Julie and I are loving the Hulu series “The Great,” about the rise to power of Catherine the Great, 18th Century empress of Russia. It’s funny, appalling, endearing, tragic, bawdy, super-violent and often sad all at once. It’s visually gorgeous, with good-looking costumes and actors. Elle Fanning stands out as Catherine, who seems at first to be a beautiful nincompoop but turns out to have mettle.
The subtitle for “The Great” is “an occasionally true story.
Getting ahead at the office when you’re not at the office.
Crises are not a time to negotiate increased titles and compensation…. Jump in and do the work, learn new skills, build your network, and don’t be afraid to fail. When the time is right, the actual promotion will come, either at this company—or in your next job somewhere else.
applied.economist.com/articles/…
American Special Operations forces used a specially designed secret missile to kill the head of a Qaeda affiliate in Syria this month….
American and Qaeda officials said on Wednesday that Khaled al-Aruri, the de facto leader of the Qaeda branch, called Hurras al-Din, perished in a drone strike in Idlib in northwest Syria on June 14. He was a Qaeda veteran whose jihadist career dates to the 1990s….
The modified Hellfire missile carried an inert warhead. Instead of exploding, it hurled about 100 pounds of metal through the top of Mr. al-Aruri’s car. If the high-velocity projectile did not kill him, the missile’s other feature almost certainly did: six long blades tucked inside, which deployed seconds before impact to slice up anything in its path.
Sounds brutal, but developed “under pressure from President Barack Obama to reduce civilian casualties and property damage.” The inert warhead and blades do less damage than explosives.
In an era when it seems the US can’t do anything right, it’s good to know we still excel at killing people.
Soft toilet paper is better for your butt, but worse for the climate. Commercial TP is made from recycled paper, but the kind of TP we use at home is made from “virgin fiber…. primarily from clear-cutting forests.” In other words, it’s fresh from the tree to your bathroom.
Sheltering at home, we use more consumer TP and less of the commercial variety.
How big tech distorts discourse: It’s the monopoly, stupid. Making the case for job guarantees. Activists dox Chicago cops in realtime. 759 Trump atrocities, documented. Congress introduces bold, sweeping Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. It’s great for America, and telcos will hate it. Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic
These were taken June 18, 2019, in Namibia.
Our cabin at Kipwe Lodge in Namibia.
View from the cabin.
View from the cabin toilet.
The cabin bathroom.
The cabin sitting room.
Another view of the cabin sitting room.
The cabin bedroom.
Driving across the Namibian desert.
Typical of the planes we used when flying between lodges in Botswana and Namibia.
Plaque inside the passenger hut at a Namibian airfield.
A passenger hut at a Namibian airfield.
June 17, 2019 [Note from 2020: Overlap here with yesterday’s entry. I’m repeating myself.] We arrived at Windhoek in Namibia two days ago, after a commercial flight of less than two hours, and were greeted outside customs by Antone, who put us in an enclosed VW van with air conditioning and car seats. He drove us through Windhoek, a relatively new city 29 years old [Note from 2020: That’s what Antone said.
June 15, 2019 – Yesterday was a travel day. We had an 11:25 am charter flight from the LLT airstrip [Note from 2020: That’s the Leroo La Tau safari camp, where we stayed for a few days], and could have jammed in a short game drive, packing and breakfast before then, but it would have been too stressful. Instead we decided to sleep in, which turned out to be 6:30 am for Julie and 6:55 am for me.
Elizabeth Gilbert is of course the author of “Eat Pray Love” and a writer who until recently I never gave any thought to because I pigeonholed her as a women’s novelist. But I heard her interviewed on two of my podcasts recently, and she seemed wise and smart and likable. And the novel is set in 1940 New York, which is a time and place that fascinates me – it’s the time and place where my parents and aunts and uncles and many of my childhood friends' parents grew up (and then they moved out to Long Island and had us).
This morning I talked with a friend who lost his sister to covid Friday. I learned about that on a professional mailing list my friend and I share; another member of the list also said he’d lost a family member to covid.
I then talked with a family member of someone who is close to me, and is very sick and may well pass, well, any minute now. This person had covid a couple of months ago, and we thought they had recovered from it, but now it appears possibly not.
Alaska has airlifted the “Into the Wild” bus out of the Alaska backcountry. Too many tourists made the trek to the location and had to be rescued.
The abandoned Fairbanks city bus that Christopher McCandless lived and died in has been removed from the Alaska backcountry. Photos that went viral on Facebook on Thursday show the bus being hauled out by a Chinook helicopter and then loaded onto a long flatbed trailer for transport to an unknown location.
Trump wants to dismantle the OTF: Trump wants to dismantle the US Open Technology Fund, a nonprofit that funds development of open source communications tools used to counter oppression throughout the world.
Cory Doctorow:
The Trump admin wants to nuke the OTF and give all its money to a bunch of grifty, closed-source privacy and firewall-circumvention tools. These tools are NOT auditable, and the companied that make them stand to make BANK from the move.
I have no idea whether these companies are CIA fronts, but I tell you what, if i was a Uyghur in Xinjiang or a dissident in Tehran, I would NOT trust my life to these tools. No goddamned way.
Even if these companies aren’t fronts for spooks, they could be in the future. Because if the companies that made these tools – companies that had been dealt a huge favor by the US government – were suborned for surveillance later, it would be very hard to catch them.
OTF’s ironclad rule of funding open, free code isn’t just a way to allay suspicions about the tools' true purpose – it’s also a preventative against corruption, because the projects OTF funds can’t insert spy code without being caught right away….
This money built the tools that Black Lives Matter protesters use, to say nothing of the Hong Kong protests and many other movements around the world.
It will be a genuine, deep, widespread tragedy if this move isn’t stopped.
That’s the art of the deal, people! Trump paid $7.3 million for covid “test tubes” that turned out to be contaminated miniature soda bottles – Cory Doctorow
Avia, c’est mort: French courts struck down a law that would have required the Internet Archive to remove 15 million documents, including a repository of Grateful Dead music, for violating anti-terrorism rules – Cory Doctorow.
Austerity in disrepute – Cory Doctorow: 75% of Americans favor maintaining or expanding extended unemployment benefits from pandemic stimulus bills. The extensions are popular even among Republican voters.
But GOP politicians intend to terminate the payments, and they’ve been clear about why: poor people won’t risk death or permanent disability in order to serve cocktails or give manicures unless the alternative is homelessness and starvation.
