A number of years ago my wife and I enrolled our daughter in a martial arts school. After watching for a few weeks, we decided to join up as well — “What the heck — seems like a good way to get exercise…” Fifteen years later she no longer goes, but we have progressed to the point where we teach at that same school.
It’s a very kid-friendly place. There are periodic half-day “kids camp” events where a couple of hours are spent teaching martial arts, and a couple of hours are spent playing “ninja games” where they can run and scream and roll around to their hearts content. Parents love these events, because they are usually held near holidays, and it’s cheap daycare.
Recently I was eating a sandwich during the lunch break following a bout of ninja games, looking over 50 kids in random happy groups spread across the mat eating, lunch boxes, paper bags, insulated sacks, soda cans, water bottles, juice boxes, conversation and giggles all over the place. All kinds of crumbs, as well — we have to quickly clean the whole mat before activities can resume.
Sitting there, I’m thinking about how remarkably well all these kids get along, when it suddenly occurs to me that this is a totally integrated scene — asian, black, latino, middle eastern, white, and undetermined in roughly equal portions. It was beautiful, and for a moment I could be proud to be human.
A must-read from Masha Gessen on how to live under autocratic rule
For a decade now, Masha has consistently been one of my favorite reporters and thinkers. From the time of her return to Russia from the US after the wall fell, she fearlessly reported on what her birth country was turning into under Vladimir Putin, even as free media outlets were being shut down. She continued, even as other reporters were being murdered and “disappeared”, until she became so worried about the situation for LGBTQ Russians that she consulted a lawyer about how to ensure that her own teenage son wouldn’t be taken away from her simply for her being lesbian, and his answer was, “you have American citizenship; your answer is at the airport”. She left.
She’s just an extremely cool person with principles and intelligence, and I’m an unabashed Masha fanboy. (She also writes the dialog for the Russian actors in The Americans, which is awesome.)
She now sees what’s happening in this country, which is also her country, and her insight and experience is something we all need to pay attention to.
Today, President-elect Trump, in his first day of official transition business, did at least four things that were unprecedented for a president-elect:
1. He did not allow a press corps to follow and report on him (all footage we’ve seen today of him came from reporters invited by the White House, Speaker Ryan, or the Congressional press corps).
2. His spokespeople lied to the press pool about where he’d be spending the night and he gave them the slip for several hours until he showed up at Trump Tower—causing for the first time in 40 years a situation where the American people did not know where their president and president-elect was (even if “the American people” was notionally represented only by a small “tight pool” sworn to secrecy for national security reasons).
3. He tweeted. He has his phone back, ironically on the very day that he gained unlimited security clearance and was politely asked by the Director of National Intelligence to cease using an unsecured phone as Bush and Obama had done at this point in the transition—a request he refused. (I suppose that’s two unprecedented things, but I meant the refusing to follow security protocols, not tweeting.)
4. That tweet was to complain that spontaneous protests around the country were actually “professional protesters incited by the media”. (And that’s actually such a ball of unprecedented things that I can’t untangle them all and will pretend like it’s just one.) If you’ve never visited the alt-right corners of the web, you may be unaware of the concept of “crisis actors”, but he’s claiming that they’ve been mobilized against him. (Oddly, “crisis actors” up till now have always been in the Obama administration’s payroll, but I guess “the media” has decided to take them over as part of the peaceful transition of power?)
This is happening, folks. If you’d hoped he was going to make that presidential pivot; if you thought that last week, when his phone was stolen from him by his own advisors and he was convinced to just sit back and let the Comey letter do its job—”easy, Donald, play it smooth”—and everyone applauded him for managing to get through eight whole days without a scandal (so presidential!), if you thought that was a preview of his presidency, today put the lie to that.
Someone asked me recently about Google’s Fuchsia, which this video is not about by the way. He asked what was more important to me, that a device run Linux or that the product be open source and open standards. I stood on the side of open source and open standards. On that note, welcome to the Sacrilege episode of Cooking With Linux. Pull up a chair, enjoy some wine, and enjoy this treat from my open source kitchen.
