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.

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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.


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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.