsRSSDead.com. I saw a similar site for Ruby on Rails, and immediately wanted one for RSS. The first text on the page was rude because I think it's a rude question. The next answer was sarcastic. And now there is a polite answer. It's given me a lot of ideas. I think I might put a reverse chronologic list of news sites that have updated recently. The list of news orgs that support RSS is impressive. Any news syndication standard would be happy with such support. And maybe list some of the software devs who have invested in RSS, and who continue to do so. Standards aren't alive or dead, but as long as people persist in blaming RSS for their problems, we should probably accept the challenge. And thanks to the Rails folks for the idea. 💥 #

When I see the Nets won without the services of Kyrie or KD, I think of how depressed Knicks fans would be if they signed them.#

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.#

Trump loves Concord. No, not my Concord. #

Poll: How will Amy Klobuchar do in New Hampshire? #

Charles Pierce, a columnist at Esquire, asks why suddenly James Carville is relevant (again). This my friends is exactly what's wrong with journalism and politics. Carville isn't any more or less relevant now. He did however do an interview on MSNBC where he said exactly what the Democrats are doing to lose the election, and correctly stated what the election is about and what the consequences would be of losing. It was a passionate wakeup call that apparently rippled out to Pierce's perch in the hierarchy of punditry, who hears it as the question he asks. Why is Carville relevant, he asks. Better question, why is Pierce such an idiot? It doesn't matter who sees the truth and yells it loud enough to pierce the fog of your self-importance, what matters is that it's the truth. We are, as Carville says, on our way to electing Trump to another term, when what we need to do is win so decisively that we have the power to undo the damage he did. We need to be very smart, focused and not worry about Pierce's pecking order. Yet our pundits and political leaders are mostly just worried about doing what they always do, being well paid and as Pierce puts it, relevant. #

I'm did some work on instantoutliner.com this afternoon.#

Doc's latest podcast is about outlines. What they taught you about outlining in school was dishonest. We cheated, we wrote the outline after writing the paper. But it's not like that on the computer: reorganizing is easy. The text is on rails. Doc understands structure and outlining, as you can hear in this podcast. The one common thing about all outliner users -- they think about how they think. Once you do that, it makes sense to look for tools to augment that. I'm going to let Doc tell you the rest. Here's his outline. #

There are two huge campaign organizations booting up now. One is Trump 2.0 and it’s a monster. The other is Bloomberg. He has more money than Trump, and he fights hard and smart. We’re lucky he’s doing it, none of the other Democratic candidates can do what he’s doing. #

The latest Bloomberg ad. #

There is a Moneyball idea lurking in the current politics.#

Women Republicans of Utah stand with Senator Romney. And I stand with them. This is how we heal as a country.#

Someone should write a piece about how much worse it's going to be with Trump than the press is willing to admit. This time he is going to have his political opponents prosecuted and jailed. He's not just going to get dirt on them, he's going to take them off the field.#

I did a small overhaul of the nightly email code yesterday. Screwing with that code is inherently dangerous, make a mistake and the wrong email goes out to all the subscribers. Or it doesn't go out at all. This kind of code is notoriously hard to test. Anyway it worked. Whew. And one of the side-effects is that the emails go out at 12:00 PM, not 12:02 PM. I know just a two-minute difference, but I'm a perfectionist, and the two minutes really bothered me. Also it's more reliable, which is the real reason I did the work. #

I want a cloud DVR. I remember how great TiVO was a very long time ago. Do I have to use Google TV to get one? I use Roku on Spectrum.#

Doc asked in passing what it means when a section of the outline has chevrons in place of the wedges. In this screen shot the red arrow points to a comment. It means the text is commented. You toggle the feature with Cmd-\. Like everything in an outline, it's hierarchic, so when you comment a headline, it and all its subs are commented. Okay so now what does it mean to be commented? It depends on who processes the outline. The idea originated in programming, when you want to explain a bit of code, you'd tell the code interpreter the writing by "commenting it out." Comments are like speaker notes for code. That was the long answer. The short one is that, for what you're doing now, it probably doesn't matter if some text is commented or not. It'll happen if you press Cmd-\ by accident. #

I turned off the Likes feature on Scripting News. Most people are reading the stuff through email and RSS. Likes predates the email distribution. The server is a bit of a hog. But the most important thing was that it wasn't being used. If it had gained traction I would have been ready to do the work to get it smoothed out. The code is still there, the server is still running, so I could turn it back on any time. #

Fixed a bunch of bugs in LO2 over the last few days. Still have a lot more to work on. It's great having people use it. It was hard to focus on it when I wasn't getting any feedback. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for me to have a connection with smart enthusiastic users. #

BTW, LO2 is just another name for Little Outliner. There was a previous version that was quite different. So when the second version was on the way, I called it LO2. Also because typing LITTLE OUTLINER was more work than LO2. Sorry for the confusion.#

It's a two voicemailcast Friday. The first one is from me, to kick it off, and a response from Doc will follow in the next item. I have an outline, but they were the notes I took before doing the podcast, I didn't clean them up, so you're seeing D2D (Dave-to-Dave) communication. I recorded this on Wednesday. And some of the items in the outline didn't make it into the cast. Still diggin. #

And here's Doc's cast. This is gold. The narrative of a user. I get so much out of this. #

As I say in my podcast, this series is a rambling disorganized and repetitive conversation between Doc and myself. I'm getting huge value out of it. We're not going to hire a writer to do transcripts, because after that we'd need an editor to make sense of it. Maybe someday, could be a book or something, but right now it's just a conversation between two old friends. And it's giving me amazing information for my software development work.#

Must-read interview with James Carville. #

Braintrust query: Here's an interesting piece of data. I said Hey Doc, create an AWS account. I didn't tell him how to do it. I wanted to see what happened. He didn't succeed. OK so this means to me that we need a piece of software. A rough idea of how it would work. The user signs on to their Amazon account, the one they use to buy socks, and then authorizes you to act on its behalf with AWS. Ideally that would feel, to the user, like giving access to an app to use their Twitter identity. From there, you create a pair of S3 buckets, one private and one public. Then you allow my software to access his bucket. I don't know what all these steps are. But it should draw on a user's ability to create accounts on other popular services. I imagine it's what Amazon itself would create if they wanted to provide a service to non-developers. I imagine at this time they consider it a "developer opportunity." I need this functionality as a go-between my users and my software. I don't want to store their stuff long-term, because I dont have a long-term. #

Trolling 101: "The press, he likely knew, wouldn’t be able to resist criticizing him. To criticize him, they would have to talk about him."#

I did a search on Google yesterday trying to find a US government website. The top hit took me to a site that looked like the site I was looking for. I started filling in my information, then I noticed the URL wasn't on a .gov domain. Looked closer and realized it was a hack. I don't want to publicize the search; just to say there's another attack vector I hadn't considered and should have. I assumed a hack wouldn't be a top hit for a government site on Google.#

Johkla is having trouble setting up Public Folder. Can you help?#

Candidates who aren't likable aren't usually elected. Like Mike Dukakis. The Repubs mocked him. On paper he was a better candidate than Bush. Bush won. Bush said cute shit like Big Mo. And ran racist ads about Willie Horton. The picture of Dukakis in the tank. He lost the election when asked would he favor the death penalty if someone murdered his wife Kitty. He gave a totally rational response. They said he was cold. It stuck. #

This video explains how the Repubs tore Michael Dukakis apart in 1988. Remember that when choosing a candidate to run against Trump, who is the great-great-grandchild heir to this slash-and-burn style of campaign. The Democratic Party in its current shape will not be able to help the nominee. That's why, even if you don't like oligarchs, it's so important that Bloomberg is building a campaign attack machine as fast as he can. #

She is so talented. I can't believe we didn't use this talent more effectively in the past. Watching this, I think Bernie and Warren should sit down and let Pelosi lead the revolution.#

I want a network that works for organizing.#

Iolaire McFadden has created a sort of mutual fund for donations to all the Democratic candidates for Senate in the 2020 election. Your donations are divided between them. I just gave $100. It's a good idea, good for the country.#

Tony Haile, the founder of Scroll and Chartbeat, had a really good idea. When the Senate votes on something consequential, such as whether to remove the president, let's have a readout that shows the number of people the Yes votes represent, by state, and the number of people the No votes represent. It would measure how far our government is from being a democracy. I would love to see this as a website.#

Randall Neff did an Excel spreadsheet for the impeachment trial. It wasn't as lopsided as I imagined. Roughly 52% to convict, 48% to acquit. The reps of a majority of Americans thought he was guilty, but not nearly enough to convict him. Here's the spreadsheet in PDF.#

When I first reviewed Chartbeat it was called Firefly. I may have been the first user outside of Betaworks. I loved it, it was one of those "You can't really do this can you?" ideas. #

Amazon should remove the Bolton book from its website.#

Why is Trump's approval rating going up? This question came up on Brian Lehrer's fantastic WNYC radio show this morning. Here's my theory. During the trial, Trump wasn't controlling the public conversation. So we didn't always hear about Trump's latest outrage every minute of every day. If he were to tone it down permanently, only spoke when a president would normally speak, he might be more popular. #

Amy Klobuchar still meets my requirements for a good Democratic candidate for the plan I outlined yesterday. My only concern was her confidence, but she's really good in this interview. I would definitely vote and work for her, without reservations. #

It's been a while since we had an Occam's News report. Here's the latest. In the impeachment trial, if the jury could have been sure there would be no retribution for a vote of guilty, a lot more would have voted that way. A bunch of them would have voted to acquit even if there would be no retribution, because they think the US is going to privatize massive parts of the government, and they want to be in position to get some of that. Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz.#

This is a test of xref node types in Old School. Following the example from 7/13/2018, this node has an xref attribute whose value is this. When you expand this item you should see the contents of the post. It's a type of inclusion. Today I'm moving the folder on the server where the linkages exist as static objects. This post let me test to see if the move worked, when I did it. #

A new cast from Doc. There is an outline. I took notes, will share them when I post my response. Lots of good stuff! #

I saw James Carville on MSNBC last night. He speaks for me. The goal of this election is to get power. To do that we need to run a smart campaign as in 2018. He says the party needs a new chairman, who should it be -- he says Ask Nancy Pelosi. Beat the drum with talking points that rarely stray off health care, climate, education. Over and over. Take power and get the Repubs out of the way and then do what needs to be done. Pick a presidential candidate that fits this plan. Nothing more complex. We're not electing god, we're electing someone who can lead us out of the nightmare of a morass we are now in. Wake the fuck up people who think the election is about the candidates. It is not. Once we have a plan, the candidate will follow the plan. That's all. Think like someone in a smoke filled room. We wanted that power, now learn to use it. That's what Carville said last night. Really passionate and smart. #

The only criteria for a candidate: I want someone who, when a Republican who believes in the rule of law sees them, they think -- I could vote for them. Even better, I want to vote for them. In this election there are two sides, one side believes in the rule of law, the other doesn't. It isn't about any issue other than that. #

Yesterday I signed up for the Bloomberg campaign. I take him at his word, if he isn't the nominee, he will back the actual candidate with his money and organization. I hope he starts a political social network, the one I thought Obama was building, not to make money (eg FB, Twitter), rather to allow us to organize politically without interference from trolls. Someone has to do this, I hope Bloomberg will.#

Say what the voters say the way they say it. Over and over. #

I'm not a Cubs fan but I've always enjoyed their tradition of rejecting opposing teams' hits by throwing them back on the field. #

Clarification. LO2 is not a blogging tool. But you can write a blog post in it. That's what I meant in the top item of yesterday's edition.#

Outlines from Anton and Andy. #

A 21-minute voicemailcast to Doc. The speech maker I was trying to think of was Ann Richards. One of the best political speeches of all time. Mr Schiff Goes to Washington. Three requests of LO2 fans. 1. Write a blog post in LO2, send me a link. 2. If you don't have an AWS account, please set one up. 3. Use the outliner as a file system. #

One thing people don't get about Bloomberg is that he is a tech entrepreneur and a media mogul in one package. As if Steve Jobs, instead of making Macs and iPhones, made magazines and terminals. Different characters, similar thought process.#

I don't know why people take the shortcut of saying other people are tone deaf. Obviously the person who they're saying it to doesn't agree. Do they really want to argue about that? What's the point. It's like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where Donald Sutherland is screaming and pointing at someone who is not yet possessed. Look I found a human, the accuser seems to be saying. It's not a good look.#

This is the story that should have been on MSNBC last night. They spent three years getting ready for it. And instead they tried to show a feel-good family hour of Americana. And it fell apart. It's a Heidi moment. #

The big lesson of all our lives is that we have to learn to work together or it doesn't work.#

If you get a chance, please listen to Adam Schiff's closing speech in the impeachment trial. I have a feeling a lot of people didn't hear this historic, passionate plea for America. The Repubs in Congress aren't listening, but we imho must. It's really right up there with JFK's inauguration speech in 1961. Thanks to Schiff and the House Democrats for standing up for America.#

And then there was Bernie walking to the tune of Stayin Alive. #

Complaining that Bloomberg is an oligarch in the age of Citizens United is like (I was trying to think of an analogy and failed) ridiculous. Of course he's an oligarch. And his ads are good Democratic values ads. He knows how to market. Kick back and thank god someone does. (This was the beginning of a long rant on Twitter. Enjoy!)#

I used to call for presidential candidates to try to work with Repubs, but that's changed since Friday's vote re evidence for impeachment. They are complicit, as corrupt as the president. There is no working with any Republican who is in Congress at this time. #

Over on Facebook Terry Heaton posted a screed in support of Jennifer Lopez in last night's SuperBowl halftime show. To me it was a big meh. I find those kinds of shows unimpressive, the music not interesting. I came to watch football, not dance. I'm not kidding. Even Prince, the Stones, Bruce, etc didn't get me off. I was in the kitchen during the wardrobe malfunction. But -- Terry's post is noteworthy because he ends it with this line: "America is facing the destruction of our democracy, and we're worried about this?" We should make a button out of that. Tatoo it on our forehead so we see it in the mirror. We need to be good to each other, find ways to combine our power, not minimize it. Let's go Mets! and thanks for listening. #

A question about how LO2 captures keystrokes. #

It turns out the source of the problem that a user was experiencing with the new version of Little Outliner was Privacy Badger from EFF. I gather it's something that a user can disable, so if you have LO2 and you're running Privacy Badger, you should disable their distrust of scripting.com and then LO2 should work as it should. #

What's really sad is that the user doesn't get an error message that they can pass on to support so we can avoid having the user go to the JavaScript console (an unnatural act for most of our users) to find the error that's causing the app not to load. #

I have to say EFF has been a constant bummer and pain in the ass. For an organization that I should be able to support (and have, see below), they are always doing shit like this. When they sued the guy who claimed to have invented podcasting, they didn't respond to my emails or blog posts begging them not to take the approach they took. I felt it's important to get on the record how media types like podcasting come about. They didn't care. So much for being on the electronic frontier. It seems to me we should be on the same side in everything, and when we're not we should listen to each other. I gave the EFF $5K, which was then and is now a lot of money for me, when they were founded by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmor and John Perry Barlow, in 1990. I believe in the mission, but often do not believe in the implementation. Thanks for listening.#

My timeline of text-related work. Adding stuff as I remember.#

The only football team I've ever been a fan of, the San Francisco 49ers, is in tonight's SuperBowl. I'm angry and frustrated that the NFL won't hire former Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick. I also remember the intellect, wisdom, character, professionalism, talent and luck of the Niners of the 80s and 90s. So just for tonight, I'll be a football fan again. Go Niners! 🏈#

New Little Outliner out yesterday. Report problems here. #

BTW, to tech-savvy users who are regulars here. Please pitch in and help test the new release of LO2. As you can see from the thread on GitHub, the problems tend to be technical, though the typical user of the outliner is not. If you've looked for a way to pitch in, this is where I need the most help. Keep an outline on LO2. When there's a new release try editing it. Do the changes stick when you reload the page? Try creating a new outline. Open an existing one. Log off and log on. Go through the menus and try all the commands. We're looking for breakage, something that used to work but because of changes doesn't work now. A lot of stuff changed in this release. But most of it isn't visible to users. Help me out. This is foundational work. I need LO2 to work for people, smoothly. Thanks.#

We have a lot more data on the problem. #

Trump is picking a fight with Michael Bloomberg, re his height. Gina Smith points out that Bloomberg is an inch taller than Putin. Heh. And then I read that Bloomberg's spokesperson, Julie Wood (a woman, this is important) said this: "The president is lying. He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan." You know, this is the first time in four years Trump has been in presidential politics, talking about people's bodies and demeanor, that someone has come back at him with this line of attack, which is totally valid. When you're being bullied by someone so obviously vulnerable, give it back to him. It's even worse better when a woman says a man is a liar, bald, fat, and wears makeup. Trust me on that. 💥#

Bloomberg's campaign manager has a killer idea in this podcast starting at around 8:30. Here's the spoiler. The first Democratic primaries should be in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan. What an advantage that would be in November#

Lamar Alexander's story doesn't add up. If it's up to the voters, can we have the information we need to make a decision. Bolton's testimony is vital. As is the documentary evidence. I've served on a jury all the way to verdict, so I know how this works.#

I asked Alexa what time the Superbowl starts. 6:30PM kickoff.#

To Amazon. I'd like to be able to say "Alexa record a podcast." When I'm done I say "Alexa stop." She mails a link to the MP3 to me. Bing.#