When I see something like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, I think "carbon party" -- clever ways to add carbon to the atmosphere. Understandable 100 years ago when people were marveling at the things you could do by vaporizing carbon. It's time to start admiring things we can do to sequester carbon.#

I went to New Orleans after Katrina. I knew the city because I went to college there. I think there will be a lot of Katrinas, I don't think anyone who knows disagrees. The city was devastated. It might have been technically possible to do something like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina, but no one would waste the effort and it would seem tone deaf a term people like these days. We're on the cusp of that. It still seems normal now to burn carbon like that, but in not much more time, we'll wonder how we ever took pleasure in such extremely negative images of how we destroyed our way of life. Another example. I was living in NYC during Sandy. I was 30 blocks north of the blackout line, on the good side. I had electricity, but everything south of 23rd St was blacked out for weeks. After a while I ventured on foot into the blacked out area. On the walk back uptown I went through Times Square. You could see it shining all the way downtown, from the blacked out part. Such extremes, amazing no one thought to turn the lights of Times Square down while the lower part of the city was living in the dark, or trying to.#

We’ve been through this drill before, with the Kavanaugh nomination. The Republicans have this angst filled “debate“ and in the end they do the evil thing. It's a trick. They find they can get credit for being open-minded and fair without actually having to be open-minded and fair. #

I'm continuing to struggle getting the old XML-RPC Manila site to open and render in today's OPML Editor. I really want to get that site fully restored before moving on. I posted a note on the Frontier-user list where in 2015 they were talking about this stuff but never got to the resolution. When this is done I want to have an app you can run that converts a Manila site to a folder of HTML files. So we never forget how to do this again. I feel the weight of all the good work we did, and how embarrassed I am that we tried so hard to preserve things, and so far have utterly failed, at least in this one important example. #

I'm reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K Dick. A small part of the story is the basis for the movie Blade Runner. A bounty hunter and artificial humans. There's a test that determines if someone is human or android, based on the ability to empathize. Androids don't empathize, humans do. It occurs to me that the online world we have created limits ourselves to androidly behavior. Empathy is not very common. #

I ordered a CD-ROM drive from Amazon, and am now reading backups from UserLand from April 2000. Should be interesting. I'm thinking about uploading the full unmodified archives. It includes a snapshot of all the Manila weblogs, from editthispage.com and weblogs.com. Problem is there are passwords in the files, almost 20-year-old passwords, but you know how that goes. What do you all think?#