Good morning sports fans!#
Are there any good impeachment podcasts?#
I am far from being a billionaire. But I've made good money selling software, real estate and I just inherited a bit of money from my parents. This is what I have to say. I was always amazed at how little I paid in taxes on each of the major events.#
I'm working my way through Mr Robot, starting with season 1 so I can watch the final season without being horribly confused. But all of a sudden there's the final season of Man in the High Castle. Oy. And the third season of The Crown is coming soon.#
- Everywhere I've lived people greet outsiders mostly generously but there are always some who don't. #
- I've moved so much geographically and in what I do, over my 64 years, I have a lot of experience with it. #
- Silicon Valley welcomed me in 1979. The people who lived there before the various booms were farmers. Lots or orchards. Small towns, it looked like the Central Valley in Calif today. My family drove through there when I was ten years old and I remember it. In the first 20 years I was there, I felt like I had come home. Everyone was into the same things I was, personal computers, software designed for humans, and it was all so new, so much potential, so much to explore. But it already looked like Long Island. And traffic like you wouldn't believe got worse every year. Was it ruined by newcomers? Hard to say. Maybe it achieved its destiny. I left in 2003 because I more or less hated what it had become. #
- While I was there, I got involved peripherally with Napster when it was booming. I was fascinated. My blog was well-read in tech, so I got to know a lot of music people in that period, not always in a friendly way. Ultimately I think they would have done better if they listened and accepted that change was inevitable, and they could profit from it. People were actively interested in music in ways I had never seen. But the insiders desperately didn't want it to change. Is it better that now we can all program our own music? I feel very strongly -- yes. It's hard to imagine that when I grew up I was limited to what was played on the radio and what I could afford to buy. There was so much more music. And music is so personal. All that potential opened up as Napster broke the dam. It was incredible for the users. The people who make and sell music didn't appreciate that or respect that. #
- My own family are immigrants. My parents and grandparents landed in Queens and Brooklyn as refugees during WWII, running for their lives from the Nazis. We were not universally welcomed. Lots of antisemitism. I grew up ashamed of my heritage, because I took on the attitudes people had about us. #
- A funny thing happened, as my mother was getting old. The neighborhood she had lived in since the 1960s was turning from Irish, Italian with a little Jewish, to Asian -- Chinese and Korean. And my mom, born in Prague, an American newbie, was angry about the changes that were coming. I was amazed to see this, because she was a very inclusive sort of person, welcoming, and sought out different experiences. And of course she had herself benefited from a country that had its doors open to anyone. When she died, and it came time to sell the house, the neighbors next door begged us not to sell to an Asian family. They were also refugees. I said nothing but I thought it was both futile and hypocritical. #
- I guess if I lived anywhere for long enough to resent newbies it would be on the net. I started using it as a grad student in the 70s. I've been through every iteration, and yes -- there's a point at which the area you've learned to call home becomes overrun with newbies. They have no idea about the culture you've developed, and they don't seem to care. They do the equivalent of leaving broken glass and dirty diapers at our pristine swimming holes. It sucks.#
- Facebook is, to me, the Land of the Newbies, the way AOL was 30 years ago. But I love FB the community (I do not love FB the company, though I know a number of people who work there, some of whom I consider lifetime friends). I especially love the Woodstock group, because it's filled with love, and I've benefited so much from it. I'm not kidding. 99.99 percent of my interactions there over the last year or so have been lovely. And I've learned so much about the place I now call home, far more than I could have without the group. It's changed the way I think about local news. Friends who work in journalism don't understand the role FB groups play, and they're not listening any better than the music industry people did in Napster days. #
- I have friends who remember the net before FB as I do who will not use FB. They say they got along fine without it before, and will be fine now. No doubt. But they're missing something huge and cultural, and eventually the software they make will be irrelevant because they failed to move where the culture was going. #
- Humans dealing with change. A constant. We don't always do it well. God bless our pointy heads. #
- PS: I cross-posted this on FB because it's so much about FB.#
How fucked is the United States? Let's find out! There should be hearings like this for years, covering the corruption of the Trumps. #
Very confused about Jimmy Wales' supposed Facebook/Twitter competitor, WT:Social. What is the monthly fee? And what is it behind the paywall? Tech journalism is basically nonexistent these days. It does not actually appear to be a competitor of Facebook/Twitter, more like Reddit.#I'm glad that Carmelo Anthony is getting another chance. He was the face of the Knicks for many years. I was surprised to find that even though his attitude about himself and the team was the source of a lot of the Knicks' problems, after he was gone, I felt affection for him. I look forward to seeing him play for Portland and I hope the team and the fans give him a chance to get settled in. He's more than a player, he's part of the soul of the NBA. There's no doubt when he returns to the Garden with his new team, there will be a huge outpouring of affection for him. #
BTW, amazingly, the Knicks beat Kristaps and his new team again last night, this time in New York. Hard to believe.#
For the first time, I am able to communicate with my doctor via email. What an innovation. Why didn't we start doing this a long time ago? Oh well better late than never. #
If you watched Maddow last night, it would be hard to call the first day of testimony in the impeachment hearings a snoozefest. Here's the deal. Everything the president does not only benefits him personally but it also benefits Russia. All of it. #- So more than an impeachment, we are hearing a case study about how the Republican Party and the American president are servants of a foreign adversary. A truth most of us find hard to accept, I guess. But there's a lot more of this than has come to light. This is just the first that has been so microscopically exposed. Expect that when we peer into the Turkish invasion of Kurdistan, we will find another clusterfuck of your favorite country and mine. #
- We need more than impeach and remove.#
- We need an exorcism.#
Can you imagine what AG Barr must think. It was his skill at hype that dug Trump out of the jam he was in with Mueller. What a gift. That was just Act One. Next would be the indictments for Justice people who started the Mueller investigation, to set an example for the people who remain. Either be loyal to Trump or get out. He probably figured he'd have DoJ and the spy agencies cleaned out by the end of next year. Then, after winning re-election, something Barr couldn't help with, they would be ready for Act Three, replete with goose-stepping storm troopers and gas chambers for people of color and non-Christians. Seems obvious that Trump and Barr's animated conversation was about Barr resigning. The Trump Train isn't going where he thought it was, and if Barr stays on board, he's probably going to jail. His bet was a long shot, and now it's impossibly long. Trump may survive impeachment, but he's not likely to become the American Hitler. #Braintrust query: What method do you use to launch and kill a Node app in the background when you're actively developing it?#
Jimmy Wales wants to turn WikiTribune into a Facebook or Twitter competitor. That imho is a much better idea than hiring reporters, as he did in the first instance of WT. The question is this -- can Jimmy Wales draw a positive community that will work cooperatively on the mission he has defined, defunking news. I signed on but I'm number 26673 on the waiting list.#
How sad for our country that yesterday's impeachment hearings were judged by American journalism as lacking in entertainment value. A good journalist could have found plenty to write about that was gripping from many perspectives. It went to the heart of the United States' role in the world. We identify with the people of Ukraine who are struggling to create a civil system like the one we used to have in the US. They were making progress, with our help, at fighting corruption. Two examples of American goodness testified. And the role of Trump and his mob was to bring American corruption to them. It couldn't be uglier. Maybe it lacked pizzazz if you have no sense of pride in America. I don't know why we place such a high value on journalism, when they fight against us with lunacy like this. #Trump, with Erdogan next to him, on Syria: "We are keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil." Someone in the military must have told him, many times, how this puts at risk all US military everywhere, basically forever. I don't buy that Trump is an idiot who has no idea what he's doing. Also it's a joke that we would be trying to acquire (or steal) more carbon-based energy. We should be putting carbon in the ground, not taking it out. #
The Nets signed Iman Shumpert, a good way to get Knicks fans interested. Last time the Knicks were good he was one of the stars. And Kristaps realizes no one in NY likes him. It's true. But where does a unicorn hide?#I requested my Yahoo Groups backup a few weeks ago, and got the download today. Lots of zipped files in various formats. I'm going to try to hold onto my download as long as I can. #
How about a holiday where every computer in the world reboots. It would be interesting to see how many don't come back up.#
If the Repubs in the Senate vote to leave the criminal in the White House that's probably okay because that's the end of the Republican Party. Only way to come back from this is if they manage somehow to destroy the record. #
Protocol is a new tech pub from the publisher of Politico. Launching in early 2020. They announced it in a Vanity Fair piece (paywall, lots of noisy dialogs). I'm in tech, have been reading tech pubs for almost 40 years. It's been a long time since one was worth reading, sad to say. But wouldn't it be cool if this one was different? They have a great web address. Why not start out with a blog about the creation of the pub, and when they're up and running it could transition to their "public editor" function. Take criticism from readers, new perspectives. I know it's weird but I expect tech pubs to make good use of the tech. I'd also like to know who's writing for them, the Vanity Fair piece doesn't have that info. #
Today's impeachment hearing will be on all the major networks in the US and on C-SPAN. Starts at 9AM Eastern.#How is it that Kellyanne Conway married someone who is so clear, thoughtful, even eloquent about Trump and our country. #
The hearing today is going to set the tone for further reporting on impeachment. At least it affords the Democrats the chance to do that. Hopefully they rise to the occasion. #
Just tuned into MSNBC for their pre-discussion of the hearings. Oh the epic vacuousness of their diatribe. After an insipid idea is completely exhausted, they repeat it. Once I finished vomiting in the waste basket, I decided I had to tweet about it. Done.#
Fascinating open spreadsheet, via CJR, with journalism salary data by position, publication, location, gender, race. You can see who earns a good living and who should be looking for a new job. #
Here's your smoking gun. Trump knew about Russian hacking of Democratic Party emails. And planned their use in the campaign. The humiliation of the United States is complete. We, you and I, are Putin's bitches. Happy holidays!#My vision of the Republican Party is death. There is no redemption. They went over the cliff a long time ago. What remains is cancer. You don't try to rehabilitate cancer, you cut it out and destroy what remains. That's why the new version of the Democrats must piss everyone off equally. No one philosophy matters, at this time, other than adherence to the Constitution. #
I envision a new version of the Democrats that pisses everyone off equally, but fanatically adheres to the Constitution so our country learns that we can survive, even thrive on disagreement, but we cannot survive chaos and kleptocracy.#
I have a test version of TweetSucker running on a server. It reads my previous day's tweets at midnight and sends them to me in an email. The body of the email is a sequence of HTML paragraphs. Attached is an OPML file ready to be loaded into Electric Outliner. Here's an example of the OPML file. First impression: I tweet a lot. #
My longtime Silicon Valley friend Don Park has a truly good idea for a business venture he calls Dropzone. "Turn your garage and spare room into mini warehouses. Brick and mortar retail can't compete with Amazon but this can and why wait for same day delivery if you can pick it up within an hour."#
Forget all the complicated arguments about impeachment, this cartoon from Tom Tomorrow cuts through all the quid pro quos. #
The conclusion from yesterday's political tweets is this. Electing a Democratic president in a squeaker is not a win. It leaves the Republican Party alive with a huge electorate that the Democrats could not convert. It they can't do it now, then we'll never get out of gridlock. We're spinning down. We almost defaulted on the national debt. We're not renewing our physical or human infrastructure. Our treasury is easily looted by the rich. The Repubs will win the next election, and the cycle repeats. Squeaking out a win is not winning. The US will continue to decline, as will the planet's health, if we continue on the track we're on. We need a revolution, a fundamental reconfiguration of our political sysem so we can tackle the actual problems we have, not made-up ones. The kind of revolution the founders allowed for in the Constitution. #Joe Trippi: "The most insightful thing anyone has said in a long time about what has really changed to create our current failure to communicate."#
Maybe Bloomberg should endorse a candidate that's already up and running. Help elevate them into the top tier. For example, Amy Klobuchar. #
So much great TV coming out in the weeks ahead. I might not get any work done. Right now I'm going through Mr Robot a second time, slowly. It's worth doing, because now the things Elliot says to the audience make sense. After the big reveal on Mr Robot, he looks at the camera and asks "Did you know?" I laughed and said damn right I knew. It's interesting in a different way when you know what's real and what's not. #It’s kind of scary how attached some people are getting to Their Candidate. Remember: 1. Most of them will lose. 2. Your favorite will probably lose. 3. We’re all going to support the Dem nominee, no matter how much they suck.#
- TL;DR: There are a lot of winnable votes in the 40 percent who are likely to vote for Trump.#
- Some elections reconfigure the balance between the two parties. Like Nixon, his southern strategy flipped the south from Dem to Repub. He saw an opportunity, took it, it worked, was transformational, and that reconfiguration is still in place 50 years later. #
- Well never imho has the country needed to reconfigure the balance between the parties more than it does now. The Repubs are being driven to fascism. That's usually a fringe thing in the US, but now is on its way to becoming mainstream. That is if you believe Trump's "base" is fascist. I for one don't think they are.#
- I think they hate liberal elites who think they know everything, but they think (in the flyover states) that they understand nothing about America. That's a complicated idea, and would take a lot of tweets to explain, but there's something real there. The America they grew up believing in, that many of us did, never was what they said it was, but it's still their core idea of America, and we've drifted very far from it. In their minds America is white, Christian, there's a mom and a dad and kids, and Thanksgiving, guns and self-sufficiency. This America doesn't have any problems. It kicks ass. It rules the world. And the white people dominate (a nice way of saying what it does to PoC's).#
- The basic grievance they have is this. Look at all the great things they're doing for "others" and I'm not getting any help at all. Take care of me first, and let the other guys pull themselves up like I did. #
- They feel the way they feel. And you probably have a lot of hypocrisy and lies in your own view of the world, btw. I know the family I grew up in did. Some day I'll write a piece about all the lies they clung to. It'll be a long piece. #
- Back to Trump's 40 percent. I'm not taling about all of them. Some for sure are real goose-stepping Jew-hating Nazis. But a lot of them just want to hear from a president "I got your back," and then enumerate their fears, so they know you hear them. Even if their fears are off the wall. You can say you hear them without selling your soul, or selling out the former Democratic Party base. And that's how the center-left party can emerge. It'll be called the Democratic Party, but it'll have a lot of until-recently Republicans in it. Nothing wrong with that. The Republicans used to have liberals. #
- Because the real important split in the US is between people who believe in the Constitution and those who don't. That's so basic. And now in 2019, it's peak season for converting rule-of-law Republicans to lifetime Democratic Party voters. And where the parents go, the kids are likely to follow. #
- So what's more important? A failed push for Medicare For All by President Warren or Sanders, or a new permanent political reality in the US that solves problems for 50 years led by President Bloomberg, Inslee or Klobuchar? I actually like Bloomberg because he mastered the sensibilities of business management, and has had three terms as NYC mayor to convert that sensibility to politics and governance. He's shovel ready, in other words. More than any of the others including Biden. #
- As I said at the beginning, this is a time when we could reconfigure the two-party system. There are a lot of winnable votes in the 40 percent who will vote for Trump if we nominate a Warren or Sanders. And if those votes plus minorities, city people and suburbanites could compromise, we could have a big enough majority to fix a lot of things. Things that most Trump voters want. Like to be sure of their health care. More jobs. Spending more money on domestic stuff as opposed to unwinnable forever wars. What they want, in a word, is security. These are all natural Democratic issues, and somehow via lies and Democratic lunacy the Repubs have been able to at least partially usurp them. That's because the Dems don't claim them. They get lost in the weeds talking about health benefits for non-citizens and taking away people's health insurance which for crying out loud is not even what the Dems are contemplating.#
- Reading Fiona Hill's testimony last night, she's saying something similar about the political system in the US. We're smart, we know how to do big things. There are a lot of good people in the United States ready to kick ass. If you can just get the poltiical stuff under control, America will resume the greatness that it never lost. #
I'm a member of The John Lennon School of Revolution. "If you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait."#I'm also a proud boomer, and member of The Grateful Dead Party. Our anthem. Wave that flag, wave it high and wide!#
I read a bit of Fiona Hill's testimony, and she's a badass. Everything we wish Mueller had been, and more. #
Brilliant tweet. When journalists ask how Warren will pay for something she should say Mexico will pay for it. #
As a newbie in town, I have basic questions like where to shop for groceries, ride the bike, look at the stars, which airport to fly out of -- really basic stuff. I usually post the question in the private Facebook group for the town. I keep an outline of some, not all of the questions and the best advice, on this.how. It's for things that aren't blog posts, stories I want to come back to, edit, refine, add to. #
Did a little prototyping for the tweetsucker project I wrote about the other day, and noted that the Twitter API toolkit that I use is now marked as not maintained. It still works, but It seems this is something Twitter ought to maintain, or pay someone to maintain. Letting this fall out of sync with the actual API wouldn't be very good. #
I couldn't bring myself to watch the Knicks game last night with the Mavericks with their new star, and former Knick, Kristaps Porzingas, who for a few years was the embodiment of hope for the team. I was sure the Knicks would be blown away. What a surprise to wake up to find out the Knicks won. I don't think anyone was humiliated, but there's a sadness when you realize how great the team could be now if KP hadn't demanded a trade, had found a way to work with the Knicks. #Not sure if this photo is real. It's supposed to be a 2008 picture of Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg and Bill Clinton. The only thing that would make it better is if Jeffrey Epstein were photobombing. 💥#
I was filling up at Stewart's on Highway 28 yesterday and a NYPD car pulls into the slot next to mine. A cop gets out, starts pumping gas. I say hey are you from NYC? He pauses and shakes his head without looking at me. For the reservoir? I ask. He turns around looks at me and says yes, with the typical NYPD stare. Let me translate. Fuck you if you keep doing that I'm going to kick you in the balls and cuff you. Even up here in the sticks, it's reassuring to know that NY cops are the same, all the world over. 💥#Voters choose based on personality, mostly, not policy.#
I didn’t realize people take the lack of a warning from Google or Firefox as an endorsement. If they do they’re going to be sorry because bad guys can get secure websites too. This is where the push to https blows up. The next step, obviously, is to make websites register with Google, and have their changes approved the same way iPhone devs do. Quickly this will mean no criticism of China, and of course Google.#
This is where Elizabeth Warren made a "joke" at the expense of people who believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Humor works, for presidents, only when it's self-deprecating. Otherwise you make a choice, you're the president of everyone, including people with unpopular beliefs, or remain a senator or college professor. Further she throws this at men, for some reason, as if men are the ones who think this about marriage, exclusively. Personally I don't care if you do or don't get married. I don't think the government should be involved. But same-sex marriage is a recent thing, and of course there are people who are uncomfortable with it. Probably MAGA sounds right to them. A president of everyone should re-assure them that they have the right to their belief, and can live their lives accordingly, but they can't control other people. Had Warren said that, that way (without the putdowns) I would have cheered. #Are you a 1 or a 0?#
I'm going to write a tool that sucks down all my tweets from the last day or two into an outline, so I can reorganize and edit them into blog posts. I'm writing too much on Twitter, and working too hard to get the ideas onto my blog. #Gates is right. We accept lies in political ads. Always have. But the ability to say different things to different people, that's a new line we should have thought about more carefully. Everyone should hear the same lies. #
Something our parents' generation did, which inspired some boomers to try to do something great with their lives.#
Today's young people practice drills to protect themselves from active shooters. Boomers learned to duck and cover.#
I was asked by an old friend what I think about lies in Facebook political ads. "I think pragmatically that Zuck is caught between people who lie about the truth, that in most things there is no such thing as the truth, and all politicians lie, and we accept that, and only an asshole would try to impose rules on FB that they aren't willing to impose on themselves." I did a Twitter poll that was kind of an editorial. #
Hillary Clinton is so relaxed, she says of Rudy Giuliani. "It's almost as if aliens have seized his brain." #
I have always despised this xkcd cartoon. I understand what the First Amendment says, I didn't need a cartoon to explain it. People send you this to remind you that your big mouth could cost you your job, and over time a lot more, as the social mob learned how to cancel people in bigger ways. Is that something to be proud of? That you're so intolerant of other views that your reaction is to punish people for expressing them. I remember when the social mob learned that an exec at a tech company had given money to a support a ballot measure that would deny same-sex couples the right to marry. He lost his job. I get it -- you had the right to do it. But that doesn't make it right. I don't care one way or the other if you agree or disagree. But one of the great traditions of our country, that is not part of the Constitution, is that we celebrate diversity. We listen, and give other ideas a chance to penetrate our view of the world. We have some flexibility. We could change our mind. As we grow older we strive to learn. So while it's not in the Constitution to listen and respect our differences, imho it is in our DNA. #
2014: "Will you have to know the politics of every person you do business with? What if your barber gave to a cause you don't support? Your doctor? How close a relationship does it have to be for their politics to be approved by whoever you look to approval for?"#
I have a bit of time to kill today, and I thought I'd try to get to the bottom of some weird behavior in the JS code for this blog. This item has an attached image that is revealed when you click the wedge next to the item. The second time you expand it, when it's revealed it happens very slowly, and it opens from the top and left, with a scrolling effect that I now find annoying. It doesn't do it the first time. I must have made it do this originally, but I don't remember how, and I can't seem to find the code. I'm going to keep looking. (Update: I was able to turn it off by setting the params to slideUp and slideDown to 0. Still not sure why it was doing it for this data type, and not for others.) 💥#
I think Sherrod Brown or Amy Klobuchar would be good Democratic candidates for president. I listened to today's Daily podcast about the chances of the Demo candidates based on polling the NYT just did. It's not a good picture. They say Biden would win, but the Repubs haven't run a campaign on him yet. They're going to let the Dems tear him to shreds first, which they will. People think this is about policy, it's not. People want to feel like winners. I wouldn't feel like a winner, of any kind, if my president was Warren, Sanders or Biden. Ugh. Anyway if a Democrat is elected what they'll do will depend totally on the makeup of Congress. The more Repubs are left the more compromise, unless of course Trump is re-elected, then you can forget about who's in Congress, it won't matter. Our Congress will be no more consequential than Russia's. I agree with Chait that the Dems have been living in a fantasy world. None of the leading candidates will beat Trump, none of them. #
- So much discussion in the news about impeachment, and they never talk about the #1 reason to impeach, asap. So here's a reminder.#
- He's running the presidency as if he was a monarch. Ignoring the Constitution. And the longer he gets away with it the worse it gets. #
- They should make a song about this. How the president is not a king. We could change the words to the Star Spangled Banner. #
Poll: Which political party will control "truth" on what remains of Facebook after the politicians get through with it.#
As the 2016 election approached, FiveThirtyEight published a series of graphs showing over time the likelihood of Clinton or Trump winning. All through October, as Clinton gained confidence, the two branches of the graph diverged, until FBI Director Comey's letter to Congress. I watched it live and my heart sank. Here we go again. Hillary's Emails. That evening, Clinton gave a speech. Eleven days before the election. Voting is already underway. We understood the damage. And you can see it clearly in the graph on this day in 2016. Yes, Clinton was still twice as likely to win as Trump. But the graph was going the wrong way. And we know how it turned out. So remember, the story that the NY Times invented, promoted with love by the FBI and the rest of journalism, was probably a bigger cause of America's defeat than Cambridge Analyitica and Facebook. But of course the NYT controls the conversation, and is unaccountable, so the blame is focused elsewhere. #
We need a C-SPAN for the web. Not archive.org (which is great). A place where you can put things on the record, so when something notable happens you can be sure this will be the last place to disappear, or to be put behind a paywall.#
I try to ask questions political journalism would ask if it were tech-aware. And the other way around. There's an intersection that is mostly missing. The enemy has been investing there. And enemy is the right word.#
You mean journalism is licking their chops. “Hillary’s Emails” was fake news created by the NY Times. We haven’t forgotten. This is the corruption of American journalism. We never got an apology from the NYT or even a mea culpa. It isn’t the first time NYT fuckery cost us huge. These people are drunk with power, and are accountable to no one.#
It was obvious that the Warriors were going to crumble if not this year next year. Dynasties in the NBA are pretty complete unlike other sports, and the teams on top get bored. Winning it all meant something the first time, maybe a bit the second but after that it gets tired. We saw it happen first with the Miami Heat. #
A couple of years later, I've yet to see a JsonFeed in the wild. And if such a thing existed, I suspect there would also be an RSS 2.0 version of the same content. In the group where developers discuss it, which I follow, most or all of the feature requests are things that have already been done in RSS or Atom.#- There was, provably, no reason to do this. At this point, is there a language or environment that doesn't have an open source library for reading feeds? It's just one call in my JavaScript code to take a bit of text that's supposed to be a feed and get back a JavaScript structure with the contents. Couldn't be simpler. Yet I don't think many of those libraries include support for this two-year-old format. So you have to do more work to read it. One of the goals of the new format was that it would be less work. #
- And on the writing side, maybe writing JSON is a little easier than writing XML, but again, if 20 years after the advent of RSS, you don't have a toolkit in your environment to write feeds, you should probably do it yourself and share it with other devs. #
- Finally if you were going to invent a new format why not just JSONify an existing feed structure. I did that for RSS in a few minutes. My blog is still available in JSON as well as XML. No need for debates or feature requests. It's RSS but in JSON. It Just Works™. Not that anyone uses it, for the reasons mentioned above. #
- I've known both Manton and Brent, the authors of the format, for many years. Nice people. But this was a mistake. Atom, also, was a mistake. All the energy should have been focused on a standard that would be supported everywhere, as easily as possible. I did it myself. I had designed a format when RSS came along, from Netscape, and I dropped it in favor of RSS, because one way to do something is better than two no matter how much better the second way is. A hard-won lesson from many times around the loop. Hopefully this is something will not be repeated for RSS at least, in the future. #
To Woodstock readers, a couple of ideas. 1. Eventually imho it would be cool if someone did what I'm doing but focused on the town and county. 2. I'm thinking of hosting a meetup, perhaps in my living room, where we do this face to face. I talk for a few minutes on topics either from the blog (most likely) or other subjects. I have done this before, in California and Boston, it can be really interesting. Kind of a like a book club for something that's ongoing, not finished. Or a book tour that lasts months. Just a couple of ideas, seeds planted for the future. 🌲 #A blogging meta-note. I use my blog-writing as a break from development work. Ideas occur to me while doing other stuff. I use the blog as a notebook to record them. I also use Twitter as a first draft. As I've said before the 280-char limit made Twitter a lot more useful. I have a graphic editing environment for blogging that only runs on a Mac. When an idea occurs to me when I'm away from work, I can use a phone or tablet to record it on Twitter. It's there when I'm back at my Mac. It's a pretty decent editorial system. I sent a DM yesterday to Jack Dorsey asking to work on the integration of Twitter with desktop writing tools (my own in particular of course). I think it's so close toa breakthrough. I can feel it. I've been right about this before, btw. 💡 #
Changes in our world are happening so fast. I wish more news orgs took this as an opportunity to teach and reinforce American rules of self-governance. (British too, btw.) They matter now. It's like jury duty. You'd be amazed at what random Americans can do. We are capable of understanding a lot, with nuance. Look at the rules of any sport, baseball, football, etc. Very complicated. Yet huge numbers of people understand them. And we have a baseline of truth in sports talk. People don't make up averages or rules, yet there's lots of room for subjective opinion. In some countries sports talk does turn violent, but not in the US. Wouldn't be a bad model for a new news org to adopt, up front. ⌚#
The NYT says the NBA is not much fun now. I get it. I tried watching the Nets v Rockets last night. Preferred the Knicks v Celtics. The Knicks are more interesting this year. A mix of young and old. And a sensational rookie. The boring part of the NBA are the corporate players like Kyrie and KD. Mercenaries. Oh we'll occupy the Nets so we can take cheap shots at the Knicks. Wow. Brilliant. No one cares about the Nets. They get their paycheck and they'll move on to humiliate another team next year, until fans get tired of it. Thing is most of the fans already are. Ask Toronto. You know the players must think we don't know it's about teams. We really don't care about them so much. Make good teams and we'll be happy. That's why we like the Celtics, the Bucks, Philly, and guess what the Knicks look okay this year. Someone put some care into creating this team. I think that's what the Knicks have been missing. Someone who cares about them. But the Knicks would've said yes to Kyrie, I'm glad they didn't get the chance. #I wrote this on this day in 2016: "Visualize Trump's victory speech where he goes off script because at that point there is no script."#
By now everyone who’s an actual person on Twitter should get that the extreme opinions there are programmed by software. These imitation people are algorithmic, not human. In other words we are being programmed by other people’s programs. All you have to do is not get sucked into the emotional smörgåsbord the algorithms try to induce in you.#We thought robots were going to steal our jobs. We didn't foresee that they would break our minds. #
El Orange is really good at the 280-char rage tweet. Would he be competitive in a world where the limit was a bit longer? No one knows. It would be a different medium. Might favor the story-teller over the grunter.#
Speaker Pelosi: "If we don't have a system of checks and balances, we might as well all elect a president and go home." The Repubs in Congress must be secretly glad Pelosi and the House Democrats are sticking their necks out for the Constitution. Unless the Dems prevail, the Repubs are out of a job too. #
We're erecting a Maginot Line, getting ready to re-fight the Battle of 2016, ignoring that the enemy already controls our capital. We should be innovating, but we're not. We're defending against Nixon with lots of Woodsteins. I have a weird feeling we should let Zuck and Jack do what they want, and help them, because our current response is a loser, totally inadequate. #
I heard someone say that Congress shouldn't go on a week recess, but this is a good time to go home and hear from the people. #
- You know the Steve Jobs ad about how geniuses think differently. He was on to something. There is a big difference between the way innovators think and everyone else. And I think I can finally put the difference in words. #
- If you're going to innovate you do it first, and look for funding when you've got something working. You don't wait for anyone's approval, or investors nagging you about when you're going to finish, because if your idea is innovative enough you'll never be able to explain it in words, and you'll learn so much in the process, the idea will sound very different very quickly if it's new enough. People will want to invest when it's up and running. You have to get there first. The innovator goes ahead. The non-innovator doesn't.#
- I have several friends who are former journalists who are so driven by what they do they write publicly, even though no one is paying them. What they do is exciting. Their ideas are different and valuable. They get me, their reader, thinking, which imho is the best kind of journalism. They may not know it but they are innovating, and if they keep at it, I think there's a good chance they will have such obvious success that people will want to invest. #
- I would invest myself if we could put it together as something investible. By that I mean it has a way to grow. That it's not just investing in a few outside-the-box thinkers, but if it could become a place where such thinkers could start, follow their idea, develop their own following, and inspire other thinkers to do what they do. I wouldn't burden it with advertising. I'd let it run for a while, the way they let software developers run without a business model these days, while they test their ideas. #
- Just thinking out loud here. I am sure there's a new journalism out there, that it's not the journalism that gets so much acclaim, the reinvention of Woodward and Bernstein, the two Washington Post innovators who brought down Nixon. We should be way ahead of that by now. We need to be, because the forces opposing democracy, the equivalent of 1974's plumbers, are moving much faster. We're erecting Maginot Lines now, getting ready to fight the Battle of 2016, ignoring that the enemy already controls our capital. They've been innovating. We haven't seen the results of their most recent innovations, yet. #
A Florida attorney writes: "Donald Trump is about to get ripped apart by NY Courts and there isn't a single presidential power that can stop it. He's moving to Florida because of a unique unlimited Homestead provision in our Constitution letting him keep a home of any value."#Another thing Facebook is good for. A friend posted a request for a referral to a cardiologist. A far-away friend was quite sick. We figured out that wasn't right, they should call 911 and get to a hospital asap. I don't know what the outcome was, but it might have saved a life.#
From a Scripting News reader: "Found my kidney donor on Facebook last year, while they weren't a match for me, they opted to swap on my behalf thereby helping four other people and me finding another match. Complete stranger."#
- Most journalistic pieces about Facebook view it as an online bulletin board with nightmarish advertising that's getting worse every day. For what it's worth, that's not how I experience it. The only political ads i see are from Democratic candidates who want money. Harmless and easily ignored. #
In the last year I've started using a private group for Woodstock residents. It's a very civil place where people do the kinds of things towns do. #- There are quite a few Republicans, occasionally someone says something inflammatory about Trump, but that's moved out the main discussion quickly. #
- I think people have an interest in civility because eventually you'll see most of them face-to-face, at the post office, grocery, in a park, on the new rail trail, a local restaurant, party. That is a real force for civility. #
- Anyway, there's no question that it works, and it's worth it. #
- I've started to create my own private groups. #
- I know it's in a silo, against my religion, but on the other hand, it's where the people are. Some things are more important than silos vs open systems. #
- So when journalists write about FB as if it's a black and white thing, they aren't really doing their job. And their editors don't create room for other views, and they aren't doing their jobs either. #
The intro of this TechCrunch piece about podcasting got me to do a podcast myself. "The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume." Thank you. That was by design.#
In today's podcast I talk about the 20th anniversary of the idea of podcasting. Not as soon as I thought: October 26, 2020. Having a blog archive is useful. Here's a screen shot of the relevant bit. #
If the Repubs don't all work for Putin by now, they should be and probably are thanking the Dems, privately of course, for standing up for the co-equal branches idea at the heart of the Constitution. Without that their jobs would be meaningless. No power at all.#
Facebook is important. The man who created it deserves respect for that. No one else did it. If anyone would minimize his accomplishment it would be me, but I'm in awe of it. Start there. How can we work together to get the most out of what he built.#I assume the NYT thinks that any ad that quotes the NYT is okay. But there are so many lies in the NYT. We need better grounding in truth before we can hold anyone else to only running truthful ads.#
In tweets today Trump is saying he's doing a good job as president. That's fair, they're half-truths and lies, but it's political speech so it doesn't have to be true. That is an American norm. The op-ed writers appear to not know this. #
- NPR isn't reporting the news, they're reporting Republican spin.#
For example this morning they talked for a half hour about the impeachment inquiry as a partisan issue, repeating the Republican claim that it's bad for the inquiry to be private. They said the Democrats in 1998 had the same objection, which wasn't true, because then there was a special prosecutor, Ken Starr, who did his inquiry in private before issuing his public report. As far as I know the Democrats never said this inquiry should be held in public. Even if they had it wouldn't have been. There are rules about the process designed to protect the accused and the process. NPR never presented the other side, how this all looks from the point of view of the Democrats, or more importantly, the Constitution, which is really what Trump has offended. (Could they cover a story without it being totally and inappropriatey partisan?)#- This is why the hearings have been private. #
- The DoJ wouldn't appoint a special prosecutor, so the House had to do it themselves.#
- Such inquiries are private to protect the accused because, if there is no indictment, they want to limit damage.#
- They want testimony to be private so the witnesses can't get their stories aligned.#
- The Repubs also complained, through their NPR voice, that the president should have been given a chance to present his evidence. He was given the chance, and chose to try to obstruct the process instead of participating. Makes the Republican complaint seem hollow. #
Read this thrilling comment from Charlie Warzel who according to his profile writes for the NY Times. He says "there's almost no space for writing anymore that's joyful or an attempt to be creative. hardly anyone is playing around with form or even just trying to entertain. so much of the joy has been sucked out of the internet unless its crowdsourced by platforms from ppl who aren't paid." The last three words in his comment are the point. Writing isn't something you necessarily get paid to do. I used to write advertising, and would have to pay thousands of dollars to have it run. It was still writing. Now I write because I like it. #Dan Conover: "Putin is funneling cash through Ukrainian organized crime to support Trump's reelection, fund Republican candidates, undermine US intelligence, and direct US foreign policy in Ukraine. The evidence is in the public domain and can be cited strictly through official documents and reputable news outlets." #
Brent Simmons wrote recently about how he can't say when a certain feature will be available with any accuracy so he doesn't try. I agree with what he said, but you can do it, by keeping a backlog of unreleased debugged features. If you use the feature yourself every day and it works well, you can probably estimate when it will ship to users, because you could do it tomorrow if you wanted (or at least start testing it). This is a weird idea in the old way of doing software, where people always release what they have as soon as they have it. A number of years ago I stopped doing that. I have a backlog of debugged usable stuff that only I have used. So if I announced a feature from the backlog I could definitely predict when it would be available. #
Yesterday I was saying how weird it is to see podcasts be so pervasive. Here's another example. The NY Post has a Knicks podcast. I will probably listen, from time to time. Today's podcast is with Charles Oakley, a former Knick and fan favorite, who is hated by James Dolan, which of course makes him even more popular with Knicks fans. He says the Knicks can prove Kevin Durant wrong. Of course they can. The Nets stars need to learn about managing expectations. If the Knicks show up and don't fall apart on the court they will have exceeded the bullshit hype of the Nets stars, both of them great players but probably not in NY after what they've said about the Knicks. #
Something I consistently forget, date comparison in JavaScript doesn't work. Date objects are alway unequal, even if they represent the same actual date. Convert the objects to numbers and compare those instead: d1.getTime () == d2.getTime (). #
Okay Tulsi is going to do a third party run.#- No one knows who or what she is. #
- So before she has a chance to position herself, do it for her. That's straight out of the Repub playbook and it's smart.#
- Make it so she takes votes away from Trump not the Demo.#
- Something like this.#
- If you like Trump, vote for Trump. Don't waste your vote on Tulsi. #
- That would do it. #
- Blast that message everywhere. #
- $1 million spent today is worth $100 million after she finishes positioning herself.#
- PS: If you haven't read about positioning you should. It's logical and fun, and explains a lot about how products work in the human mind. It's Marketing 101.#
- These are the Trumpers who imho are going under the bus.#
- Mike Pence.#
- Mick Mulvaney.#
- Rick Perry.#
- Mitch McConnell (aka #moscowmitch).#
- Rudy Giuliani and all his cohorts.#
- And..?#
Dreams are so funny. One of my recurring dreams all through my life is not being able to find my way home. I'd start going there, but realize I wasn't getting anywhere. It would go on and on, and I'd never get there. Well last night I had a weird variant on that. I was still trying to get home. I had parked my car somewhere, and was trying to get there, so I could begin my journey, but first I had to call my mother. I couldn't find the phone feature on my iPhone. I'd keep navigating through the menus thinking I was on the way to the phone, but I'd get lost and have to start over. It seems my subconscious has completely absorbed the UI of computers as reality. And even though I'm an adult and my mother is gone, I still feel the need to call her. And of course all this is going on inside me even when I'm wide awake. 💥#
Also in my dreams last night, since I'm on the topic, Craig Newmark was partying. Dancing, telling jokes, introducing people to other people, being gregarious. I was surprised because this is out of character for him. He's a very nice, considerate person, in real life. But he seems a bit reserved. I find him hard to read. I've known him since the early days of the web in the Bay Area. I defended him when the press took what I felt were unfair shots, taking advantage of the fact that his product had his name in it, blaming him personally for the demise of print news. Ridiculous. So, I was happy to see Craig let go in my dreams. I sometimes say things that might have offended him, but he's never complained. Once I remarked, riding in the back seat of a car with him next to me that it was like being in a car with Aunt Jemima. I had gotten the idea from Peter Norton, who like Craig, had personally become a famous brand. He once said he was the Aunt Jemima of software. I thought that was clever. But of course Craig may not see it the same way. I tend to do that, take risks, I probably offend people from time to time, not meaning to, I assure you. I'm nowhere near as rich as Craig. Maybe that's why? 😄#
A number of people in the town where I now live have blogs and do podcasts. It feels weird to me, so far from the center of civilization, I guess there's a bit of pride, but mostly bewilderment. Like the guy who creates a new computer system in Soul of a New Machine and sees someone using it and thinks you can't use this stuff. Heh. I don't play much of a role in these things anymore. Not sure I'd want to actually, though I think the software most people use for blogging is nowhere near as good or complete as what we had in the early 00s. Just a little factoring and UI reorg would make things flow much better. Podcasting has become a huge undertaking for people, with seasons and episodes, sponsors. It should be imho like leaving a voice mail to a few friends. Nice thing is today it can easily scale up to millions of friends. That wasn't true at the beginning. #I had breakfast last week with a new local friend who reads this blog. He's a former DJ at WDST, and from that he built a business selling music at fairs in the northeast. He was in the business when Napster rolled through. We shared some interesting stories. I told him what I had been hearing about the sale and reboot of Bearsville and Todd Rundgren's old studio and stage. British dude, his sports are rugby and soccer. Not much overlap with this NBA and MLB guy. #
I was hoping podcasting would be more spontaneous and casual, sort of like the Talking Heads song that goes like this: "When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed. Say something once, why say it again?" Of course I don't live up to that rule on my own blog. 💥#
The reality of Kyrie is sinking in for the Nets. I didn't used to care about the Nets, and I still don't, but I wonder why Kyrie thought we would? Their story is only interesting because of the drama. I would have preferred if they grew slowly. New York is a dysfunctional NBA city, btw, in case it wasn't obvious. #
I've been working on an SQL-based RSS aggregator for a while. I just got it working with a managed database on Digital Ocean. That's a big deal because I don't want to manage databases. Now I don't have to? So far I like it though there were too many hoops to jump through for the setup. A Hello World app for Node with step by step instructions would have helped. Good docs is the thing that sets Digital Ocean apart from AWS. This time I have to say they could be better.#
It'd be kind of fun to make a Lock Him Up hat using exactly the same red hat as he uses. So from a distance you couldn't tell if it was one of his assholes or one of ours.#I know this is blasphemy but Michelle Obama is wrong. We need rallying cries too, and demonstrations, and slogans. We've bottled up our anger, that's nice, but look where it's gotten us. What Trump's assholes are doing to America, our country, is unacceptable. #
Robert Occhialini is restoring his old blog and reports that one of the only links from November 1997 that still works is the old Frontier home page. That was a good page, a lot of love was poured into it. But there was a broken image, I was immediately sure of the cause. The original server, a Mac, had unicase filenames. It's now hosted on S3 which has case-sensitive file names. So what worked when it was originally posted, now is broken, when served through S3. I guess it must be hard or impossible for S3 to offer unicase for HTTP requests. #
Today I'm working out problems with Digital Ocean's managed MySQL database. Currently trying to turn off ANSI_QUOTES.#
One of things I've always admired about Cubs fans is that when an opposing team hits a home run, the Wrigley Field protocol demands that the fan who caught the ball throw it back on the field. It's a sign of disrespect. Basically fuck you and your home run. In baseball, that's cool. And it is in politics too, to throw back at a president who crosses the line of propriety every waking moment, to throw back at him one of the most vile and disgusting campaign slogans ever, in any political system, anywhere. #- And last night, the crowd at the World Series game in DC did something most of us would love to do if given the chance. With President Trump in attendance, being called out on the scoreboard, they first booed him and then chanted Lock Him Up. #
- As a Mets fan of course I don't usually have a lot of sympathy for Nationals fans, but this is bigger than baseball. I love what they did. #
- Lock Him Up should be the chant at every sports event until he is gone.#
- This morning on MSNBC we get a lecture from Morning Joe and Mika saying you shouldn't do that. And then Senator Chris Coons from Delaware, a Democrat, says the same. Respect the office if you don't respect the person. Well fuck you. We've been very civil through this whole process, and we're fed up. If you respect the office so much, Coons, why do you stand by and let him shit all over it?#
- These people have the wrong idea about who we are. We're not children who are misbehaving. We're the electorate of this country, the ones who elected them, and we're saying if you haven't had enough yet, we have. It's time to do what we sent you there to do. #
- So much damage is being done to our country while pundits and Democrats worry about which side of the plate the napkin goes. When you get him out of our White House, we'll stop calling for him to be locked up. Do your jobs and until you take care of this just shut up. #
- Now that the pundits and pols are making such a big deal about this, it'll be interesting to see what happens Tuesday night in Houston. #
- The reaction from pols and pundits reinforces that it would be a good idea to have a permanent citizen's occupation of DC. 100K people, always there, walking up and down the mall chanting Lock Him Up until the Repubs and Dems and members of the Supreme Court get the idea that the people of the United States are fed up not just with him, but with you too. #
Very few people use the Chat tab, so I took it out of the list of active tabs. I'm going to keep looking for the best form of interaction for blog readers. Right now, it seems to be Twitter. The software is still running and can be accessed at chat.scripting.com. #
I'm trying to watch The Spy on Netflix, but I keep expecting Borat to show up. I'm watching for it. Anyway it's not that good. What is good that I found at random is the 1998 movie A Simple Plan. It got great reviews, but don't watch the trailer, it's a total spoiler. On Amazon.#
I bet it's going to turn out that Al Baghdadi was working with a famous Democrat to rig the 2016 election. "The server" will turn up in several places along with "the missing emails."#
All is right with the world. The Knicks are 0-3. Some norms will never be broken, it seems. BTW, they say the last time the Knicks had a winning team was 2012. Already a long time ago. Here's what happened in a single image.#
One of the many things wrong with our president is he never wins. He always feels he has to sell. Can you imagine, never a moment to relax, kick back, and savor your accomplishments? What a terrible way to live.#
Wow some feeds go back years. Feed readers have to allow for this possibility. Here's an example, the Daily podcast. It has items going back to Feb 2017. #
I find that I can't watch Mike Pence on TV anymore. In my mind I've written him off. It's no longer Mike Pence season. I feel the same way about Mike Pence as I feel about Game of Thrones.#
The new half-season of BoJack Horseman was of course very good. I gulped it down in two sittings. Can't wait for the final episodes on Jan 31.#I had a thought early in the Trump presidency that we should offer him a deal. He could have $25 billion cash if he resigns immediately. That number goes down by a billion every month he stays. So he would have a very clear picture of how much the misery of being president was costing him. It would be good for us because it's a small amount of money, all things considered, and if we ever elect a president who would take the deal, we would want them to take the deal. I would say we could start there right now. Pelosi gets together with Moscow Mitch and visits the White House.#
I hear some Democrats are getting crazy about the choices we have for president. They're trying to think of someone to come in and save the day. They come up with the usuals, Bloomberg, Kerry, even HRC again. But what about Jay Inslee, governor of Washington state? Really smart, thinks well on his feet, confident, has executive experience. Republicans would like him. I don't know about blacks, but he's so much more confidence-inspiring than Biden imho. #
Kyrie Irving doesn't understand NY sports if he thinks the Nets are going to "take over" the city. He shouldn't say stuff like that if it's really his intention. More likely he'll be traded in two years to Chicago as a backup point guard. People will say, "Remember Kyrie Irving? He had such a promising career. What happened to him?" He should remember how NY chews up players who think they're bigger than the city. 💥 #- Let me explain. NY sports fans, except for Yankees fans who they may actually temporarily get a number of because all they care about is winning, suffer for very long periods waiting for their team to rebound. With the Knicks it seems to never happen. But we suffer anyway. We don't want the city to win Kyrie, we want the Knicks to win. We're tired of people rubbing their shit all over the Knicks. If you want to be loved by the city, and that's where we begin, you have to understand this. We aren't a prize to be won, we're loyalty that must be earned. Over generations. I went to Knicks games with my grandfather. Not much chance my loyalty will ever switch, Kyrie, but if you want my respect, you shouldn't say stupid shit like that.#
- One thing you may not appreciate coming from New Jersey is just how huge the city is. One basketball player, no matter how great he is, cannot conquer the city. Even the Mets in 1969 didn't. For a few days everyone was happy, then life went on. And we don't like arrogant assholes. Unfortunately the Knicks are currently owned by one, but we hope that is just a temporary thing. #
I wrote Twitter as Coral Reef after meeting with Jack Dorsey in 2007 and hearing his vision for Twitter as a platform. It was a good vision. #Over the decades I've spun out a number of individual developers from teams I lead. That started when I sold Living Videotext to Symantec in 1987. I left the company a few months after the deal closed. I wasn't smart or patient enough to try to fit into someone else's company, and I had a project I really wanted to do. Here's the interesting thing. When I called back the developers I had left behind, and asked if they would collaborate on interop with my new product, they told me how they work for a big company now and can't collaborate with someone like me. Heh. I knew that they were working on a project with Apple called Bedrock. Anyway, it happens all the time. Once they or I leave the nest, they don't see the value of continuing the collaboration. You'd think, schooled in the power of prior art and interop, they'd want to go forth in the world and create more interop, but big companies are a big influence on the people who work there. Even relatively small companies (like Symantec in the 80s) have a lot of inward pull. #
I have a geothermal heating and cooling system that works well, is supposed to be efficient (I haven't used it enough to verify) but there is one thing that sucks about it. When it turns on there's a huge slamming sound. Like a garage door. You can't sleep through it. It's jarring even when you're awake. I get mixed opinions. Some say the loud sound is just the way it works, and others say it's wrong, they have used geothermal systems that worked just like any other forced air heating or cooling system. Anyway I have the problem solved for now, at least in October. I don't turn the heat on. I use a space heater at night, and keep the bedroom door closed. But we haven't had a frost yet. Then I'll need another answer. #
I think Trump wants Biden to run against, despite the "optics," because he's the only Democrat who makes Trump seem young. In other words, surprise -- for the #1 narcissist, the reason is vanity. 💥#
As I've been saying since it started, Bojack Horseman is one of the most consequential and riveting shows ever. And totally entertaining. People can't seem to accept that a cartoon could be all that. It can. The first half of the sixth season is on Netflix tonight. #I feel sorry for Richard Engel on MSNBC. His reporting from Syria raises a question that his colleagues in the US don't want to discuss. Russia moving in to take over from the US is no accident, it was the plan. In America for some reason they don't want to incorporate the obvious fact that Trump works for Russia, not for the United States. Over and over, for years, they pretend they don't know this. Why?#
I'd like to put down a bet. Another scandal will come out that has a cash quid pro quo. #
Reporting on the demonstration put on by Republican House members yesterday, CNN repeated the claim that Repubs were being denied entry to the Shiff hearings. This is why the Repubs do these stunts, because journalism doesn't report the news in a realistic way. The technically correct lead-in would be: Repubs put on a dishonest demo, trying to attract naive press coverage. Now would be a good time to change the game with Repubs, because they don't have a choice but to accept reasonable rules re lies.#
On Facebook I saw Trump referred to as dear leader and my mind read drug dealer. It really happened, I'm not making this up. 🍌#
I hear they're doing a sequel to The Matrix. May I suggest Matt Gaetz as Agent Smith. Adam Schiff as Morpheus. AOC as Neo, and Maxine Waters as The Oracle. #I'm glad to hear that Amy Klobuchar has qualified for the next Democratic debate. I want a candidate that everyone can get behind and that includes Republicans and former Obama voters who voted for Trump. We need a president who wins in a landslide, takes both houses, and someone who knows how to get things done in our political system. When we've elected "outsiders" the results have never been good for us. But Klobuchar's confidence isn't there yet. Warren has it, as does Sanders, but neither has the ability to govern with the full support of most Americans. We have to think clearly about how our political system will work after Trump. #
We need a Wikipedia for news. A landing page for each story, with a summary, and pointer to coverage of all major news sites. As they all adopt paywalls I find it's hard to pick a good story to point to from pieces on my blog. Also I don't like pointing to news pages that are overloaded with crapware. Two bits of prior art. Political Wire and Memeorandum. I like Political Wire's synopses, and Memeorandum's accumulation of links and tweets. Merge those two ideas, and cover more than politics, that's the basic idea. And also use relatively future-safe server tech. #We're having the fight to preserve the Constitution and rule of law, right now, today. It's debatable the extent to which the president is above the law, but certainly no one else is. Or are they? The Repubs are testing that today.#
CNN is prepping an online news aggregator to counter tech giants. Every big news site should be an aggregator and compete with Facebook. I was pitching CNN on this in 2004, fifteen years ago.#
The Ukrainian government has more backbone and honor than the supposedly honest American press, who were happy to throw the election to Trump for a few bucks.#
This is the best thing I've read on toxic masculinity. Imho it's a disease of the society not of one gender.#
After reading about Taylor’s testimony it’s amazing that there are still people as competent, honest and brave in our government, esp one who was appointed by Pompeo. I was of the belief they had all been removed.#
I may have found a workaround for the problems with Dropbox, but there are still outages at Amazon causing problems elsewhere in Dave's Server Land. As Ringo Starr used to sing, It Don't Come Easy. #