Paul foresaw that computers would change the world. Even in high school, before any of us knew what a personal computer was, he was predicting that computer chips would get super-powerful and would eventually give rise to a whole new industry. That insight of his was the cornerstone of everything we did together.
In fact, Microsoft would never have happened without Paul. In December 1974, he and I were both living in the Boston area â he was working, and I was going to college. One day he came and got me, insisting that I rush over to a nearby newsstand with him. When we arrived, he showed me the cover of the January issue of Popular Electronics. It featured a new computer called the Altair 8800, which ran on a powerful new chip. Paul looked at me and said: âThis is happening without us!â That moment marked the end of my college career and the beginning of our new company, Microsoft. It happened because of Paul.
Gates also noted Allenâs love of music. In an interview earlier this year, legendary producer Quincy Jones said Allen âsings and plays just like Hendrixâ.
Yeah, man. I went on a trip on his yacht, and he had David Crosby, Joe Walsh, Sean Lennon â all those crazy motherfuckers. Then on the last two days, Stevie Wonder came on with his band and made Paul come up and play with him â heâs good, man.
Hereâs a short clip of Allen melting some faces:
Chief Justice John Roberts Orders New Investigation Into Kavanaugh
âSexual violence in conflict is a threat to peace and a stain on our common humanity. Yet it remains widespread. Congratulations to our UN partners Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad on the Nobel Prize. We will continue to support their courageous efforts.â
â United Nations Secretary-General AntĂłnio Guterres on Fridayâs announcement that the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to Denis Mukwege & UNODC Goodwill Ambassador Nadia Murad Basee for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict. We congratulate both Nobel Prize laureates, who have used their voices at the UN to call attention to critical issues affecting women and girls in conflict.
Part of the reason the Kavanaugh news cycle has been such a flashpointâpart of the reason that so many conservatives have fanatically defended his right to have hypothetically committed the crime heâs been accused of, and that so many women have been spending the last two weeks in a haze of resurfaced traumaâis that it illuminates the centrality of sexual assault in the matrix of male power in America. In high schools, in colleges, at law schools, and in the halls of Washington, men perform for one another and ascend to positions of power. Watching it happen is a deadening reminder, for victims of sexual assault and harassment, that, in many cases, you were about as meaningful as a chess piece, one of a long procession of objects in the lifelong game that men play with other men.
âI think itâs giving courage just to other women to speak about their stories in general. Itâs been very triggering for women, triggering for some of us who are not ready to share, so being here today for us is very important, we feel like weâve created a movement of people who see whatâs at stake here and are willing to put it all on the line.â
In the autumn of 1929, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her husband Charles flew across the YucatĂĄn Peninsula. With Charles at the controls, Anne snapped photographs of the jungles just below. She wrote in her journal of Maya structures obscured by large humps of vegetation. A bright stone wall peeked through the leaves, âunspeakably alone and majestic and desolate â the mark of a great civilization gone.â
Nearly a century later, surveyors once again took flight over the ancient Maya empire, and mapped the Guatemala forests with lasers. The 2016 survey, whose first results were published this week in the journal Science, comprises a dozen plots covering 830 square miles, an area larger than the island of Maui. It is the largest such survey of the Maya region, ever.
The study authors describe the results as a revelation. âItâs like putting glasses on when your eyesight is blurry,â said study author Mary Jane AcuĂąa, director of El Tintal Archaeological Project in Guatemala. Read more.
You claim, on the opinion pages of the âfailingâ New York Times no less, that senior officials working for the president of the United States âare working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.â
âI would know,â you add dramatically. âI am one of them.â
Sorry, what was the point of this particular piece? And what is it that you want from the rest of us? A thank-you card? A round of applause? The nationâs undying gratitude?
Screw. You.
There is no redemption; no exoneration for you or your colleagues inside this shit-show of an administration. You think an op-ed in the paper of record is going to cut it? Gimme a break. You cannot write an article admitting to the presidentâs âanti-democraticâ impulses while also saying you want his administration âto succeed.â You cannot publish a 965-word piece excoriating Donald Trumpâs âworst inclinationsâ while omitting any and all references to his racism, bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism.
You did find space, however, to heap praise on yourself and your fellow officials. âUnsung heroes.â âAdults in the room.â âQuiet resistance.â âSteady state.â
The reality is that you and your fellow officials are enablers of Trump; you are his protectors and defenders. You say it yourself. Why were there only âwhispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment,â which provides for the cabinet to remove the president from office if he is unable to do the job? Why not invoke it and let Mike Pence take over? (Are you, by the way, Mike Pence?)
If as you claim â and we all agree! â that the president you serve âcontinues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republicâ with âmisguided impulses,â then how can you advocate for anything other than his swift removal from office?
Your defense is that âno one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.â Seriously? You donât agree with former Secretary of State John Kerry that weâre already in the midst of âa genuine constitutional crisis,â given your own op-ed outlining his âerratic behaviorâ and âreckless decisionsâ and Bob Woodwardâs new book describing âan administrative coup dâetatâ and a ânervous breakdownâ at the center of the Trump White House?
You are keen to remind the liberal readers of the New York Times that yours âis not the popular âresistanceâ of the leftâ and that you believe this administrationâs policies have âalready made America safer and more prosperous.â You cite âhistoric tax reformâ and âeffective deregulationâ as the supposed âbright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture.â But by tax reform, do you mean the Trump tax cuts that give the richest 1 percent of Americans almost half of the benefits? And by deregulation, do you mean the rescinding of Obama-era protections for the oceans; the lifting of controls on toxic air pollution; and the green light to Wall Street to once again cause havoc in the financial markets?
What is it, then, that you object to? Well, it seems, your biggest concern is ânot what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency,â but how Americans have âsunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.â
Also, what did you think would happen when you signed up to work for a reality TV star who was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women, and of rape by his first wife? Who stiffed hundreds of contractors, ripped off Trump University students, cheated on his third wife just months after she gave birth, and cut off health care coverage to his own nephewâs sick baby in a fit of rage?
You knew all of this and yet you still chose to work for him at the highest level of government. You now acknowledge that âthe root of the problem is the presidentâs amorality.â But how about your own amorality? I hate to agree with your boss, but you are âgutless.â Youâre a shameless coward, a cynical opportunist.
Donât hide behind anonymity. Donât pretend that you have âgone to great lengthsâ to restrain Trump and âput country first.â
Tell us your name. Quit your job. Call out this president in public.
Call him out for his bigotry, his mendacity, his sheer mental and emotional unfitness for the office he occupies. Call him out in front of a congressional committee. Or a court of law.
Thereâs no place like home for a pair of ruby slippers used in âThe Wizard of Oz,â recovered in an FBI sting last month 13 years after they were stolen from a Minnesota museum. The FBI said in a news release yesterday that the shoes were among several pairs of the ruby red slippers worn by actress Judy Garland in her iconic portrayal of Dorothy Gale. This particular pair was insured for $1 million and investigators offered a $250,000 reward for its return. #wizardofoz https://www.instagram.com/p/BnWlatjHH-S/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=vcy6xtreqrfk
one of the oldest and arguably the most important museum in Brazil is burning to the ground as we speak. home to the portuguese royal family from 1808 to 1821, the Museu Nacional stored fossils, meteorites, pre-historic human skeletons and a variety of artefacts related to natural history. it holds two centuries of latin & brazilian history and now itâs all gone.
some of the things that are now lost forever: the largest collection of egyptian artefacts in latin america; the skeleton of the largest flying reptile ever found in Brazil; the oldest human fossil ever found in the country, named âLuziaâ (over 11.000 y.o) and other 20 million extremely important relics and researches just burned to the ground. never to be seen again.
thanks to our government, of course, who didnât want to pay the museum the necessary funds to make the essencial maintenances since 2014 (which by the way, costed less than a supreme federal court judgeâs sallary: R$520 in a year).
another sad instance where the stateâs indifference towards culture and history becomes painfully obvious. this is a massive blow to our cultural legacy.
all that in our independe week. happy independe for us, brazilians, who just lost our history and culture in a fire caused by ignorance and indifference.
in case youâre wondering, this is what the museum used to look like:
this is what it looks like now:
thousands of years of culture lost. happy independence week.
âAuthorities say the fire lasted for six hours, causing irreparable damage. To put it bluntly: itâs all gone. A meteorite, that can sustain incredibly high temperatures, was found intact. But other than that, there are apparently no other pieces left. It would not be an understatement to call the Museu Nacional the Brazilian equivalent of the Louvre or the British Museum.â
here is some of the international news saying on this, because most articles and videos are all in portuguese, u can check some of the news in english: (here *new york times*) (here *bbc news*) (here *le monde* for french speaking readers) (here *shorouk news* for people who speak arabian) (here *azteca news* for spanish) (here *corriere della sera* for italian).
it was a natural science and historic museum, there were all sorts of important researches and relics. all burned. this was our culture. our history. the first human fossil found in brazil (mentioned above, Luzia) was so important for science, since it proved that way before indigenous tribes existed in Brazil, there were black people.
this is the place where our first constitution was made and the declaration of independence was signed. our independe day is this friday. heartbroken.
How Monsanto Plants Stories, Suppresses Science & Silences Dissent to Sell a Cancer-Linked Chemical
For decades, American historians have viewed the summit between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, in 1961, as the worst ever between the U.S. and Moscow. That disastrous bit of summitry has now been topped by Trump.
Iâve been meeting women who are crying so violently they can barely speak. Iâm meeting women whose hands are shaking, who look at me with kind of a vacant gaze. Itâs extremely upsetting to see.
A youth care worker who quit his job at a Tucson detention center for unaccompanied minors is speaking out about inadequate facilities, untrained staff and inhumane policies, after witnessing the devastation of family separations firsthand. Antar Davidson says he quit after he was forced to tell three tearful children who were separated from their mother not to hug one another. The facility is run by Southwest Key, a nonprofit that operates 27 facilities and has recently signed a lease to detain hundreds of separated children, including many who are a younger than 12 years old, in whatâs being called a âbaby jailâ in a former warehouse and homeless shelter in Houston.
Antar Davidson told Democracy Now!:
âI realized that if I were to continue with Southwest Key, at least here in this facility, that Iâd be told to do things that were⌠against the code of all humansâ morality⌠Weâre not talking about an organization that was good. Weâre talking about an organization that, for the past five years, has made millions of dollars in basically the detention of youth.â
House Speaker Paul Ryanâs announcement Wednesday that he would not seek re-election adds a big name to what was already shaping up to be a near-record year of seat turnovers in the U.S. House of Representatives.
For many poor families in America, eviction is a real and ongoing threat. Sociologist Matthew Desmond estimates that approximately 2.3 million evictions were filed in the U.S. in 2016 â a rate of four every minute.
âEviction isnât just a condition of poverty; itâs a cause of poverty,â Desmond says. âEviction is a direct cause of homelessness, but it also is a cause of residential instability, school instability [and] community instability.â
Desmond won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. His latest project is The Eviction Lab, a team of researchers and students at Princeton University dedicated to amassing the nationâs first-ever database of eviction. To date, the Lab had collected 83 million records from 48 states and the District of Columbia.
âWeâre in the middle of a housing crisis and that means more and more people are giving more and more of their income to rent and utilities,â Desmond says. âOur hope is that we can take this problem thatâs been in the dark and bring it into the light.â
One excellent way to stay calm but well-informed, Iâve found, is to consume the news a day or three later than everyone else. Print is one way to do this. But it works online, too: more and more, I find myself promiscuously cruising the web, saving umpteen articles in a âread laterâ app (in my case Evernote, though you could use your browserâs bookmarks). By the time I read them, the time filter has worked its magic: a small proportion of them stand out as truly compelling.
A new car loses about 10% of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot; most news depreciates a lot faster than that. Humans are curious, hard-wired to seek out new information on a continuous basis. But not everything we havenât seen before is worth our attention. As Burkeman says, a great way to determine if something is intrinsically interesting or worthwhile apart from its novelty is to set it aside for awhile.
My process for gathering links and information for kottke.org is pretty much what Burkeman outlines in the article: when I see something that looks interesting, I file it away and revisit it later. I donât even leave it that long sometimesâŚeven a few hours works wonders. Most of the links I throw out, some because they werenât as interesting as Iâd hoped from reading a headline or pull quote but more often because they wonât be interesting after a day or two passes. Iâm proud that you can go back weeks, months, years, and (more rarely) decades into the kottke.org archives and still find things worth your time.
House of Brat 