Author: lucasgonze

Shortages are a distinctive feature of the United States in the time of COVID and in the Trump years as a whole.

They are a new thing. In my lifetime the US has always been a place of plenty. In Trump’s strongman capitalism the economy comes second to his hold on power.

Shortages were a feature of the Soviet Union. I witnessed the strange dysfunction of the market visiting East German in the 1980s. It was like nothing I had ever seen until now.

The causes of shortages included:

• Trump’s trade war with China. Tariffs. Retaliation.
• COVID-related manufacturing, farming and distribution shutdowns
• Closing of the schools, related to COVID. Move to remote learning.

Here are some shortages that come to mind.

• Chromebooks (trade war, remote learning)
• toilet paper (COVID)
• meat (COVID)
• eggs (COVID)
• bikes (caused by trade war)

Though some Internet users are unaware of this fact, a large number of personal websites still exist in the Internet jungle. They can be found in the well-lighted regions, but Gopherspace and the darknets are more productive hunting grounds. Since search engines in the well-lighted areas of the Internet jungle are nearly blind to all but the most well-known personal websites, other hunting methods are more productive in those areas. Some of those methods are: looking for webrings, searching for personal website congregation points, and combing the blogrolls of previously-discovered personal websites.

Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

This bit is interesting:

An interesting fact is that, thanks in part to the the near total absence of corporate predators and government species in the darknets, these areas are growing in number and size. More users are coming to the darknets in particular to breath in the wonderful aroma of a beautiful flower called “free speech”. Not many free speech flowers continue to bloom in the well-lighted areas of the Internet jungle. Almost all have now been trampled by corporate and government animals.

I like that idea, but I also know that a Tor blog would have less traffic than this one on ye olde WWW, if that’s even possible.

Last night I dreamed about the wave of Republican cruelty under Trump. Yes, it was a political dream. In it I was painfully aware of the scope and depth of wrongs happening right now. I could feel them.

I woke up to a story about the first of three planned state killings being carried out.

In 2019, Barr moved to reinstate the federal death penalty after a nearly two decade lapse.

Daniel Lewis Lee, a convicted killer, was executed Tuesday morning in the first federal execution in 17 years after the Supreme Court issued an overnight ruling that it could proceed.Lee was pronounced dead by the coroner at 8:07 a.m. ET in Terre Haute, Indiana. His last words were “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man,” according to a pool report.The Supreme Court cleared the way for the resumption of the federal death penalty in an unsigned order released after 2 a.m. ET Tuesday.

Daniel Lewis Lee executed after Supreme Court clears the way for first federal execution in 17 years

Imagine a printed version of your Facebook wall that is distributed by mail like a magazine subscription.

It’s self absorbed like social media. It’s a stapled collection of pages like a magazine.

There are follows like social media. The more people you follow, the thicker your printout.

Not mega + zine

Me + magazine

Police could not shoot so many people if they didn’t have guns. As long as police do carry guns there will be a lot of shootings. It is rarely necessary to carry guns.

If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. If you have a gun everything looks like something which calls for it. Those of us who are not carrying guns get by just fine. Police can do the same as anybody else.

There are not many situations which really demand guns. Among other reasons, suspects would be less inclined to reach for a gun if officers weren’t known to be carrying themselves. There is an arms race between suspects and law enforcement. If law enforcement stands down, suspects will too.

If a suspect has a gun, police don’t need to engage immediately. The suspect isn’t going to shoot them just for the hell of it. In the moment the police can put their hands up and hand over their wallets. They can get the suspect later.

There do exist rare situations which call for police with guns. When that happens the unarmed cop should call a specialist, like a SWAT team.

Outside of the US police don’t always wear guns. They get by fine using weapons with lower lethality.

In Manchester, England, where the number of deaths in the last 40 years is two. Sir Peter Fahy, the chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, believes that the the number is the result of a radically different approach toward guns and mental health than we have in the United States. “The whole way that we train officers is that the absolute last resort is to use your firearm,” he says. “When you get into a situation, you assess the situation, you give yourself other options. And it starts from a position, always, that the best weapon is their mouth.” The vast majority have to use their mouths, or at least not firearms, because only 209 of the 6,700 officers in Manchester’s force are armed.

How British police officers keep the peace, without carrying guns

In a battle between a suspect who does not have a gun and a cop who does have a gun, the cop should never ever use their gun.

You can argue that guns are too common in the US for everybody to be armed but the police. But this is a problem created by 2nd amendment extremism. Guns should not be so common. We should not accept that broken situation. That police carry guns feeds into gun-nutism.

In that sense the reason there are so many police shootings is that gun nuts have put guns in so many hands. The cause of Breonna Taylor’s death and so many others is political obsequiousness towards guns. Which matters more, Black lives or plentiful guns?

The answer to that in American politics is clear: guns. We all know which way the scales will tilt. And this raises the question of whether that is by design. Do we have so many guns floating around out of fear of Black people? Are police carrying guns in the first place because of Blackophobia?

The Pedal Steel Guitar Slides Into Jazz

Roots

Ecstacy

Agony

I hate hearing Black people say n****. I hate it every time. It always makes me recoil. It makes me feel alienated and sad.

I was watching a Dave Chappelle show on Netflix. He is really funny. Great comic. But he uses the N-word a lot. And get this — he uses it to talk about white people. Like this: You my <N-word>. I’ve been told, not by Chappelle, that it’s a term of endearment. To me, that’s ridiculous — it’s a threat. Because if I use that term of endearment, a 10-ton weight comes down on my head. I don’t like it. We’re also told this is a word African-Americans use among themselves, and we wouldn’t understand what it means. But many of the people in Chappelle’s audience are white. We’re his N-words. I’m watching it, and reminded every time I hear the world, and he says it a lot, that this is something I’m not allowed to like. The more I listen to him use the N-word, my inner voice, constantly yapping about nothing, repeats what he says, and I’m concerned that will eventually come out of my mouth, without thought because that actually happens in real life. It’s a painful word, not just for African-Americans.

http://scripting.com/2020/07/03.html#a130938

Over my lifetime the word has grown and grown and grown. There seems to be nothing I can do but accept it, but how can I accept it?

I don’t understand why Black people want this to happen. It is inevitable that non-Black people will use it. Like, hello, DJ Khalid.

The Palestian DJ explained that he grew up using the word and doesn’t see how he isn’t entitled to use the racial epithet. He justified his use of the word in songs and everyday conversation, drawing a line between variations on the term but explaining how it could be used as a term of endearment. “For me to say ‘We the best, oo wee nigga, we the best!’ You know what I’m talking about. Niggas that’s thinking that is dumb fucks. Once again, I’d like to shout out the fans who love this music. What makes me mad, when I grew up, niggas was calling me sand nigga. That’s ignorant, because there’s only one way to say it. You can’t say, ‘Yo what up my sand nigga?’

https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.16970/title.dj-khaled-justifies-his-use-of-the-n-word

Earlier this week, Dilbert creator and local Twitter crackpot Scott Adams claimed that he’d lost multiple jobs because he was white. I don’t think that’s something that ever actually happened. I want to believe Adams will immediately delete his tweets after realizing they are banana pants with crazy cheese frosting.

Wonkette

The path of Trumpism leads to madness. No functioning mind can hold all the contradictions. Either adherents embrace nihilism or they go banana pants.

I would like a telepresence device which lets people seesaw together over the Internet.

There would be two near-identical devices in different locations. They would be small, roughly the size of a hand. They would be connected to the Internet.

One side of both would be labeled A, the other would be labeled B. The actual labels don’t have to be A and B – they could be the names of two children, or pictures, or sculptures. The important thing is to be consistent on both devices.

One device would know it was A, the other would know it was B. The A device is active on A and passive on B. The B device is active on B and passive on A. On pressing down the active side, the corresponding passive side on the other device would mirror the motion.

The interaction would be strangely trivial and magical at the same time. It could feel sweet or spooky. You don’t even have to know who the other person is! The experience would be like a enchanted toy found in the back of a curio shop in a Twilight Zone episode.

This is a simplified version of my Hand-holding Telepresence Romance Bot idea.

The NYT asks: Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’?

I capitalize “Black” when I refer to Africans or members of the African diaspora because I am not referring to a color but a singular group, which makes it a proper noun:

A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity, such as London, Jupiter, Sarah, or Microsoft, as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (city, planet, person, corporation)

I say African-American when I’m talking heritage, Black when I’m talking about identity and culture. Black music. African-American history. Black speech. African-American families. I would avoid describing a person as Black unless they chose that themself. Otherwise I would default to African-American.

What am I?

First, European or Belgian. Second, American. My father, who was born in a British-occupied part of Africa to a Belgian father and ethnically French mother herself born in a British territory in Africa, categorized himself as European. My mother was born in North Carolina to White parents one generation removed from Germany, fled north for good when she hit 18, and thought of herself as American.

Last, and unavoidably, White, with a capital.

I am not the color white. The dominant color of my skin is pink. Most White people are pink. I have very light patches which are white and tan patches which are reddish or light brown.

I belong to an ethnic group defined by the (repugnant) one-drop rule. This group is unique and distinct. That makes it a proper noun: White.

The NYT again:

So far, most news organizations have declined to capitalize white, generally arguing that it is an identifier of skin color, not shared experience, and that white supremacist groups have adopted that convention. But some scholars say that to write “Black” but not “White” is to give white people a pass on seeing themselves as a race and recognizing all the privileges they get from it.

We White people like to think we are the default. We have no race. It is others who have race.

But Whiteness did not exist before the invention of Blackness. We Europeans made race for our benefit, then assigned it to others. For White people to accept responsibility, we have to accept being racialized. The prison we made holds us too.

The color white symbolizes holiness, purity, virtue. I have no more claim to these than anybody else. There is no reason for me to think I was born into them.

White identity is problematic because only full-bore supremacists like the KKK embrace it explicitly. Oops. As it turns out, small-bore supremacists have it too.