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.

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!

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. If you’re not actively infuriated by the deepening spiral into pure unadulterated Fascism that the current regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is imposing on the once-proud United States, you’re deluding yourself. You need to be taking this deadly seriously, as in “this could – and more likely than not will – end in bloodshed that might well affect me personally” seriously. Every article I’ve read from political scientists, military strategists, and intelligence specialists over the last few weeks has explicitly noted that there is only one way this goes and our window to stop it or even slow it down is rapidly closing. Do you want to know why I devote so much space to all of this here? I’d really rather not, you know. It sucks. I’d rather be discussing my own life and opinions because that’s the kind of wild man I am. But this is a fast-moving and potentially catastrophic crisis and I am going to do everything I can to throw sand in its gears, even if most of that is just shouting into the wind.

2. Perhaps the most frightening development of the last week has been the abduction and disappearance of a green-card-holding US resident because he participated in protests that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk disapprove of. Mahmoud Khalil helped to lead protests at Columbia University against the Israeli war crimes in Gaza last year, and for this explicitly the current regime has vowed to deport him without trial. Folks, the First Amendment to the US Constitution – literally the first one, written by James Madison and approved by the Founding Fathers mere months after the Constitution was ratified – explicitly bars the federal government from persecuting people it disagrees with. And if they can disappear a green-card-holder for speaking publicly about an issue, there is nothing to prevent them from doing that to citizens. You are not safe. You have been warned.

3. ICE – “America’s Gestapo!” – summarily declared that Khalil’s green card was revoked, a flatly illegal act. Any change in Khalil’s status has to be done through due process of law, including a hearing before an immigration judge. The idea that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s minions have any authority to unilaterally say otherwise is grotesque and criminal and everyone involved in that decision and action should be jailed.

4. When questioned, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (sic) could not provide any clear justification for why Khalil was arrested beyond the fact that he spoke out on an issue on the opposite side from that which Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves are on. As the Alt National Park Service (a site you should be following) put it, “If the mere act of demonstrating is grounds for arrest and potential deportation, it represents a significant erosion of civil liberties and a step toward authoritarian tactics where individuals are punished for their political beliefs rather than actual crimes.”

5. This, by the way, is the time-tested strategy of dictators. Crush dissent, terrorize citizens and residents who were doing nothing illegal, and make people afraid. If you don’t see where this is going there is no hope for you. None at all.

6. For fuck sake, even Ann Coulter – a right-wing ghoul of long standing – thinks this is unconstitutional. “Isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?” she asked. Credit where due, I suppose. Perhaps other right-wingers will start to realize that the current regime will come for them too if they let it continue.

7. Because we are in a new age of McCarthyism. Did you know that there is an entire list of words that you’re not allowed to use anymore if you work for the federal government, according to this regime? Every last one of them is something that would allow Americans to realize that the world is composed of more than just wealthy straight white men. You’re not allowed to say “belong.” You’re not allowed to say “bias.” You’re not allowed to say “climate science.” You’re not allowed to say “cultural differences.” You’re not allowed to say “diversity.” You’re not allowed to say “female.” You’re not allowed to say “hate speech.” You’re not allowed to say “inclusivity.” You’re not allowed to say “LGBTQ.” You’re not allowed to say “multicultural.” You’re not allowed to say “Native American.” You’re not allowed to say “privilege.” You’re not allowed to say “pronoun” or “race” or “segregation” or “sexuality” or “stereotype” or “transgender” or “traumatic” or “tribal” or “victim” or “women.” Again, the First Amendment is specifically designed to prevent the federal government from doing any of this, not that this Fascist regime seems to notice or care.

8. Part of this censorship here in the Land of the Free (tm) is that the current regime is actively scrubbing historical archives of any hint that there were anything other than straight white men at any point in American history. This photo, of black women soldiers during WWII, for example, was removed from its archive without explanation or warning.

And if you really want to know the depths of the blind fanaticism, so was this one.

That’s the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. Apparently the word “gay” is too much for their tiny little minds to handle, so they scrubbed this photo. Perhaps there has been enough public ridicule that they put it back by now, but it wasn’t there when I checked. Again, this is right out of the totalitarian playbook. We have always been at war with Eastasia, after all.

9. The next obvious step is to target universities, which are notoriously unruly when it comes to free speech. Even universities can’t police universities – lord knows they try sometimes. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has cut $400,000,000 in federal grants to Columbia University because they offended his precious feefoos somehow – again, entirely illegally and I’m sure that Columbia has an army of lawyers working on this now. He’s cut $800,000,000 from Johns Hopkins University for the same unconstitutional reason, so the’re going to start laying people off while they pursue legal responses. Which is why the current regime is now explicitly targeting for political persecution any law firms who dare to represent people that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump disapproves of.

10. If you want to destroy American science – and with it any hope of American prosperity going forward – that’s how you do it.

11. Iowa State recently sent this out to a prospective graduate student in Chemistry. I have no doubt that it will not be the last such letter sent out this year. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk are not working for the United States, folks. You need to figure out who they are working for before they destroy it all.

12. Is anyone surprised that the US is now on an international watchlist as a violator of human and civil rights? We’re right there with a host of dictatorships and rogue states, and honestly I can’t really fault the watchlist people for it – they’re not wrong.

13. But we’re a free country, right? Right? Hello? Is this thing on?

14. As the next step in the unfolding coup against the United States by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk they are seriously considering invoking the Insurrection Act over a non-existent “emergency” regarding immigration, and if they do that there likely will be no further elections in this country. The Insurrection Act allows a president to declare martial law across the United States – he wouldn’t even have to declare that there is an insurrection happening. Ordinarily the US military would be oath-bound to disobey any unlawful orders that might result from that, but since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump purged both the highest level of military commanders across all four services and most of the Judge Advocates General – the military lawyers who would be responsible for determining what is and is not an unlawful order – and replaced them with blind loyalists, that may or may not happen. One thing about Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is that you should always take him seriously. Like most sociopaths he has no sense of humor, and like most people slipping into dementia he has no ability to stop saying the quiet part out loud. During the campaign he flat out said that if he won nobody would ever have to vote again. Believe him.

15. As the recently purged Secretary of the Air Force put it, “There is one characteristic of this President and this administration, and it is the utter lack of respect for legal restraints. … It is time for the American people, across the political spectrum, to realize what is happening. We have a rogue President and a rogue administration, and we need to acknowledge that and respond.”

16. D. Earl Stephens, the former managing editor of Stars & Stripes, the official newspaper of the US military, is very clear on where we’re heading. It would be helpful, he said, that Americans get over the idea that democracy is theirs by right and has no end date because the US may well be arriving at that point now. “We are in deep, deep trouble, and now would be a wonderful, necessary time to step in front of your favorite mirror and honestly ask yourself what you are willing to do to fight for our nation’s survival.” The clock is ticking, he said, and “there will be blood.”

17. And once that starts nobody has any idea where it will end up or who will die. That’s why it’s a stupid idea. But history is full of stupid ideas that people acted on, so watch your back. I don’t condone political violence in this country, but like every observer with more than half a dozen brain cells I do predict it.

18. Meanwhile, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk have managed to take an economy with the lowest unemployment rate in half a century and a stock market that had increased by nearly 50% in the previous four years and destroy it in less than two months. Stocks have fallen into “Correction” territory (a decline of over 10% from a previous high) and are heading closer to bear market territory with every passing day. The cost of living is going up, not down. Treasury yields are falling. Long term bonds – a sign of how confident investors are in the health of the US economy over the next decade – are down. Corporations are pulling back from investing in new productive capacity because they realize nobody is going to be able to buy any of what they produce and the economic chaos unleashed by this administration makes it impossible to make sensible plans. The price of eggs remains high. All of the economic lights are blinking red and it is very likely that the US will be in a severe recession within four to six months. All this from a position of strength relative to the rest of the world when Joe Biden left office. Truly, everything that Trump touches dies.

19. Even conservatives are noticing this. Fox “News” talking head Peter Doocy – a reliable right-wing mouthpiece for the last few years – went after Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at a recent White House briefing. “This is a White House that came in trying to get federal workers to retire by the hundreds of thousands but it’s tough to make the argument that you should retire if your retirement accounts are getting throttled, which is what is happening right now. … You said that the Dow dropping and dropping is a period of transition. You’re sure nobody here at the White House shorted the Dow?” It will take a shift in the mindset of conservatives to make any real change happen, as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves have already written off everyone else. They’re more likely to write off the right-wingers who disagree with them than listen to them, but it has to start somewhere.

20. No wonder Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is posting “Shut up about eggs!” on his social media feed.

21. The ongoing tariff war is not going to help anything. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has imposed random and punitive tariffs on all of our biggest trading partners – Canada, Mexico, the EU, and China – and has reacted with all of the petulance of a spoiled toddler when they responded with tariffs of their own. I mean, who saw that coming, right? For those of you who have no fucking clue how economics actually works, a tariff is a tax paid by your own consumers. Good luck, my fellow Americans! Everything you buy just got more expensive.

22. We’re going over the roots of the Great Depression right now in class, and it’s interesting how timely the discussion of how “the vast wealth inequalities of the laissez-faire 1920s led to an unsustainably narrow consumer base, which collapsed the economy, and when the US imposed punitive tariffs on its trading partners (despite every competent economist in the world screaming at us not to do that) it made everything worse” actually is.

23. The Wall Street Journal, that noted bastion of fuzzy-minded socialism, called it the “dumbest trade war in history.” And you will lose. Not Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump or Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk – they have more money than they know what to do with. They’ll be fine. But you? Sucks to be you.

24. This may be one reason why Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are so hot to invade Canada – and yes, remember, Trump has no sense of humor and no ability to not say the quiet part out loud, so they are indeed planning to do this. Former US Navy intelligence officer and terrorism expert Malcom Nance predicts an invasion within 18 months, one that will also encompass Greenland (both of which are NATO members, which will trigger an all-out intra-NATO war). The consequences of this will be catastrophic – the US would become a pariah nation, its constitutional structure would likely collapse, and roughly 60% of the US military would likely disobey the unlawful orders that would have to be given to make this invasion happen. Contrary to what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves think, the combat would not end well for the US. Canada is a huge country and its citizens are as well armed as Americans. There would be decades of guerilla war. And if you think this sort of thing is unlikely, just swap “Russia” for the US and “Ukraine” for Canada and see how things parallel.

25. It is an utter moral and political outrage that I even have to point this out. Invade Canada? What the actual fuck? Everyone in the current regime should be removed from office – preferably on a rail – for even suggesting such a thing in public, and then stripped naked, coated in maple syrup and dropped into a forest with nothing but a pair of boots and a pocketknife. And if they make it back, they should have to do it again.  On behalf of every sane American, we're sorry Canada.  It should never have come to this.

25. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Junior Assistant JD Vance tried to bully Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky in a pre-arranged ambush in the Oval Office in what amounted to a complete surrender to Vladimir Putin before Trump declared that he would abandon Ukraine and let Russia have it. This is perhaps the most despicable foreign policy decision the US has ever made, and let me tell you as a historian that this is not an easy title to win.

26. Did you know that the US is actually obligated by international treaty to defend Ukraine? The US, Russia, and the UK signed it in 1994. For Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to shred that in order to suck up to his Kremlin handler is cowardly and subversive. Lech Walesa, one of the heroes of the Cold War resistance to the Soviet Union and now long retired, took time out of his day to remind the US not only of this responsibility but also of our larger responsibility to the world. Not that the American right wing wants to hear about any responsibilities, let alone ones that don’t pay them money. But it’s worth reading anyway.

27. Even Trump voters are “livid” about how Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump treated Zelensky. “I was in my district yesterday,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, “and this city voted for Donald Trump. … The propaganda that they heard from the commander in chief made Americans feel less safe and made them feel ashamed.” As well it should have.

28. It’s not that hard to figure out, though.

29. Meanwhile, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk continues to slash and burn his way through the federal government, though on what authority is not clear. Much of what he’s declared has been overturned by the courts as blatantly illegal and unconstitutional and most of what hasn’t has proven disastrous. Mostly he seems eager to steal all of your information – often, as with the case of taxpayer information, in clear violation of federal law.

30. Efficiency!

31. His “tell me five things you’ve done in the past week or you’re fired” threats were so blisteringly stupid that even officials appointed by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump were telling their people not to bother. And as one intelligence officer pointed out, to comply with this would be an intelligence nightmare and a giveaway to every hostile nation on earth.

32. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s popularity – never high to begin with – has nosedived and taken with it most of his investments. Tesla’s stock has lost over half its value since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was inaugurated. Canada and other nations have canceled Starlink contracts worth billions, and when Musk publicly insinuated that the richest man in Mexico was connected to organized crime that man canceled Starlink contracts worth $7,000,000,000 and then got his allies to cancel contracts worth $25 billion more. Musk has lost more than a million dollars a minute in 2025. He’s overleveraged, and it is entirely possible that his empire might collapse in the near future. It’s not an accident that the first people he tried to fire were the ones in the federal government who had any kind of regulatory authority over him.

33. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to the rescue! He turned the White House lawn into a car dealership and promised to buy a Tesla. Wouldn’t it be bitterly ironic if that was all it took to get all of the MAGAts to drop their gas-guzzling pickups and buy an electric car?

34. The car dealership stunt was not the first time a Fascist leader has used his office for a car deal, of course.

35. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk – the world’s richest man, at least for the moment – has now set his sights on destroying Social Security. I hope your grandmother is independently wealthy, because otherwise she’s going to starve – that’s why FDR put that system in place in the first place, after all, to make sure that the American consumer economy would not run out of consumers in the future and as a byproduct keep the elderly from being turned out into the streets. Social Security is the third rail of American politics and I for one will enjoy watching the world’s richest man – at least for the moment – electrocute himself on it.

36. It all comes down to empathy, you know. The ability to understand and inhabit the position of others. One of the defining characteristics of the right is that they lack this quality and don’t see why that’s a problem. It’s been a problem of the right for nearly a century now, probably longer, and I don’t think it will get better.

I’ll stop calling them Nazis when they stop doing the things the Nazis did.

37. Perhaps this is why Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves have unilaterally slashed over a billion dollars in food aid given to local schools and low-income food banks across the country, which will not only hurt students and the poor but also the farmers, many of whom were blinkered enough to vote for this guy. FAFO, I suppose. The through-line of wealthy right-wing men immediately using their political power to take food away from children is notable, and pretty conclusive proof of the nonexistence of a loving God.

38. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has introduced his Shiny New Tax Proposal and if you’re at all surprised at who will benefit from this and who will get fucked by it you haven’t been paying any attention at all since Reagan have you?

39. The Culture War continues unabated, since it serves as a useful distraction from the many crimes and embarrassments of the current regime. Did you know that the US has spent millions on transgender mice? You didn’t? Congratulations! That puts you one up on Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump who made that accusation in a nationally televised speech before Congress only to have every responsible commentator in the nation – once they stopped laughing – point out that the mice were actually “transgenic” and were being used for cancer research.

40. Yeah, this is not a surprise.

41. But the assault on trans people – a small and powerless group who just want to live their lives without being destroyed by the blind hatred of the ignorant (and good luck to them on that) – also continues unabated. There is currently a bill in the Texas legislature, for example, that would make the mere existence of trans people a felony punishable by two years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Think about that. Representative Tom Oliverson – a Republican, of course – is so far gone in blind hatred that he honestly thought he could say these things in public and a) not get curb stomped by every normal human on earth and b) have people take him seriously. I have no idea how part “a” is going for him and I frankly don’t care to find out one way or the other, but I do know for sure that part “b” isn’t going well.

42. The GOP is also trying to get rid of 504 plans, because why should disabled people get any breaks? Speaking of lack of empathy.

43. If you haven’t read the transcript of the takedown that Representative Sarah McBride (D-DE) and Representative Bill Keating (D-MA) put on self-important turd Keith Self (R-TX) for his repeated and deliberate misgendering of Rep. McBride (a trans woman), do yourself a favor and look it up. When Self addressed McBride as “Mr.” she responded by addressing him as “Madam Chair,” and when Keating gave Self a chance to exit gracefully that Self obstinately refused to take he told Self that he was out of order. “Have you no decency?” Keating asked – a clear reference to Joseph Welch’s takedown of another self-important turd, Joe McCarthy (R-WI). Whereupon Self dismissed the hearing and fled. Pure gold.

45. There are some good signs, though, in all of this. The courts are having none of it – Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk are getting their asses handed to them by increasingly angry and incredulous judges, many of whom had been appointed by Trump in his previous administration. GOP Representatives are now hiding from their own constituents because they can’t go out without being confronted with their crimes. Anonymous took out what was once called Twitter and likely will continue to do so whenever the mood strikes them. Wankpanzers across the country are rotting in unsellable numbers. You take your victories where you can.

46. Remember folks. We’re in this for the long haul.

A Night at the Operetta

Sometimes you just go.

Nolan was part of the Squad back when Lauren was in high school – one of those friends who no longer knock on our front door because they know they can just come on in and be welcome. It’s good to have friends like that. The Squad hared off in different directions once they got to college but they’ve pretty much stayed close anyway – I got a phone call from Lauren the other day with one of those “that’s a weird question that I’ll bet my dad would know the answer to” requests and there were three other members of the Squad there with her. We had a lovely time saying hello! And I actually did know the answer to the original question, though not the follow-up. Win some, lose some.

Nolan ended up as a theater major where he went to college, and this is the year when everyone starts graduating, so his performance as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance would be his last one before moving on to the next stage of his life. Kim discovered this and announced that she was going to see the show – it’s a good couple of hours’ drive from Our Little Town, which is how you know we live in the midwest where such a thing sounds reasonable. I thought about it for a bit because that’s a long drive, but in the end it wasn’t really a decision. Of course I’m going. That’s what you do.

Although we originally thought the performance was today rather than yesterday. It was a bit of a scramble to shift things around, but not all that hard in the end.

Oliver started a graduate program this semester and was weighed down with assignments so he couldn’t come with us. But we picked up Lauren on the way, bought tickets online while driving, and made it to the theater with about ten minutes to spare.

 

It was a really lovely performance. Nolan is one of the most gifted physical comedians I’ve ever seen, and he used that to full effect in this performance. He’s more than that, of course – his slow fade from comedy to madness as the emcee in Cabaret a few years back was a thing of beauty and frankly terrifying – but honestly Gilbert & Sullivan is a place where you're supposed to just let it all loose, chew on the scenery, and enjoy the ride. His footwork during the Modern Major General song was worth the price of admission alone.

I’d never seen a Gilbert & Sullivan show before, despite a lifetime of theater. Oh I knew the play – you can’t spend any time in theater and not have most of the G&S repertoire done for you, one bit at a time, by your peers. They’re like Monty Python that way, which is probably not a coincidence. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it’s basically two hours of set-piece comic songs draped over just enough plot to justify the next song in line, and in this case the story revolves around a pirate apprentice with an overdeveloped sense of duty (chest thump), a squadron of daughters of a retired English general, a dancing chorus of English bobbies, and an unfortunate quirk of the calendar. The sense of duty (chest thump) gets things going, and then everything rolls downhill from there. At one point they haul out an old-fashioned ring life preserver from a pirate chest and I don’t know if anyone else appreciated the fact that it had "HMS Pinafore" painted on it but I did.

The cast was talented, the pit orchestra was live and in form, and I had fun watching the lighting because that’s just me. What more can you want?

We caught up with Nolan afterward just to congratulate him on his performance and we spent some time doing that before he had to move on and make his rounds. We even called Oliver so he could pass on his best as well, as you can see in the bottom photo.

And then we drove home. We got in far too late, but today was not a work day and the cat let us sleep in.

Sometimes you just go. It’s always worth it in the end.

Please Forward

My old personal email address died over the weekend.

It’s kind of the end of an era. I’ve had that address since around 1998, after all. It was the second non-school address I’d ever owned.

The first one was an address I got from a local provider in the next town south of us a couple of years earlier. It was one of those things where you brought your desktop computer down to this brick and mortar store and they configured it for you on the spot, and then they sent you an annual bill. It never really worked right, though. One time I remember bringing my computer back to the store to complain about the lack of functionality and the boss of the store was there at the time. He got mad at me. “Why is it always my fault?” he asked me. “I don’t know, Matt,” I told him. “Precedent?”

So when a new brick and mortar store selling email services opened up a couple of blocks from where Kim and I were living, we switched.

It’s been a while since then. They were the local provider that hosted my first blog, which ran from 1999-2004. It hosted the web site for the homemade soap business that Kim and I ran from 1998-2005, and for which I still get credit card offers. Got one last week, in fact, along with a solicitation from a recruiting firm to look for workers to help us market soap that we haven’t made since the Bush years.

The provider moved away from that local shop more than a decade ago. Maybe two decades. It eventually ended up a few towns north of us.

And it’s been slowly dying on the vine for much of that time.

My original plan was to keep the address until my mother passed away, since she was the main person who used it by then, but even after that there were always more pressing things to do and it was never really a priority. I eventually compiled a list of about 90 accounts that were keyed to that address, though, and last summer I started moving them over to my new email address – at least the ones that I felt were worth moving, which was about a third of them. I don’t need the local public schools to have my email anymore, for example, or the 4H. Those have served their purposes. But the ones that still had some utility I moved over, bit by bit.

I haven’t been able to send email from that address for about three years now – a long story involving a pile of settings that even my internet-savvy friend who does this sort of thing for a living could never quite sort out – and nobody’s been able to access my first blog since long before the pandemic, but until this year I could still at least receive email and then respond to it from a different account. That stopped without notice New Year’s Day and didn’t return until a couple of weeks ago, and even that rather fitfully. I’m down to about five or six accounts I still need to switch, but a couple of them I can do in person here in Our Little Town. The others I’ll have to call. On the phone. With my voice. Because I am old.

My internet-savvy friend has been trying to buy out the provider for a while now in order to salvage it and keep it running. There aren’t many of these old local providers left anymore in the age of gmail, and it’s good to have some local options. But the owner refused to respond to any phone calls, emails, or smoke signals, and by all accounts seems happy to squat on the IP and do nothing with it.

So when I got my annual bill – a relic of a bygone past – I figured it was time to let it go.

I’ve joined the mob over at gmail now. If you still have the old address you should ask me for the new one. I still haven’t quite figured out how gmail works, but fewer and fewer people use email at all these days anyway so I figure I’ve got time.

In the grand scheme of things it’s hardly a ripple, but it feels sort of elegiac.

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. Sweet dancing monkeys on a stick but it’s hard to keep up with this crew of cannibals. Every time you think there might be a slight pause in their reckless brutality and deliberate destruction they reload and obliterate some other once useful or meritorious thing created by better people than them for purposes they can’t even dimly begin to comprehend. The barbarians are within the keep, and at this point the only question is whether anything at all can be salvaged before their onslaught. Seriously, where to start.

2. The deliberate ambush of a sovereign leader on a trip to the White House is potentially an act of war, and there is simply no other word for the disgraceful premeditated treatment of Ukrainina leader Volodomir Zelinsky than that. It was a shockingly crass, revoltingly immoral, and utterly destructive of the national security interests of both the United States and one of its most important allies. There is no excuse – none – for what can only be described as a betrayal of trust and a kowtowing to Putin. Either Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is actively on Putin’s payroll or he is working for free and if there is one constant in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s life it is that he is in it for the money.

3. As an American citizen, I hereby apologize to Ukraine for the shameful and morally reprehensible treatment that Zelinsky suffered at the hands of the baboons who have taken over my government. No genuine American patriot can support such treatment.

4. I have my issues with Liz Cheney, but her integrity is not one of them.

5. At this point it is probably relevant to note that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was formally impeached for the first time because he tried to shake down Ukraine into fabricating evidence about Hunter Biden in order to subvert an American election and was roundly turned down by Ukrainian authorities. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s 2025 Petty Revenge Tour continues without interruption.

6. The free world – of which the United States is rapidly losing its membership, let alone leadership – immediately leapt to the defense of Ukraine, because they understand full well what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s dereliction of duty means. Leaders of Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, France, Moldova, Sweden, Germany, Croatia, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, and other nations all pointedly rebuked the United States for its stupidity and pledged support for Ukraine because that’s what real leaders do. They don’t suck up to dictators and ambush allies.

7. The great irony here is that the United States is obligated by international treaty – The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 – to come to the aid of Ukraine in the event of invasion or other military threat. It was signed by the US, Russian, and Britain in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Just pointing that out.

8. Of course, Junior Assistant Vance is fresh from a trip to Europe where he did his best to destroy NATO and undermine the post-WWII order that has largely kept Europe at peace since 1945. Who benefits from such a detonation? Three guess, first two don’t count – just look to see who Junior Assistant Vance’s boss is actually working for.

9. Best comment from the Zelinsky fiasco: “If Rubio sinks any further into that couch Vance will fuck him.” I can only wish I said that first.

10. Second best comment that I can only wish I’d said first: “Both of those guys are going to Hell but only Rubio knows it.”

11. By the by, has anyone seen our nuclear weapons inspectors? Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk fired the lot of them and now nobody in the United States government knows how to maintain them or operate them. Because efficiency.

12. One of the fascinating foreign policy issues that is going to plague the US for the next generation even if a Traitor Virus miraculously wipes out everyone even remotely connected to the current regime and replaces them with the ghosts of Eisenhower, Truman, and George Marshall is the simple fact that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s chainsaw approach to firing dedicated, hardworking experts on stupid ideological grounds is creating a class of justifiably disgruntled and angry people with vast insider knowledge of critical US government functions who have been unceremoniously dumped from their jobs and betrayed by the nation they swore to serve and who are now actively being recruited as intelligence assets by Russia, China, and pretty much every hostile nation on earth. If you don’t think that’s going to be a problem, you really need to cut down on your hallucinogen intake.

13. Meanwhile the US hurtles ever forward on the path toward dictatorship. One of the deluge of executive orders that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump signed recently declared that he and only he had the authority to determine what the law would be – not Congress, and not the courts. It strips all independent federal agencies of their ability to do anything other than enforce Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s will. It installs a White House spy in every agency and allows Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to reject any attempt at regulation regardless of need or justification. It denies funding from any agency that doesn’t actively support the Dear Leader’s policies. Even right-wingers are starting to figure out that this is a coup. Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the conservative Society for the Rule of Law, says he is disturbed “by the increasing suggestions from the White House that the law is what the president says it is. The law is what Congress passes and the Supreme Court interprets, and the president has the obligation to obey the law.” And it’s damn nice of him to be disturbed at such a fundamental breach of the Constitution, isn’t it? Let’s see if we can move that needle to outraged, infuriated, and ready to grab pitchforks and torches, shall we? Either that or we concede the republic entirely.

14. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump knows what side he’s on, anyway. “He who saves his country does not violate any law,” he recently declared, echoing the French Emperor Napoleon I – a flat out declaration that he sees himself as above the law and entitled do whatever he wants, regardless of Constitution, morality, law, or justice.

15. He also declared himself king, after squashing New York City’s new congestion pricing designed to make Manhattan more habitable.

16. Be careful what you wish for, son. Presidents get impeached, but kings get beheaded. Maybe stay in your lane.

17. Perhaps the best response to this came from Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzger, who rather pointedly reminded Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump that his oath was to the Constitution. “We don’t have kings in America,” he reminded the wannabe in the White House, “and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one.” No real American will.

18. Although Maine’s Governor Janet Mills held up pretty well at a meeting of governors at the White House when Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump threatened her for not complying with one of his flagrantly illegal executive orders. “You better comply, because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding” he said – a threat which is itself a violation of multiple federal laws. “See you in court,” she responded. I don’t think anyone has had the spine to do that to his face in decades, and perhaps if someone had we’d all be better off now.

19. If you’re going to execute an internal coup you need to purge the military and install your own ideologues whose only qualification is blind loyalty, and we are already deep into this process as well. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump fired the Joint Chief of Staff on February 20 and replaced him with an unqualified stooge, then fired the heads of the Navy (which includes the Marines) and the Air Force as well as the top independent lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. You only fire the JAGs if you’re planning to do something illegal that they’d stand in the way of, and Secretary of Defense Pete “One for the Road” Hegseth openly admitted that the next day.

20. Five different former Secretaries of Defense – including James Mattis, who served in the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – issued a public alarm over this, as it overtly politicizes the military – something that cannot easily be undone.

21. They’ve also taken over the Post Office, further consolidating their hold on information. The pieces are coming together if you care to look. They’re not even trying to hide them.

22. If you haven’t run into the chillingly named Operation Whirlwind, boy howdy do I have a treat for you. The interim US Attorney Ed Martin launched this to investigate threats to DOGE employees but like all such things that was mere smokescreen and now it has became a powerful tool for silencing opposition, intimidating critics, and suppressing critical media. It’s probably not a coincidence that they stole the name from the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when a budding democracy was ruthlessly crushed by authoritarian violence.

23. They’re still talking about internment camps for immigrants. Let’s see here, taking people deemed undesirable by the government and forcibly quarantining them into camps? That does sound familiar, doesn’t it?

24. It’s actually kind of interesting to see how even some of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s handpicked stooges are pushing back against Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his merry band of rogue teenagers now. They are openly advising their departments to ignore his increasingly frantic demands that they report their accomplishments to him (who, according to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, doesn’t even run that department) or be fired. When the inevitable blowup between these two towering fragile egos comes, I want front row seats. I can only hope that a) it comes soon enough to save the nation, and b) it annihilates everyone involved.


25. 

26. Also, even on his own bullshit terms, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his merry band of rogue teenagers are failing. They keep posting updates to their triumphant website announcing how much money they’re saving, and they keep having to take them down because they’re so catastrophically, simplistically wrong. Like “elementary errors a high school student would be ashamed to make” probably because they’re high school students making them. How did this guy get a reputation for being anything other than a clueless irritant?

27. Hey, Elon!

28. They tried to set up a tipline webform for likeminded idiots to report teachers for doing anything that might actually involve teaching real history, sociology, literature, or anything that contradicted the carefully constructed ideological bubble in which they live and it’s like they’ve never seen an internet poll spiral off into madness before. Let’s just say the site was offline within an hour, and if they read 3% of what was submitted they probably are now suffering a well-deserved collective case of PTSD now.

29. For fuck sake they fired the weather forecasters.

30. Speaking as someone who recently got over a nearly week-long illness, watch your back. They’re actively working to destroy the US health care and monitoring system and a lot of people who might otherwise have survived are going to die.

News and Updates

1. I spent much of this week sick with whatever crud is going around that isn’t any of the more deadly ones, of which there are apparently a wide range of choices – the measles epidemic that has already killed one child, the first to die of that disease in a decade in this country, not that Health Secretary Brain Worms sees that as a problem; the tuberculosis outbreak in Michigan; the rapidly expanding bird flu that is now considered endemic in American cattle so good luck all of you who think raw milk is somehow healthy; and so on. No, I just had a normal flu. Two days of fevers and chills, plus a week of headaches, coughing, and brain fog. Fun times.

2. The second day of the fevers was Monday and I actually stayed home from work – the first time I called in sick for non-Covid reasons since before the pandemic. I spent the day letting random soccer games wash over me and not eating. But by Tuesday I felt well enough to go back wearing a mask, and now I think I am back to where I can read more than seven words at a time so tomorrow my goal is to catch up on a backlog of text messages and emails.

3. I’m not going to address politics directly in this post, not much. I suspect there will be another one of those lists in the next day or two. So goddamn much has been destroyed since the last one. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and every last one of their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves need to be thoroughly horsewhipped, dropped into a large scrubland surrounded by razor wire, and told to go Galt and leave the civilized folks alone. If they die, they die.

4. On Saturday, when I still felt pretty good, Kim, Lauren and I went to see our local minor league hockey team play. It is always a fun time to do that. They’re building a new athletic center on the north side of town now, one that will have a regulation sized rink instead of the scale model they currently play in, but the current place has a lot of charm in a way. Just don’t stand in the end of the concession line when it reaches out to the front door because at that point you will be standing directly in front of the home team locker room and there will be a MIASMA that will tempt you to reconsider your thoughts of food. It turned out to be a good game, though. There were 67 total shots on goal and the home team won 3-2 and Lauren figured out that the assistant coach was someone she went to high school with because that’s what living in a fairly small place will get you.

5. I haven’t had much focus to read, so I’m still slogging my way through the book I started weeks ago. It’s a good book by one of my newfound favorite authors, but I have to say that this author took a calculated risk by taking the absolute least likable character from his previous book, putting her in a new context, and centering the narrative around her. It’s been a challenge.

6. Working in higher education these days has been an exercise in just pressing on as if tomorrow will still happen, because what else can you do.

7. One of the nice things about being more or less over this flu has been being able to return to my own bed. I’d been borrowing Lauren’s old room in order not to spread this crud to Kim, and nobody else’s bed is ever as nice as your own.

8. I got to tell the story of the Dawes Plan this week in class – the abbreviated version I use for my US history class rather than the full version that my Western Civ class gets, since for the US it’s a small foreign policy act but for Europe it’s a major event in many ways – and that always makes me happy. There are a number of set-piece stories that I look forward to in each class and it is always a good day when we get to one.

9. Every so often the list of small things that need to be fixed on one or the other of the cars reaches a tipping point and we take it in to our Local Guys and they get it sorted out for us. We’ve been going to these same Local Guys since before I moved here in the mid-1990s and they know me pretty well at this point. They do good work. And now the van has two functional headlights, a working overhead brake light, and fresh oil on top of it. Win.

10. I find myself getting sucked into various “reels” these days – the little video clips that Facebook and Instagram have now that Vine is dead and TikTok openly mouths right-wing propaganda. I already know FB and IG are owned by a vile right-wing billionaire and can take that into account, and for the most part I skip over those and head to the comedy and the music (as well as far too many highlights of the recent Super Bowl – hey, the Eagles don’t win those things very often, so I’m going to revel in it a bit). There are a lot of talented people on this planet. That’s a good thing to remember in these parlous times.