Check out “Clouds of Sils Maria” on Netflix
www.netflix.com/title/80013293?source=android

Juliette Binoche.

Reading a Guardian article about the fracas in MT between the Republican candidate and the journalist, and once again come across the handwringing and the line “This is not America”. I’m getting tired of this. This is America. This is not a small, aberant, shameful minority. This is a large group of loud, foul mouthed, bullying, ignorant people who have been empowered to express clearly who they are and what they think, and they don’t express themselves by writing op-eds in the paper. They yell, and they beat you up if they think you’re weak. This is the country we live in, these are the people we live with. Pretending that they’re unrepresentative is wishful thinking. Trump won half the damn country, people.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/27/greg-gianforte-ben-jacobs-media-donald-trump-journalism-montana

Cutting the Gordian Knot of Technological Unemployment with Unconditional Basic Income
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/6dhsdf/cutting_the_gordian_knot_of_technological/

He glosses over implementation and evidentiary details, and makes plenty of unchallenged assertions, but makes a case for the severing of the relationship between paid work and survival. Does a nice job decimating the gig economy, too.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book

And we return to the UBI.  A light hearted but serious question answered.

The video guy posted.  This is closer to how it was than the photos I took:

My old friend Douglas calls up one day and says”How about going together on a five-day bike trip in the South Island?”. Since I’ve known him since high school and never seen him on a bike, how could i say no?
https://goo.gl/photos/1BZApuczH4SQJCQSA

How Did I Celebrate Becoming American? Protesting Trump https://nyti.ms/2nKn0XX

Hmm.

Been saying this for a few years. The current aesthetic for hip restaurants is raw space, exposed utility pipes, etc, lots of acoustically shiny parallel hard surfaces.  I miss the old hushed velvet-covered banquette.

An idea for the acoustics of restaurants http://scripting.com/2017/03/22/anIdeaForRestaurantsThatServePeople.html

The baying for the resignation of Gorka is illegitimate.  The trigger was the claim of membership in a historically pro-Nazi organization by one of it’s members, a claim denied by Gorka, his appearance in public with a Hungarian medal on his chest and a rummaging through his parents’ past.

These are dangerously insufficient reasons to sack an individual.  What better way to smear someone whose views you dislike than by claiming he’s a fellow traveler (as I recall, this happened frequently in the McCarthy era)?  As for the medal, I’ve worn in public a Soviet-era border guard medal that I picked up in the former Eastern Bloc, but I don’t claim it to indicate anything about my political views.  I’ve seen lots of people wearing Soviet kitsch without being accused of being reactionaries.  Finally, guilt-by-association, while a great rhetorical device for manipulating opinion, is not a valid argument.

Investigate, by all means.  Ask the man for his views, and vilify him for answers you don’t agree with.  Be wary, and skeptical of his pronouncements.  Publicize any bigoted, racist polemic that he utters, and call him on it.  But you can’t call for his resignation without good cause, and inuendo is not good enough.  There are plenty of other Trump appointees that have already done more than enough to be turfed from office.

The Smokestacks Come Tumbling Down.

Nice piece from Alex Steffen, whose “WorldChanging” blog I used to follow.  An inveterate optimist, with more than charged words to back it up.