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January 15, 2021

Mom at 100

My mother, Sherry, died 29 years ago today. On this birthday she would have been 100.

Here’s what my sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis (“Sue” to us) posted on Facebook about her.

This would have been the 100th birthday of my mother-in-law, Sherry Weinberger, Andy and Ellen and David’s mom. She was a magnificent lady, a left-liberal activist, a folk guitarist and guitar teacher, a gifted friend. She used to put out a meal for twenty on the lake house porch, wearing hoop earrings a lavender and blue outfit, drinking a margarita and smoking a cigarette. Then the party started. She was what they call a balabusta in the home and an organizer in the neighborhood. I, like dozens of others, was fascinated and lifted up by her generosity and vivacity.  

Sue captures much of my mother in those few details. You won’t be surprised to hear that Sue is a wonderful and respected novelist.

I am loathe to say more because I won’t get it right, but I’m going to anyway.

She was a wonderful mother who sacrificed much to devote herself to her children. That includes giving up on a career she had just begun at The New Republic, which was at that time the intellectual center of the Left.

She was so, so social, hospitable to all, making parties but never pushing her way to the center of them. She was happy to talk, and laugh, and wouldn’t say no to a little flirting. So many people thought they were very special to her. And they were.

And when we said she was a balabusta, I don’t think we meant it in its actual Yiddish meaning (“homemaker”) which I just learned, but rather as a ball-buster: She didn’t take shit from anyone, especially from men. In the early 1950s (I was born in 1950) she was well-aware of the inequality among the sexes (as we used to say), including in her own marriage.

As Sue notes, she taught folk guitar, and she did so in the 1950s before the big Folk Music Boom in the early ’60s when Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary were stars, and there were actual folk singing shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig! on the national networks.

She cared about folk music because it gave literal voice to Black people and to all the workers whose lives are so hard that we avert our eyes. She cared about folk music because it brought the world’s cultures into our community and household. She cared about folk music because it gave her work while being a “homemaker” and mother. She cared about folk music because it gave her a little financial independence from Dad. She cared about folk music because she was a proficient guitarist with a beautiful voice.

She cared about many other things and people, but always with the same mix of personal connection, love of differences, and a commitment to a world in which there is more music, more love, and more justice.

PS: She hated Donald Trump from the moment he got the public’s eye. I wouldn’t know how to break it to her that the worst person in America actually became president.

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Categories: culture, free culture, personal, politics Tagged with: folk music • mom • personal Date: January 15th, 2021 dw

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January 9, 2021

Beyond the author’s intent

Twitter’s reasons for permanent banning Donald Tr*mp acknowledge a way in which post-modernists (an attribution that virtually no post-modernist claims, so pardon my short hand) anticipated the Web’s effect on the relationship of author and reader. While the author’s intentions have not been erased, the reader’s understanding is becoming far more actionable.

Twitter’s lucid explanation of why it (finally) threw Tr*mp off its platform not only looks at the context of his tweets, it also considers how his tweets were being understood on Twitter and other platforms. For example:

“President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate…” 

and

The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

and

The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” …

Now, Twitter cares about how his tweets are being received because that reception is, in Twitter’s judgment, likely to incite further violence. That violates Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy, so I am not attributing any purist post-modern intentions (!) to Twitter.

But this is a pretty clear instance of the way in which the Web is changing the authority of the author to argue against misreadings as not their intention. The public may indeed be misinterpreting the author’s intended meaning, but it’s now clearer than ever that those intentions are not all we need to know. Published works are not subservient to authors.

I continue to think there’s value in trying to understand a work within the context of what we can gather about the author’s intentions. I’m a writer, so of course I would think that. But the point of publishing one’s writings is to put them out on their own where they have value only to the extent to which they are appropriated — absorbed and made one’s own — by readers.

The days of the Author as Monarch are long over because now how readers appropriate an author’s work is even more public than that work itself.

(Note: I put an asterisk into Tr*mp’s name because I cannot stand looking at his name, much less repeating it.)

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Categories: censorship, culture, internet, philosophy, politics Tagged with: philosophy • politics • pomo • trump • twitter • writing Date: January 9th, 2021 dw

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June 1, 2020

Rights vs. Dignity

Of course we need to accord people their rights and their dignity. But over time I have come to find dignity to be the more urgent demand.

Rights cover what a society will let people do. Dignity pertains to who a person is.

Rights are granted on the basis of theories. Dignity is enacted in the presence of another.

Rights are mediated by whatever institution grants the rights. Dignity is unmediated, immediate.

Rights are the same for all. Dignity is for the singular person before you.

You can grudgingly grant people their rights. The moment you grant someone their dignity, any resentment you had about doing so turns against yourself.

Grant people their dignity, and rights will follow. Grant people their rights and you may treat them like slaves who have been freed by law.

A world without dignity is not at peace.

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Categories: culture, ethics, peace, politics Tagged with: culture • politics • rights Date: June 1st, 2020 dw

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April 1, 2020

Funny podcasts for unfunny times

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts – maybe a little less than back in Normal Times when I was commuting 1.5-2.0 hours a day, but if I’m putterin’, I’m pod-listenin’.

I find it wearying to envelope myself in coronavirus or political podcasts these days. I’m not sure why. Maybe you have some ideas. In any case, I’ve been turning to comedy more and more.

Here’s a list, in alphabetical order. I am not necessarily proud of any of these.

  • Alchemy This. Kevin Pollack – yes, that Kevin Pollack – has assembled a troupe of improvisers who do three scenes in each hour. At their best, they find an absurd narrative coherence that is mindblowing and reminiscent of Firesign Theatre’s scripted pieces. At their worst, I can’t make sense of the flow of the scene – too many of their voices sound the same to me – but still find the moments of it funny.
  • Behind the Bastards. Each episode tells the story of some despicable person, often someone I have never heard of. It’s not flatout comedy, but the tone is comedic. Often excellent.
  • The Dollop. Much like Behind the Bastards, but not focused purely on bastards. One of the two comedians who put it together reads an essay about some odd incident in history while the other reacts while hearing it for the first time. Ranges from hilarious to never quite getting up to comedic speed. And it’s entirely possible that the comic style is not exactly to your taste. It’s not exactly to mine.
  • Good One. This is one of my favorites. Each episode interviews a comedian for an hour about one single joke of theirs. The interviewer is a total comedy nerd, and the interviews can be very revealing about the comic process.
  • How did this get made? Usually recorded live at a theatre, three funny people riff about some terrible movie. Funny bad taste all around.
  • Improv4Humans. Matt Besser’s improv troupe improvs scenes, much like Alchemy This. I personally find it less consistent, but it came be very good. For example, the archival show with Zach Woods, recently re-released, has some very funny stuff on it.
  • Mike and Tom Eat Snacks. This ended a couple of years ago, but its hundred episodes of Michael Ian Black and Tom Cavanagh are still available. The two of them, unscripted, review snack foods, a timeless topic. (Spoiler: The snack reviews are just a pretense.)
  • Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. As a tote-bag carrying NPR supporter (and once time serial All Things Considered commentator), this one is obvious. It’s also consistently funny.
  • WTF. Marc Maron’s podcast used to focus on comedians but has expanded wildly. Which is good, because he is an excellent interviewer. The recent interview with Dan Ackroyd, for example, is great. It turns out that the real Dan Ackroyd is like a Dan Ackroyd character.

I also listen to many other podcasts that don’t talk about current events but are not comedic. Some are fantastic. But it’s comedy tonight!

What would you add to this list?

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Categories: culture, entertainment, humor, podcast Tagged with: comedy • coronavirus • humor • podcasts Date: April 1st, 2020 dw

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Free novels by Meredith Sue Willis to read while alone

Meredith Sue Willis, the noted novelist and my sister-in-law, has made six of her novels available for free, as e-books, until April 20th.

Sue, as her family members call her, brings characters to life in just a few words. Her novels tend to be centered on places that she brings to life as well – small-town West Virginia, rural Massachusetts, even a cruise ship before that phrase conjured a plague ward.

Give ’em a try. And you well might like her free literary newsletter as well.

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Categories: culture, free culture Tagged with: books • covid29 • culture • free culture • literature Date: April 1st, 2020 dw

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February 26, 2020

My 2004 Blogroll

Blogrolls were early social networks.

Y’see, back in the old days of the Blogosphere, there wasn’t any Facebook or Twitter. Your blog was your presence on the Web. And because people are relational, not independent autonomous agents, many bloggers posted a list of the other blogs they read and sometimes responded to. It was a way of building a networked community.

Blogrolls were good, generous things. I’ve been intending for a long time to post one on this blog again. As a first step, I went to the WayBack Machine, AKA the blessed Internet Archive, and looked up 2004 editions of this blog. I randomly chose the April 1 edition and copied its blogroll. (WARNING: Put on protective eyewear before viewing that old edition.)

Here is the blogroll, unaltered. Many of the links work because the Internet Archive, blessed be its name, automatically inserts links back into the Archive. I suspect that precious few of these blogs are still around. But they were magnificent in their day.

Akma
Jennifer Balderama
Hank Blakely
Blog Sisters
Tim Bray
Dan Bricklin
BurningBird
Marc Canter
Cory Doctorow
Dean Campaign
Betsy Devine
Paul English
Ernie the Attorney
Glenn Fleishman
Dan Gillmor
Gonzo Engaged
Mike Golby
Seth Gordon
Steve Himmer
Denise Howell
David Isenberg
Joi Ito
Jeff Jarvis
Steve Johnson
Kalilily
Pete Kaminski
Jason Kottke
Eliz. Lawley
Adina Levin
Lawrence Lessig
Living Code
Chris Locke
Chris Lydon
Joe Mahoney
Marek
Kevin Marks
Tom Matrullo
Ross Mayfield
Scott McCloud
Megnut
Peter Merholz
Misbehaving
Eric Norlin
The Obvious
O’Connor Clarke
Frank Paynter
Jonathan Peterson
Chris Pirillo
Reed/Frankston
Howard Rheingold
Dave Rogers
Jay Rosen
Scott Rosenberg
Steve Saltire
Doc Searls
Jeneane Sessum
Clay Shirky
Social Software
Halley Suitt
Gary Turner
Mary Lu W.
Dave Winer
Amy Wohl
Gary Wolf
Steve Yost

Free Newsletters I read
David Isenberg
Lockergnome
RageBoy’s EGR
Slate’s Today’s Papers
Steve Talbott
Ted Stout’s RF
Dylan Tweney
Amy Wohl
World Wide Words
JOHO (mine) )

Paynted

TopTen First Names at Google award I've given to myself.

I miss your daily presence, my webby friends. Long live blogrolls!

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Categories: blogs, culture, free culture, internet Tagged with: blogrolls • blogs • internet history • social networks Date: February 26th, 2020 dw

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February 16, 2020

Dutch national health insurance – probably not what you think

A Dutch friend wrote this up for a list I’m on, and kindly gave me permission to post it. It turns out that the Netherlands is to the left of Bernie and Warren when it comes to national health insurance.

Here are my friend’s comments.


The Netherlands has privatised all government health funds in 2006. They were regional organized and covered 65% of the population.

The remaining 35% had private health insurance. Partially coöps/non-profits and others for-profit.

Those 35% were higher incomes and/or self-employed and students without a (part-time) job.

The Netherlands doesn’t have Medicare. Elderly people have to purchase health insurance. We do have a mandate, and there are transfers to low income people, paid by a partial income related tax on the wages of working people.

In short, the Netherlands introduced the “Heritage Foundation Health Care System”. It was done by a center-right government who saw an opportunity to privatise the public health funds.

There are some interesting differences how The Netherlands implemented the “Heritage Foundation System” in comparison to RomneyCare and ObamaCare:

  1. Employer provided health insurance was grandfathered into an individual polis (you could keep it, but the employer went out of the system)
  2. There is a mandatory list called ‘basic insurance list’. Every insurer has to offer that list. It is the cheapest available.
  3. Contraceptive pills have been kicked off the ‘mandatory list’ by centre-right governments and put back on the list by centre-left. Currently they are off the mandatory list.
  4. Abortion is outside the mandatory list, except for medical necessity in hospitals
  5. There is a specialist ‘Pro Life Health Insurance’. No abortion, no euthanasia, no transgender operations, no in-vitro-fertilisation, no sterilisation and no morning after pill coverage etc. ample on palliative care and courses for natural family planning / counseling. When I drive on the highway through the Bible Belt, I see billboards for them. 
  6. Pro-Life Insurance is also the health insurer promoted by the PCOB and KBO. The Protestant Christian and the Catholic associations for the elderly, both are mainline protestant and catholic social organisations. They cover a lot of elderly people with the insurance they negotiated for their members.
  7. The Netherlands has a ‘conscience clause’. Those who don’t want health insurance for religious reasons or any other personal belief, can call it in. The government then opens a health account and fills it with your health-tax payments. The account can only be used for paying health care/cure. If it is empty, your on your own. If there is still an amount when you die, it becomes part of your estate and goes to your heirs.
  8. If you want insurance, you relinquish your health account to the insurer of choice, but you cannot go back from insurance to the tax-authority filled health account.

As far as I understand it, Switzerland also made reforms toward a “Heritage Foundation health care system” in the 2000s. 

And as a final note: keep in mind that the ‘hot button issues’ like contraception and inclusion/exclusion of abortion on the mandatory coverage list are political footballs here too.

There were 17 abortion clinics in the Netherlands. 7 went bankrupt in the early ’10s due to too low demand for their services. 4 were relaunched, so there are now 13 abortion clinics on a population of 17 million. California has ca. 150 clinics for ca. 40 million. I think only South-Carolina has a lower ratio in terms of Abortion Clinics per 1,000,000 women. Kansas and Missouri are more on par with the Netherlands.

In general, abortion policies are far stricter in Europe. The Netherlands isn’t much of an outlier in restrictive abortion policies, where restrictions kick-in after 13 weeks of gestation and a 5 working day “rethink period” with adoption counseling is mandatory. The big outlier in Europe is Great-Britain, which has abortion policies a lot like the USA. Northern-Ireland however is very strict, just like Ireland.

Off course this is far from China’s ‘one-child-policy’, where it was encouraged to have single-child families and abortion is easy accessible.

There are some intriguing points to make, about what went different.

  1. The USA didn’t grandfather private health insurance policies from employers to individuals and continued employer provided health insurance.
  2. As a result demand for the “ObamaCare exchanges” was much smaller
  3. Due to the existence of Medicare, untouched by ObamaCare, there wasn’t massive ‘insurance pool organisation’
  4. US Labor Unions still negotiate health benefits with employers instead of operating as the middleman towards health insurers c.q. owning a stake in a health insurance fund
  5. The absence of “Conscience Opt-Out” and “Pro Life Insurance”, combined with employer based health care, caused a Supreme Court case (Hobby Lobby) which forced a ridiculous decision that a corporate legal entity now can have a ‘religious conscience’
  6. This of course did extend to Catholic Nuns too, who were forced to pay for mandates that went against their beliefs.

It all smacked as incomplete design and as a result a set of flaws due to provisions not taken, probably because of political expediency.

Currently the Netherlands has 11 health insurance providers after a lot of M&A had happened. The interesting result is that the big winners have been 

a. A rather high-end private insurer, offering expensive “we cover everything” policies 

b. A former health fund which had worked in a blue-collar region (Delfland-Schieland-Westland), being the repeated price-breaker and as a result is now the darling of consumer organisations etc.

What is really different between the Dutch implementation and the USA, is the bargaining positions in the system. The collectives that sprang up (some spontaneously, around websites) and went shopping. It makes a difference when in a market of 17 million and 11 providers, someone shows up at your doorstep with ‘I have 200.000 signatories looking for a good insurance policy …’).

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Categories: culture, politics Tagged with: bernie sanders • election2020 • elizabeth warren • healthcare • politics Date: February 16th, 2020 dw

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February 15, 2020

Internet Ritual and Trust

Well, here are two things I never heard of before. First:

Through this intriguing Register report I learned about the DNSSEC root-signing ceremony. It happens quarterly in alternating fashion on the east and west coasts of the US. The carefully scripted ceremony, lasting over two hours, is meant to anchor the web of trust in the DNS, the Internet’s domain name system. To this end it is streamed live and archived for posterity.

So writes Keith Dawson (twitter) in a post on the A Recovering Physicist blog.

Then he notes the resemblance to the second thing:

Reading about this modern ceremony, performed quarterly for 10 years now, immediately put me in mind of a similar ritual, the Trial of the Pyx, staged in London for 738 years, for a substantially similar purpose: anchoring trust in the English currency.

I’d bet against either of these on a “Bluff the Listener” game on Wait Wait Don’t Tell me. But they’re both real.

Here’s some information about the DNSSEC ceremony, taken from the post Keith links to:

The root DNS zone contains information about how to query the top-level domain (TLD) name servers (.com, .edu, .org, etc). It enables Internet users to access domain names in all TLDs, even brand new ones like .software and .bank, making it an integral part of the global Internet.

In How DNSSEC Works, we explained how trust in DNSSEC is derived from the parent zone’s DS resource record. However, the root DNS zone has no parent, so how can we trust the integrity and authenticity of its information?

The article ably describes the trust systems involved, which include trusted institutions and individuals, redundancy, and encryption. And ceremony.

Trust won’t anchor itself.

(Actually that’s quite contestable.)

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Categories: culture, internet, policy Tagged with: dns • internet • trust Date: February 15th, 2020 dw

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January 13, 2020

In the public domain, but encumbered

It is fantastic that 14 Paris museums have put images of 150,000 artworks into the public domain. Go take a look. It makes the world visibly better.

But …

…The images are easily accessible one at a time for a human who is browsing. You can also click to download it, and then do whatever you want with it. But they are, apparently purposefully, difficult to batch download. That deprives us of the ability to set computers onto the images and their metadata so that they can discover relationships, and patterns of relationships, among them. That’s a lost opportunity.

I understand it’s hard for institutions to give up on the credit they deserve for maintaining these artworks. Items put in the public domain can be passed around and duplicated without any reference to the source that made them available, or even to the artist who created them. But in return, the culture gets to freely share those images, and to incorporate them into new works, which helps to preserve and extend our shared culture.

So I don’t want to be ungrateful for this enormous gift to the world. But one more step – say, an open API that enables batch download – and the world can benefit even more from these museum’s awesome generosity.

(Hat tip to Keith Dawson.)

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Categories: culture, free culture, open access Tagged with: art • culture • free culture • museums • open access Date: January 13th, 2020 dw

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December 31, 2019

Early animation

Here are links to the earliest cartoons in Riochard Brody’s excellent article, “Draw Stars,” in the Dec. 30, 2019 New Yorker. (Note: Racist and other stereotypes below.)


Emile Cole, Fantasmagorie, 1908, restored. (Original)

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo, 1911:

McCay, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914:


Max and Dave Fleischer, Out of the Inkwell: The Tantalizing Fly, 1919 (remastered):

The Fleischers, Jumping Beans, 1922 (remastered):

Wallace Carlson (Bray Studios), How Cartoons Are Made, 1919:

Wallace Carlson, He resolves not to smoke, 1914:

Gregory La Cava, The Breath of a Nation, 1919:


Joseph Sunn claymation: Green Pastures, 1919:


Wallace McCutcheon’s merging of Green Pastures with live action, in The Sculptor’s Nightmare:


Howard S. Moss stop action, Mary & Gretel, part 1, 1916:


Mary & Gretel, part 2:


Walter Ruttmann’s abstract Opus 1, 1921:


Lette Reiniger’s silhouette Cinderella, 1921:


Bryant Fryer’s silhouette Follow the Swallow, 1927:

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Categories: culture, free culture, liveblog Tagged with: animation • culture • history • movies Date: December 31st, 2019 dw

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