Bill Maher has to — tries to — explain freedom of speech to Mark Cuban and Joe Scarborough.

Bill Maher warns Democrats like Mark Cuban and Joe Scarborough that their unfair treatment of Elon Musk is proving Republicans' point that Democrats do not care about free speech:
Bill Maher: "He launches his rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base, used to call the Air Force… pic.twitter.com/ATx5At09XG

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) October 19, 2024

A history of the weekend.

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Workweek and weekend":

A continuous seven day cycle that runs throughout history, paying no attention whatsoever to the phases of the moon and having a fixed day of rest, was most likely first practised in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest.

In Ancient Rome (753 BC–476 AD), every eight days there was a nundinae. It was a market day, during which children were exempted from school and agricultural workers stopped work in the field and came to the city to sell the produce of their labor or to practice religious rites.

The French Revolutionary Calendar (1793–1805) had ten-day weeks (called décades) and allowed décadi, one out of the ten days, as a leisure day.

"They made a Hitler chatbot. Like, what are the ethics of that?"

Zane Cooper, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, quoted in "AI chatbot mimics anyone in history — but gets a lot wrong, experts say/A GPT-3-powered app simulates conversation with historical figures, but has dictators and Nazis offer false apologies for their crimes" (WaPo).

“It’s as if all of the ghosts of all of these people have hired the same PR consultants and are parroting the same PR nonsense,” [said Cooper].... An app that obscures the controversial aspects of historical figures’ pasts or that falsely suggests they were repentant would be dangerous in an educational setting, Cooper told The Post. 

“This type of whitewashing and posthumous reputation smoothing can be just as, if not more, dangerous than facing the explicit antisemitic and racist rhetoric of these historical figures head on,” Cooper said.

“I’m going to build five properties, so it’s my first community, I’m getting into development…It’s just the next frontier for me, to develop... So I’m going to be one of the biggest real-estate developers of all time..."

"... what Howard Hughes was to aircrafts and what Henry Ford was to cars. Just the relationships I have with architects, my understanding of space and sacred proportions, just this new vibe, this new energy…We gonna develop cities.”

Said Kanye West, quoted in "Is Kanye West Trying to Build His Own Rajneeshpuram?/The musician/entrepreneur recently divulged that he’s purchased a 300-acre plot of land to build a new community. And he’s apparently been planning it for years" (Daily Beast).

As for "what Henry Ford was to cars," somebody tell Kanye about Fordlândia.

As for Rajneeshpuram, that's a current topic of conversation among people watching the Netflix series "Wild Wild Country." Here's "9 Rajneeshpuram Residents on What Wild Wild Country Got Wrong":

Wild Wild Country... tells the story of Rajneeshpuram — a utopian commune established in rural Oregon in the early 1980s, by the the followers of Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later called Osho). The riveting series charts the escalating criminal activity that took place on the ranch, led by Bhagwan’s ruthless personal secretary Ma Anand Sheela, who adopts ever more extreme methods (poison, arson, and more) to oppose the forces — like the U.S. government — that she sees threatening their group.

It seems mean to put that template on Kanye's real estate project, but it's be-mean-to-Kanye time in some quarters.

Those terrible mountebanks.

I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive — all the way back to 1852 — and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").

Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank — a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."

I see that future President Woodrow Wilson — upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 — said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"

Who has had as much impact on business and our lives as Steve Jobs?

"You'd probably have to go back to Henry Ford..."

Fascist cars?

Why aren't we more hostile to cars? Are we deluded about what they are doing to us? Jon Garvie is reviewing a couple books. Here's a challenging excerpt:

Nineteenth-century English conservatives detested the car, believing that it would destroy the looks and manners of the countryside. Italian Futurists exalted “the beauty of speed” in the 1920s, hoping that it would usher in a new violent age, shorn of “emasculating tendencies” like democracy. Mussolini and Hitler followed through such ideas, the latter bequeathing the autobahns and the Volkswagen to subsequent road enthusiasts. [Brian] Ladd's explicitly anti-car study ["Autophobia"] questions why machines associated with individual freedom have appealed so greatly to fascists of all stripes (Russian and Chinese central planners were both great admirers of Henry Ford).

Opponents of cars have laboured the same points for more than a century: damage to the environment, social atomization and, of course, a high risk of accident and death. In opposition, the pro-car lobby requires abstract arguments which refuse to address the same set of “facts” and foreground ideology instead. From Hitler to Margaret Thatcher, car advocates have seen them as literal engines of change; vehicles by which to remake society, whether on the basis of individualism or collectivism.