An artist made this in response to Texas banning abortion from Astuff

Still digging. …

https://novaramedia.com/2021/08/30/david-graeber-was-right-a-debt-free-world-is-possible/

My friend Dave Winer (haven’t actually met, but I feel like we have a conversation going) asks for a simple explanation for why the pharmas won’t release the IP for the Coronavirus vaccines to the public domain, to alleviate the shortage in supply,

It’s clear that this is needed. But my understanding of why it’s not in the companies’ interest is: the tech behind the new mRNA vaccines is potentially much more general, to be applied to all sorts of disease. It’s taken years to develop, and the COVID vaccine is just the first instance of its being (fabulously) successfully applied to a real world problem.

Companies are concerned that, by teaching anyone to make it, they’re effectively foregoing any ability to make a return from future applications of the same tech.

Health, south wind, books, old trees, a boat, a friend

Ralph Waldo Emerson

False accusations were made against Richard Stallman in September 2019. They started a cascade of difamatory reactions that spread like wildfire, fueled by misquotes and misrepresentation of events in mainstream headlines, blogs, and social media that ultimately led to Stallman’s resignation from his positions at Mit and the FSF
— Read on stallmansupport.org/

I signed the support letter. It’s a bit involved, making you fork and merge a text file with your name and website in it. I find Stallman provocative, thoughtful and worth listening to.

My friend Roger disses a proposal to add a walking/cycling structure to the Auckland Harbor Bridge. I think he’s right, especially since one of he points he makes is that the structure can’t handle it.

Not surprising, given its age. And what about rail? There isn’t any transit rail on the North Shore, because it has to come over the top of the harbor. Trans-harbor transit is a bus on the harbor bridge taking lanes away from commuter traffic, or a foot ferry.

Time for some Biden-style infrastructure spending? Time for a new multimodal bridge?

Pulse//Wave connects wood and flesh in a sound installation https://blog.bela.io/2021/04/07/pulse-wave-installation/

The end of the article says that STEIM closed due to funding cuts. That’s bad; it was an international resource for experimental music.

A heathen’s Easter https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/8442.html

This is kinda how I’m feeling.

For nearly 30 years, the American counterculture icon Robert Crumb has lived with his family in a remote French village. In an interview there, he talks about making the Bible a feminist text and his brushes with political correctness
— Read on www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-rare-interview-with-robert-crumb-on-pc-culture-and-his-trump-voodoo-doll-1.9113809

The interview is in Haaretz!

Under the shadow of the Israeli separation wall, one man’s quest to find his son.
— Read on www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/03/19/a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama/

This is important enough that the Review is making it freely available for the next two weeks, over the period covering the Israeli elections.  As the editor of the Review says, the author is debunking the uncritical assumptions about the situtation, such as

“the view prevalent among American elites that in Israel-Palestine there are two national movements—Jewish and Palestinian—that have equally legitimate legal and moral claims to the same piece of land, which must be divided in the form of a partition”

But the lived reality is that of an intentional apartheid state. As he says,

“Every aspect of that analysis is wrong,” he told me. “Because most of the liberal elite support a two-state partition, the starting point of their understanding is not the reality on the ground but rather their preferred ‘solution.’ I wanted to put aside these ideological framings and simply describe reality as it exists today: Israel not just controls but fully administers over 90 percent of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and the Palestinians have very limited autonomy in the remaining less than 10 percent.”

The discussion of the schism amongst the liberal Zionists and the traditional and religious factions is illuminating. And the story overall is a tragedy.