In case you missed it, the President of the United States is a racist. Over the weekend, he decided to go after Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore.

....As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019

Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019

The Baltimore Sun was having none of it.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run,” which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb.”

In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments. It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like “you people” or “welfare queens” or “crime-ridden ghettos” or a suggestion that the congressman “go back” to where he came from.

This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Mr. Cummings’ criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Mr. Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that “Fox & Friends” had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cell phone into action.

As heartening as it has been to witness public figures rise to Charm City’s defense on Saturday, from native daughter House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, we would above all remind Mr. Trump that the 7th District, Baltimore included, is part of the United States that he is supposedly governing. The White House has far more power to effect change in this city, for good or ill, than any single member of Congress including Mr. Cummings. If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

That last line… burrrrn.

M. G. Siegler, writing at his site 500ish.com, says piracy is coming back in full force not for music but for television shows and movies. He thinks the price isn’t the issue but the lack of a unified service to connect all the services together.

Even if you are eventually paying for all of these services, the experience of using them as their own, stand-alone apps is sub-par. Which is a nice way of saying “crap”. It’s like an egg hunt in a coal mine. Friends was on Netflix, now it’s on HBO Max. The Office was on Netflix, now it’s on NBC Whatever. So and So Movie was on Amazon Prime Video, but now it has been pulled to stream exclusively for the next three month window on Showtime. You will not be able to keep up with it all. Nor should you.

In a way, the success state here ends up looking like… cable. A simple, unified UI to serve up the different content you want. Even better if you can buy different content sources as… bundles. Funny that.

Basically, he thinks Apple or some company is going to create a “cable company” for all the streaming sites.

I think he’s wrong. Or maybe I should say he’s not quite right.

To my mind, what people want is to curate their own entertainment by show. I said this back in March.

Let’s say I want to watch Game of Thrones, Star Trek Discovery, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, all the seasons of Criminal Minds, Shameless, Doom Patrol, This is Us, Russian Doll, Cobra Kai and live sports. I’d have to subscribe to nine streaming services and probably a cable package to get it all.

This is untenable.

What Apple or some company needs to do is create a way for every television show, live event, and movie to be available for streaming by name. I don’t want to subscribe to nine different streaming services. I want one service that costs me maybe as much as $100 a month, and I get everything.

That’s it. Plain and simple.

Elizabeth McCracken, writing for Real Simple, has a charming story about her and her daughter bonded over going to the movies last summer.

It made me think a lot about my own daughter and me going to see movies as often as we could when she was little because it was something we both truly enjoyed. In fact, after reading the story it made me want to go see a bunch of movies with my kiddo even though she now lives a few hours away.

Adam Elder, writing in MEL Magazine, has a horrifying story about cyber-blackmail. It made my skin crawl.

Shibasaki is an elderly Japanese watercolor artist with a YouTube channel in which he teaches you to paint a rainy day in a village, figures on a street, and cherry blossoms. Watching him work is soothing and inspirational. I’ve never really had a desire to do watercolors, but after watching one of his videos I kind of want to try.

Rutger Hauer, best known for his performance as replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner, has died at 75.

Blade Runner is not my all-time favorite film, but it’s in the top three. Bilge Ebiri, writing in The New York Times, writes about his performance in the film with obvious reverence. It was a chilling yet soulful performance.

Of course, he will be most remembered for his short, dying soliloquy that director Ridley Scott allowed Hauer to improvise. It was poetry in a neon-noir movie, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

What a beautiful piece of acting.

Lieu: "The reason again that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC opinion stating you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?"

Mueller: "That is correct." pic.twitter.com/yemIYmMkmb

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 24, 2019

Nicholas Bate with your productivity list

1. Address true priorities for the day (set by Personal Compass, not urgency nor ease. More here.)

2. Vertical timeline: 30 minutes slots. Priorities matched to timeline.

3. Batch work on digital interrupts.

4. Minimise meetings by reducing numbers attending, clear goals and shorter length.

5. Regular breaks to stand, stretch, sip water and ask: what’s really, really important here?

6. Chaos in the day? 97% of the time it’s the result of poor planning in the past. Fix it for the future.

7. Go home on time. All work and no play etc.

Fifty years ago, the Apollo 11 astronauts had to go through customs after landing. Basically, they left Florida, took a detour to the Moon, and landed in Hawaii. Plus, they declared moon rocks and dust.

The Mueller Report, originally released as a scanned image PDF, is now available via the Digital Public Library of America as a text-based EPUB document with 747 live footnotes and is conformant with both Web and EPUB accessibility requirements.

Seems appropriate about now.

A couple of days ago, Xeni Jardin, writing at Boing Boing, criticized national reporting for not calling Trump’s racist twitter tirade what it was: racism.>On Sunday morning, popular-vote-losing illegitimate president Donald Trump tweeted some awful racist tweets that you can read about everywhere, all the time, because he does white supremacist bigoted stuff constantly and will only continue to escalate it as his day of cosmic comeuppance approaches.»Trump’s totally a racist.»The tweets were explicitly racist.»Everyone knows this.»So why did the big respected major media news outlets everyone turns to for breaking news all decide NOT TO CALL IT RACIST in their reporting, and instead rely on embedded tweets, commenters, pundits, and op-ed contributors to use the r-word?»“Xenophobic,” “provocative,” and “inflammatory” aren’t synonyms for “racist.”»“Racially charged” isn’t a better phrase to use in this case than “racist.”»Just say racist.

Seriously, if you are surprised by all this you simply haven’t been paying attention.

David Graham, writing for The Atlantic, thinks Trump is going all-in on the bigotry apparently because he thinks this is a sound strategy.

Trump uses Twitter to try on new ideas and policy ideas in real time, seeing how he likes them, and then either discarding them or centering them. The current incident began, as my colleague Yoni Appelbaum reports, with Trump tweeting that the Democratic members should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.” (While Trump doesn’t make explicit whom he means, it’s likely he’s referring to the “squad” of progressive Democrats — all four of whom are American citizens, and three of whom were born in the United States.) By Sunday evening, he had decided he liked the reaction, welcoming a battle over race at the ballot box in 2020.

His doubling down on the whole thing would seem to indicate his willingness to go down this path. Of course, it didn’t work AT ALL in 2018 when he employed the same hateful strategy.

Simply because the president has concluded that open racial disparagement is a winning political tactic doesn’t mean that his calculus is correct, and Trump has made good and bad bets on political outcomes. During the 2018 midterms, the GOP suffered a political battering. Most people viewed this as a rebuke of Trump himself, but the president seems to believe the vote was simply a referendum on Congress.

If he really believes that then his advisers are morons.

You see, Republicans will never admit to racism or call out Trump for his obvious racism because, in fact, they are racists themselves. Amanda Marcotte, in Salon, makes this abundantly clear.

>Telling someone to “go back” is, in the ranks of racist statements, right up there with calling a person the N-word or some other rank slur. Yet, there still appears to be resistance among Republicans to admitting that is racism, which leads many on the left to wonder: If this doesn’t count, then what could possibly count?»The answer, it’s becoming quite clear, is that there is no limit. There’s no line in the sand, no sentiment so ugly, where most Republicans will cave in and admit, OK, that’s racist.»A new poll from Ipsos confirms this. While more than two-thirds of Americans correctly identify the “go back” language as racist, only 45% of Republicans agree with that assessment. Instead, 57% of Republicans agreed that these women should “leave” the country where all four are citizens, and where three of the four were born. A startlingly large majority of Republicans — 70% — also said that the word “racist” is a bad-faith effort to discredit a political opponent’s views.

Of course, no one with half a brain will identify themselves as racists but that doesn’t mean they aren’t.

Efforts to educate about the irrationality of racist beliefs are dismissed as “political correctness.” Efforts to stigmatize the expression of racist views are characterized as assaults on “free speech.” Unfortunately, that also means that these kinds of public debates about race only make Trump supporters more fiercely defensive of their bigoted beliefs, which the Ipsos polll registered by showing that Republican support for Trump has intensified in the wake of his “go back” comments.

Jamelle Bouie, in The New York Times, explains this all perfectly: For Republicans only white-skinned people are Americans.

If Donald Trump has a theory of anything, it is a theory of American citizenship. It’s simple. If you are white, then regardless of origin, you have a legitimate claim to American citizenship and everything that comes with it. If you are not, then you don’t.

That’s textbook racism. Republicans who are silent or defend Trump are enablers of this racism. I’m not sure what you call someone who enables racism, but they deserve to be called out.

Faith Hill (not that one), writing for The Atlantic, has a fascinating story about the rise and fall of secular churches. I’ve often thought a secular church would thrive, but it’s interesting to see how difficult it is to maintain.

Visiting a Sunday Assembly near me might be fun.

y'all dirty bitches here's david tennant cursing for one minute straight
nsfw, obviously kskdkdk pic.twitter.com/hU0mD9iypU

— charlie vickers supremacy💍 (@halbrandthinker) July 23, 2019

Both surprisingly cathartic and entertaining.

A true artist can make an F-bomb have some gravity, but here it’s like a compilation of Shakespeare’s favorite insults. The accent helps.

This pitch might have broken physics. pic.twitter.com/9M62Y5gzRt

— MLB (@MLB) July 21, 2019

We need to call Montgomery Scott because I think this pitch broke the laws of physics.

Nicholas Bate with 100 words –

The gentlest of rain on the oldest of pebbles on that most misty of mornings. A Saturday, a thermos of coffee and damp. Damp, damp, damp. But secure in a ‘proof’ and secure in a thought or two. A dog observed as a stick is thrown and a walker steps out along that shore. Both free for the time-being. Elsewhere, anxiety for the fete: stalls ready, cakes unwrapped and children restless in a world dominated by the addictive electron. Moods change, thoughts come and go but rain is always right. Decide your destiny, select your freedom and abandon your fate.

The “addictive electron” is a nice description.

Seth Godin on finding your own lane.

It doesn’t make you go any faster.

It doesn’t make the leader go any faster.

Tailgating creates frustration, limits your choices and isn’t safe.

If you want to make a difference, you’ll probably need to find your own lane.

The Atlantic has 50 photos from 50 years ago in honor of the 50^th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Worth taking a long look.

I’m terrible at meeting my goals. I set monstrous goals and always fall short. What I should do is take the time to figure out the process of achieving the big goal. What are the smaller goals that I can do every day to finish a big goal?

Time to make a real plan. Execute the plan day by day. Achieve success. Seems easy enough.