1. I’m trying to put together another one of those lists that I write noting the crimes and immoralities of the current regime – it’s a target-rich environment, really, since every day Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves (including Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk) hit rock bottom and continue digging. I’ll probably finish it in a day or two, but right now it is just a hassle. I think we can all take it as read that this administration is doing everything in its power to destroy the American republic, our national security, our economy, our civil society, global trade, and whatever respect the rest of the world may have had for us at the beginning of the year. It has been an absolutely horrifying time to be an American and it does not look to be getting any better anytime soon.
2. But life goes on. It does that.
3. Every year we put together our March Madness Bracket despite the fact that none of us here follow basketball at any level and only Kim has any real idea of how the game works. Lauren also does, but she is away at school and not filling out a bracket these days, at least not with us. I don’t know how Kim chooses her teams. Mine are based on a few simple questions – 1) Did I go to this school? 2) Did any of my friends or family go to this school? and 3) Is this school in a city or state that I would like to visit? (or, put in the negative, is it in a place that I or my family would not be safe visiting?). Oliver is the most thorough, as he looks up all the mascots and picks the teams that have the best ones. There is still another weekend to go with this and not even the basketball fans care because all four top seeds have advanced to the Final Four and straight chalk is boring. We have even less reason to care as our brackets are officially busted and no further points can be obtained, so we have declared Kim the winner on points and she will receive the Fabulous Prizes as soon as those can be determined.
4. I have completed my Instagram project and will now have to find another project to keep my mind off the sad state of the world. Not sure what that will be yet. Further bulletins as events warrant.
5. On Friday it was 76F (24C) here. On Sunday night it snowed. Today we had a tornado hit the northern part of the county after a day of drenching rain. Tomorrow it will get cold again. The rabbits were out for a few days, and now they’re back in the basement to ride things out until things stabilize a bit. The weather has gotten very science-fictiony of late – another thing that does not look to be getting better any time soon.
6. All of this has made it very hard to read – I’ve been working on the same novel for a month now. It’s actually a well written book, but my focus just isn’t there right now. Too many other pressing things that require more attention, I suppose.
7. We took our paperwork over to the Tax People last week even though the idea of supporting this particular version of the government leaves a lot to be desired. It took a few tries since there were random paperwork bits that had to be retrieved over a few days to complete the full set, but all documents have been delivered now and pretty soon the taxes will be done and then all I will have to do is sign the forms and either wait for a refund or write a check. No, I do not accept direct deposit for any refund I might get. Unelected President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his crew of feral teenagers do not need my banking information on top of everything else. The government can just send me a check if it comes to that. I don’t expect it to do so – my income is so variable that it is hard to get the withholdings right and I prefer to err on the side of not lending money to the government interest free if I can help it. But there you have it. I tell you, though, having someone else handle all this has been just the most wonderful thing ever.
8. Is it just me or is everyone really tired about now?
9. It is a parenting win when your child messages you from the road to let you know that she has been listening to Woody Guthrie on the drive. Next up: Pete Seeger!
10. The rest of the old notes and notebooks that I took out of my little corner of the basement have now hit the recycling bin, which is kind of cathartic. I did find a few things that were worth keeping amid the paper, though. A small Scottish flag that had gotten tossed into one of the boxes. A couple of old books, including one on dinosaurs that my dad bought for me when I was about five. And a photocopy of a pamphlet-sized thing that I found tucked into a dark corner of the library at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 or so – a work of revolutionary scholarship by one “P. N. Oak” entitled Great Britain Was Hindu Land. It’s a virulently nationalist and vibrantly stupid tract dedicated to the idea that a vast Indian civilization once ruled the British Isles in sharp contrast with the situation in recent centuries. It is a textbook example of how not to write history and howlingly funny if your tastes run toward laughing at idiots, and it sold for a mere rupee when first published. I skimmed through it this weekend. It has not improved with age.
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Saturday, March 29, 2025
A Margarita and a Toast
The second to last picture I have of my mom was taken just a couple of weeks before she died.
She was in hospice care at that point, five and a half months into a four-to-six month prognosis, and we all knew where things were going. My brother spent a lot of time at her apartment in those last few months, with his family coming down to join him as they could, and we tried to get out there as often as we could manage as well. Between late August of that year, when we took Oliver back to college, and late October, when we cleared out my mom’s apartment, we put over 10,000 miles on the minivan. It was a long couple of months in a lot of ways.
This particular visit was in mid-September. There were a few of us there at the time, and we were just sort of hanging out and talking about not much of anything at all which is the best way to share time as a family, I think. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation turned to this particular topic but at some point my mom said that she’d really like a margarita.
And you know what? Why not. She’s in hospice. We’re not worried about any long-term health implications of anything. Hell, she could have asked for heroin at that point – what would it hurt? Get the lady a margarita. There were none of the component pieces of a margarita in the apartment, though, so I drove down to the nearby State Store (which is how you have to buy alcohol in Pennsylvania) and bought a bottle of margarita mix and a small bottle of tequila to go with it.
They were good margaritas, once we remembered to add ice.
I think we finished the mix that night, and I ended up custody of the tequila. It came home with me, when all was said and done.
We’re not teetotalers in my family but we’re not really much of a drinking bunch either and the little bottle of tequila sat in the closet with all the other alcohol for more than three years after that, biding its time. On our Pre-Tariff Stocking Up Mission a few weeks ago Kim and I discovered a lovely bottle of jalepeño margarita mix that turned out to be quite tasty.
We finished up the little bottle of tequila tonight.
It’s good to use things as they were intended. Food and drinks are meant to be consumed, after all. But you should not do this mindlessly. Sometimes you have to pause and remember.
Cheers to you, mom.
She was in hospice care at that point, five and a half months into a four-to-six month prognosis, and we all knew where things were going. My brother spent a lot of time at her apartment in those last few months, with his family coming down to join him as they could, and we tried to get out there as often as we could manage as well. Between late August of that year, when we took Oliver back to college, and late October, when we cleared out my mom’s apartment, we put over 10,000 miles on the minivan. It was a long couple of months in a lot of ways.
This particular visit was in mid-September. There were a few of us there at the time, and we were just sort of hanging out and talking about not much of anything at all which is the best way to share time as a family, I think. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation turned to this particular topic but at some point my mom said that she’d really like a margarita.
And you know what? Why not. She’s in hospice. We’re not worried about any long-term health implications of anything. Hell, she could have asked for heroin at that point – what would it hurt? Get the lady a margarita. There were none of the component pieces of a margarita in the apartment, though, so I drove down to the nearby State Store (which is how you have to buy alcohol in Pennsylvania) and bought a bottle of margarita mix and a small bottle of tequila to go with it.
They were good margaritas, once we remembered to add ice.
I think we finished the mix that night, and I ended up custody of the tequila. It came home with me, when all was said and done.
We’re not teetotalers in my family but we’re not really much of a drinking bunch either and the little bottle of tequila sat in the closet with all the other alcohol for more than three years after that, biding its time. On our Pre-Tariff Stocking Up Mission a few weeks ago Kim and I discovered a lovely bottle of jalepeño margarita mix that turned out to be quite tasty.
We finished up the little bottle of tequila tonight.
It’s good to use things as they were intended. Food and drinks are meant to be consumed, after all. But you should not do this mindlessly. Sometimes you have to pause and remember.
Cheers to you, mom.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Organizing Saved Things
Sometimes you just need a pointless little project to get through the days.
I have an Instagram account. I’ve never actually posted anything to it because I have enough social media presence in my life without it and I’m not entirely sure what I would put there anyway, but it is a fun little account to lurk on. Mostly I follow accounts from friends and family, vintage photography, random musicians and Bake Off contestants, and meme pages because they amuse me, and whenever I find something that seems worth saving I’ll check the little ribbon-shaped box that tells Instagram to put it in my Saved folder.
I’ve been doing that for a while now, in fact, and I’ve reached the point where I no longer remember what’s there. This can be annoying when I come up on a situation where I think, “I have just the perfect meme/photo/whatever for that!” and then I can’t find it because there’s no search feature that I’ve ever noticed.
So I’ve decided to go through all of my saved images and download them onto my computer so I can organize them and find them when I want to do so. And yes, I am fully aware of how that sounds. Thanks for noticing.
I like this project because it has nothing at all to do with the current maelstrom of American politics. It is a nice break, and if it is ultimately kind of a nonsensical thing to do then, well, we need those now and then. I’m finding all sorts of things that I’d forgotten about and that makes me happy, so perhaps it’s not such a pointless project after all.
The thing about Instagram is that you can’t actually download anything from it – you have to screenshot anything you want to save – and this in turn means you have to name every file. My general plan has been to try to name things the way I think I’d search for them in the future – “If I wanted to find this again, how would I look it up?” And so far, I have to say, I’m doing a pretty good job of this. I’ve been saving those images for a long time now, and there are a lot of duplicates from when I’d forgotten I’d already saved something, and very often I go to put something in one of the various folders where I’m saving them and I get a notice that says “You already have a file with that exact seven-word phrase as its title, moron” although the last word is usually more implied than stated. Usually. And I go and check and, yep, there it is. I find this reassuring in a vague sort of way. That is indeed how I’d look for that image.
And yes, there are folders. Of course there are. Anyone who would embark on this sort of project is naturally going to have folders to put things in. I wrote a dissertation once. If that process teaches you anything it is that most of life is just organizing information. Also, that having a niche interest can be monetized for certain values of money that do not include a lot of it, but that’s a separate issue.
The biggest folder, of course, is the one that has all the images that I found funny because that was the whole purpose behind all this. I’ve trained Instagram’s little algorithm to show me mostly things that would fit into this category as well, so it’s kind of self-fulfilling. So I often find myself cackling maniacally over something that I’d forgotten about that I’m probably the only person in a fifty mile radius who finds it amusing but I’m okay with that.
This, for example:
I have an Instagram account. I’ve never actually posted anything to it because I have enough social media presence in my life without it and I’m not entirely sure what I would put there anyway, but it is a fun little account to lurk on. Mostly I follow accounts from friends and family, vintage photography, random musicians and Bake Off contestants, and meme pages because they amuse me, and whenever I find something that seems worth saving I’ll check the little ribbon-shaped box that tells Instagram to put it in my Saved folder.
I’ve been doing that for a while now, in fact, and I’ve reached the point where I no longer remember what’s there. This can be annoying when I come up on a situation where I think, “I have just the perfect meme/photo/whatever for that!” and then I can’t find it because there’s no search feature that I’ve ever noticed.
So I’ve decided to go through all of my saved images and download them onto my computer so I can organize them and find them when I want to do so. And yes, I am fully aware of how that sounds. Thanks for noticing.
I like this project because it has nothing at all to do with the current maelstrom of American politics. It is a nice break, and if it is ultimately kind of a nonsensical thing to do then, well, we need those now and then. I’m finding all sorts of things that I’d forgotten about and that makes me happy, so perhaps it’s not such a pointless project after all.
The thing about Instagram is that you can’t actually download anything from it – you have to screenshot anything you want to save – and this in turn means you have to name every file. My general plan has been to try to name things the way I think I’d search for them in the future – “If I wanted to find this again, how would I look it up?” And so far, I have to say, I’m doing a pretty good job of this. I’ve been saving those images for a long time now, and there are a lot of duplicates from when I’d forgotten I’d already saved something, and very often I go to put something in one of the various folders where I’m saving them and I get a notice that says “You already have a file with that exact seven-word phrase as its title, moron” although the last word is usually more implied than stated. Usually. And I go and check and, yep, there it is. I find this reassuring in a vague sort of way. That is indeed how I’d look for that image.
And yes, there are folders. Of course there are. Anyone who would embark on this sort of project is naturally going to have folders to put things in. I wrote a dissertation once. If that process teaches you anything it is that most of life is just organizing information. Also, that having a niche interest can be monetized for certain values of money that do not include a lot of it, but that’s a separate issue.
The biggest folder, of course, is the one that has all the images that I found funny because that was the whole purpose behind all this. I’ve trained Instagram’s little algorithm to show me mostly things that would fit into this category as well, so it’s kind of self-fulfilling. So I often find myself cackling maniacally over something that I’d forgotten about that I’m probably the only person in a fifty mile radius who finds it amusing but I’m okay with that.
This, for example:
Or any of these:
There’s another folder for things that I found thought-provoking. Most of them are rather long so I’m not going to put them in here, but some are fairly concise.
Like this one:
Or these:
I’ve also saved a whole pile of images that I might use for the PowerPoint slides for classes I teach, or simply because I like old photos.
I just missed being able to put this one into the slides for the Great Depression. I do mention the Dust Bowl, but I don’t think students really grasp what that meant until they see it.
Sometimes the photos are illuminating in a historical way.
And sometimes I like them because they’re just a little absurd and one of the things that students forget very easily is that historical people were just people and they weren’t always serious and they didn’t always do serious things.
I’ve got another folder for historical memes that I might, perhaps, put at the end of the exams I give because you need something funny to get through an exam. Most of the images in that folder are not really the sorts of things I can use without somebody getting all frowny-face at me in a humorless legal sort of way, but I can amuse myself anyway. These I might actually use someday.
And there’s a folder just for photographs that I found interesting for no other reason than I found them interesting. This one is clearly a composite image, but it is striking nonetheless.
We all need our projects.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Doing Our Part
Kim, Oliver , and I went down to City Hall to vote today.
It’s an important election here in Wisconsin, which you can tell by the fact that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting to buy it. He’s sunk over twenty million dollars into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race – the equivalent of about ten bucks to you and me, but a significant amount of coin for what is supposed to be a nonpartisan judicial race – in order to buy a seat for the right-wing candidate and return the court to where it was a few years ago: a reliable rubber stamp for whatever Teabagger nonsense the brutally gerrymandered Wisconsin legislature cared to propose in defiance of morality, common sense, and (surprisingly often) the desires of their own voters, many of whom are not nearly as far out on the edges of right-wing extremism as their purported representatives are.
There’s also a statewide race for the Superintendent of Public Education – a post formerly held by the current governor, and a race which features the current incumbent Jill Underly running against a paid lobbyist for private schools. The challenger tried to lie about that in a recent softball interview with one of those pet “news” outlets on the right but couldn’t even keep up that pretense for ten seconds (literally) before backtracking and declaring that yes, indeed, she was exactly the paid lobbyist everyone knows she is and therefore not an appropriate person to lead the state’s public schools since she’s been working to destroy them for a while now.
We also had some City Council races and some slots open for the local school board, and those are also critical because it’s at that level that the world is run. My general tactic for those races is to go to the local GOP website, find out who they endorse, and then cross those people off my list because honestly a two-pound bag of carrots would do a better job of promoting the public interest than anyone the Republican Party favors these days. Having done that I then have to choose from whoever remains, which is a bit more challenging, granted, but not all that hard once you get down to doing a bit of research.
The actual election isn’t until a week from now, but the State of Wisconsin opens things up for in-person early voting a week or two in advance and it’s easier just to do that than deal with the crowds that will appear on election day. Not that election day crowds are a bad thing unless you’re actively working toward the death of American democracy in which case Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has a job opening for you. It’s just easier this way.
Honestly, I suspect this may be the last free election I ever get to vote in, given the accelerating path of the United States toward Fascist dictatorship. Can’t miss out on that, now, can we?
It’s a pretty painless process, for all that. You go to the City Hall and find your way to the big room where the volunteers running the voting are stashed. You provide proof that you have paid your unconstitutional poll tax and possess the state-sanctioned qualifications of a voter, and they check you off their list, though for some reason they can never find me the first time and I have to suggest alternate ways to look me up until they do – apparently this is something that happened the first time I registered to vote here in Our Little Town back in the mid-90s and is now uncorrectable. They hand you a big cardstock ballot, the kind that can’t be hacked by some feral teenager working for DOGE. You take it to one of the little privacy stations and fill it out, put it in an envelope, and then you take it to the volunteer at the other end of the room from where you got it and they seal the envelope, have you sign it, and wish you a good day.
Sometimes you get a sticker, and today was one of those days.
With any luck, Justice Susan Crawford will be seated on the Court soon and there will be at least a chance that Wisconsin can resist the general tide of authoritarianism that is engulfing this nation. Given my general history in elections and the express hostility to free and fair elections that has become standard on the American right these days I’m not all that confident of that, but you do what you can when you can with what you’ve got.
I did my part.
It’s an important election here in Wisconsin, which you can tell by the fact that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting to buy it. He’s sunk over twenty million dollars into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race – the equivalent of about ten bucks to you and me, but a significant amount of coin for what is supposed to be a nonpartisan judicial race – in order to buy a seat for the right-wing candidate and return the court to where it was a few years ago: a reliable rubber stamp for whatever Teabagger nonsense the brutally gerrymandered Wisconsin legislature cared to propose in defiance of morality, common sense, and (surprisingly often) the desires of their own voters, many of whom are not nearly as far out on the edges of right-wing extremism as their purported representatives are.
There’s also a statewide race for the Superintendent of Public Education – a post formerly held by the current governor, and a race which features the current incumbent Jill Underly running against a paid lobbyist for private schools. The challenger tried to lie about that in a recent softball interview with one of those pet “news” outlets on the right but couldn’t even keep up that pretense for ten seconds (literally) before backtracking and declaring that yes, indeed, she was exactly the paid lobbyist everyone knows she is and therefore not an appropriate person to lead the state’s public schools since she’s been working to destroy them for a while now.
We also had some City Council races and some slots open for the local school board, and those are also critical because it’s at that level that the world is run. My general tactic for those races is to go to the local GOP website, find out who they endorse, and then cross those people off my list because honestly a two-pound bag of carrots would do a better job of promoting the public interest than anyone the Republican Party favors these days. Having done that I then have to choose from whoever remains, which is a bit more challenging, granted, but not all that hard once you get down to doing a bit of research.
The actual election isn’t until a week from now, but the State of Wisconsin opens things up for in-person early voting a week or two in advance and it’s easier just to do that than deal with the crowds that will appear on election day. Not that election day crowds are a bad thing unless you’re actively working toward the death of American democracy in which case Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has a job opening for you. It’s just easier this way.
Honestly, I suspect this may be the last free election I ever get to vote in, given the accelerating path of the United States toward Fascist dictatorship. Can’t miss out on that, now, can we?
It’s a pretty painless process, for all that. You go to the City Hall and find your way to the big room where the volunteers running the voting are stashed. You provide proof that you have paid your unconstitutional poll tax and possess the state-sanctioned qualifications of a voter, and they check you off their list, though for some reason they can never find me the first time and I have to suggest alternate ways to look me up until they do – apparently this is something that happened the first time I registered to vote here in Our Little Town back in the mid-90s and is now uncorrectable. They hand you a big cardstock ballot, the kind that can’t be hacked by some feral teenager working for DOGE. You take it to one of the little privacy stations and fill it out, put it in an envelope, and then you take it to the volunteer at the other end of the room from where you got it and they seal the envelope, have you sign it, and wish you a good day.
Sometimes you get a sticker, and today was one of those days.
With any luck, Justice Susan Crawford will be seated on the Court soon and there will be at least a chance that Wisconsin can resist the general tide of authoritarianism that is engulfing this nation. Given my general history in elections and the express hostility to free and fair elections that has become standard on the American right these days I’m not all that confident of that, but you do what you can when you can with what you’ve got.
I did my part.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Further Dispatches From the Coup
With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!
My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.
--
1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s plans to install himself as Dictator For Life are proceeding at a breakneck pace and if you’re not infuriated by the dismantling of the American republic you are either kidding yourself or part of the plot.
2. One of the defining features of Fascist state is the fact that loyalty to the Dear Leader is the only criteria for any job in government, and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been cutting a path through the federal government firing anyone he sees as having any independent existence other than his will. For example, he recently fired the two Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, in violation of the federal law governing appointees to that body and the 1935 Supreme Court precedent upholding that law. FTC appointees cannot be fired by presidents, period. The FTC enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws and cannot legally have more than three of its five commissioners of the same party, but laws and citizens mean nothing to Fascists and so here we are.
3. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also declared that the pardons issued by Joe Biden at the end of his administration – pardons explicitly designed to shield Americans who had spoken out against the crimes of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves – were null and void because they were signed by an autopen, which is frankly the dumbest thing he’s said this year and there is some pretty stiff competition for that title. First of all, how things are signed is completely irrelevant. Biden declared they were his pardons, and that’s all that matters. Second, no lawfully given presidential pardon can be repealed under the Constitution. There are limits to who can receive a pardon – a president cannot pardon anyone for state or local crimes, only federal crimes, and no president can pardon himself as that is a bedrock foundation of Anglo-American law going back centuries – but such limits do not apply here. All that is happening is that a wildly out-of-control rogue president is claiming absolute power he does not legally have, and we’ll just throw that on the large and ever-growing pile of impeachable offenses that an actual Congress would have acted on by now.
4. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump continues to impound funds expressly approved by Congress, in violation of both multiple court orders and the entire Separation of Powers enshrined in the Constitution, which alone is reason to have him removed from office on a rail and dropped into a holding cell somewhere in the desert.
5. J. Michael Luttig – a former mentor to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and one of the most conservative judges on the bench during his time as a federal judge, though now retired – has put it plainly. “The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America. In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system, and the nation’s legal profession. … America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment.” There is a difference between a conservative and a right-winger, and while I suspect that I would have disagreed with most of Luttig’s judicial decisions I respect him as a conservative mind and not a right-wing extremist. When people like him are sounding alarm bells, the situation is dire.
6. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump along with Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, are following along the checklist of tyrants, as Robert Reich points out. Are we great yet?
My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.
--
1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s plans to install himself as Dictator For Life are proceeding at a breakneck pace and if you’re not infuriated by the dismantling of the American republic you are either kidding yourself or part of the plot.
2. One of the defining features of Fascist state is the fact that loyalty to the Dear Leader is the only criteria for any job in government, and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been cutting a path through the federal government firing anyone he sees as having any independent existence other than his will. For example, he recently fired the two Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, in violation of the federal law governing appointees to that body and the 1935 Supreme Court precedent upholding that law. FTC appointees cannot be fired by presidents, period. The FTC enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws and cannot legally have more than three of its five commissioners of the same party, but laws and citizens mean nothing to Fascists and so here we are.
3. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also declared that the pardons issued by Joe Biden at the end of his administration – pardons explicitly designed to shield Americans who had spoken out against the crimes of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves – were null and void because they were signed by an autopen, which is frankly the dumbest thing he’s said this year and there is some pretty stiff competition for that title. First of all, how things are signed is completely irrelevant. Biden declared they were his pardons, and that’s all that matters. Second, no lawfully given presidential pardon can be repealed under the Constitution. There are limits to who can receive a pardon – a president cannot pardon anyone for state or local crimes, only federal crimes, and no president can pardon himself as that is a bedrock foundation of Anglo-American law going back centuries – but such limits do not apply here. All that is happening is that a wildly out-of-control rogue president is claiming absolute power he does not legally have, and we’ll just throw that on the large and ever-growing pile of impeachable offenses that an actual Congress would have acted on by now.
4. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump continues to impound funds expressly approved by Congress, in violation of both multiple court orders and the entire Separation of Powers enshrined in the Constitution, which alone is reason to have him removed from office on a rail and dropped into a holding cell somewhere in the desert.
5. J. Michael Luttig – a former mentor to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and one of the most conservative judges on the bench during his time as a federal judge, though now retired – has put it plainly. “The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America. In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system, and the nation’s legal profession. … America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment.” There is a difference between a conservative and a right-winger, and while I suspect that I would have disagreed with most of Luttig’s judicial decisions I respect him as a conservative mind and not a right-wing extremist. When people like him are sounding alarm bells, the situation is dire.
6. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump along with Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, are following along the checklist of tyrants, as Robert Reich points out. Are we great yet?
7. And why is anyone surprised?
8. Another obvious sign of tyranny is the fawning sycophancy that it engenders among the gutless cowards to latch onto it as a way to protect themselves and promote their own ambitions and petty hatreds. This has been abundantly clear among the GOP faithful as a once-proud party has degenerated into a personality cult for the worst person on earth. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) last month introduced a bill to make Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s birthday a national holiday – something generally reserved for kings or the dead. Brandon Gill (R-TX) introduced a bill earlier this month to put Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump on the $100 bill, displacing Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. Legally, only dead people can be put on US stamps or currency, so this may be an idea I can actually support. And perhaps my favorite FAFO moment of all of this lunacy came when a bunch of GOP state senators in Minnesota led by Justin Eichorn introduced a bill to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” – i.e. any criticism of the Dear Leader for anything regardless of objective evidence – as a mental illness, which would allow state Republicans to institutionalize anyone who dissents from the Dear Leader’s agenda. Later that same day Eichorn was arrested for soliciting sex with a minor, joining the long list of Republican pedophiles lecturing the rest of us on morality and patriotism. Eichorn resigned from the Minnesota Senate before he could be expelled.
9. Another sign of a tyrant trying to shift a country away from democracy is that they seek to control every aspect of elections so as to guarantee their power, and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves are doing precisely that. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump fired Ellen Weintraub, one of the Commissioners of the Federal Election Commission, without cause – something no other president has ever done, probably because it’s illegal. This is an attempt to stack the FEC with loyalists and weaponize it against anyone who opposes him. He’s also planning to dissolve the independent leadership of the US Postal System – which handles mail-in ballots – and incorporate that into the Department of Commerce under his control. This administration has also gutted electoral security programs designed to protect against foreign (hello, Putin!) interference in American elections, stripped federal funding for systems that alert state and local officials of election threats, and disbanded the FBI special unit tasked with confronting foreign threats to elections. He has taken over control of the Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting equipment and determines what standards it should have for security. And he’s weaponized the Department of Justice into his own personal vendetta-pursuing machine, ordering it to drop voting rights lawsuits against Texas, Virginia, and Alabama (all red states) and withdraw from a lawsuit against Louisiana’s rampant gerrymandering. As we learned in Wisconsin during the reign of Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries), if you control the elections you determine the results. Watch your back.
10. If you think that’s hypothetical, notice what’s going on in North Carolina, which hasn’t been a democracy in over a decade. GOP candidate for State Supreme Court Jefferson Griffin lost the popular election by 734 votes – a result confirmed by two separate recounts – but has now decided that he deserves the seat anyway because he’s a white man and his opponent wasn’t and the best way to ratify that would be to retroactively disqualify 65,000 North Carolina voters because “the right to vote is not absolute.” Over 200 North Carolina jurists, attorneys, state government officials, bar leaders, and legal educators have publicly called on Griffen to knock this stupid shit off, grow up, and accept that he lost, but so far he has refused. The Republican National Committee has also refused and has its own separate lawsuit trying to do the same thing for the same reasons. Your vote only counts if it supports the GOP, apparently.
11. Perhaps the scariest feature of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s regime’s increasingly arrogant slide into dictatorship is their insistence that they can just disappear people from the streets. Remember, they tried this the last time, back in 2020, when faced with American citizens exercising their Constitutionally protected right to protest their government – jackbooted thugs were grabbing people off the streets and shoving them into unmarked vehicles that summer, which most Americans seem to have forgotten – and they’re back at it. Right now the most well-known example (and remember, the whole point of this exercise is that you, the American public, will NOT know when people get disappeared) is Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University who has a green card entitling him to all of the legal protections of American citizens, and yes I discussed this last time but it is worth revisiting his case just because it is that important. Khalil was a leader in the protests against the Israeli government’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza last summer, and this month ICE agents broke into his home and arrested him in front of his pregnant wife. It took days of intense media attention to determine that he had been taken to a holding facility in Louisiana where he faces deportation under the express orders of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. At no point has the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump accused Khalil of breaking any law – they simply objected to his position against war crimes and decided they could just make him disappear. They also decided that they could just randomly revoke his green card because Reasons – an outright lie and another indication that this rogue regime will not follow either laws or Constitution if they decide they don’t like someone. And if they can do that to him, my fellow citizen, they can do that to you. You are not safe. You should stop pretending you are.
12. This regime also insists that it can deport people anytime they want for any reason they want or even for no reason at all, a willful violation of law, morals, and Constitution. It leads them to do stupid and immoral things, such as deporting a 10-year-old American citizen recovering from brain cancer, on her way to an emergency visit to her doctors in Texas. Her family are not citizens, but with letters from lawyers and their daughter’s doctors they had been able to enter the country and take their daughter for medical treatment. Nobody in this story has any criminal record whatsoever, so the harpies and mouth-breathers who invariably try to make that case can fuck off now. Seriously, this is what happens when cruelty is the heart of your agenda.
13. They also deported a kidney transplant surgeon at Brown University – a highly specialized medical professional who had a valid visa to be in the United States – despite a judge’s order halting any such action. Defiance of court orders is a running theme here – keep it in mind
14. They also deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants despite another court order forbidding any such thing. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump asserts that he cannot be stopped from doing these things – a criminal assertion that should be added to the large and growing pile of impeachable offenses referred to earlier in this post. The administration has claimed that they were gang members – something Venezuela has confirmed is a lie – and therefore he can deport them under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same law that was used to justify the forced incarceration of Japanese-American civilians in WWII. The Alien Enemies Act was passed by Federalists as a partisan effort to deny Democratic Republicans support and it has continued to be a favorite among lawless politicians ever since.
15. While we’re on the subject, ICE (“America’s Gestapo!”) rounded up 48 undocumented immigrants on March 12 and nobody knows what happened to them. The regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not identified any of them or where they are or what conditions they are being held in. They have simply been disappeared, the way any unfortunate people who crossed a dictator would be. Folks, this is blisteringly immoral and violates both US and international law. And you could very well be next if you’re not careful.
16. Meanwhile, tourists – yes, there are still people brave enough to try to come here despite our Fascist government – are also being disappeared or just blocked from coming into the US. Becky Burke, a UK citizen on a backpacking trip, was held for 19 days, chained by her legs, waist, and wrist, without anyone being aware of her location for most of it. Jessica Brösche, a German tourist, was held for over a month – including 8 days in solitary confinement – despite having a valid passport, visa, and return flight booking. And a French scientist traveling to a conference in Houston was stopped at the border and had his phone searched, and when they found messages critical of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s science policies they refused to let him in. Read that again – they’re denying entry to people based on their opinion of the Dear Leader. Why France, Germany, and the UK haven’t cut diplomatic relations with the US is an interesting question. It’s been done for less.
17. Also, why people would want to keep coming here is another interesting question, because increasingly they’re not. Tourism is already down significantly since January 20, as many Europeans are canceling trips out of fears they might be unlawfully detained. Chinese tourism is down 11%. Canadian tourism is down by either 13% if you count air travel or 23% if you look at vehicle crossings – about 15% overall. Tourism overall is expected to fall by 5% this year, a total cost of $64 billion dollars in lost revenue – this from an initial outlook before Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump took over that anticipated a 9% growth in US tourism. That’s a turnaround of -14% if you’re not good with math. This happened during the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump too, but not so quickly and not with such obvious justification. Honestly, I don’t blame people at all for not wanting to take a chance coming here while this petit-Fascist regime is in power.
18. Meanwhile the oncoming economic recession means that Americans are not going to make up that difference by traveling around the US. Are we great yet? Asking for a friend in the hospitality industry.
19. One positive sign is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are getting their collective ass handed to them by the courts. Federal judges – many of them appointed by the Convicted Felon himself in his first go-round, so you know they’re right-wing as hell – have blocked dozens of the illegal Executive Orders that our wannabe king has issues from his gold-plated throne, 46 of them as of March 21. They’ve overturned the attempt to suspend the US Refugee Admissions program. They’ve overturned the “blatantly unconstitutional” attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by fiat (“Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It boggles my mind,” said the judge in that case). They’ve overturned the order to fire every single female agency head. It’s pretty much been a massacre, and deservedly so.
20. The judge who shot down Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s plan to ban trans people in the military was particularly unforgiving of this illegal nonsense, it has to be said. “The military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext,” she wrote. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.” The entire case presented by the regime “egregiously misquotes studies and ignores data.” If you’ve ever read a judicial opinion, you will know that they are almost always written with a restraint that requires you to read carefully to see any hint of anger but this? This judge is ready to burn them all down over such willfully illegal and immoral conduct, and it’s good to see.
21. This has also been the case regarding the regime’s illegal deportations, which have uniformly been ordered halted by judges hearing those cases – often scathingly. The chief judge for the US District Court in Washington DC has barred the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act and demanded that all such deportations be halted, which would bring the regime into compliance with the law and Constitution if obeyed.
22. But they’re not obeying, and that’s the problem. Chief Border Lackey Tom Homan actually stated publicly, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” And the rest of the administration has followed suit. Folks, this is a Constitution crisis of the first order. When one branch of the government refuses to recognize the Constitutional authority of another it is a direct assault on the republic. The Founding Fathers understood that the branch most likely to do that was the Executive, and that when the Executive stomped on the Legislature (by refusing to recognize that Congress and Congress only has the right to determine what federal money gets spent where) or the Judiciary (by refusing to obey court orders) that is tyranny. The Founders wrote the Constitution to prevent this, but it will only work if we make it work.
23. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are calling for the impeachment of any judge who dares uphold the law and the Constitution because that’s what tyrants do. Tyrants, historically, don’t tend to end well, though.
24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is also attacking the lawyers who work to defend the people he’s assaulting, a clear attempt to intimidate his opponents into silence by weaponizing the federal government against them. You know, folks, when Shakespeare wrote “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” it wasn’t meant as something a hero would say. It was the sentiment of a tyrant getting rid of any effective opposition.
25. Here in Wisconsin we’re having another election for our Supreme Court, and there are two candidates left – a far-right extremist and a Democrat. The extremist, naturally, has found a happy ally in Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk who has spent over $20 million to get him installed onto the court where he can block any number of lawsuits aimed at Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk. The Unelected One has also publicly offered $100 to every voter who would support his pet, which last time I checked is illegal. Wisconsin, do not let that soulless automaton purchase your Supreme Court as a trophy – not if you want to survive. Vote for Crawford.
26. Is it just me or is there a real whiff of 1935 Germany in the air here in the Land of the Free (tm)? PZ Myers, in his blog Pharyngula, has outlined the historical stage we’re in as Gleichschaltung, a term that usually gets translated as coordination or consolidation, as the totalitarians in power use the authority of the state to shift loyalty away from the constitutional state and toward the Leader. It’s designed to unnerve the institutions that have served the nation and force them to comply with the diktats of the Leader instead. It’s designed to isolate people, take them away from their support networks, and make them easy targets. To resist, we must stand firm and keep focused. As always, do not obey in advance, and if possible do not obey at all. If we wish to avoid the fate of Germany, we should heed the lessons it offers. Thanks to Lucy for the head's up on on Myers' blog post, by the way.
27. In case you think I’m exaggerating, remember that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk sent out something on his very own Xitter about how Hitler wasn’t to blame for the Holocaust – that was the public service workers. And it’s surely just a coincidence that public service workers are so far the most effective opposition to the radical agenda being pursued by Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, right?
28. A little history lesson.
29. If you want to institute a dictatorship, one of the first things you have to do is crack down on education because educated people are notoriously difficult to herd. And this is precisely what you are seeing now, as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves engage in an all-out assault on American universities. They have cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from universities to punish them for daring to hold differing opinions or do things the Dear Leader disapproves of – the University of Pennsylvania, for example, was denied over a hundred million dollars in grants it had already won because there had been a trans woman on the university swim team three years ago. Please note that this student doesn’t even attend Penn anymore. It is enough that she did at one time. They are cutting scientific research. And this past week they tried to destroy the Department of Education, which doesn’t do most of what people think it does (it has no control over state education curricula, for example). Instead it funds student aid through grants and loans. It funds programs that help students graduate from college so they can get better jobs. It helps universities create the kind of educated citizenry that the Founding Fathers understood was critical to the survival of the republic. Tyrants always crush education. When you see education under siege, you should get very worried and very angry.
30. The Department of Education also has an important role in protecting students’ civil rights and providing funding for poor districts, and if you think that’s not why they hate it so much you should think again.
31. Meanwhile the right-wing project of turning the US into an explicitly white supremacist state is continuing to move forward with this administration. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump recently lifted the ban on federal contractors having segregated facilities, so we can all move back to Jim Crow America with confidence. Don’t you want “separate but equal” facilities, citizen? Move along.
32. This white supremacist project has been most obvious in the extreme purges currently taking place on federal websites, notably the Defense Department’s pages. They took down Jackie Robinson’s page. They took down the page for the Navajo Code Talkers who were instrumental in the Pacific Theater – the US Marine Corps acknowledged that they could not have taken Iwo Jima, for example, without them. They took down the photos of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima because it was named after the pilot’s mother – Enola Gay – and the word “gay” was apparently too much for their tiny minds to handle. They took down all mention of the 442nd, the most decorated combat unit in the entire US military during WWII, because it was mainly composed of Japanese-Americans. They took down any evidence of women in the military, or blacks. And yes, this was deliberate.
33. They also took down all of the websites for the Medal of Honor soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The Medal of Honor is the highest award this country gives, and it is given to military personnel who have demonstrated extraordinary heroism under fire. For President Bone Spurs and his Chicken Hawk Brigade to dishonor these veterans like that is unforgivable.
34 Meanwhile the recession is coming. Remember, when 2024 ended the US economy was the envy of the world. Under Biden the US had rebuilt its economy more quickly and on a more stable footing than any industrialized economy in the world after COVID. The US economy was, according to such liberal rags as The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, “the envy of the world.” And it took Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves less than two months to destroy that. Every economic indicator is blinking red now. The stock markets are, depending on which index you look at, either in correction territory or in full-on bear market territory. Banks are pulling back on loans and other credit. Consumer confidence has tanked. Of course Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is saying that it won’t be a problem when the economy crashes. It won’t to him, of course. But for you? Yeah, probably will. You’ve been warned.
35. One of the key factors leading up to this economic crash is the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s policies have made the US such an unstable place to put money that investment money is flowing to other places. Bruce Kasman, JP Morgan’s chief economist, notes that “The US seems to have established itself as a place where people can be comfortable about the rule of law … comfortable about the integrity of information flow, and they can be comfortable that the government isn’t going to be, in unexpected ways, getting involved in the rules of the game. The term which has been in place for a very long time is that we have “exorbitant privilege.” That we end up paying a much lower cost for financing our deficits and debt, we have much greater capital flows and attractiveness of the dollar and assets because of these things. The risk that that stuff starts to come under pressure and becomes a structural issue in the markets is not something I would, by any means, underplay.” In other words, once investors lose trust in the US because of the erratic and harmful policies being implemented by the current regime, that trust will take decades to recover if it can recover at all and in the meantime investment will go elsewhere, our costs will go up, and our economy will suffer. And so will you.
36. And this is why the open assaults on Social Security are going to be so painful if they succeed. Right now Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his band of feral teenagers are demanding access to all of the data in the Social Security system, a catastrophic breach of federal law that would damage both the economy and US national security for decades. Their efforts have so far been rejected by the courts, and in response the current director of Social Security has threatened to shut down the entire program. Think about that. I hope your grandmother is independently wealthy, because this administration is working to steal all of the money she put into that system for her retirement.
37. And while that’s going on the measles outbreaks continue to spread. Measles is a highly contagious disease that is fully capable of killing people and we’d nearly had it eradicated before the halfwit antivaxxers reared their idiot heads and declared that they’d rather see their children die than get vaccinated against the disease. Which of course, given how contagious it is, means that they’d be perfectly happy to see your children die too. And that’s what’s happening. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert “Brain Worms” Kennedy Jr. advises you to do your own thing, which is at least consistent with a man who has been brain damaged. He needs to stop advocating cod liver oil, dietary changes, or other nonsense as preventatives. Seriously – is there any part of this administration that isn’t an embarrassment?
38. Remind me of their priorities again?
39. Of course this is the same administration that is currently working to halt all research into mRNA vaccines – you know, the ones that brought the COVID pandemic under control and the ones that are currently nearing breakthroughs in curing some forms of cancer? The cruelty is the point with these soulless assholes.
40. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy continues to be catastrophic for the US. NATO has formally told him to shove his plans for conquering Greenland up his ass, and at least one member of the French Parliament has demanded the return of the Statue of Liberty since the US was clearly no longer an appropriate place for it. When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s amateur press secretary responded to that by chortling about how the French should be grateful to the US or they’d be speaking German right now, the French MP – Raphaël Gluckmann – noted the gratitude the French have and have always had regarding the US actions in WWII but pointed out that the current administration has more in common with the Nazis they fought than they do with the Americans who served in that war. “The America of those heroes fought against tyrants,” he said. “It did not flatter them. It was the enemy of Fascism, not the friend of Putin. It helped the resistance and did not attack Zelensky. It celebrated science and didn’t fire researchers for using banned words. It welcomed the persecuted and didn’t target them. It was far, so far, from what your current President does, says, and embodies.” Put some ice on that burn, Donnie. You’ve just been owned.
41. In these dark times, remember that false idols prey on the unwary and do not send your devotions to those who would harm you and everyone you love.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
News and Updates
1. I keep trying to quarantine the political things to one more or less weekly post but damn those fuckwits make that hard. Every day is a new world of cruelty, lawlessness, arrogance, and destruction. When historians finally get a chance to write about this year – if there are any historians left and anyone to write it for when this year is over – there will not be enough obscenities in the language to encompass the sheer disgust that anyone with more than five working brain cells and even a rudimentary moral code should have in reaction to it all. I remember once, as a fairly small child, watching some terrible made-for-tv movie in the 1970s about the Lincoln assassination and at one point one of the prison guards watching over the convicted conspirators pointed to them and growled at another character, “There’s more bodies than souls in this world.” That line has stuck with me for over half a century, and the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has certainly proven it correct many times over.
2. But life goes on and we do the best we can. Even as the world ends, there are flowers.
3. Kim and I have begun the project of trying to clear out at least some of the nonsense in our basement. I don’t really want to do this – I would much rather just leave things be and stare aimlessly at the walls – but it has to be done so we get on with it. We’re going to try to spend a couple of hours every weekend on it and this weekend was our start. I picked my own little corner of the basement and decided that, nearly a quarter century after being awarded my PhD and only a few years away from what one hopes will be my retirement, I am not likely ever to revise my dissertation into anything that a publisher would want to see. So the recycling bin is about 2/3 filled with old paper now, and I’m not going to add any more until it gets emptied because paper is just finely sliced lumber and it gets heavy quickly. It was sad but kind of cathartic to see all those drafts and notes disappear. I’ve still got about that much left to get rid of.
4. My back has neither forgotten nor forgiven this and remains unhappy, but unhappiness is the state of things these days so it can just take a number and get in line.
5. What’s really kind of pathetic is that I genuinely can’t tell that anything has been removed just by looking. This is going to be a very long-term project, but so it goes. A few years ago, when Lauren graduated high school and we were worried we might have to move her graduation party into the garage if the weather didn’t hold up, we took everything out of the garage – everything, down to the joists – and piled it in the driveway and then got rid of half of it, donated half of the rest to Goodwill, and put the last bit back. Lauren told us that this was what convinced her we could actually move if we had to. So on to the next step.
6. We bought a wine rack to store our collection of Basilicata reds since it has now outgrown the closet shelf where we used to keep it (a sign that we’re not actually drinking it quickly enough, I suppose), and it arrived this afternoon in a flat-pack box that included a single-sided instruction sheet containing exactly zero actual words. This meant that putting it together was a bit of a trial and error sort of affair but I got it done and set up in the dining room and now the cat is annoyed because it was a bit longer than I thought it would be so her food plate is three feet to the right of where it used to be and that just is not something cats deal with very well, at least not this cat. Maybe we’ll let her have some wine.
7. This is spring break for one of the campuses I work for. Next week is spring break for another. There are thus two half-breaks and no actual breaks and ain’t that just the story of the year.
8. This week has been forever and it’s only Tuesday. If you had told me this afternoon that it was Thursday I would have absolutely believed you.
9. I’m still out there doing my Wordle and posting it to the family text thread, which pretty much identifies me as old though Oliver and Lauren will join me occasionally and sometimes even Kim. It is a nice way of touching base now and then in a busy world. Oliver and I compare notes on the Spelling Bee as well. Nobody but me does the Quordle, but that’s fine. I like to do these three puzzles because then I feel as if I’ve actually won something – a rare feeling in these parlous times – and that’s enough to keep moving forward.
10. If I ever do make it to retirement I have enough projects to last me for decades. I think that’s a good place to be, really. I hope I will get to work on them.
2. But life goes on and we do the best we can. Even as the world ends, there are flowers.
3. Kim and I have begun the project of trying to clear out at least some of the nonsense in our basement. I don’t really want to do this – I would much rather just leave things be and stare aimlessly at the walls – but it has to be done so we get on with it. We’re going to try to spend a couple of hours every weekend on it and this weekend was our start. I picked my own little corner of the basement and decided that, nearly a quarter century after being awarded my PhD and only a few years away from what one hopes will be my retirement, I am not likely ever to revise my dissertation into anything that a publisher would want to see. So the recycling bin is about 2/3 filled with old paper now, and I’m not going to add any more until it gets emptied because paper is just finely sliced lumber and it gets heavy quickly. It was sad but kind of cathartic to see all those drafts and notes disappear. I’ve still got about that much left to get rid of.
4. My back has neither forgotten nor forgiven this and remains unhappy, but unhappiness is the state of things these days so it can just take a number and get in line.
5. What’s really kind of pathetic is that I genuinely can’t tell that anything has been removed just by looking. This is going to be a very long-term project, but so it goes. A few years ago, when Lauren graduated high school and we were worried we might have to move her graduation party into the garage if the weather didn’t hold up, we took everything out of the garage – everything, down to the joists – and piled it in the driveway and then got rid of half of it, donated half of the rest to Goodwill, and put the last bit back. Lauren told us that this was what convinced her we could actually move if we had to. So on to the next step.
6. We bought a wine rack to store our collection of Basilicata reds since it has now outgrown the closet shelf where we used to keep it (a sign that we’re not actually drinking it quickly enough, I suppose), and it arrived this afternoon in a flat-pack box that included a single-sided instruction sheet containing exactly zero actual words. This meant that putting it together was a bit of a trial and error sort of affair but I got it done and set up in the dining room and now the cat is annoyed because it was a bit longer than I thought it would be so her food plate is three feet to the right of where it used to be and that just is not something cats deal with very well, at least not this cat. Maybe we’ll let her have some wine.
7. This is spring break for one of the campuses I work for. Next week is spring break for another. There are thus two half-breaks and no actual breaks and ain’t that just the story of the year.
8. This week has been forever and it’s only Tuesday. If you had told me this afternoon that it was Thursday I would have absolutely believed you.
9. I’m still out there doing my Wordle and posting it to the family text thread, which pretty much identifies me as old though Oliver and Lauren will join me occasionally and sometimes even Kim. It is a nice way of touching base now and then in a busy world. Oliver and I compare notes on the Spelling Bee as well. Nobody but me does the Quordle, but that’s fine. I like to do these three puzzles because then I feel as if I’ve actually won something – a rare feeling in these parlous times – and that’s enough to keep moving forward.
10. If I ever do make it to retirement I have enough projects to last me for decades. I think that’s a good place to be, really. I hope I will get to work on them.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Stocking Up
We went up to the Giant Wine Store yesterday to stock up before Tariff McTariffson decides to reimpose Prohibition in the name of his dimwitted trade war.
This is a strange sort of thing for us, really, as we are not all that much of a drinking group. We ended up with maybe ten bottles of nice mid-range Italian wine – mostly red, almost all from southern Italy (Aglianicos from Basilicata, for example, which have become my favorites of late) – as well as a couple of other non-wine things that struck us as interesting. The wines will likely last us until the end of 2026 at current consumption rates though to be honest the news headlines these days would seem to require more than that just to survive.
It is a strange thing to realize that if you want to have a small treat you have to outwit your own government to do so.
Not that outwitting this crew of nitwits is all that hard, in principle. It just takes a bit of money (and not all that much of that – not one of those wines was more than $20, and since we bought more than eight bottles we got a 15% discount on the lot) and some planning, and if you have any ability to plan you’re one step ahead of the current regime anyway. They seem to careen from snap decision to overreaction to panicked backtracking and back again in a way that I haven’t really had to deal with since before my kids were old enough to go to daycare. Even as toddlers they knew how to plan better than the current administration.
Of course, not everyone has a bit of money in this economy – we are fortunate that way, at least for now, though as educators we do have a big red target on our backs and may well find ourselves either out of work or jailed for daring to teach actual knowledge instead of the white-supremacist-washed propaganda that is fast becoming a requirement. And if the majority of Americans had any ability to plan we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
The Giant Wine Store is a fascinating place, on its own terms. It’s as big as an aircraft hangar, stocks almost but not quite everything alcohol-related that you could possibly want (my vague quest to find chinotto liqueur remains unfulfilled – it’s not exactly a pressing thing, though, more like an unfocused sort of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool?” kind of side quest) and more than a few things that I’m not sure that anyone actually wants (Malort?), and they give you free samples from the moment you walk in the door. Yesterday they were running a deal where if you bought two six-packs of Irish beer they’d give you a free glass and engrave it for you while you waited. The glass will go to one of Lauren’s friends as a gift, and now we have Irish beer. I’m not a beer drinker, so perhaps we’ll have a party.
We celebrated with some Thai food afterward, because there haven’t been any moves to make that illegal yet and it tastes good.
Sláinte!
This is a strange sort of thing for us, really, as we are not all that much of a drinking group. We ended up with maybe ten bottles of nice mid-range Italian wine – mostly red, almost all from southern Italy (Aglianicos from Basilicata, for example, which have become my favorites of late) – as well as a couple of other non-wine things that struck us as interesting. The wines will likely last us until the end of 2026 at current consumption rates though to be honest the news headlines these days would seem to require more than that just to survive.
It is a strange thing to realize that if you want to have a small treat you have to outwit your own government to do so.
Not that outwitting this crew of nitwits is all that hard, in principle. It just takes a bit of money (and not all that much of that – not one of those wines was more than $20, and since we bought more than eight bottles we got a 15% discount on the lot) and some planning, and if you have any ability to plan you’re one step ahead of the current regime anyway. They seem to careen from snap decision to overreaction to panicked backtracking and back again in a way that I haven’t really had to deal with since before my kids were old enough to go to daycare. Even as toddlers they knew how to plan better than the current administration.
Of course, not everyone has a bit of money in this economy – we are fortunate that way, at least for now, though as educators we do have a big red target on our backs and may well find ourselves either out of work or jailed for daring to teach actual knowledge instead of the white-supremacist-washed propaganda that is fast becoming a requirement. And if the majority of Americans had any ability to plan we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
The Giant Wine Store is a fascinating place, on its own terms. It’s as big as an aircraft hangar, stocks almost but not quite everything alcohol-related that you could possibly want (my vague quest to find chinotto liqueur remains unfulfilled – it’s not exactly a pressing thing, though, more like an unfocused sort of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool?” kind of side quest) and more than a few things that I’m not sure that anyone actually wants (Malort?), and they give you free samples from the moment you walk in the door. Yesterday they were running a deal where if you bought two six-packs of Irish beer they’d give you a free glass and engrave it for you while you waited. The glass will go to one of Lauren’s friends as a gift, and now we have Irish beer. I’m not a beer drinker, so perhaps we’ll have a party.
We celebrated with some Thai food afterward, because there haven’t been any moves to make that illegal yet and it tastes good.
Sláinte!
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