Goodbye, Dolly
"She was also a great philanthropist. Her Imagination Library has distributed more than 200 million books to babies and young children." -Robert Reich
When I started hacking on WordPress in 2004 (the word "hacker" as in "wp-hackers" was understood to mean modify the code) there was a plugin called "hello dolly" by Matt Mullenweg (Hello, Dolly! the musical or film). Back then another Dolly was only 58.
This week we say "goodbye, Dolly."
Some people use the term "philanthropist" not to refer to vicious oligarchs who steal from society. █
"When I saw the first headline about her demise, it mentioned that she was eighty, and it staggered me to think that she was the same age as Donald Trump, because she was utterly profoundly magnificently opposite to him in every way. Born into extreme poverty in rural Tennessee, she made her own way with massive talent and ambition that seems never to have been decoupled from kindness and principle. Born into great wealth, he was helped along into late middle age by his father and then by his inheritance from that racist real estate tycoon father. He learned a particular kind of ruthless unscrupulousness from Fred Trump and from Joe McCarthy's righthand man, Roy Cohn, as he stumbled, failed, scammed, lied, litigated, and got picked up again and again by Fred."
"No matter how rich Donald Trump is he will never have enough because the poverty isn't material, it's emotional and spiritual. [...]"
"In Praise of Dolly Parton, 1946-2026, Our Goddess of Kindness"