general

Paul Slocum compiled an internet surf club history, where he explains the "clubs" as the product of a particular technological moment, specifically, the use of PHP and MYSQL in the late '90s/early '00s to make dynamic websites, a practiced that flourished in the mid-'00s. His listing of the main group blogs employing these techniques for "art," including sites that preceded and followed them (for context), is thorough, if lacking in value judgments. All these sites can't be good, in fact many of them weren't.
Slocum's original, clean HTML design for the history can be found on this archive page at Rhizome.org.
Rhizome posted the history on its blog, where it added a second side scroll, made navigation more awkward, and kiboshed the "retro" effect of the HTML page. Their blog, you may recall, is the result of a recent redesign by Coca Cola's ad agency, which added zany upside down fonts and rendered past content on the site invisible. The blog is also now published separately from the Rhizome front page, for some reason.
There was back channel discussion of the possibility that Slocum's survey would coincide with the "official" archiving of the surf club Nasty Nets. Rhizome saved all the posts from that site and published them on their back pages but never finished the conservation. Curiously, the far more art-world-friendly (some might say conservative) site Vvork was lovingly preserved for future generations (or until the next site redesign).

Posts keep appearing from the left side of the spectrum noting refreshing Trump heresies. John Feffer at Lobelog quotes the exchange below, on the subject of military bases, which took place when the Orange One sat down with Washington Post staffers. "Trump point[ed] out that South Korea is a rich country and wonder[ed] why the United States is paying for military bases there," Feffer writes. "Charles Lane, the columnist, point[ed] out that South Korea covers 50 percent of the costs." Then this was said:

TRUMP: 50 percent?

LANE: Yeah.

TRUMP: Why isn’t it 100 percent?

HIATT: Well I guess the question is, does the United States gain anything by having bases?

TRUMP: Personally I don’t think so. I personally don’t think so. Look. I have great relationships with South Korea. I have buildings in South Korea. But that’s a wealthy country. They make the ships, they make the televisions, they make the air conditioning. They make tremendous amounts of products. It’s a huge, it’s a massive industrial complex country. And —

HIATT: So you don’t think the U.S. gains from being the force that sort of helps keep the peace in the Pacific?

TRUMP: I think that we are not in the position that we used to be. I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation.

You aren't supposed to say this in official Washington. The "US as world cop" is the accepted position, whether or not it's a dated paradigm.

As the appalling possibility of another Clinton presidency looms into view, several writers have taken revisionist turns on Trump. None of Matt Taibbi, Thomas Frank, or Paul Street (in Counterpunch) are apologizing for the candidate's naked racism but all have noted the economic populism in his campaign. According to Taibbi, Trump talks more forthrightly on trade issues than the bought politicians:

[Trump's] pitch is: He's rich, he won't owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won't do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.

He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act.

Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. "The insurance companies," he says, "they'd rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding ...  It's so hard for me to make deals  ... because I can't get bids."

He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that's impossible because of the influence of the industry. "I'm the only one that's self-funding ...  Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers."

Trump isn't lying about any of this. Nor is he lying when he mentions that the big-pharma companies have such a stranglehold on both parties that they've managed to get the federal government to bar itself from negotiating Medicare prescription-drug prices in bulk.

"I don't know what the reason is – I do know what the reason is, but I don't know how they can sell it," he says. "We're not allowed to negotiate drug prices. We pay $300 billion more than if we negotiated the price."

John Robb, who advises the military on so-called fourth generation warfare issues and blogs at Global Guerrillas, has this to say about the Trump/Sanders applecart upset:

The American Imperium in Zombie Mode

The policy wonks are up in arms over the NYTimes and WaPo interviews with Trump on foreign policy and trade. They simply can't say enough about how uninformed Trump is on this topic.... but there's something wrong with this picture.

The same wonks who claim to "know" everything have gutted the US economy, gotten us into wars we can't win, and plunged entire regions of the world into chaos & terrorism.

Personally, I like that both Sanders and Trump are isolationists. People profoundly out of step with the demands of an "Imperial Presidency." In my view, the Imperial Presidency beloved by the policy wonks should have died with the end of the cold war.

Yet it's still here, eating our future, in Zombie mode.

Have fun,

John Robb

PS: What if, and this is a crazy notion, we simply focused on making the United States a success story, rather than a poorly run Imperium?

"Non-interventionist" is the preferred term over "isolationist" but Robb has nailed it here. It should have been swords-to-plowshares after the USSR broke up but too many (self-)important sinecures in the US were at stake to just end all the militarism. As a wise blogger said years ago, the US should be less like the Romans and more like the Swiss. But no.

Please come to Sunview Luncheonette, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY tonight for the talk:

ptyxolopies: a nighght of image-textonics

8-10 pm. The address is 221 Nassau Ave. / more / event page

Organized/moderated by Joe Milutis, the event includes yrs truly and two other speakers, Cat Tyc and Nico Vassilakis.
We are anticipating strong WiFi and the ability to project and discuss dump.fm "live."
As a backup I prepared some "visual notes" that I'll also be discussing.