We got our taste of the bitter cold the rest of the country has been experiencing. According to the weather forecast, it'll start warming up tomorrow, and by Sunday it'll be 50. So we got just the minimum. I understand this has been going on for weeks in the Midwest.

I forgot how cold 5 degrees can be. I went out wearing two layers over my whole body and still I was freezing cold, until I had been walking for about a half-hour, which is when it started being fun.

But I'm glad it'll be in the 20s tomorrow. And I feel quite differently about the cold weather now.

01/08/14; 12:32:29 AM

As you may know I'm working on a new CMS.

I've been talking about its existence fairly openly since the project started, I guess it was in October? I'll have to go back and look.

Up till now, I've been "using" it, but not for anything the public can read. However, with this post, that has changed.

The text you're reading here is flowing out to the web in a new way.

It's a milestone, an achievement, an ending, in a sense. Because this CMS is what I was trying to develop many many years ago, when I started blogging.

To me, the two things, the software development and the blogging, are one and the same. That's why my site is called Scripting News. It's about scripting, and it is the result of scripting. It's news, and it's the thing used to build news.

Now, let's see if it worked! :-0

A picture of a slice of cheese cake.

PS: It did!

01/07/14; 04:15:35 PM

First, I am sorry for posting this tweet. I screwed up. In the tweet, I said that the only thing transparent about Glenn Greenwald is his stonewalling. The article which I was linking to, on the New York Magazine website, provided quotes from a Greenwald piece, without reporting the substance. In the piece they were citing, Greenwald answered the most important question I had been calling on him to answer. I had not read the Greenwald piece when I wrote that tweet. That was a mistake.

In his post, he said, unequivocally, that he owns no stock in either of the Omidyar ventures, one which is a non-profit for journalism and the other a for-profit tech company. Not that there would be anything wrong with owning stock, but it is something that needed disclosure, something that I have explained over and over in a series of posts late last year, none of which got this response from Greenwald or any of the other principals in the new company.

There are still other issues. Why the delay in saying he had no stock? And by item #4 in the Greenwald post, we're back to the normal Greenwald approach, over-stating his critics' concerns. At best, this is his lawyerly alter-ego popping up. At worst it makes me think he's still hiding important stuff. Not everyone is out to get him. I was a Greenwald defender and fan until I was introduced to Greenwald the Stone Wall.

An important point, the Snowden documents don't belong to him or the Omidyar ventures. They don't belong to Snowden. They belong to the people of the United States. We have a huge stake in what's done with them. In normal times we'd trust the government to look out for the people's interest, but this is about the government abusing that trust. Greenwald is dancing with high charge explosives. We deserve his full devotion to this story. Why is now a good time for him to be involved in a startup? Why not wait until the Snowden disclosures are complete? Or if he must be involved in a startup, which I know from experience is a hugely time-consuming thing, why not pass the torch to another reporter, or group of reporters? Greenwald's newest response is that we're asking for a complete and immediate dump of the documents. I'm not asking for that! I don't know anyone else who is. What I do want to see is an honest, fair, complete, expedient and urgent disclosure of that information. Perhaps he should start a new venture just to disclose the information in those documents. These are the questions behind the questions about Greenwald's ownership position in the Omidyar companies.

Transparency is not easy, but when you are occupying a seat of historic importance, with our future at stake, we insist that you take that responsibility seriously. And saying you are, when your actions don't indicate that you are, is not a good answer.

01/07/14; 10:25:22 AM

Last built: Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 12:29 PM

By Dave Winer, Tuesday, January 7, 2014 at 10:25 AM.