First I want to say I'm a voter, not a campaigner. 

So anyway, I read this great interview with Barney Frank about Bernie Sanders and other political animals, including the voters.

He says what I've been thinking but a lot more clearly. Of course, he's a professional politician. I know we're supposed to hate them, but the problem is we need them. And BF is one of the good ones. Smart guy.

First, if you want to know who to blame for why everything is so fucked (if you believe it is), if you're a voter and you only vote in Presidential election years, then look in the mirror. If we, who voted for Obama the last couple of times, also voted in the off-year elections, the House and Senate might be Democratic, and you would have gotten more what you want. 

If you're a college student with big loans, you might have gotten relief by now. Because the government serves people who vote. Remember that one.

If you elect President Sanders, you're going to have to vote every year, otherwise you'll be complaining about him too.

About Sanders, what did he get done in the 25 years he's been in Congress? Basically not very much because the guy didn't work with others. No compromise in him, I guess, or maybe he just isn't that social. But it's not going to get any better for him if he's President. We've elected Presidents before who thought Congress had to come to him, it doesn't work that way. 

The most effective presidents are pretty much assholes you wouldn't want to have a beer with. Look at some pictures of Lyndon Johnson relating to other DC politicos. He used to talk to people while he was taking a shit, with the door open! And when he got in your face he totally got in your face. Not a great pal, but boy did he get things done.

Carter is a great example of a Sanders-like President. He was a saint. And really smart, and a good campaigner, and after Watergate and Ford's pardon of Nixon exactly the punishment we all wanted and voted for ourselves. Carter is a great man, but not because he was President, rather because he was a great ex-President. 

Last night Rachel Maddow asked Sanders if he would use some of the money he was raising to support down-ticket candidates. He said no, over and over. I couldn't believe what he was saying. I don't think Maddow could believe it either. And he thinks he's going to get super-delegates to work with him to throw out HRC who is working on raising money for Congress and state offices. As a good top-of-ticket candidate must. It comes with the job. I don't think Bernie gets that.

Not only can't Sanders win with that approach, he clearly doesn't want to create a legacy even if he knows he can't win. Sanders could do a lot for his campaign finance goal right now, this minute, by helping elect people using his access to money. He can't effectively spend all he's raising. I don't understand what game he's playing. Certainly not trying to build some kind of revolution, that's baloney. A revolutionary would be seizing this moment, rather than complaining about the past. 

You want to change the way campaigns are financed Bernie, then fucking do it and stop talking about it. Carpe diem man. 

BTW, one of the reasons our most effective presidents are assholes is that the USA is an asshole country. You want to make it live up to the hype and be a bastion of freedom, where everyone gets a chance to win, and we don't do crazy shit to the world and ourselves? Well that's a big hill to climb. Maybe it's possible, I kind of doubt it is, but if it were to happen you'd have to do a lot more than elect one good President and expect somehow that's going to change hundreds of years of being an asshole country. 

So Microsoft has a port of the Bash shell on Windows. It's a wise move. Early days Microsoft would have done this right off. In the middle in Ballmer's Microsoft they lost the sense of urgency. It isn't even a huge deal from a software standpoint. Think of it as intellectual interop.

They ported Word and Excel to Mac when they were trying to get the world to adopt Windows. I think you can see where this is headed. Flatten out the differences between the OSes as much as possible. Why not. No one cares about that stuff, that's the layer that was established 30 years ago. The action is happening 10-levels up the stack.

BTW, speaking of stacks, we're getting a little traction in 1999-server-land. Of course since we're building on Node.js, all this stuff should run nicely on Microsoft's OS, whatever they call it. ;-)

Good morning!

This is just an announcement, if you have questions you should ask them on the new mail list. Link is at the end of this post.

1. I've created a new blogging system called 1999.io.
2. Anyone can run a server. The server software is open source, MIT License. In that way it's comparable to WordPress or Ghost and unlike Blogger, Medium and Tumblr. I want it to be easy and free to set up and run a server. 
3. It's written in JavaScript, running in Node.js.
4. Each blog can have multiple users, each server can have multiple blogs. Think of 1999 as a community of communities of communities.
5. The software is patterned after a product I created at UserLand Software called Manila. It shipped in 1999. Hence the tagline -- Blogging like it's 1999. 
6. It's the writing and publishing system I've been using for Scripting News since October. It works! I love it more than any blogging system I've ever used. I'm not kidding.
7. It's got features that no blogging system has ever had, like a live connection between the story pages and the server, so updates flow back automatically to every reader. It does liveblogging automatically, without any plug-ins, iFrames, hacks, etc.
8. It's super easy to create a new post. Since that's the first thing you want to do, and I want you to do a lot of it, I made it very very easy. Here's a video demo.
9. Rather than open the system by offering free hosting, instead I am starting with server sysops. So I need help testing that. To be part of this group you should set up a server. It must be publicly accessible, and you need to set up a free app on Twitter. But it's totally doable, if you were able to set up River5 you should be able to set this up.
10. So if you're into helping me do this bootstrap, please sign up for the mail list. I'm not saying I'll approve everyone at first, I want to have a sense that you will be able to give decent bug reports as we shake out the initial setup issues. Please understand.

This is exciting! Let's have fun! :-)

Dave

Libraries should teach people how to run their own servers and provide support groups and self-help. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. I kept thinking of teaching journalism students how to do it, but they're like the Harvard profs. Why did they need blogging? They didn't. But libraries are perfectly situated to bring technology into neighborhoods. And the cost is so low nowadays, get Google and Amazon to donate services. They would of course jump at the opportunity.

Follow-up to yesterday's post re Ev and Joi, Medium and the open web. There was one big problem in hooking Medium up to my blog, after I added Instant Articles support in my feed. 

I had to create a special feed just or Medium because the IFTTT connection choked on the IA support. It's true Facebook could have done something to make this not happen, but they didn't. And as discussed yesterday, to some extent we are all trying to co-exist in Facebook's publishing ecosystem. 

So my advice to Medium and/or IFTTT, please make sure you can handle an IA-capable feed. I'm leading-edge on this, I suspect this will become a big issue for you soon. 

I would actually like to see Medium embrace RSS directly instead of depending in IFTTT to act as an intermediary. It's a pretty well-established standard by now. Why not embrace it and make life a little easier for the publishers?

I'm watching the video between Joi Ito and Evan Williams talking about me. Technically Medium is no worse than other systems, and lately has become better, because it now has an API, as Ev is mentioning right now in the video as I'm listening to it.

The reason I focus on Medium is because it is becoming the default platform for people writing blog posts. But Medium is actually part of the open web.

Joi is now asking the right question. It would be great if Medium directly supported Instant Articles as-is. Interop is great. Many ways to do the same thing sucks. 

He doesn't need to talk to Facebook to support IA. It's an open format. 

The problem with the way Medium API works is that you can't flow updates to it. So if I make a change later the update doesn't show up on Medium.

BTW, I heard a touch of irony in Ev's voice as he questioned whether Medium was really the 800-pound gorilla in this space. They aren't, Facebook is. But Medium is still drawing a lot of good stuff away from the open web, and believe it or not that's okay with me,  as long as it can be shared back into rest of the web, exactly as Joi was discussing. That's what was so great about what Facebook did, they said the content shared with them through IA can be shared anywhere, as-is, without modification. I think this is actually smart, following through on the Central Park analogy -- if they feed back to the open web, there's at least a chance of new interesting stuff being created outside the silos. There's certainly no way anyone but a FB employee can directly add value to the FB platform and same with Medium. But the open web, by definition, is not in any way exclusive. Anyone can do whatever they like, without permission from Ev or Zuck.

Links

Anyway the big pieces relevant to this conversation are:

1. Anywhere But Medium.
2. How Instant Articles Supports the Open Web. 
3. The vision of Central Park.

Every so often I have to write a piece about why I blog. Not that blogging changes so  much, I don't think it does -- but the world around my blog is changing all the time. So the context in which blogging exists changes.

First, Om Malik published a piece yesterday about how to write a good blog post. As I read it I was reminded of a brief Twitter conversation I had the day before with Hossein Derakhshan, who started by saying "Social media have scattered our 'self'. Now they're doing that to #journalism. Era of unified, single website is over." 

These two people who I only know because they blog, are right -- but then I thought -- no I don't agree. And yes, it's something I've been struggling with, but for me the struggle is over. I write my blog not because I want to write a "good" blog post, or even one that's read by a lot of people. And my own self is not scattered, it's right here, and as long as I live it will continue to be here. And my online self doesn't exist for the benefit of others, it's here to help my real self develop his thinking and create a trail of ideas and feelings and experiences that I can look back on later. 

Having a body of online writing going back almost 22 years, I've benefitted from that, many times. For example, my memory told me that I was against the Iraq war right from the start. But that is contradicted by my blog. I had doubts, but I supported the President. I felt I had no choice. This has turned out to be an important consideration in this year's election. We'd all like to think we were against the war from the start, but the reality is most of us were not against it (which is different from being for it, Bernie). Recall the times and the fear we had about our own safety. Our President laid out a set of facts that turned out later to be lies. Yes, we were suspicious. But did we have a choice but to go with our leader? Most of us felt we had to support him. 

I think Hossein is right, for the short term, and wrong for the long term. There are too many technological and societal things happening for the current situation to stay unchanged much longer. Kids who have grown up in the last ten years have never known a world where they couldn't set up their own server. That would be like me, as a young kid, having my own radio station, which I did, even though it was hard to do and illegal! Because I felt compelled to broadcast. I loved communication tech as a kid. It was visceral. There must be kids like that today. Why should they respect what Hossein thinks is the indelible future? No one asked them! Remember what it's like to be coming of age and finding out the whole world had been carved up so that you had to fit in a very tight little box. Some of us didn't like that, and some rebelled against it. Well you may feel it's all over and the structure of the world has already been decided, but I can promise you one thing -- they don't. 

And I don't. I still get a thrill at putting up my own web service. I know it's right. And we haven't lost that ability yet. But it could happen. And that will just mean, imho, that it will take a bit longer for the next iteration to come about. And I promise you it won't have any respect for the rules of the previous iteration. That's just not how our species works.

Kristof wrote an op-ed in the NYT today that's being much-discussed in the journosphere. He says that journalists failed by giving Trump so much airtime. But he didn't say what to do about it. 

I certainly can't say all of what's needed, but I'd like to call your attention to the need for new stronger rules, or don't have debates. 

I outlined some ideas in this piece written on March 17, I think it might be worth a read. It begins thus..

We never had a rule that you couldn't interrupt people in a political debate because most people running for the job understood how serious it is and while they did interrupt each other, it never became a huge problem the way it did this year. Likewise we never had a rule saying candidates couldn't call each other names or make personal comments about their bodies or mannerisms. The thought never crossed anyone's mind because it was unthinkable that anyone running for this job would have so little respect for it.

And continues on from there...

On Twitter, earlier I wrote that the United States needs a good therapist. I'd like to add that the United States also needs to grow up.

Growing up means seeing that there are other people who are not corrupt or evil or weak who just have a different point of view.

Our system of government is set up so that if you want to get anything done, you must listen to other people and consider their needs. Give a little to get a little. You'll never get all that you want. And that's a good thing.

Too many people belong to the My Way Or The Highway Party. They're tired of being politically correct or they're feeling the bern, whatever it is, they've found a reason they don't have to listen. And that's not actually going to work.

The key is to listen. Listen especially carefully to things you don't want to hear. That's where our country comes together. That's where growing up happens.

One year ago I posted this Little Card Editor editorial, on Facebook and many other places. Here's what it said:

How great if Facebook, asking publishers to provide full text, spec'd an open format, so it could also flow to the open web.

I thought the picture was really beautiful. It's the way I think of the web, lots of flows, some big, some small -- and then places that things don't flow in and out of. 

Ideally everything that's public should be able to flow everywhere, so we can build all kinds of apps on the information we all create together. That's the vision of the web. Realized only somewhat, as it is with all human things. Nothing ever does all we hoped it would. And we never anticipate all that will come from innovations, good or bad. 

Anyway, today I reposted that card with a simple message. They did. 

And that's good. 

When Republicans talk about not having to be politically correct, a lot of what they're talking about are violence, and illegal.

What if with all the developments in cloud technology, it's possible to make boring old  useful technology exciting again? You think it can't happen, well people always think that, until it happens. And most don't realize it was just a remix until long after it's been integrated into our way of doing things, and then it just seems normal, and boring, if not useful.

For example, today Facebook seems normal. Is it a remix? Yes of course. It's USENET groups, or a BBS, or a blog-with-comments, or a chatroom, all of it schmushed up into a sprawl of features and services. But there was something important about Facebook when it was new -- three things really.

1. It scaled. It was fast no matter how many people used it.
2. Huge amounts of venture capital was available to fund growth before they knew what their business model would be. 
3. Everyone could use it. This was a combination of improving computer-using skills among normal people, and devs learning how people learn so we could make it easier. The two met at Facebook. 

True, not everyone could use it, but enough people so that people who couldn't felt left out, instead of the people using it being weird (as we were in the day of USENET, BBSes and blogs).

But now it's old hat. Many people think this is it. Everything has to compete with Facebook and it's so pervasive and fast that it can't happen, therefore it's all over. This is the way it will be forever. No one actually says that, but other things they say imply it. It's behind their thinking, rarely said out loud. Of course it's wildly wrong.

Because while Facebook is basically sitting there, serving as a backbone for all of the company's adventures and as a barrier to entry for upstarts, other tech is roaring forward making previously unthinkable things more thinkable.

I have the ability to see into these technologies, and to see them as a user does. This gives me a pretty unique perspective. Network servers are now very cheap and getting easier to deploy. They have to get just a little bit easier before enough people can start one up to create the kind of swell of people that Facebook created. And then what we will have will be just like everything else, but like nothing that came before, as Facebook was when it was new. And blogs, and BBSes and USENET all the way back to cave drawings. 

What will we do with it? I have some opinions about that, and am developing my software accordingly. ;-)

Life is like a plane taking off down a runway. As you get older, there's more runway behind you than in front of you. It's inescapable. You see it when celebrities you admire, who are your own age, die. Like Garry Shandling. When you see a picture of David Letterman and he looks realllly old, but happy -- and when you're writing about it you pause because you can't remember his last name. There's not much time left. That's so true. What's also true is the great song that The Supremes sang. You can't hurry love. Etc. Somehow between the two forces, life happens. And then you take off for the skies.

PS: Shandling on Letterman.

Ideal Node.js hosting service — 

1. Here’s the URL of a GIT repo, containing a Node app. Run it with forever. 
2. I want to be able to do a tail -f on the log so I can see what’s going on. 
3. And to view its file system, perhaps through a browser-based JS app.

I think that's about it. I give you a URL, you run it.

I know some services get close, but I don't want close. I want just this. 

A Node virtual machine. 

We need help from educational institutions in starting a tradition of public hosting without attaching venture capital business models.

Recently the Node community had a fairly big outage that can be traced to the fact that NPM, the code distribution system, has been taken over by VCs. When NPM became VC-backed, it was obvious that at some point this would cause problems. And it certainly doesn't stop there. I worry about GitHub. It plays such a central role. But eventually the VCs are going to want an exit. Then what happens?

There are examples everywhere.

Sure there are some cases where we benefit from having the tech industry host our stuff, YouTube is a good example, because videos are so large, but in other cases it gets ridiculous.

We need a framework, legal and social, for projects that are not "owned" but are just there.

This is a project that "Old Berkman" could have tackled. Right now I don't know where to bring these questions.

We could use some help.

To Bernie's supporters who say they won't vote for HRC if she's the eventual nominee, I have a few things to say.

It's meaningless now. What matters is what you do in November. And if Bernie loses the nomination, if he has any love for our country, he'll be campaigning actively for HRC. If not, he's playing a dangerous game with our future, and doesn't, imho, deserve your support.

There's a lot of powerless talk now. People don't have any control over events. We all have our say. You have to convince us if you want to win. The first sign of a revolutionary is not that they pout, or feel self-pity -- that's not revolutionary. It's a relentlessness, that if you don't get it this year, you'll be back next year. And the year after that. Etc.

HRC was 60 when she lost to Obama in 2008. So what did she do? Sulk? Complain? Not vote for Obama? Stay silent when her pouting supporters complained? No, she picked herself up and got busy, and came back at age 68 to try again. She never claimed to be a revolutionary but that's a lot more revolutionary than being a victim.

There's a context to this year's vote that's inescapable. In 2012 if you abstained, the worst that would have happened is Mitt Romney, which would have been pretty bad considering that Congress was about to become fully Republican. But this year, abstaining could mean turning the US over to a crazy KKK-loving Nazi strongman. One that even the Repubs don't support. That's pretty damned awful if you stop and think about it!

No, we don't have to worry about this. The threat isn't credible. Come November Bernie's supporters will do the right thing. Bernie himself will do the right thing.

Trump reminds me of the college roommate who had strong opinions about the subject matter of classes he was flunking.

New business model for Twitter.

Pay them $ to omit all refs to Trump.

This actually has a name: Checkbox News.

I want this from cable news when I'm sick of a story, but still want to get news about other stuff.

It could work for advertising too. 

But right now I desperately need to have Trump silenced. His weasel words are making me ill. 

In 1999, my company, UserLand Software, released a product called Manila.

There was a lot to the product, it was a content management system, or CMS, and was built around the idea of editorial roles, and a discussion group. Templates. Full control over appearance with templates for everything.

The idea was that a publication would consist of a group of editorial people collaborating on a flow of news stories.

But it was also for blogging. We ran EditThisPage.com with Manila. A lot of people used it.

One of the big innovations of Manila was that every bit of content you could edit had a big Edit This Page button on it. Click the button, make a change, click Submit. This was a huge innovation. Made it a lot easier.

Anyway, fast forward to 2016, and I'm doing this year's version of Manila. It's called 1999. Because when you're using it, you're blogging like it's 1999. With a H/T to Prince. 

The software is getting very close to being finished now.

And I wanted to sneak out a preview of what editing is like in 1999.

Believe it or not, it's even easier than Edit This Page. 

Here's the demo...

I had what I thought was an excellent suggestion for PubNub a few years back -- that they support the <cloud> element in RSS 2.0.

When I first wrote it up, SOAP was the big deal in web services. So I called it SOAP Meets RSS.

It would give them a super-simple API, and one that's part of a broadly-supported standard. Nothing ever came of the idea. 

I get emails from them pretty regularly about seminars I could attend to learn how to code to their APIs. Every time I think how great it would be if they used our pre-existing API. Lots of stuff would "just work" and it would be a super easy way for people to get started with their notification service. I still think it's a no-brainer. I don't think I ever wrote a blog post about it, so now I have. ;-)

Last night I was searching Google for an article I wrote earlier this year, the way I always do it. I couldn't find it. Not only that, searches that should have turned up hundreds of hits, only showed one or two. 

Google has been thoroughly indexing my site for many years. I remember when they first started, how nice it was, but today I take it for granted. If they weren't doing such an excellent job I would have had to write my own site search function.

The thought has occurred to me that this is Google taking its push to HTTPS to a new level. No, I don't want to support HTTPS on all my sites. I have a huge number of them. I've been creating new sites since 1994. And of course they have the right to index or not index whatever they want. And I have the right to stick to HTTP for my sites.

Of course this could be:

1. A bug.
2. My imagination.

But they have said they play games with the search engine that have nothing to do with the actual relevance of a site. And this isn't even about relevance, I'm prefixing the searches with site:scripting.com. I'm specifically searching on my own site.

Conclusions.

1. I need to raise the issue publicly. Done.
2. We need to replace Google now, because if this isn't the time that they turn the lights off on my site, that day could well be coming. I have trusted Google since they started up in 1998. Clearly I don't trust them anymore if I have doubts about whether they're deliberately downgrading the search quality of my site.
3. The day of Google being the default search engine may be coming to a close. 

Note: To be absolutely clear, for people who skim, I am not talking about other people finding my content or them reducing the rank of this site, I'm talking about using Google as a utility to help me find stuff on my own site, something I absolutely need to be able to do, reliably. 

Update

I tried searching with DuckDuckGo instead. What I found:

1. It appears to have a much better index of recent posts on Scripting News than Google does. 
2. However I was not able to find the post I was looking for. That might imply that the writer's memory of where he wrote this is imperfect. ;-)

Bernie starts off with a joke about what good friends he is with Donald Trump. The crowd gasps. Then he smiles. They laugh. He says "It's not as if I went to his wedding or anything." 

Of course there's the famous picture of Bill and Hillary at Trump's wedding. And that somehow makes her what? Why doesn't he just come out and say it? Because what he's implying is not true. Going to someone's wedding, unless you know otherwise, for sure, is just that -- they went to his fucking wedding. 

So please Bernie. Chill. Just a bit. If I didn't know better I'd think you were a Republican. ;-)

Political discourse on the net is just a minor league version of what you get on cable news. I think that's why it's so exhausting. It's so utterly impersonal. You get cut-and-paste comments from people you've never met, who didn't read what you said, who just gave you a splattering of talking points, presumably to start an argument of some kind, where you recite the talking points of some other guy. We could all just wear badges saying who we're emulating, and click a button to play an MP3 of their talking points. Life on the net could consist of clicking buttons and listening to clips of MP3s. Like Disco the parakeet. When that's fully implemented the robots can take over. Sooner than you might think.

Now I flatter myself to think that I am actually ahead of the talking heads, although these days that can be hard to do because some of the coverage, esp that from Rachel Maddow, is actually pretty first-rate. But I don't see anyone wanting to talk about that stuff on Facebook or elsewhere, people mostly still quote soundbites and talk over each others' heads as if there were massive numbers of people listening. (There aren't.)

A question for Sanders

If you're a Sanders supporter, I imagine you are one of those people who, like me, is frustrated when we can't get the politicians to budge an inch because they're so totally controlled by the NRA. 

Now since you're a Sanders supporter, and if you're similarly frustrated, can you get a clear statement from your candidate that he agrees or disagrees that when an assault rifle is used to kill people, as it was in the Newtown massacre, that the manufacturer, distributor and retailer that sold the gun should be liable for damages. They don't go to jail, they just compensate the victims. 

The rationale for this is simple. These guns have no practical use for hunting. Their only purpose is killing large numbers of humans. They have use in wars, but no real use for civilians, unless they want to kill lots of other humans. 

Here's an op-ed written by parents who lost their 7-year-old son in Newtown, explaining why Sanders' dismissal of their lawsuit was wrong. You really have to read this to understand the issue and why Sanders is so wrong about it.

So here's the question for Sanders.

Senator Sanders, please explain why you are opposed to manufacturer, distributor and retailer liability for sale of assault rifles used in mass killings? Would you consider changing your position? If not, understanding that the NRA has given you a D-minus rating (something you brag about, we heard you), even so, are you in bed with the NRA in some way? Is this evidence of your corruption? 

One for the Repubs

The professional operators are moving in on the Republican side, now that the race has been reduced to three, and some real slick fucks are showing up. 

One of them yesterday referred to Hillary Clinton, repeatedly as "Mrs Clinton."

That's not cool. Her correct title is Secretary Clinton.

When you change her title to something so old-timey, that's an obvious dog-whistle for "Women's place is in the home baking cookies."

Stop doing that. 

My two cents on NPR deciding not to promote podcasts.

1. It makes sense when you realize that the radio stations and the sources of programming are often independent of each other.
2. I think it's good, because this will let independent channels of distribution develop that build on the realities of the net, not radio broadcasting. 
3. We still haven't broken through the journalism barrier. Reporters and analysts mainly listen to each other. Trying to get good ideas on the agenda of professional news people, even if they have Twitter accounts and email addresses, is virtually impossible if you aren't one of them or don't use a PR firm to approach them. We need to break this barrier. 
4. NPR is a silo, an old one. Silos, by design, stifle communication. Too much of the current news system is built around that.
5. Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
6. We talk about breaking free of The Establishment when it comes to political parties, but what we really need to do imho is break free of the media. They openly brag that they profit from the destruction of the US political system. I think that's true to some extent of NPR too. 
7. So if we want new politics, we must have new media. 
8. Honestly, I think we have an oversupply of new podcast content, and along with it we have an inadequate discovery system. We need to try out new ideas there. Ones that aren't limited by the limits of radio. 
9. I'm a blogger, and one of the creators of the podcast medium, and I don't mind promoting new podcasts. You might try broadening your reach to influencers. Right now I get zero new ideas from the industry, I only hear about their podcasts when I ask friends for recommendations. 
10. Be creative, and also listen more. Radio is basically one-way. The secret is the podcast medium doesn't have to be. 

I started work this morning with a server outage. 

It seems to be cleared now. 

Knock wood. Praise Murphy. I am not a lawyer.

A few random notes.

I find the current political situation both exhausting and fascinating.

I've now listened to all the Whistlestop podcasts. Very good stuff, and much of it is on-topic for the convention fights that are coming up, perhaps in both parties. 

Watching a lot of MSNBC. I find it encouraging that so much of the discourse is now informed and skillful. The people who have had so little to say over the years when there wasn't much news, now have a lot of relevant education and information. Many of them have studied the history of politics. And they know their stuff.

I wonder if there's a great readable book about how conventions work?

Trump has hired some inside-Washington political advisors. I saw one of them interviewed on CNN today. BTW, Wolf Blitzer was fantastic with him. Deadpan. No sense of irony. Took all his putdown questions literally (as they deserved to be treated). Even better it's great to hear Trump rep'd by someone who doesn't know how to steamroll a reporter like Trump does. Blitzer was able to control the interview. Refreshing. And the panel that came on after was excellent. None of the usual CNN stuffed shirts who never say anything but the vaguest of platitudes. Intelligence on CNN! Go figure. 

Too much politics on Facebook. Mostly mindless repetitive recitals. I think a lot of other people are feeling the exhaustion. I unfollowed someone today who I know is smart and witty on other things, but is totally tiring me out with his sad and depressing political analysis. I imagine other people feel the same about what I've written, so I try to keep it mostly over here on my blog and just post links to Facebook.

I especially dislike the comments from people whose political opinions I already know. I know they know I must know. So why are they restating the same ideas over and over? Even when I agree with them, I think it's a form of spam. Maybe it gives them a feeling of power? I don't know what to do about this. I don't want to unfriend people because they are exhausting me. I don't want to hide their posts (I don't even know how to do it), and I sure don't want to block them. But I have even deleted some of my own links on Facebook because they have attracted these recitals.

It'll be interesting to see if this post attracts the same kind of spam on Facebook.

So much of political discourse in normal times sounds like this. Moderator: Person A will you sing your song now. Okay enough. Person B sing yours. Thank you. Now we will hear person C's song. Okay good, now some harmony (talk over each other). We have to leave it there for now.

I guess it's just late and I'm tired. See you in the morning! :-)

We never had a rule that you couldn't interrupt people in a political debate because most people running for the job understood how serious it is and while they did interrupt each other, it never became a huge problem the way it did this year.

Likewise we never had a rule saying candidates couldn't call each other names or make personal comments about their bodies or mannerisms. The thought never crossed anyone's mind because it was unthinkable that anyone running for this job would have so little respect for it.

But now we need rules. If we're going to have debates in the next round, there has to be a way to cut off a candidate that's taking more than his share of the time. And a way to switch off a candidate when they call the other candidate a name, or make a comment about their appearance. And take the camera off a candidate that's making gestures with his arms or face while another candidate is talking.

If the moderators don't plan for this in advance they are responsible for what comes next. It's obvious now -- we can't assume that the candidates will behave like reasonable adults. We have to assume they won't. 

I was very disappointed last night when MSNBC ran the video of HRC and Putin produced by Trump, on every show. Very sexist. Demeaning. Over the line, over the top. 

This is still fresh territory. Are we going to let Trump run a sexist name-calling campaign against Clinton? This is a decision all news orgs need to make. I expect that from Fox, but MSNBC? Really? 

Can you imagine that HRC would run a similar video about Trump? Why not? Because this is a place we should not be going. 

We shouldn't have let Trump use name-calling to win the Repub nomination. Now he's threatening riots. You know where this leads. That video was over the line.

PS: I refuse to point to the video. Honestly I was reluctant to write this because I didn't want to call attention to this. But enough. How could they do this at MSNBC? Are they completely not paying attention?

It's good that I wrote the piece yesterday about how I came to be a Democratic voter. A few follow-on notes.

I have also become a Democratic contributor. I have not only given to Presidential campaigns, but also to local campaigns for candidates that I thought were either inspiring, or in seats that were currently occupied by people I find intolerable. And not just in the areas I live. I've given to candidates all over the US as well as in California and New York where I've lived since switching parties.

There was another even more important reason I switched. We didn't feel the wars in the US. Our soldiers were dying. We were destroying Iraq, killing many hundreds of thousands of people, turning many more into refugees, but everything went on normally in the US. 

You couldn't tell we were at war! Travel all over the world, you'd never know the US was at war. Now that's not sound. When we're fighting a war, esp one that we started (Iraq) we should feel it at home. Our family members should be fighting and dying. Rationing. A lot of us would be involved in the war effort. Taxes would be much higher to pay for the war. Instead, the Repubs just put the wars on the credit card, and controlled what Americans saw on TV. Tax cuts!  All our bubbles continued to inflate, the economy over-extended in a very crazy way and it finally crashed in 2008. 

People in the US still don't feel responsible, we're so selfish all we think about are what little most of us had to pay. But it was all done in our name, by people we elected. I felt it was paramount in 2004 that we switch from Repubs. Didn't happen until 2008.

Rachel Maddow is great again tonight. We're learning about the Merrick Garland tonight, from experts. New standard in political journalism.

I have a confession to make. 

Through the 80s and 90s I voted Republican. 

I've been trying to figure out why I did that. 

In the 80s I was a software entrepreneur. It was very hard and demanding work. I was doing two full-time jobs, as the CEO of a company during the day, and a programmer at night. The company I wanted to create needed me to do that. I wanted to make exceptional software. So I pulled out all the stops and went for it. That's near as I can explain why the Republican story appealed to me.  It's why I was sympathetic to Microsoft until I saw what they tried to do to the Internet. I believed that good engineering practices can lead to good government practices. I've since changed my thinking on that. It's more subtle. Countries have different goals from startups. And necessarily so! I see some of the current generation of tech entrepreneurs struggling with this, as I was thirty years ago.

I switched to voting for the Dems for the election of 2004. I had seen enough with Bush II. The country was careening in a corrupt way. The Repubs, conservatives, always making a huge issue of deficits, were spending obscenely on two wars. Totally out of control. Without any debate. Being an outspoken critic of the President at that time got you a lot of hate. I was ambivalent about the war here on my blog, as we were starting the war. But I was just an individual blogger with an academic job where I was supposed to have public and personal opinions. I remember seeing MSNBC claim the President was a "Visionary" when the bombs were first falling on Baghdad. I thought "we are lost." It was in this time that they fired Phil Donahue because he was too critical of the President. It's important to remember how we reacted to 9/11. It made us all pretty crazy. 

So I did everything I could to support Kerry. And then Obama twice. And now Clinton. Anything but let the Repubs have control of the whole government. We must remember what kind of country and economy they left us with. All so they could funnel a few more dollars to their friends in the defense industry. That really seems to be what it was all about. 

To me, being a business person comes with very high ethical standards. The dollar chasers who have taken over the Repub Party are a different kind. They act as if as long as they get more dollars anything is justified. They probably were just as bad in the 80s and 90s when I was voting for them, perhaps I was too naive, or busy with my life, to understand. 

I know other Repub voters made a different choice. They vote for bomb throwers, people who think it would have been okay to let the auto industry fail. They should read up about the huge refugee crisis of the Dust Bowl, to get a small idea of the human wreckage that would have created. 

I was having lunch with a Dutch entrepreneur last week, talking about Trump of course, and he said he thought Trump would do or say something that would wake everyone up. That's about the most optimistic thing I've heard! :-)

Did you see the movie Wag the Dog? The Trump campaign is like that except in the open. You can see the stage.

And if you doubt Trump can win the November election, regardless of polls, did you think of the staged event last Friday? He did. 

I wrote this before the Chicago protest: "All the numbers say Trump can't win in the fall, unless something terrible happens. Therefore something terrible is going to happen."

HRC is part of the Establishment, as is Bernie Sanders. Each has their own histories. HRC has been closer to the levers of power. So she's had to compromise more. If Sanders gets the top job, he will compromise too, or -- more gridlock. Probably a lot of gridlock either way. 

As an American citizen, you are also part of the Establishment. Esp in relation to people from other parts of the world. Something all Americans should be aware of. Degree of Establishment-ness is a function of how close you are to the center of power. As an American, you're pretty close.