My fellow Americans, the State of the Union is not good.
Indeed, we are in an extraordinarily perilous time, one that the American republic may not survive. This union has endured through a great many challenges – through wars and pandemics, though economic collapse and through civil disorder – and through it all there has been one constant: the most dangerous enemies of the United States have never been external. They have always been among us.
This was true during the Civil War, this union’s gravest threat, when treasonous southern states nearly destroyed the country to further their empire of human slavery, and it is no less true today.
We today in the United States are ruled by a collection of neo-Nazi ghouls using a senile child rapist as a meat puppet in order to reduce the country to a dictatorship while a corrupt Republican Congress stands idly by and cheers, and the only things that are standing in their way are the fact that they are blisteringly incompetent, the fact that the federal judiciary is still doing the job it gets paid to do, and the fact that the mass of Americans refuse to allow it.
All of those ghouls are home-raised, and whatever the statistical anomalies might say the official record states that the child rapist won the 2024 election with the support of a plurality of those Americans who bothered to vote. The call is coming from inside the house, my fellow Americans.
Let the following be submitted to a candid world:
Under the US Constitution, only Congress has the authority to declare war or commit US military forces into battle, and yet today this rogue administration has launched a war against Iran, one that has already killed more than fifty schoolgirls at an elementary school. This war stands in violation of both the US Constitution and the UN Charter – to which the US and its partner in this travesty Israel are both signatories – and constitutes a war crime. In a just world the people responsible for it would have already been arrested and held without bond for trial. In this world, where those people have access to power and make further claims to unlimited power, this will take some time.
The unprovoked attack on Iran parallels the unprovoked attack on Venezuela of just a few weeks ago. Whether the regimes in those countries are good, evil, or indifferent – and it would be hard to generate much sympathy for either of them on their own terms – the fact remains that it is not the job of the US to use military force against them unless they represent a clear and active threat to the United States, and only after such force has been Constitutionally approved. Further, the long-term consequences of these assaults are not predictable and, historically, these wars have not ended well for anyone involved.
What they are, however, is a desperate attempt to distract the American people and the world from the rapidly expanding horror of the Epstein Files.
Let’s start with the fact that the regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains in violation of the federal law that requires them to have released all of the files by now. According to estimates from British intelligence the US Department of Justice has released barely 3% of the files and the screeching banshee who runs that department went before Congress, lied under oath about that, and then refused to speak with or even acknowledge the Epstein survivors who were there in the room with her. She carried in an binder detailing everything that members of Congress had accessed while the DOJ had permitted them to look at the files – a grievously illegal but not at all surprising authoritarian move – and her main response to being asked about the pedophiles in power was to shout about the stock market.
Again, they’ve released barely 3% of the files. Files with victims’ names out in the open and pedophiles’ names redacted just in case you can’t figure out who they’re working for and what they’re trying to do. 3%. The fact that the allegations and documentary evidence regarding the rape and murder of children contained in those files is horrifying and deserving of pitchforks and torches should give you pause because that 3% is what they thought they could get away with releasing. Imagine the nightmare fuel that is in the other 97% of these files.
I saw an Instagram reel recently from a guy named Nick J. Freitas who summed up the only possible reaction to that. “You know,” he said, “whenever somebody says that maybe it’s time to move on from the Epstein files I’m always like, ‘Great, I totally agree. I think we should have moved on to the public execution phase of this a long time ago. So what’s the hold up? Do we not have enough woodchippers? I’ll donate.’"
Put me down for a donation as well, and I’ll also happily kick in some time building bleachers for the American public to watch when it happens.
We know from these files that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is credibly accused of raping girls as young as 13 years old. We know his name appears in these files over 38,000 times – an order of magnitude more than anyone else’s other than Epstein himself. That’s almost 40 more times than Jesus appears in the Bible. It’s more than double the number of times than Harry Potter’s name appears in the entire seven-book series that’s named for him. Representative Jamie Raskin, who was able to view the unredacted files, searched for Trump’s name and got “more than a million” results. They’re Trump’s files more than they are Epstein’s.
You know who’s not in the Epstein files? Drag queens. Transgender people. Immigrants. Brown people. No, this is entirely about wealthy straight white men. Maybe the Republican Party needs to rethink its definition of a threat. Or maybe they already know and are okay with it. One or the other.
“The United States government is engaged in an active cover-up of the largest sex trafficking scandal and influence peddling scandal in the history of the United States, and Donald Trump is right at the center of it,” noted Representative Melanie Stansbury. The UN has noted that the crimes committed by Epstein and his crew are sufficiently vast that they fall under the heading of Crimes Against Humanity.
The cover up being conducted by the DOJ is open, blatant, unrepentant, and doomed to fail. At least nine other countries are investigating these files now, none of which are planning to hide the evidence they have. Britain’s Prince Andrew has already been arrested and will likely face serious legal consequences as a pedophile – the first senior royal to face serious legal charges since 1649, which didn’t end well for Charles I. Norway has arrested a former prime minister. Poland is well into its own investigation. It’s all going to come out, and when it does all hell will break loose. There will be blood.
Not enough popcorn in the world, really.
This is what they’re trying to distract you from with the attacks on Iran.
They’re also trying to distract you from the ongoing thuggery of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private unaccountable army as ICE continues its reign of terror across the country. They have continued to execute people without consequence, they are stockpiling weapons as if they are preparing for war, and they are trying to build a network of concentration camps across the country to warehouse all of the people that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his neo-Nazi ghouls declare to be undesirable and if you think that’s going to stop with immigrants (documented or otherwise) then you clearly haven’t read a history book in your life.
Folks, immigrating to the US without documentation isn’t a crime. It’s a civil offense. It’s a misdemeanor, roughly on par with a parking ticket. You know what is a felony? Raping children. Consider that.
Every statistic that has come from people other than the thugs currently running amok in this country notes that the overwhelming majority of the people kidnapped by ICE have no criminal record and weren’t even considered threats by the regime that sent ICE after them. In point of fact, given the dregs of society that ICE is reduced to hiring since nobody with any moral fiber will work for them, statistically speaking if you kept all of the immigrants (documented or otherwise) and deported the ICE agents the crime rate in the US would decrease.
Meanwhile Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s tariffs were shot down by his own handpicked radical right Supreme Court, but not before upending world trade, spiking inflation, and alienating most of our trading partners. Now that the highest court in the land has told him to knock it off, his response has been to double down and try to weasel his way to do it again. Because your ability to afford food is not really his concern.
And with all of this – the illegal war, the pedophile protecting, the violent ICE thuggery, the continuing economic collapse of a country that had mostly recovered from the pandemic by the end of 2024 – the neo-Nazi ghouls running this shitshow know very well that they cannot win a free and fair election this coming November. That any such election will likely be such an overwhelming repudiation of their twisted agenda that they could not only be stymied from furthering it but also prosecuted for doing what they’ve already done.
Naturally their solution is to try to prevent any such election from happening.
They’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which would effectively disenfranchise anyone who has ever changed their name for any reason, such as most married women in the US. It would require burdensome and unconstitutional documentation for voters – you’d need a birth certificate and a passport, for example, and unless those are provided free of charge that would constitute a poll tax. And the administration is making those documents harder to get by ordering libraries not to provide pathways for them the way they’ve done in the US. The related MEGA Act – introduced by Wisconsin’s own Bryan Steil – is more or less the same disenfranchisement in a different package because the GOP is many things but imaginative isn’t one of them.
Meanwhile both the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation – two of the most right-wing organizations in the US – have publicly stated that voter fraud (and particularly the non-citizen voter fraud that the perpetrators of the SAVE and MEGA Acts are in theory so worried about) simply does not happen on any noticeable scale. The Heritage foundation examined US elections from 2003 to 2023 – over a billion separate votes – and discovered 24 instances of noncitizens voting, most of them by accident, for a fraud rater of 0.0000076%. The Cato Institute notes that Utah has 2.1 million registered voters and an investigation showed exactly one was a noncitizen and that person never cast a ballot. In Georgia there were 15 noncitizens loudly declared by the GOP to be registered in Macomb County, out of 724,000 voters, it turned out that three actually were citizens, four had already been removed from the rolls, and four more were already under investigation. This is a non-issue for anyone who actually has a clue.
It's about voter suppression, not election security. It’s just another form of gerrymandering – if they can choose who gets to vote, then they can determine the outcome of the election. A free and fair election with widespread voting from American citizens will be the death of MAGA and they know it.
The SAVE Act appears dead in the Senate at the time of this writing, and the MEGA Act hasn’t even passed the House. But news broke this week that figures in the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump are circulating plans for an Executive Order that would allow Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to seize control of the November elections completely. The odds of that succeeding are low but not zero, and the mere fact that it is even being seriously planned is enough to justify prosecution and punishment.
This would amount to a coup, and since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already gotten away with one coup attempt unpunished it is not farfetched to think he’d try for a second.
Steve Bannon – one of the ghouls leftover from the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – has already floated the idea of using ICE to enforce who can and cannot vote in November. That ICE has no such authority is not apparently an issue for him. That conducting elections is, according to the US Constitution, the sole province of the states, doesn’t seem to be either.
As noted, the State of the Union is perilous and the survival of the American republic is not guaranteed. Nothing is. The Founders understood that republics were short lived, historically, that eventually they succumbed to authoritarianism, anarchy, or vice. They didn’t know how long their republic would last.
We, my fellow Americans, can make it last that much longer if we are vigilant, if we are active, and if we refuse to let this country be taken over by the sorts of people our ancestors shot in World War II.
This is our country.
The ghouls can’t have it.
Thank you, and good night.
Saturday, February 28, 2026
Thursday, February 26, 2026
An Evening of Music
We were supposed to go to a concert for Kim’s birthday, back in November, but the venue was a good drive away and we ended up with 14 inches (35cm) of snow that day so we hunkered down at home and were glad that they ended up rescheduling the show rather than just canceling it.
And last night was it.
The Movable Feast Tradition says that holidays happen when you have time for them, and if Kim’s birthday is going to be celebrated two months after the actual calendar date, well, that’s just how it works out isn’t it? There’s never a bad time for a celebration.
Although it has to be said that we are getting rather old to be out at concerts on a Wednesday night at venues that require a journey to get back home from, especially since work starts at the normal time no matter what. But sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind, laugh in the face of danger, and drink caffeinated beverages after 4pm to ensure survival. It’s a dangerous job, and we get to do it.
We went up a bit early and had dinner at one of Kim’s favorite places – a restaurant that she introduced me to before we were even married – and then walked over to the venue. It’s a nice place to see a show if you don’t mind standing – there are a handful of chairs set up way off to house right, all clearly labeled “ADA Seating,” and another handful in a balcony way in the back, but the vast majority of people in attendance stood for the duration of the show.
On the down side, see above re: getting old. It’s hard on the feet after a while. On the plus side, it was pretty easy to get right up to the stage. We were one person back, maybe a yard or so from the stage, and the view was lovely.
Although when I am Grand Vizier of the Universe, one of my many Proclamations will be to impose height restrictions on people standing at the front of audiences. Dude, if you’re two meters tall go stand in the back and let the rest of us see. We did have to do a bit of jockeying to find our spot, but in the end it wasn’t that hard. We just shifted a bit to our left.
And last night was it.
The Movable Feast Tradition says that holidays happen when you have time for them, and if Kim’s birthday is going to be celebrated two months after the actual calendar date, well, that’s just how it works out isn’t it? There’s never a bad time for a celebration.
Although it has to be said that we are getting rather old to be out at concerts on a Wednesday night at venues that require a journey to get back home from, especially since work starts at the normal time no matter what. But sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind, laugh in the face of danger, and drink caffeinated beverages after 4pm to ensure survival. It’s a dangerous job, and we get to do it.
We went up a bit early and had dinner at one of Kim’s favorite places – a restaurant that she introduced me to before we were even married – and then walked over to the venue. It’s a nice place to see a show if you don’t mind standing – there are a handful of chairs set up way off to house right, all clearly labeled “ADA Seating,” and another handful in a balcony way in the back, but the vast majority of people in attendance stood for the duration of the show.
On the down side, see above re: getting old. It’s hard on the feet after a while. On the plus side, it was pretty easy to get right up to the stage. We were one person back, maybe a yard or so from the stage, and the view was lovely.
Although when I am Grand Vizier of the Universe, one of my many Proclamations will be to impose height restrictions on people standing at the front of audiences. Dude, if you’re two meters tall go stand in the back and let the rest of us see. We did have to do a bit of jockeying to find our spot, but in the end it wasn’t that hard. We just shifted a bit to our left.
DakhaBrakha (the k’s are silent and you hit the h’s hard) consists of four musicians from Ukraine and they play what can perhaps best be described as Ukrainian folk music mixed with free-form jazz, house music, and forest sounds. At one point the singer headed off in a particularly growly direction and all I could think of was, “Hey – it’s Louie Armstrongsko!” It’s an interesting mix of styles, and they put on a really great show – nearly two hours of music without an intermission, and with some really fascinating background visuals as well.
Right before their encore song they auctioned off a piece of original art made by the singer with the proceeds going to benefit the Ukrainian fighters resisting the brutal Russian invasion that started four years ago almost exactly, and they raised a good amount of money. You have to love that. It became part of the show.
It was a long and tired drive home, but it was well worth it.
Happy birthday to Kim!
Monday, February 23, 2026
On the Recent Olympics
Well the Winter Olympics are over for another four years and now I have nothing to do but the work I should have been doing all along, so naturally I’m writing this blog post because surely there is something better I can be doing than my assigned tasks.
You’d think.
I always enjoy the Olympics. Yes, I know that the IOC is a cesspool of corruption that rivals Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s business empire. Yes, I know that these things rarely if ever benefit the places that put them on and in about eight years there will be sad little stories in the news featuring abandoned venues and tales of fiscal crisis. Yes, I know that the world did not stop revolving around its axis and the grotesque horror of modern American politics continued along its lethally immoral way unbothered by anything happening with the Olympics. I know all these things. But still.
You need a break sometimes. You need to focus on good things, and that’s what the athletes are for. These people trained for years to be there. Most of them will never win a medal and most of those people already know that going in but they’re there anyway because it’s enough to say that they were there. Many of them were competing in events that nobody had any idea whether or not they exist outside of an Olympics (skicross?) but which were fun to watch anyway and maybe they should be more well known.
Kim and I watched a fair bit of the Olympics this year, in this darkening world. It was a very nice way to try to stay sane in a climate that wants very much to prevent that.
We watched the figure skaters and marveled at the sheer grace and power of it all. You don’t realize how strong these people are until you see the close-up shots. We mostly saw the Americans because that’s what NBC shows to Americans, but I really loved how supportive most of the skaters were with each other – particularly, it has to be said, the American women. Alyssa Liu set a tone, after ditching the sport four years ago and then returning on her own terms to skate with joy for herself and her art, and watching her, Amber Glenn, and Isabeau Levito be there for each other – and in Glenn’s case, for at least one of the Japanese skaters as well, shooing away the press when that skater needed some time to herself – was a refreshing sight in a world consumed by meaningless rivalry.
The fact that a number of skaters managed to convince other skaters to be part of their their routines during the exhibition gala at the end was a lovely thing.
We watched the US women’s and men’s teams win hockey gold over Canada in overtime, in hard-fought games that could have easily (and in the men’s case probably should have) gone the other way but there is only one statistic that matters in the end and they came out on the plus side of it this time. I remember watching the Miracle on Ice in 1980 live, and while this wasn’t exactly the same it was nice to see. The fact that the women’s team declined Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s grudging invitation to visit was glorious, and I can only wish the men were similarly principled.
We watched a lot of the curling, and it was good to see the most sportsmanlike of games live up to its reputation, mostly, except for the Canadian men’s team, who were caught blatantly cheating, responded with obscenities when questioned, and somehow were not only not immediately disqualified, dunked in maple syrup, and sent home in disgrace but also were permitted to win gold in the end. That travesty did not take away from the larger fun of the sport, though.
We watched the speedskating, which always seems like it’s about three breaths away from catastrophe. We watched a pile of skiing events, including the skicross because it’s good goofy fun. We watched the bobsleds and the luge and the skeleton and wondered precisely how anyone would think that would be a good idea even if they were a lot of fun to watch.
We watched a lot of things.
It has to be said that the primary advantage the US has in these games, aside from enough national wealth to fund training for a lot of athletes and a population large enough to find fifty examples of pretty much anything you care to search for, is the simple fact that immigrants choose to come here. This is a valuable lesson that should be more loudly expressed and more eagerly taken to heart in this country.
But now it’s over, and we return to our regularly scheduled lives already in progress.
C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.
You’d think.
I always enjoy the Olympics. Yes, I know that the IOC is a cesspool of corruption that rivals Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s business empire. Yes, I know that these things rarely if ever benefit the places that put them on and in about eight years there will be sad little stories in the news featuring abandoned venues and tales of fiscal crisis. Yes, I know that the world did not stop revolving around its axis and the grotesque horror of modern American politics continued along its lethally immoral way unbothered by anything happening with the Olympics. I know all these things. But still.
You need a break sometimes. You need to focus on good things, and that’s what the athletes are for. These people trained for years to be there. Most of them will never win a medal and most of those people already know that going in but they’re there anyway because it’s enough to say that they were there. Many of them were competing in events that nobody had any idea whether or not they exist outside of an Olympics (skicross?) but which were fun to watch anyway and maybe they should be more well known.
Kim and I watched a fair bit of the Olympics this year, in this darkening world. It was a very nice way to try to stay sane in a climate that wants very much to prevent that.
We watched the figure skaters and marveled at the sheer grace and power of it all. You don’t realize how strong these people are until you see the close-up shots. We mostly saw the Americans because that’s what NBC shows to Americans, but I really loved how supportive most of the skaters were with each other – particularly, it has to be said, the American women. Alyssa Liu set a tone, after ditching the sport four years ago and then returning on her own terms to skate with joy for herself and her art, and watching her, Amber Glenn, and Isabeau Levito be there for each other – and in Glenn’s case, for at least one of the Japanese skaters as well, shooing away the press when that skater needed some time to herself – was a refreshing sight in a world consumed by meaningless rivalry.
The fact that a number of skaters managed to convince other skaters to be part of their their routines during the exhibition gala at the end was a lovely thing.
We watched the US women’s and men’s teams win hockey gold over Canada in overtime, in hard-fought games that could have easily (and in the men’s case probably should have) gone the other way but there is only one statistic that matters in the end and they came out on the plus side of it this time. I remember watching the Miracle on Ice in 1980 live, and while this wasn’t exactly the same it was nice to see. The fact that the women’s team declined Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s grudging invitation to visit was glorious, and I can only wish the men were similarly principled.
We watched a lot of the curling, and it was good to see the most sportsmanlike of games live up to its reputation, mostly, except for the Canadian men’s team, who were caught blatantly cheating, responded with obscenities when questioned, and somehow were not only not immediately disqualified, dunked in maple syrup, and sent home in disgrace but also were permitted to win gold in the end. That travesty did not take away from the larger fun of the sport, though.
We watched the speedskating, which always seems like it’s about three breaths away from catastrophe. We watched a pile of skiing events, including the skicross because it’s good goofy fun. We watched the bobsleds and the luge and the skeleton and wondered precisely how anyone would think that would be a good idea even if they were a lot of fun to watch.
We watched a lot of things.
It has to be said that the primary advantage the US has in these games, aside from enough national wealth to fund training for a lot of athletes and a population large enough to find fifty examples of pretty much anything you care to search for, is the simple fact that immigrants choose to come here. This is a valuable lesson that should be more loudly expressed and more eagerly taken to heart in this country.
But now it’s over, and we return to our regularly scheduled lives already in progress.
C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.
Sunday, February 22, 2026
The Road Goes Ever On
I was one of those kids who took a deep dive into Middle Earth at an impressionable age and never quite resurfaced.
My introduction to that world came in early 1980 when some network decided to air the Rankin Bass version of The Lord of the Rings. I remember watching it and thinking that this was a great story but there had to be a better version of it out there than this.
Turns out there was, and I spent a good chunk of the next month reading the book, which the library was happy to lend me, and then much of the summer working as an assistant to my mother in the Montgomery County Courthouse fetching real estate records. She paid me $1/hour out of her own pocket and when I’d amassed enough funds I rode my bike up to the little bookstore in Suburban Square in Ardmore, just outside of Philadelphia, and bought the red-boxed single-volume edition and rode home with it bouncing around in the front basket. I read that annually for more than a decade after that. I can still write your name in Elvish script, which is not the most useful skill in the world but it’s mine and I enjoy it.
From there I read The Hobbit – the prequal to the main story, though Tolkien had to retcon the story to make it fit into the larger universe so there are a lot of differences between the first edition and the one that’s available now. Not all of the gaps got filled by the revisions, though, and one of my favorite facts about that process is that the canonical explanation for this is that Bilbo Baggins was just an unreliable narrator.
I also read The Silmarillion and enjoyed that immensely – it’s much more dense, but if you’re looking for the backstory of it all you will not be disappointed. There’s a reason I became a historian, after all.
I have reached the point in my life now where I am starting to deaccession things. I like stuff as much as the next person – ascetic I am not – but having been part of the process of clearing out my parents’ house I’m seeing the virtue of not leaving that task to my children whenever they need to think about such things.
One of the nicer consequences of this is that more and more of the gifts I receive for birthday or Christmas presents come in the form of experiences, of time spent with family, and that’s a lovely development.
For Christmas last year Lauren said she would get tickets for us to see a play up in Madison, and we went on Friday. I drove up after work and we made a grocery run (because as a parent that is one of the things I enjoy doing for my children) and had a lovely dinner together at a Thai place, and then we headed off to the theater.
The Hobbit: A Musical.
My introduction to that world came in early 1980 when some network decided to air the Rankin Bass version of The Lord of the Rings. I remember watching it and thinking that this was a great story but there had to be a better version of it out there than this.
Turns out there was, and I spent a good chunk of the next month reading the book, which the library was happy to lend me, and then much of the summer working as an assistant to my mother in the Montgomery County Courthouse fetching real estate records. She paid me $1/hour out of her own pocket and when I’d amassed enough funds I rode my bike up to the little bookstore in Suburban Square in Ardmore, just outside of Philadelphia, and bought the red-boxed single-volume edition and rode home with it bouncing around in the front basket. I read that annually for more than a decade after that. I can still write your name in Elvish script, which is not the most useful skill in the world but it’s mine and I enjoy it.
From there I read The Hobbit – the prequal to the main story, though Tolkien had to retcon the story to make it fit into the larger universe so there are a lot of differences between the first edition and the one that’s available now. Not all of the gaps got filled by the revisions, though, and one of my favorite facts about that process is that the canonical explanation for this is that Bilbo Baggins was just an unreliable narrator.
I also read The Silmarillion and enjoyed that immensely – it’s much more dense, but if you’re looking for the backstory of it all you will not be disappointed. There’s a reason I became a historian, after all.
I have reached the point in my life now where I am starting to deaccession things. I like stuff as much as the next person – ascetic I am not – but having been part of the process of clearing out my parents’ house I’m seeing the virtue of not leaving that task to my children whenever they need to think about such things.
One of the nicer consequences of this is that more and more of the gifts I receive for birthday or Christmas presents come in the form of experiences, of time spent with family, and that’s a lovely development.
For Christmas last year Lauren said she would get tickets for us to see a play up in Madison, and we went on Friday. I drove up after work and we made a grocery run (because as a parent that is one of the things I enjoy doing for my children) and had a lovely dinner together at a Thai place, and then we headed off to the theater.
The Hobbit: A Musical.
It has to be said that the musical part was pretty limited – most of it was a stage show, though there were some songs interspersed throughout. It was a fairly small but very talented ensemble cast who did a nice job of switching in and out of various roles, highlighted by some really clever costume changes. And they covered pretty much all of the main events of the book in a way that was fun for those of us who know the story and also worked pretty well for people new to it.
Honestly they did a better job with the story than Peter Jackson did.
We didn’t realize until a week or two before the show that it was a production aimed at children – the actors were adults, but a good chunk of the audience was too young to drive. They were captivated. And so were we.
Lauren and I had a lovely evening together.
Merry Christmas to me.
Monday, February 16, 2026
Staring Evil in the Face
We need to talk about the Epstein files.
Because holy fucking shit these things are grotesque.
One of the more interesting articles I read about them was written by a cop, someone who spent a good chunk of his career investigating the sexual abuse of children, and the whole point of this article was that we aren’t ready for these documents. He wasn’t trying to be condescending. His point was that the level of moral depravity and horror that is in these documents is deeply harmful to anyone who isn’t specifically trained to deal with it, and frankly it’s harmful to those people too. He wrote as a man who has stared true evil in the face and survived, barely, haunted and damaged but still mostly whole. For the rest of us, he had only warnings.
And the more that leaks out about the content of these files, the worse it gets.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of what I’ve read – I’ve only seen the public versions of things, and they’re horrifying even in their redacted and censored state. All I will say is that everyone mentioned in these files needs to be put in holding cells and thoroughly investigated and if they have actually committed the crimes against children that they are accused of committing then we as a nation need to think long and hard about whether the Eighth Amendment should be repealed because there needs to be some deeply cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on those fuckers.
All of them. No matter what their current job title may be.
I want every goddamned one of them dangled in a harness from a lamppost and then executed with a cheese grater, starting with their left big toe. I want those fuckers to suffer, immensely and without relief, for what they did to those children. I want a lot of things I won't get, but that doesn't stop me from wanting them.
We are not normalizing this shit. No way in hell. Not on my watch. Not in my country.
And here’s the kicker, folks.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration was required by federal law to release ALL of those files back in December. By most accounts they haven’t released half. I’ve seen some estimates that take into account new analyses indicating that they’ve barely released 4%. If this is the stuff they thought they could get away with releasing, what the actual fuck is in the rest?
I’ve heard defenders of the indefensible claim that if we prosecuted everyone in the Epstein files the whole system would collapse, and you know? If the system depends on protecting child rapists, then the system should burn and take every one of those vermin with it.
It’s going to be a long few months, folks. This isn’t going away, and the reckless actions that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are going to take to distract from this will get ever more desperate, ever more violent, ever more authoritarian, and ever more criminal.
Watch your back.
Because holy fucking shit these things are grotesque.
One of the more interesting articles I read about them was written by a cop, someone who spent a good chunk of his career investigating the sexual abuse of children, and the whole point of this article was that we aren’t ready for these documents. He wasn’t trying to be condescending. His point was that the level of moral depravity and horror that is in these documents is deeply harmful to anyone who isn’t specifically trained to deal with it, and frankly it’s harmful to those people too. He wrote as a man who has stared true evil in the face and survived, barely, haunted and damaged but still mostly whole. For the rest of us, he had only warnings.
And the more that leaks out about the content of these files, the worse it gets.
I’m not going to get into the specifics of what I’ve read – I’ve only seen the public versions of things, and they’re horrifying even in their redacted and censored state. All I will say is that everyone mentioned in these files needs to be put in holding cells and thoroughly investigated and if they have actually committed the crimes against children that they are accused of committing then we as a nation need to think long and hard about whether the Eighth Amendment should be repealed because there needs to be some deeply cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on those fuckers.
All of them. No matter what their current job title may be.
I want every goddamned one of them dangled in a harness from a lamppost and then executed with a cheese grater, starting with their left big toe. I want those fuckers to suffer, immensely and without relief, for what they did to those children. I want a lot of things I won't get, but that doesn't stop me from wanting them.
We are not normalizing this shit. No way in hell. Not on my watch. Not in my country.
And here’s the kicker, folks.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration was required by federal law to release ALL of those files back in December. By most accounts they haven’t released half. I’ve seen some estimates that take into account new analyses indicating that they’ve barely released 4%. If this is the stuff they thought they could get away with releasing, what the actual fuck is in the rest?
I’ve heard defenders of the indefensible claim that if we prosecuted everyone in the Epstein files the whole system would collapse, and you know? If the system depends on protecting child rapists, then the system should burn and take every one of those vermin with it.
It’s going to be a long few months, folks. This isn’t going away, and the reckless actions that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are going to take to distract from this will get ever more desperate, ever more violent, ever more authoritarian, and ever more criminal.
Watch your back.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Sportsball
We had a sport-filled weekend, and I have to confess it was good to take a bit of a break from the madness of the world.
The joy of sports is that they are utterly meaningless. It’s a game, and you can get caught up in what’s going on and cheer for one side or another – especially if it’s Your Team, or just a team you happen to like for whatever inscrutable reason one decides to like a team – and the action goes this way and that until the game is over and then you just move on with your life. Nothing of any significance has changed. The sun rises the next morning, the state of the republic remains whatever it was prior to the final score, and all that happened is that you got a couple of hours of entertainment out of it.
More things should be like that.
It’s still early in the semester and this spring I only have one class going (versus the five that I had last semester), so there’s not much grading to do. I got Monday’s class prepped first thing Saturday morning – none of the various Sportsball events I wanted to see had started when I came downstairs, so why not – and the weekend was mine.
First up: Premier League soccer.
I watched the Premier League for over a decade before deciding to settle on a team to cheer for, mostly because I like the logo and their coach at the time reminded me of Ser Davos from Game of Thrones. The Onion Knight is still coaching in the Premier League, though on his third or fourth team since leaving, but I still support Wolves whenever I get a chance to watch.
On the plus side, I have discovered that this gives me a surprising amount of credibility among soccer fans here. The conversation is always the same. We get to talking. We discover that we share a fondness for watching Premier League soccer (while I have no particular issue calling it football, I’m American enough to default to soccer). They ask me what team I support, fully expecting me to say one of the Big Names (Liverpool, Man City, Man United, Chelsea, or Tottenham) and when I come back with Wolves there is a little pause as they decide that maybe I’m not just some bandwagon casual. Not many Wolves fans here in the US, I suppose.
On the down side, Wolves have pretty much already been relegated this year – they have a grand total of one win since the season started in August – and it will be a lot harder to watch them next year. So I try to catch them when I can.
Yeah, they lost. But they played hard and that has to count for something. As a Philadelphia sports fan, that’s all I ask.
Next up: the Olympics.
I generally prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer version. Yes, I enjoy watching the track and field events and the soccer games and some of the random Weird Sports that they insist on adding every four years, but there’s nothing to compete with a Sportsball Festival that includes hockey, luge, and curling. I’ll watch the figure skating because it’s fun to see what people can do and even the skiing is entertaining for a while, but give me the sliding sports, the hockey games, and the sheer absurdity of curling any day.
C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.
I saw a couple of the women’s hockey games – both Canada and the US beat a determined and hard-working Swiss team that held them pretty close for most of the two games – and I’m looking forward to more of that. The mixed doubles curling event has been fun to watch and since Oliver and Lauren were curlers for several years back in the day and I went to my share of bonspiels, I actually know what’s going on when I watch. And I saw some of the luge runs, because that’s just astonishing that people are allowed to do that unmedicated. Skeleton coming up!
Kim and I did watch large chunks of the figure skating, and it’s really amazing how much better the skaters are than they used to be.
And finally, here in the US it was Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after the Fourth of July and the only day of the year where Americans are legally obligated to have junk food for dinner.
On the one hand, most of the usual parts of this were kind of meh. My team was eliminated early in the playoffs so there wasn’t the Home Town Interest to keep me focused on the game, and to be honest I can’t remember a Super Bowl where the game was so much of an afterthought. There was almost no hype for it leading up to the game that I noticed, and there were times last week when it was actually hard to remember who was going to play. And then they got to the actual game and, yeah, suddenly that made sense. If I had just woken up from a coma and you told me this was a week three preseason game I would have believed you.
Both of those teams played like they knew the winner was going to have to go to the White House afterward.
Even the commercials were uninteresting this year. There was only one that I thought was even remotely funny, in a gross sort of way, and even the good people who make Doritos clearly thought there wasn’t any point in spending their money this year so that was disappointing. From what I could gather from the ads, the American economy is being held together by cryptocurrency, AI, and prescription drugs right now and this does not give me much hope for the future.
Two bubbles and a list of side effects do not a prosperous era make.
I have to admit that I enjoyed the halftime show. I wanted to see an accomplished American with strong artistic skills and a finger on the cultural pulse of the nation, so naturally I watched the Bad Bunny show.
No, I wasn’t going to spend my time watching the Right Wing Safe Space Consolation Halftime Show featuring a has-been lip-synching about having sex with children, which is apparently what conservatives consider a comforting these days. It seemed a bit too much on the nose here in the Age of Epstein if you ask me.
So Bad Bunny it was.
As JJ Watt said later, “Did I understand a word of it? No I did not. Was it a vibe? Yes it was.”
The songs were interesting. The staging was phenomenal. The message was inspirational. The impotent rage it inspired in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves was deeply satisfying. Pedro Pascal was there in the background, which is always a good thing. And apparently Mr. Bunny ran more yards while carrying a football during that halftime show than the New England Patriots did during the actual game. Win all around, I say.
I also loved the fact that the plants were played by actual people in costumes. For everyone who played Tree #3 in their elementary school musical, this one’s for you.
And then we went back to the Olympics.
The joy of sports is that they are utterly meaningless. It’s a game, and you can get caught up in what’s going on and cheer for one side or another – especially if it’s Your Team, or just a team you happen to like for whatever inscrutable reason one decides to like a team – and the action goes this way and that until the game is over and then you just move on with your life. Nothing of any significance has changed. The sun rises the next morning, the state of the republic remains whatever it was prior to the final score, and all that happened is that you got a couple of hours of entertainment out of it.
More things should be like that.
It’s still early in the semester and this spring I only have one class going (versus the five that I had last semester), so there’s not much grading to do. I got Monday’s class prepped first thing Saturday morning – none of the various Sportsball events I wanted to see had started when I came downstairs, so why not – and the weekend was mine.
First up: Premier League soccer.
I watched the Premier League for over a decade before deciding to settle on a team to cheer for, mostly because I like the logo and their coach at the time reminded me of Ser Davos from Game of Thrones. The Onion Knight is still coaching in the Premier League, though on his third or fourth team since leaving, but I still support Wolves whenever I get a chance to watch.
On the plus side, I have discovered that this gives me a surprising amount of credibility among soccer fans here. The conversation is always the same. We get to talking. We discover that we share a fondness for watching Premier League soccer (while I have no particular issue calling it football, I’m American enough to default to soccer). They ask me what team I support, fully expecting me to say one of the Big Names (Liverpool, Man City, Man United, Chelsea, or Tottenham) and when I come back with Wolves there is a little pause as they decide that maybe I’m not just some bandwagon casual. Not many Wolves fans here in the US, I suppose.
On the down side, Wolves have pretty much already been relegated this year – they have a grand total of one win since the season started in August – and it will be a lot harder to watch them next year. So I try to catch them when I can.
Yeah, they lost. But they played hard and that has to count for something. As a Philadelphia sports fan, that’s all I ask.
Next up: the Olympics.
I generally prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer version. Yes, I enjoy watching the track and field events and the soccer games and some of the random Weird Sports that they insist on adding every four years, but there’s nothing to compete with a Sportsball Festival that includes hockey, luge, and curling. I’ll watch the figure skating because it’s fun to see what people can do and even the skiing is entertaining for a while, but give me the sliding sports, the hockey games, and the sheer absurdity of curling any day.
C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.
I saw a couple of the women’s hockey games – both Canada and the US beat a determined and hard-working Swiss team that held them pretty close for most of the two games – and I’m looking forward to more of that. The mixed doubles curling event has been fun to watch and since Oliver and Lauren were curlers for several years back in the day and I went to my share of bonspiels, I actually know what’s going on when I watch. And I saw some of the luge runs, because that’s just astonishing that people are allowed to do that unmedicated. Skeleton coming up!
Kim and I did watch large chunks of the figure skating, and it’s really amazing how much better the skaters are than they used to be.
And finally, here in the US it was Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after the Fourth of July and the only day of the year where Americans are legally obligated to have junk food for dinner.
On the one hand, most of the usual parts of this were kind of meh. My team was eliminated early in the playoffs so there wasn’t the Home Town Interest to keep me focused on the game, and to be honest I can’t remember a Super Bowl where the game was so much of an afterthought. There was almost no hype for it leading up to the game that I noticed, and there were times last week when it was actually hard to remember who was going to play. And then they got to the actual game and, yeah, suddenly that made sense. If I had just woken up from a coma and you told me this was a week three preseason game I would have believed you.
Both of those teams played like they knew the winner was going to have to go to the White House afterward.
Even the commercials were uninteresting this year. There was only one that I thought was even remotely funny, in a gross sort of way, and even the good people who make Doritos clearly thought there wasn’t any point in spending their money this year so that was disappointing. From what I could gather from the ads, the American economy is being held together by cryptocurrency, AI, and prescription drugs right now and this does not give me much hope for the future.
Two bubbles and a list of side effects do not a prosperous era make.
I have to admit that I enjoyed the halftime show. I wanted to see an accomplished American with strong artistic skills and a finger on the cultural pulse of the nation, so naturally I watched the Bad Bunny show.
No, I wasn’t going to spend my time watching the Right Wing Safe Space Consolation Halftime Show featuring a has-been lip-synching about having sex with children, which is apparently what conservatives consider a comforting these days. It seemed a bit too much on the nose here in the Age of Epstein if you ask me.
So Bad Bunny it was.
As JJ Watt said later, “Did I understand a word of it? No I did not. Was it a vibe? Yes it was.”
The songs were interesting. The staging was phenomenal. The message was inspirational. The impotent rage it inspired in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves was deeply satisfying. Pedro Pascal was there in the background, which is always a good thing. And apparently Mr. Bunny ran more yards while carrying a football during that halftime show than the New England Patriots did during the actual game. Win all around, I say.
I also loved the fact that the plants were played by actual people in costumes. For everyone who played Tree #3 in their elementary school musical, this one’s for you.
And then we went back to the Olympics.
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
A Wedding in February
One of the better things I’ve done in my life was to get ordained online because under the laws of the State of Wisconsin this means I’m legally allowed to officiate weddings.
A proper wedding is a time of joy. Two people declare their love for each other and set off for their future together, and while you don’t necessarily need to be married to do that it is a fact that rituals matter in life and it is a lovely thing to mark the occasion with a ceremony.
I got to officiate a wedding today.
I’ve known Camrin and Jacob since they were in grade school. Camrin, in fact, invited Oliver to her birthday party when they were both in kindergarten. We’re all adults now and I consider both of them to be friends, and when they asked me to be the officiant for their wedding, well, of course I said yes. It would be a pleasure and an honor.
I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
It was a short, simple ceremony with just family in attendance. They’re planning a larger Celebration of Marriage ceremony for later but this was an important date for them so they wanted to have the actual wedding today.
There is much good in this world, and sometimes we get to be part of it.
Congratulations to Camrin and Jacob! May you know joy and love together all your days.
A proper wedding is a time of joy. Two people declare their love for each other and set off for their future together, and while you don’t necessarily need to be married to do that it is a fact that rituals matter in life and it is a lovely thing to mark the occasion with a ceremony.
I got to officiate a wedding today.
I’ve known Camrin and Jacob since they were in grade school. Camrin, in fact, invited Oliver to her birthday party when they were both in kindergarten. We’re all adults now and I consider both of them to be friends, and when they asked me to be the officiant for their wedding, well, of course I said yes. It would be a pleasure and an honor.
I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
It was a short, simple ceremony with just family in attendance. They’re planning a larger Celebration of Marriage ceremony for later but this was an important date for them so they wanted to have the actual wedding today.
There is much good in this world, and sometimes we get to be part of it.
Congratulations to Camrin and Jacob! May you know joy and love together all your days.
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