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machination.org

Dave and Art did enough damage.

…the least we can do is take their money and run. Or something.

Today was the first day in a while without structured plans and without starting out with a steaming hot morning en route to a 90F high, only to feel even hotter.

So my son and I got on the bike and went to our town’s free museums… yes, the Smithsonian Institution. We’re lucky to have this and I try to remember that and make use of them, for my own benefit, but especially for my toddler’s. That said, I glaze over portions I think I know sometimes… and sometimes I discover something that might’ve been on display for years because I was finally paying attention. Among the nuggets today was a little bit of locking on to a couple of the big donor names behind some of the exhibits, and the politics of those names still being on plaques or carved in stone, despite disgrace or challenging content.

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (my son calls it the “Dinosaur Museum,") and its Hall of Fossils doesn’t seem to shy away from Climate Change education. I say that because it is the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils and that pig fucker spent a lot more of his money to stop society from understanding and confronting the climate crisis. Either the Smithsonian didn’t agree to any dictates on the substance of exhibits (Koch’s name is also all over a massive human evolution exhibit which seems both accessible and solid, as far as I can tell), or they said “fuck you, Dave,” after he died. I assume the former.

Meanwhile, across the Mall, at the National Museum of Asian Art, once more prominently known as the Freer & Sackler Galleries they’ve changed the emphasis, but have apologized for having to technically keep the Sackler name on the gallery. Apparently, they’d have to give up a bunch of their stuff.

I don’t know the true how and why behind all this, but it sure seems that one museum was better at negotiating a donation and its conditions than the other.

Over at the American History Museum, in General Motors Hall of Transportation, also paid for by ExxonMobil, among others, the electric car does get a mention, as does Ralph Nader… but you kind of have to know the current state of the art and some of the history to appreciate the effort made to get that technology (and its long history!) and, separately, Ralph (a friend, a former boss), included in this exhibit.

Gratitude in absence

My son is at his “Grammas’” (he intuitively started using a gender neutral plural diminutive colloquialism when he was about 1). I get an evening to myself. My wife gets an evening off with a girlfriend, before re-engaging in her 70+ hr per week job. I miss my son and I’m grateful for the break. I’ll also be better at making sure he knows how grateful we both are for him while keeping the guard rails up.

Watching Lewis Black’s beginning-of-pandemic stand-up special … there’s a duality to the experience now. “It’s been so long, wow” and “we never (or I, anyway) quite got back to normal.” Understandable this time. I’m still pissed at all the things lost from before 9/11 though.

Re-watching Slacker, for the first time in a long time, and it is kind of terrifying how relevant it is.

Regular programming will be interrupted

Just Stop Oil protesters interrupt opera at Glyndebourne festival (The Guardian):

“Our highest priority was the safety and security of everyone on site and we would like to thank our staff and performers, whose calm and professional response kept everyone safe, and disruption to a minimum.”

I’m with the demonstrators on this. I think everyone’s highest priority should be the climate crisis. This doesn’t mean one can’t wind down and go to an opera, but only if and until society actually realigns to this priority, expect the rest to be interrupted lest we keep thinking everything is fine.

Keep it dumb, dummy.

Will it be possible to buy a dumb electric car? No Internet Protocol dependence and certainly no fucking ChatGPT? I don’t mind contemporary local computer-driven safety features—not talking Model T dumb. I like the idea of bringing extra brains and network connectivity to the vehicle with me (e.g. via smartphone) but entirely optionally.

I’d still like to go for a drive without anyone but… the CCTV and imagery satellites and drones knowing where I am. 😮‍💨

Bad air

For the second day in a row, I am explaining to my 3-year-old why we’re not going to the playground. Hauling out the weather app, showing him the AQI map, and saying “Do you remember when you said the air was smoky? You were right - the air is bad right now.”

A photograph of the National Mall, facing West from Third Street NW. The Washington Monument, usually dominating this view is almost imperceptible in the haze.

He and his peers are not the first toddlers to have air pollution explained to them (or just have had to deal with it), in fact we have more than enough code orange days around here that systematically impact others more than us, but the intensity, range, and reason is still a shame.

If we were doing everything we could, it might get a little better later in his lifetime. Sure, it might be notably better tomorrow or Saturday but it’ll happen again and again….

Listening to behind-the-scenes tales of the incoming demise of the debt ceiling negotiations. Democrats playing to lose, as always. Doesn’t matter how bad it gets.

(Edited for clarity: what was intended was the demise of things in the course of debt ceiling negotiations. All lose, no win on the part of the Dems. The negotiations themselves continued and its participants wouldn’t recognize a demise.)

“Propellers are louder over ground.” This study seems to state the obvious, but I am sure I didn’t read the article closely enough to understand what was novel. That said, it also seems to be speaking to its relevance in a near future urban environment with more VTOL air taxis and ubiquitous drones. But I am going to imagine it bears directly on present-day Washington, D.C. which seems to be increasingly (over the past twenty years of living here in three of the four quadrants) plagued by helicopters, seemingly flying lower too. So much so that our non-voting Congresswoman has made repeat protest actions that in yet another way, mark the failure of the Congress to be a steward of the city. (There’s no change that bill will be acted on.)

Our civics suffer from misdirection

Cory Doctorow has an essay in Locus flagging points of common ground between broadly genuine progressives and leftists and the misdirected but genuine right, or uncritical skeptics who are often lumped-in with conservatives.

I’ve been getting tongue-tied in knots internally on the same general topic, so thank you, Cory.

How powerful our civics could be if we could unite in numbers on some of these things and reject the truly corrupt.

Instead, genuine folks get conned into engaging in distractions or holding their nose to pick one of two corrupted sides… and it’s only gotten more extreme, and worse, with the alienated becoming seemingly as extreme as the extremists in at least rhetoric sometimes.

Mike Gravel would’ve been 93 today. Before the ‘08 election he took me to lunch on the recommendation from Ralph Nader’s camp, hoping I’d join his campaign. I was flattered but passed. I don’t regret it, but even with how I saw things go, I think it was a bigger opportunity than I understood.

I picked up a paper train schedule today. It’s the kind of physical ephemera that reminds you of the potential to do something.

Sometimes I think my phone is kind of like my closet… everything is in it, and stays in it.