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.
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Further Dispatches from the Coup
With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!
My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.
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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.
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.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
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.
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.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
On Crisis and Quiet
I keep thinking that if there is a slight pause to catch my breath I will write about normal things – about the ins and outs of a small but worthwhile life, comfortable in its way. When you reach a certain age that kind of life seems more inviting than it did when you were young and full of fire, seeking to make a mark on the world and change it into something more to your liking. You discover, eventually, that the world changes in its own way and on its own schedule and you make your peace with that and having done so you discover that the best part of life is found in the ordinary things and the people you surround yourself with.
That’s why I started this blog after all, back in 2008. To record those things, and perhaps to look back on them when I might otherwise have forgotten them.
But we find ourselves in a time of crisis, one that was entirely predictable – indeed, one that I was clear was coming here in this very space, a bit of fortune-telling that I claim no particular credit for since it was obvious to anyone who cared to look. The United States of America is under attack by internal enemies, the figurehead leader sitting in the Oval Office itself while the minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves who are doing the actual planning and executing are busily tearing down a century of labor by better people than themselves.
I will bear witness.
I will take what opportunities arise to make a difference.
I expect that this will lead me to harm, as Fascists do not take dissent lightly and are not clever enough to have any response other than violence. But so it goes. You do what you can. I am old now and have reached the point where my primary concern is the world I leave my children.
“You cannot kill me in a way that matters,” as the old meme has it.
The current coup has progressed quickly, but American patriots are starting to get their feet back underneath them and fight back.
“We don’t have kings in America,” said Illinois Governor JB Pritzger the other day, “and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions but in deference to my obligations. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
Much damage has already been done, and more will come. Some of it is not recoverable. The United States will be fortunate to emerge out of this with the Constitution intact, with some allies who still trust us, with an economy worth mentioning and a society not utterly corrupted by hatred and bug-eyed insanity.
It will be the work of a generation of Americans to rebuild from this, if it can be done at all.
And we’d best start now.
That’s why I started this blog after all, back in 2008. To record those things, and perhaps to look back on them when I might otherwise have forgotten them.
But we find ourselves in a time of crisis, one that was entirely predictable – indeed, one that I was clear was coming here in this very space, a bit of fortune-telling that I claim no particular credit for since it was obvious to anyone who cared to look. The United States of America is under attack by internal enemies, the figurehead leader sitting in the Oval Office itself while the minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves who are doing the actual planning and executing are busily tearing down a century of labor by better people than themselves.
I will bear witness.
I will take what opportunities arise to make a difference.
I expect that this will lead me to harm, as Fascists do not take dissent lightly and are not clever enough to have any response other than violence. But so it goes. You do what you can. I am old now and have reached the point where my primary concern is the world I leave my children.
“You cannot kill me in a way that matters,” as the old meme has it.
The current coup has progressed quickly, but American patriots are starting to get their feet back underneath them and fight back.
“We don’t have kings in America,” said Illinois Governor JB Pritzger the other day, “and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions but in deference to my obligations. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
Much damage has already been done, and more will come. Some of it is not recoverable. The United States will be fortunate to emerge out of this with the Constitution intact, with some allies who still trust us, with an economy worth mentioning and a society not utterly corrupted by hatred and bug-eyed insanity.
It will be the work of a generation of Americans to rebuild from this, if it can be done at all.
And we’d best start now.
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Further Dispatches From the Coup
With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!
My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.
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1. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers randomly fired almost 400 nuclear weapons specialists who worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration the other day and now the Department of Energy is frantically trying to get them to come back to work because nothing says making America great again like getting rid of all of the people who understand how nuclear weapons function.
2. The CDC and other public health agencies have been banned from speaking out on any of the current challenges facing the US, such as the tuberculosis outbreak in Michigan, the increasingly deadly wave of bird flu that is sweeping the nation, and the rapidly spreading measles outbreak in one of the most unvaccinated regions of Texas, so you’re on your own with that. Measles outbreaks are very difficult to contain once they get started and right now the one in Texas has a hospitalization rate of 27% – a shockingly high figure in the world of epidemiology. COVID hasn’t gone away and the regular flu seems to be more dangerous than usual. Every nurse, PA, EMT, and CNA that I know is in full panic mode right now because they can see the system overloading. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump knows that one of the many reasons he was unceremoniously tossed out on his ass back in 2020 was because he botched the COVID pandemic so badly that he was personally responsible for over a quarter million excess American deaths and the lesson he got out of that was not to do better next time but instead just to try to hide it more effectively. Your death will help him politically, and that’s all he cares about.
3. Meanwhile the supine GOP Congress just folded like a wet paper tent and installed a rabid antivaxxer nutjob as the nation’s top health and science officer, so good luck with that.
4. RFK Jr., the aforementioned nutjob, announced almost immediately that people “addicted” to antidepressants and anyone even prosecuted for drug crimes would be send to government-sponsored “wellness farms” to produce organic crops for up to four years. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community” he said. Forced collective farming just sounds like Maoism to me but what do I know.
5. Apparently so many people have complained to Google about their craven capitulation to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s increasingly unhinged demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico that Google has had to turn off 1-star reviews and comments for it. Meanwhile the AP has been banned from press conferences because they actually have a backbone and have refused to bow down to the naked emperor on this matter.
6. 800 people were fired from the USDA and another 1000 from the NRCS which will cripple research and farm aid programs. Watching the rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump get hammered like this provides some schadenfreude but not nearly enough to make up for the fact that this is hurting both them and the rest of us. The US will take decades to recover from this, if it can recover at all.
7. The ongoing destruction of USAID is also destroying American farmers, as well as halting a great deal of the AIDS prevention efforts that have succeeded in reducing the spread of that lethal plague, and foor and medical programs designed to keep children from dying across the globe. All so Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk can get a tax break. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, and if you study the social unrest of that period you know what’s coming next.
8. I hope you enjoyed having national parks because soon they won’t be there. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have slashed NPS staff, including rangers, firefighters, and EMTs, and taken down the reservation system people use for campsites. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is looking to sell off the land to wealthy speculators. And what was once the envy of the world collapses into dust, a fitting metaphor for the United States under this regime.
9. Keep in mind that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk was never elected to anything, heads a “department” that has no Constitutional legitimacy, and is ineligible for the office of president whose powers he is unilaterally exercising and exceeding.
10. The IRS is next on Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s hit list because we can’t have anything that impinges on his greed or power, now, can we. You can compile a pretty comprehensive list of the agencies that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers have targeted just by looking for the ones that could conceivably stand in the way of that greed and power. Follow the money, folks.
11. Meanwhile the price of eggs is at near record highs and nothing that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing is going to change that for the better. A lot of it is just going to make things worse. But MAGA will still blame Biden. Possibly Obama. The ones that have read a book in the last quarter century might try to blame Jimmy Carter, but I suspect that will be a very quiet part of the chorus. In any event, the Dear Leader can do no wrong by them, so take your pick.
12. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has now officially installed himself as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and even North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thinks that’s a little excessive.
13. Junior Understudy JD Vance went to Germany and it did not go well for him. He met with neo-Nazi groups and then tried to lecture the German government about how they should obey his two bosses and then both the German Chancellor and the Defense Minister tore him a new asshole and began working on re-arranging European defense around the idea that the US is now a security threat. Well done, Junior! You’ve managed to upend three quarters of a century of hard work and concrete achievements by better people in just a couple of weeks.
14. Apparently we’re also abandoning Ukraine in particular and NATO in general. Defense Secretary Pete “One for the Road” Hegseth announced that the US does not consider the defense of an ally against naked aggression important and will not contribute further to its security, nor does the current regime regard NATO – the lynchpin of post-war security for the US and the West – to be of any value. So anyone out there thinking the US is a trustworthy ally, think again. I expect a future of isolation and pariah status for the US thanks to this crew of utter lunatics.
15. Don’t even get me started on the sheer mind-boggling evil of the proposals for ethnic cleansing in Gaza that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has made repeatedly this month. We executed people for that sort of thing at Nuremberg.
16. Do you think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will ever stop yammering on about invading Canada? Seriously – what an asshole.
17. If you think the Republican Congress is doing anything to limit the damage done to the nation both here and abroad you should seek counseling because you know damn well they’re only pouring gasoline on these fires and roasting marshmallows while the republic burns, right? Let’s see some of the highlights of what they’ve got cooking there:
a. First, we have the intentionally misleadingly titled hellscape of the SAVE Act, a voter suppression tool that will accomplish two longstanding goals of the Republican Party by requiring all voters to produce birth certificates and passports in order to vote (how many Americans even own passports?) and denying the vote to anyone whose birth name does not match their current name. The main purpose of this is to deny the vote to trans people – cruelty to trans Americans being a foundational principle of the modern GOP – but it will also unofficially overturn most of the 19th Amendment by denying any married woman who has legally changed her name the right to vote as well. The GOP has been very clear that they don’t think women should vote at all – perhaps because women are smarter than men and do not vote for Republicans as a group – and this denial is a feature of the SAVE Act, not a bug.
b. There is also HR1161, introduced by Republican Representative Earl L. Carter (R-GA), which proposes that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump buy Greenland and rename it “Red, White, and Blueland.” Folks, I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried. How much antifreeze does someone have to drink in order for this idea to make sense, let alone to think that you should say it in public?
c. The GOP released its preliminary budget plan and it calls for a) zeroing out funding for Medicaid so poor people can’t get healthcare, adding $3,000,000,000,000 to the national debt, and giving billionaires a $4,500,000,000,000 tax cut. In case you weren’t aware of the priorities.
18. Junior Understudy JD Vance also publicly announced last week that he has never read the US Constitution and has no concept of the foundational principle of the separation of powers. Good for him for admitting his bone-deep ignorance, but man – the fact that this imbecile is a heartbeat away from becoming the second banana to Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is unnerving. Yes, Junior – judges are in fact allowed to tell the executive branch what to do.
19. If you get the feeling that this administration is laying the groundwork for cutting out both the legislative and judicial branches and seizing all power for themselves, good for you for paying attention. I give them four months before they declare it openly. It’s going to be a long hot summer in the US.
20. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have now accessed all of your health care data, so I hope you didn’t think that little things like federal privacy laws were going to protect you when he uses that against you. They’ve also downloaded all of your identity information, including your banking information if you’ve ever gotten a tax refund through direct deposit. MURCA!
21. Also, this week Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers ransacked the National Park Service’s websites, and among other things they deleted all references to trans people from the site dedicated to the Stonewall uprising – a pivotal event in gay rights in this country and one where trans people played central roles. This is how genocides start, with small erasures like this, before they ramp up. You either catch it when it starts or your regret it when it proceeds.
22. They’ve also fired 10% of the staff of the National Cancer Institute, because cruelty and waste is pretty much the only strategy they have.
23. In other national security news, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers forced the CIA to attempt to buy out its entire workforce, and if you’re wondering who would benefit from the crippling of American intelligence, honestly it’s not that hard to figure out.
24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also purged the entire boards of all four service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard) because apparently the US military is too “woke” or something like that. When a neo-Fascist starts purging the military and installing loyalists, it’s past time to worry.
25. The US imposed sanctions on South Africa for daring to undo decades of apartheid, which apparently counts as discrimination against rich white people. I wonder who benefited from that?
26. Office of Project Management Director Charles Ezell released a memo to all agency heads the other day claiming that “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and unenforceable,” which is something that you’d expect to hear from someone who will likely be on the wrong end of the first labor unrest this country sees this year. Grab your popcorn!
27. We’re also no longer enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that prevents US companies from bribing foreign officials to secure or keep business deals. Given who the US government has devolved to these days, I suppose that’s not a surprise.
28. Did you notice that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fired the previous director who was known for rigorously enforcing consumer protection laws? Strange how that happens just as Elmo enters into a deal to process payments.
29. The first wave of assaults on American scientific research culminated in an across the board slashing of federal grants from the NIH. Grants come with money allotted for “indirect expenses” but which universities call “keeping the lights on and the plumbing working.” This nation became a world power on the strength of its scientific research, most of which happens at universities. I wonder who has an interest in seeing that destroyed.
30. Finally (because I could go on but there are only so many hours in the day) there is the legal fiasco of the Eric Adams case. If you’ve not caught this one Adams is the Democratic mayor of New York City who has been enmeshed in a bribery and corruption scandal for a while now. The new imperial forces at the Justice Department ordered his charges dropped explicitly so they would have leverage over him to get him to enforce their anti-immigrant hysteria on one of the most immigrant-populated cities in the world. This is transparently illegal and in a normal political environment would have resulted in serious charges being filed against everyone involved, but in a cult dictatorship such as the one we seem to be living in now it’s just part of the background noise. The acting Attorney General for the Southern District of New York – a conservative Federalist Society member appointed by none other than Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – told them that this was illegal and what Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove could do with his demands (hint: a lubricant would help) before resigning. Assistant US Attorney Hagen Scotten also resigned, but not after telling Bove that only a fool or a coward would consent to Bove’s demands. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General – a disgraced lawyer named Pam Bondi – finally did get someone to do the deed, but the naked partisanship and illegal conduct is out there for anyone who wants to see it. We’ll see who cares.
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. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers randomly fired almost 400 nuclear weapons specialists who worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration the other day and now the Department of Energy is frantically trying to get them to come back to work because nothing says making America great again like getting rid of all of the people who understand how nuclear weapons function.
2. The CDC and other public health agencies have been banned from speaking out on any of the current challenges facing the US, such as the tuberculosis outbreak in Michigan, the increasingly deadly wave of bird flu that is sweeping the nation, and the rapidly spreading measles outbreak in one of the most unvaccinated regions of Texas, so you’re on your own with that. Measles outbreaks are very difficult to contain once they get started and right now the one in Texas has a hospitalization rate of 27% – a shockingly high figure in the world of epidemiology. COVID hasn’t gone away and the regular flu seems to be more dangerous than usual. Every nurse, PA, EMT, and CNA that I know is in full panic mode right now because they can see the system overloading. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump knows that one of the many reasons he was unceremoniously tossed out on his ass back in 2020 was because he botched the COVID pandemic so badly that he was personally responsible for over a quarter million excess American deaths and the lesson he got out of that was not to do better next time but instead just to try to hide it more effectively. Your death will help him politically, and that’s all he cares about.
3. Meanwhile the supine GOP Congress just folded like a wet paper tent and installed a rabid antivaxxer nutjob as the nation’s top health and science officer, so good luck with that.
4. RFK Jr., the aforementioned nutjob, announced almost immediately that people “addicted” to antidepressants and anyone even prosecuted for drug crimes would be send to government-sponsored “wellness farms” to produce organic crops for up to four years. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community” he said. Forced collective farming just sounds like Maoism to me but what do I know.
5. Apparently so many people have complained to Google about their craven capitulation to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s increasingly unhinged demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico that Google has had to turn off 1-star reviews and comments for it. Meanwhile the AP has been banned from press conferences because they actually have a backbone and have refused to bow down to the naked emperor on this matter.
6. 800 people were fired from the USDA and another 1000 from the NRCS which will cripple research and farm aid programs. Watching the rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump get hammered like this provides some schadenfreude but not nearly enough to make up for the fact that this is hurting both them and the rest of us. The US will take decades to recover from this, if it can recover at all.
7. The ongoing destruction of USAID is also destroying American farmers, as well as halting a great deal of the AIDS prevention efforts that have succeeded in reducing the spread of that lethal plague, and foor and medical programs designed to keep children from dying across the globe. All so Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk can get a tax break. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, and if you study the social unrest of that period you know what’s coming next.
8. I hope you enjoyed having national parks because soon they won’t be there. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have slashed NPS staff, including rangers, firefighters, and EMTs, and taken down the reservation system people use for campsites. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is looking to sell off the land to wealthy speculators. And what was once the envy of the world collapses into dust, a fitting metaphor for the United States under this regime.
9. Keep in mind that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk was never elected to anything, heads a “department” that has no Constitutional legitimacy, and is ineligible for the office of president whose powers he is unilaterally exercising and exceeding.
10. The IRS is next on Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s hit list because we can’t have anything that impinges on his greed or power, now, can we. You can compile a pretty comprehensive list of the agencies that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers have targeted just by looking for the ones that could conceivably stand in the way of that greed and power. Follow the money, folks.
11. Meanwhile the price of eggs is at near record highs and nothing that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing is going to change that for the better. A lot of it is just going to make things worse. But MAGA will still blame Biden. Possibly Obama. The ones that have read a book in the last quarter century might try to blame Jimmy Carter, but I suspect that will be a very quiet part of the chorus. In any event, the Dear Leader can do no wrong by them, so take your pick.
12. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has now officially installed himself as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and even North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thinks that’s a little excessive.
13. Junior Understudy JD Vance went to Germany and it did not go well for him. He met with neo-Nazi groups and then tried to lecture the German government about how they should obey his two bosses and then both the German Chancellor and the Defense Minister tore him a new asshole and began working on re-arranging European defense around the idea that the US is now a security threat. Well done, Junior! You’ve managed to upend three quarters of a century of hard work and concrete achievements by better people in just a couple of weeks.
14. Apparently we’re also abandoning Ukraine in particular and NATO in general. Defense Secretary Pete “One for the Road” Hegseth announced that the US does not consider the defense of an ally against naked aggression important and will not contribute further to its security, nor does the current regime regard NATO – the lynchpin of post-war security for the US and the West – to be of any value. So anyone out there thinking the US is a trustworthy ally, think again. I expect a future of isolation and pariah status for the US thanks to this crew of utter lunatics.
15. Don’t even get me started on the sheer mind-boggling evil of the proposals for ethnic cleansing in Gaza that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has made repeatedly this month. We executed people for that sort of thing at Nuremberg.
16. Do you think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will ever stop yammering on about invading Canada? Seriously – what an asshole.
17. If you think the Republican Congress is doing anything to limit the damage done to the nation both here and abroad you should seek counseling because you know damn well they’re only pouring gasoline on these fires and roasting marshmallows while the republic burns, right? Let’s see some of the highlights of what they’ve got cooking there:
a. First, we have the intentionally misleadingly titled hellscape of the SAVE Act, a voter suppression tool that will accomplish two longstanding goals of the Republican Party by requiring all voters to produce birth certificates and passports in order to vote (how many Americans even own passports?) and denying the vote to anyone whose birth name does not match their current name. The main purpose of this is to deny the vote to trans people – cruelty to trans Americans being a foundational principle of the modern GOP – but it will also unofficially overturn most of the 19th Amendment by denying any married woman who has legally changed her name the right to vote as well. The GOP has been very clear that they don’t think women should vote at all – perhaps because women are smarter than men and do not vote for Republicans as a group – and this denial is a feature of the SAVE Act, not a bug.
b. There is also HR1161, introduced by Republican Representative Earl L. Carter (R-GA), which proposes that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump buy Greenland and rename it “Red, White, and Blueland.” Folks, I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried. How much antifreeze does someone have to drink in order for this idea to make sense, let alone to think that you should say it in public?
c. The GOP released its preliminary budget plan and it calls for a) zeroing out funding for Medicaid so poor people can’t get healthcare, adding $3,000,000,000,000 to the national debt, and giving billionaires a $4,500,000,000,000 tax cut. In case you weren’t aware of the priorities.
18. Junior Understudy JD Vance also publicly announced last week that he has never read the US Constitution and has no concept of the foundational principle of the separation of powers. Good for him for admitting his bone-deep ignorance, but man – the fact that this imbecile is a heartbeat away from becoming the second banana to Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is unnerving. Yes, Junior – judges are in fact allowed to tell the executive branch what to do.
19. If you get the feeling that this administration is laying the groundwork for cutting out both the legislative and judicial branches and seizing all power for themselves, good for you for paying attention. I give them four months before they declare it openly. It’s going to be a long hot summer in the US.
20. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have now accessed all of your health care data, so I hope you didn’t think that little things like federal privacy laws were going to protect you when he uses that against you. They’ve also downloaded all of your identity information, including your banking information if you’ve ever gotten a tax refund through direct deposit. MURCA!
21. Also, this week Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers ransacked the National Park Service’s websites, and among other things they deleted all references to trans people from the site dedicated to the Stonewall uprising – a pivotal event in gay rights in this country and one where trans people played central roles. This is how genocides start, with small erasures like this, before they ramp up. You either catch it when it starts or your regret it when it proceeds.
22. They’ve also fired 10% of the staff of the National Cancer Institute, because cruelty and waste is pretty much the only strategy they have.
23. In other national security news, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers forced the CIA to attempt to buy out its entire workforce, and if you’re wondering who would benefit from the crippling of American intelligence, honestly it’s not that hard to figure out.
24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also purged the entire boards of all four service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard) because apparently the US military is too “woke” or something like that. When a neo-Fascist starts purging the military and installing loyalists, it’s past time to worry.
25. The US imposed sanctions on South Africa for daring to undo decades of apartheid, which apparently counts as discrimination against rich white people. I wonder who benefited from that?
26. Office of Project Management Director Charles Ezell released a memo to all agency heads the other day claiming that “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and unenforceable,” which is something that you’d expect to hear from someone who will likely be on the wrong end of the first labor unrest this country sees this year. Grab your popcorn!
27. We’re also no longer enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that prevents US companies from bribing foreign officials to secure or keep business deals. Given who the US government has devolved to these days, I suppose that’s not a surprise.
28. Did you notice that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fired the previous director who was known for rigorously enforcing consumer protection laws? Strange how that happens just as Elmo enters into a deal to process payments.
29. The first wave of assaults on American scientific research culminated in an across the board slashing of federal grants from the NIH. Grants come with money allotted for “indirect expenses” but which universities call “keeping the lights on and the plumbing working.” This nation became a world power on the strength of its scientific research, most of which happens at universities. I wonder who has an interest in seeing that destroyed.
30. Finally (because I could go on but there are only so many hours in the day) there is the legal fiasco of the Eric Adams case. If you’ve not caught this one Adams is the Democratic mayor of New York City who has been enmeshed in a bribery and corruption scandal for a while now. The new imperial forces at the Justice Department ordered his charges dropped explicitly so they would have leverage over him to get him to enforce their anti-immigrant hysteria on one of the most immigrant-populated cities in the world. This is transparently illegal and in a normal political environment would have resulted in serious charges being filed against everyone involved, but in a cult dictatorship such as the one we seem to be living in now it’s just part of the background noise. The acting Attorney General for the Southern District of New York – a conservative Federalist Society member appointed by none other than Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – told them that this was illegal and what Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove could do with his demands (hint: a lubricant would help) before resigning. Assistant US Attorney Hagen Scotten also resigned, but not after telling Bove that only a fool or a coward would consent to Bove’s demands. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General – a disgraced lawyer named Pam Bondi – finally did get someone to do the deed, but the naked partisanship and illegal conduct is out there for anyone who wants to see it. We’ll see who cares.
Sunday, February 9, 2025
Fly, Eagles, Fly
Tonight I took a break from monitoring the ongoing destruction of the American republic to watch the Super Bowl, and I was richly rewarded for doing so.
My hometown Philadelphia Eagles, in a rematch from the game two years ago, thoroughly dominated the Kansas City Chiefs. The Eagles were up 24-0 at halftime, and went on to a fairly comfortable 40-22 victory despite a couple of meaningless late touchdowns by the Chiefs. It was nice to watch the game and not be worried in the last few minutes. I’ve been slowly losing interest in football for a long time now, but I’m enough of a hometown fan that when my Birds are in it, I’ll watch and cheer.
Philadelphia is, no doubt, hopping right now. It will likely do so for a while. There are professional sports franchises in Philadelphia representing all of the major leagues that play in the United States, but the Eagles own that town.
I hope they didn’t grease the light poles to try to keep people from climbing them. All that does is make the people at the top of the pole greasy.
We had a quiet night of it here in Our Little Town, just me and Kim and Oliver. Lauren was up at her campus where the main bar on the main street was having a $20 for all you can drink special and she said that by the end of the game there were only Eagles fans left and the vibes were immaculate. I should expect so. Eagles fans know how to celebrate. But here it was just us and about three times as many salty snacks as we could possibly eat because this is the one day where I don’t care about my diet and to be honest I may have gone a bit overboard. Oh well. You have to ignore the guidelines once in a while.
This one is for my dad, a diehard Eagles fan who never saw them win a Super Bowl though he did see them win a championship in 1960. It’s for the city of Philadelphia, the only city in the United States that hates Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump more than New York City does – he was at the game looking like someone stole his lollipop and I hope he has an utterly miserable flight home secure in the knowledge that there is no point to inviting the Eagles to the White House in honor of their victory because they will tell him point blank to fuck himself just like they did last time. It’s for all the sports knobs who overwhelmingly picked the Chiefs to win because they were the Chiefs and therefore entitled to win.
And it’s for me, because in this dark year it is nice to have a bright spot.
Fly, Eagles, fly.
My hometown Philadelphia Eagles, in a rematch from the game two years ago, thoroughly dominated the Kansas City Chiefs. The Eagles were up 24-0 at halftime, and went on to a fairly comfortable 40-22 victory despite a couple of meaningless late touchdowns by the Chiefs. It was nice to watch the game and not be worried in the last few minutes. I’ve been slowly losing interest in football for a long time now, but I’m enough of a hometown fan that when my Birds are in it, I’ll watch and cheer.
Philadelphia is, no doubt, hopping right now. It will likely do so for a while. There are professional sports franchises in Philadelphia representing all of the major leagues that play in the United States, but the Eagles own that town.
I hope they didn’t grease the light poles to try to keep people from climbing them. All that does is make the people at the top of the pole greasy.
We had a quiet night of it here in Our Little Town, just me and Kim and Oliver. Lauren was up at her campus where the main bar on the main street was having a $20 for all you can drink special and she said that by the end of the game there were only Eagles fans left and the vibes were immaculate. I should expect so. Eagles fans know how to celebrate. But here it was just us and about three times as many salty snacks as we could possibly eat because this is the one day where I don’t care about my diet and to be honest I may have gone a bit overboard. Oh well. You have to ignore the guidelines once in a while.
This one is for my dad, a diehard Eagles fan who never saw them win a Super Bowl though he did see them win a championship in 1960. It’s for the city of Philadelphia, the only city in the United States that hates Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump more than New York City does – he was at the game looking like someone stole his lollipop and I hope he has an utterly miserable flight home secure in the knowledge that there is no point to inviting the Eagles to the White House in honor of their victory because they will tell him point blank to fuck himself just like they did last time. It’s for all the sports knobs who overwhelmingly picked the Chiefs to win because they were the Chiefs and therefore entitled to win.
And it’s for me, because in this dark year it is nice to have a bright spot.
Fly, Eagles, fly.
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Dispatches from the Coup
The ongoing coup being staged by Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is rolling along at a pretty good clip, it has to be said.
His minions are fanning out through any number of federal agencies, demanding access to legally protected data and throwing tantrums (as befits their tender ages) whenever anyone gets in their way. Apparently their next target is the Pentagon, which is staffed by highly trained, heavily armed, and very dedicated men and women who have sworn an oath to defend the US Constitution against all enemies domestic and foreign and I for one would pay money to see that happen.
Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has taken to simply declaring things as if that made them so. Did you know there is no Department of Education anymore? He said so! This should come as a surprise to Congress, which is the only body that can make that call under the Constitution.
But then the Republicans in Congress seem pretty satisfied with their increasing irrelevance and unaware that they are the next obvious target for this coup, so we’ll see what happens.
This is all part of the “flood the zone with bullshit” strategy that you knew was coming, by the way.
The goal here is simply to demoralize, distract, and disturb. Few if any of the things that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting are designed to last. They’re only designed to overawe.
Although given that Co-President Elon “Sieg Hiel” Musk now has the full identifying information and tax data for every single American (including Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump), there is the rather sad notion that he isn’t the Co-President anymore. I wonder if anyone has explained to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump how irrelevant he has become.
That’s another thing I’d pay money to see.
It has been another horrifying week to be an American, the third such since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power, and the list of things that he and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have done in that time is both long and unforgivable.
I would very much like to be thinking about other things. I have students to advise and classes to teach. The Super Bowl – the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after all – is featuring my own hometown Eagles on Sunday for just the fifth time ever and I have had no time at all to revel in that fact. We have summer plans that we’d like to be making, and celebrations that we’d like to plan.
All of this is getting put on hold because a toddler of a man couldn’t deal with losing an election and his fanatical cult put him back into power, apparently to burn the country down.
I will stand and I will be heard, but it would be nice to sit for a while too.
His minions are fanning out through any number of federal agencies, demanding access to legally protected data and throwing tantrums (as befits their tender ages) whenever anyone gets in their way. Apparently their next target is the Pentagon, which is staffed by highly trained, heavily armed, and very dedicated men and women who have sworn an oath to defend the US Constitution against all enemies domestic and foreign and I for one would pay money to see that happen.
Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has taken to simply declaring things as if that made them so. Did you know there is no Department of Education anymore? He said so! This should come as a surprise to Congress, which is the only body that can make that call under the Constitution.
But then the Republicans in Congress seem pretty satisfied with their increasing irrelevance and unaware that they are the next obvious target for this coup, so we’ll see what happens.
This is all part of the “flood the zone with bullshit” strategy that you knew was coming, by the way.
The goal here is simply to demoralize, distract, and disturb. Few if any of the things that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting are designed to last. They’re only designed to overawe.
Although given that Co-President Elon “Sieg Hiel” Musk now has the full identifying information and tax data for every single American (including Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump), there is the rather sad notion that he isn’t the Co-President anymore. I wonder if anyone has explained to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump how irrelevant he has become.
That’s another thing I’d pay money to see.
It has been another horrifying week to be an American, the third such since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power, and the list of things that he and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have done in that time is both long and unforgivable.
I would very much like to be thinking about other things. I have students to advise and classes to teach. The Super Bowl – the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after all – is featuring my own hometown Eagles on Sunday for just the fifth time ever and I have had no time at all to revel in that fact. We have summer plans that we’d like to be making, and celebrations that we’d like to plan.
All of this is getting put on hold because a toddler of a man couldn’t deal with losing an election and his fanatical cult put him back into power, apparently to burn the country down.
I will stand and I will be heard, but it would be nice to sit for a while too.
Sunday, February 2, 2025
It's What We Got
You know, folks, I really would like to be discussing pretty much anything but politics right now.
If there is one thing I will be forever grateful to Joe Biden for it is that he was boring. For four blessed years I didn’t have to wake up wondering what catastrophic nightmare the sitting president had pulled out of his ass in the wee hours and foisted off onto an unsuspecting world. I didn’t have to try to figure out ways to protect my loved ones and my communities from the militarized hatred of bigots, fanatics, and lowlifes. I didn’t fear for the survival of the American republic.
It was nice.
And now it’s gone and we’re back to all of that after a four year hiatus.
Just in the last forty-eight hours:
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has launched a catastrophically stupid and immoral trade war with our closest trading partners – Canada and Mexico – as well as our largest (China). Because nothing says “stable genius” than trying the same thing he tried last time when he got his ass handed to him, only on a grander scale. Folks, you have no idea what this is going to do to the American economy and, to cite the meme I saw float by a couple of hours ago, I’m not about to try to explain how tariffs work to people who think DEI causes planes to crash. That would be like trying to explain calculus to a dung beetle and all I’d get out of it is older. In both cases I’d probably get shit flung at me. Both Canada and Mexico are going to respond to this with their own tariffs, which Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already promised will simply escalate the trade war until the entire economy collapses.
Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, whom nobody actually voted for, has installed his minions into both the Treasury Department and the OPM, locking out the civil servants who actually work there and downloading all of their files and information onto portable hard drives. There isn’t anything in that sentence that is even remotely legal. When actual government employees have tried to stop these crimes they’ve been fired and slandered. Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk has declared that the entire USAID – an agency that leads international development and humanitarian assistance efforts in allied countries – is a “criminal organization” for not doing exactly what his minions have ordered, and he’s declared the Evangelical Lutheran Church to be a money laundering organization. He’s also declared that he will unilaterally stop releasing funds to groups he dislikes, which alone should have had him arrested and jailed by now but these are the times we live in.
Federal employees are now being warned by their colleagues to document everything, say nothing, and generally behave in a manner consistent with self-defense in a Fascist regime. There is nothing unwarranted about that advice, either.
And so on. There’s more.
I’d really like to be talking about other things here. I have a life. I have observations that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the collapse of the American republic. I’d like to focus on better things.
And at some point I will do that, no matter how bad things get. You need a break now and then.
But for now it is important to use whatever platform I have to get the word out.
It’s not much, but it’s what I have right now. When there is more, there will be more.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
If there is one thing I will be forever grateful to Joe Biden for it is that he was boring. For four blessed years I didn’t have to wake up wondering what catastrophic nightmare the sitting president had pulled out of his ass in the wee hours and foisted off onto an unsuspecting world. I didn’t have to try to figure out ways to protect my loved ones and my communities from the militarized hatred of bigots, fanatics, and lowlifes. I didn’t fear for the survival of the American republic.
It was nice.
And now it’s gone and we’re back to all of that after a four year hiatus.
Just in the last forty-eight hours:
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has launched a catastrophically stupid and immoral trade war with our closest trading partners – Canada and Mexico – as well as our largest (China). Because nothing says “stable genius” than trying the same thing he tried last time when he got his ass handed to him, only on a grander scale. Folks, you have no idea what this is going to do to the American economy and, to cite the meme I saw float by a couple of hours ago, I’m not about to try to explain how tariffs work to people who think DEI causes planes to crash. That would be like trying to explain calculus to a dung beetle and all I’d get out of it is older. In both cases I’d probably get shit flung at me. Both Canada and Mexico are going to respond to this with their own tariffs, which Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already promised will simply escalate the trade war until the entire economy collapses.
Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, whom nobody actually voted for, has installed his minions into both the Treasury Department and the OPM, locking out the civil servants who actually work there and downloading all of their files and information onto portable hard drives. There isn’t anything in that sentence that is even remotely legal. When actual government employees have tried to stop these crimes they’ve been fired and slandered. Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk has declared that the entire USAID – an agency that leads international development and humanitarian assistance efforts in allied countries – is a “criminal organization” for not doing exactly what his minions have ordered, and he’s declared the Evangelical Lutheran Church to be a money laundering organization. He’s also declared that he will unilaterally stop releasing funds to groups he dislikes, which alone should have had him arrested and jailed by now but these are the times we live in.
Federal employees are now being warned by their colleagues to document everything, say nothing, and generally behave in a manner consistent with self-defense in a Fascist regime. There is nothing unwarranted about that advice, either.
And so on. There’s more.
I’d really like to be talking about other things here. I have a life. I have observations that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the collapse of the American republic. I’d like to focus on better things.
And at some point I will do that, no matter how bad things get. You need a break now and then.
But for now it is important to use whatever platform I have to get the word out.
It’s not much, but it’s what I have right now. When there is more, there will be more.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
Friday, January 31, 2025
Remember and Resist
So let’s take a step back and consider what the long game here is.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have launched their Blitzkrieg against the American republic and are rapidly careening through the Fascist playbook toward absolute dictatorship. In the last week or so we’ve seen multiple assertions of power he does not legally possess, daring patriots to push back against him. We’ve seen purges, not only in the federal government in general but in law enforcement in particular. He’s nominated a bizarre slate of suck-ups, fuck-ups, incompetents, and assholes for key government positions, some of them Cabinet level and some of them not, creatures wholly dependent on his whim and possessing no other qualification than a deep and callous willingness to inflict cruelty on command. We’ve seen the deliberate targeting for extinction of entire groups of vulnerable Americans – and if you’ve ever wondered how the Holocaust happened, by the way, this is it. He’s antagonized our allies, launched utterly stupid trade wars that he’s already lost even though he’s claimed victory because he’s too stupid to see past the next fifteen minutes, threatened military invasions, exacted petty revenge against anyone who has ever crossed him, and generally demonstrated exactly why every thinking human being on the planet was screaming at the American electorate to shitcan this halfwit.
Yeah, the American electorate can be stupid. It’s a gift.
It can be hard to keep up with it all, as noted earlier in this space. But in a very real sense that’s the point of it.
Very little of what he’s done so far has been designed to stick. He’s simply testing to see what he can get away with.
Violating the Separation of Powers? Not yet. Maybe next time. The spineless lickspittles that make up the GOP majority in Congress don’t seem to mind being sidelined out of their Constitutional roles and certainly don’t have the gumption to impeach him as the Constitution already requires.
Installing a blind drunk loyalist at the top of the US military? Accomplished. The US military is trained to refuse unlawful orders, but when they come from the SecDef that distinction might be hard to make so it’s going to get interesting when (not if) Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump decides to unleash lethal force against American citizens for the crime of not being part of his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves.
And so on.
The point of a Gish Gallop is to overwhelm, demoralize, and distract.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that he is systematically gutting the federal government, turning it into an instrument of his own aggrandizement and removing the guardrails that the Founding Fathers installed to protect the republic from tyranny.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see how he has handed over day-to-day policy decision-making to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, who has already demanded that federal employees resign en masse and infiltrated the US Treasury’s payments system to shut off federal funds to anyone not subject to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk’s approval, which is pretty good for a guy who should have been deported decades ago.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that once he’s finished destroying the people you hate he’s going to come after you because that’s just how Fascism works.
You’re supposed to be distracted. You’re supposed to be demoralized. You’re supposed to be overwhelmed.
But forewarned is forearmed, after all, and once you know what the magician knows it isn’t magic anymore. We know what his strategy is, and therefore we can take it into account and respond appropriately.
Do not obey in advance.
Do not forget that Fascism requires submission from more people than can be controlled.
We are Americans. We are perhaps the most stubborn, ungovernable bastards on earth. If we do not wish to be ruled by Fascists, we do not have to be ruled by Fascists.
Remember that in the coming chaos. Remember the larger picture amid the flurry of assaults on all that is worthwhile and sacred.
Remember, and resist.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves have launched their Blitzkrieg against the American republic and are rapidly careening through the Fascist playbook toward absolute dictatorship. In the last week or so we’ve seen multiple assertions of power he does not legally possess, daring patriots to push back against him. We’ve seen purges, not only in the federal government in general but in law enforcement in particular. He’s nominated a bizarre slate of suck-ups, fuck-ups, incompetents, and assholes for key government positions, some of them Cabinet level and some of them not, creatures wholly dependent on his whim and possessing no other qualification than a deep and callous willingness to inflict cruelty on command. We’ve seen the deliberate targeting for extinction of entire groups of vulnerable Americans – and if you’ve ever wondered how the Holocaust happened, by the way, this is it. He’s antagonized our allies, launched utterly stupid trade wars that he’s already lost even though he’s claimed victory because he’s too stupid to see past the next fifteen minutes, threatened military invasions, exacted petty revenge against anyone who has ever crossed him, and generally demonstrated exactly why every thinking human being on the planet was screaming at the American electorate to shitcan this halfwit.
Yeah, the American electorate can be stupid. It’s a gift.
It can be hard to keep up with it all, as noted earlier in this space. But in a very real sense that’s the point of it.
Very little of what he’s done so far has been designed to stick. He’s simply testing to see what he can get away with.
Violating the Separation of Powers? Not yet. Maybe next time. The spineless lickspittles that make up the GOP majority in Congress don’t seem to mind being sidelined out of their Constitutional roles and certainly don’t have the gumption to impeach him as the Constitution already requires.
Installing a blind drunk loyalist at the top of the US military? Accomplished. The US military is trained to refuse unlawful orders, but when they come from the SecDef that distinction might be hard to make so it’s going to get interesting when (not if) Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump decides to unleash lethal force against American citizens for the crime of not being part of his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves.
And so on.
The point of a Gish Gallop is to overwhelm, demoralize, and distract.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that he is systematically gutting the federal government, turning it into an instrument of his own aggrandizement and removing the guardrails that the Founding Fathers installed to protect the republic from tyranny.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see how he has handed over day-to-day policy decision-making to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk, who has already demanded that federal employees resign en masse and infiltrated the US Treasury’s payments system to shut off federal funds to anyone not subject to Co-President Elon “Seig Heil” Musk’s approval, which is pretty good for a guy who should have been deported decades ago.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump does not want you to see that once he’s finished destroying the people you hate he’s going to come after you because that’s just how Fascism works.
You’re supposed to be distracted. You’re supposed to be demoralized. You’re supposed to be overwhelmed.
But forewarned is forearmed, after all, and once you know what the magician knows it isn’t magic anymore. We know what his strategy is, and therefore we can take it into account and respond appropriately.
Do not obey in advance.
Do not forget that Fascism requires submission from more people than can be controlled.
We are Americans. We are perhaps the most stubborn, ungovernable bastards on earth. If we do not wish to be ruled by Fascists, we do not have to be ruled by Fascists.
Remember that in the coming chaos. Remember the larger picture amid the flurry of assaults on all that is worthwhile and sacred.
Remember, and resist.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
On the Current Gish Gallop
Duane Gish was one of those right-wing morons who rode the idea of “creationism” to notoriety back in the 1970s. Because of the modern American belief that Truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing viewpoints, no matter how vacuous or toxic one of those viewpoints might be, he was often invited to “debate” actual scientists regarding evolution. His signature style in these confrontations was to start speaking and never stop, spewing a continuous rapid-fire stream of bullshit designed to overwhelm and discourage whoever had the misfortune to hear it. He’d vomit words with no particular regard for logic, common sense, provable fact, or connection with objective reality and while everything he said was nonsense he never gave anyone time or space to point this out – and even when someone would try, by the time they did Gish would be a dozen lies further down his road.
This is called a Gish Gallop.
The right wing lionized him for this tactic, which is what happens when a group recognizes they have empty and unpopular ideas and must rely on cheap tricks and overwhelming force to get their way.
Not surprisingly, therefore, this is what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves are doing to the American people right now. The firehose of catastrophic decisions, impeachable offenses, Fascist orders, and callous cruelty that has spewed out from the capital in the nine (NINE!) days since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power is specifically designed to disorient and demoralize any coherent opposition while at the same time cementing his authoritarian dismantling of the American republic.
Once you know this, you can protect yourself and others from it. And you can figure out effective responses, rather than spinning wildly after each new outrage.
Because there have been a lot of outrages perpetrated in a very short amount of time. These include:
Attempting to repeal a Constitutional amendment by fiat in order to deny the birthright citizenship that is clearly and explicitly outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment, an amendment ratified in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to avoid having white supremacists and insurrectionists decide who gets to be an American. If you’ve ever wondered why the American right wing loves to cite the Dred Scott decision (universally regarded by as the worst Supreme Court decision ever made, which is saying something in the target-rich environment that is the Court’s history) it is because that was the decision the Fourteenth Amendment was specifically designed to overturn.
Declaring that he had fired more than a dozen independent Inspectors General – officials whose job it is to root out corruption, abuse, and criminality in federal agencies – in clear violation of the law governing how that process works.
Impounding all grants and loans given by the federal government, a brutally cynical violation of the Separation of Powers and as such a direct assault on the Constitution itself, because – as one observer pointed out – if the President can unilaterally decide how much of or even whether money designated by Congress can be spent then you don’t need a Congress and all you have left is tyranny. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the President has any say whatsoever in this matter or any role other than to do what Congress has told him to do. For Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to attempt to arrogate this power to himself is therefore an astonishingly serious crime that should have already produced an impeachment vote. A court blocked the impoundment and then apparently some Real Lawyers explained to the Trump Lawyers exactly how much shit was about to hit the fan and magically the cryptic two-page memo purporting to undo the basic structure of American government was “rescinded,” but the offense was still committed and should still be punished.
I’m not even going to go into the long list of agencies and programs that this assault on America would have crippled except to note that most Americans have no idea how much they depend on those agencies and programs.
He has issued Executive Orders by the dozens – the weakest and least effective form of federal power – in large part because he recognizes that not even the spineless buffoons masquerading as Republican Senators and Representatives would consent to them, an avalanche of cruelty, illegality, counterproductive backsliding, and/or petty vengeance.
Some things these Executive Orders have accomplished so far include raising costs for medications for Americans (something Biden had capped); restricting voting access; cutting funding for public health; protecting workers safety; unleashing the jackbooted thugs of ICE on the population – including, apparently, American citizens who just happen to have brown skin, as news reports have repeatedly demonstrated; directing his administration to seek vengeance against any official or state or local government who dares to protest this; suspending American participation in the Global Tax Deal (an international agreement designed to prevent multinational corporations from evading taxes); declaring several specious “emergencies” allowing him to expand the use of executive power; eliminating policies designed to reduce fossil fuel dependence and climate change; eliminating the professional civil service and replacing it with more minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves; canceling sanctions against right-wing Israeli groups; removing guardrails preventing the abuse of AI; forbidding any federal agency from making public comments unless approved in advance (did you know we are currently in the middle of the largest outbreak of tuberculosis in recent American history? No? Do you wonder why you don’t know?); and pardoning the treasonous insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the government the last time Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was in power.
This is just a selection, by the way. There’s more.
He’s also more or less eliminated any mention of – let alone protections for – anyone who is not a straight white man. He has officially declared that – contrary to all understandings of biology – there are only two genders and anyone who says otherwise will be punished. Bottom line, anyone who is LGBTQ+, non-white (especially if they speak Spanish), or female is now a target for official persecution from their own government.
He’s pulled out the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization. He’s put tariffs of 25% on Mexico and Canada, two of our largest trading partners and the source of much of our food and energy. He’s threatened trade wars with countries that refused to do his bidding and threatened actual wars with countries whose land he’s decided he wants, some of whom are NATO allies. He’s interfered with the census in order to reshape the Electoral College. He’s declared he can give security clearances to anyone he wants for six months, a profoundly threatening move given the collection of rubes, foreign puppets, and security threats he’s assembled for his administration.
He even revoked the Equal Employment Opportunity order issued by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, freeing up the federal government to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, and gender.
So far, though, he has done nothing to reduce the price of eggs. We’re all waiting for that.
The bottom line of all of this is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing everything he can to turn the American republic into a tin-horn dictatorship with him at the center. Everything he has done so far has been to move power into his own hands. It’s a playbook we’ve seen before with dictatorships.
If the US Capitol mysteriously catches fire in the next few months, don’t say you weren’t warned.
The way to defeat a Gish Gallop is simply to wait it out until opportunities arise. Swat down the most obvious and harmful parts, but don’t run around madly trying to deal with it all at once. Soon enough it will run down. The wave of cruelty and sedition will crest, and there will be a period where Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves will try to consolidate their gains.
And this is when they will be vulnerable. This is when the counterattack in defense of the republic begins.
Stand firm. Do not be baited. Protect those who need to be protected and actively minimize harm whenever possible.
And then when the opportunity to respond effectively arises, take it.
This is called a Gish Gallop.
The right wing lionized him for this tactic, which is what happens when a group recognizes they have empty and unpopular ideas and must rely on cheap tricks and overwhelming force to get their way.
Not surprisingly, therefore, this is what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves are doing to the American people right now. The firehose of catastrophic decisions, impeachable offenses, Fascist orders, and callous cruelty that has spewed out from the capital in the nine (NINE!) days since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was installed into power is specifically designed to disorient and demoralize any coherent opposition while at the same time cementing his authoritarian dismantling of the American republic.
Once you know this, you can protect yourself and others from it. And you can figure out effective responses, rather than spinning wildly after each new outrage.
Because there have been a lot of outrages perpetrated in a very short amount of time. These include:
Attempting to repeal a Constitutional amendment by fiat in order to deny the birthright citizenship that is clearly and explicitly outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment, an amendment ratified in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to avoid having white supremacists and insurrectionists decide who gets to be an American. If you’ve ever wondered why the American right wing loves to cite the Dred Scott decision (universally regarded by as the worst Supreme Court decision ever made, which is saying something in the target-rich environment that is the Court’s history) it is because that was the decision the Fourteenth Amendment was specifically designed to overturn.
Declaring that he had fired more than a dozen independent Inspectors General – officials whose job it is to root out corruption, abuse, and criminality in federal agencies – in clear violation of the law governing how that process works.
Impounding all grants and loans given by the federal government, a brutally cynical violation of the Separation of Powers and as such a direct assault on the Constitution itself, because – as one observer pointed out – if the President can unilaterally decide how much of or even whether money designated by Congress can be spent then you don’t need a Congress and all you have left is tyranny. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the President has any say whatsoever in this matter or any role other than to do what Congress has told him to do. For Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to attempt to arrogate this power to himself is therefore an astonishingly serious crime that should have already produced an impeachment vote. A court blocked the impoundment and then apparently some Real Lawyers explained to the Trump Lawyers exactly how much shit was about to hit the fan and magically the cryptic two-page memo purporting to undo the basic structure of American government was “rescinded,” but the offense was still committed and should still be punished.
I’m not even going to go into the long list of agencies and programs that this assault on America would have crippled except to note that most Americans have no idea how much they depend on those agencies and programs.
He has issued Executive Orders by the dozens – the weakest and least effective form of federal power – in large part because he recognizes that not even the spineless buffoons masquerading as Republican Senators and Representatives would consent to them, an avalanche of cruelty, illegality, counterproductive backsliding, and/or petty vengeance.
Some things these Executive Orders have accomplished so far include raising costs for medications for Americans (something Biden had capped); restricting voting access; cutting funding for public health; protecting workers safety; unleashing the jackbooted thugs of ICE on the population – including, apparently, American citizens who just happen to have brown skin, as news reports have repeatedly demonstrated; directing his administration to seek vengeance against any official or state or local government who dares to protest this; suspending American participation in the Global Tax Deal (an international agreement designed to prevent multinational corporations from evading taxes); declaring several specious “emergencies” allowing him to expand the use of executive power; eliminating policies designed to reduce fossil fuel dependence and climate change; eliminating the professional civil service and replacing it with more minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves; canceling sanctions against right-wing Israeli groups; removing guardrails preventing the abuse of AI; forbidding any federal agency from making public comments unless approved in advance (did you know we are currently in the middle of the largest outbreak of tuberculosis in recent American history? No? Do you wonder why you don’t know?); and pardoning the treasonous insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the government the last time Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was in power.
This is just a selection, by the way. There’s more.
He’s also more or less eliminated any mention of – let alone protections for – anyone who is not a straight white man. He has officially declared that – contrary to all understandings of biology – there are only two genders and anyone who says otherwise will be punished. Bottom line, anyone who is LGBTQ+, non-white (especially if they speak Spanish), or female is now a target for official persecution from their own government.
He’s pulled out the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization. He’s put tariffs of 25% on Mexico and Canada, two of our largest trading partners and the source of much of our food and energy. He’s threatened trade wars with countries that refused to do his bidding and threatened actual wars with countries whose land he’s decided he wants, some of whom are NATO allies. He’s interfered with the census in order to reshape the Electoral College. He’s declared he can give security clearances to anyone he wants for six months, a profoundly threatening move given the collection of rubes, foreign puppets, and security threats he’s assembled for his administration.
He even revoked the Equal Employment Opportunity order issued by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, freeing up the federal government to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, and gender.
So far, though, he has done nothing to reduce the price of eggs. We’re all waiting for that.
The bottom line of all of this is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing everything he can to turn the American republic into a tin-horn dictatorship with him at the center. Everything he has done so far has been to move power into his own hands. It’s a playbook we’ve seen before with dictatorships.
If the US Capitol mysteriously catches fire in the next few months, don’t say you weren’t warned.
The way to defeat a Gish Gallop is simply to wait it out until opportunities arise. Swat down the most obvious and harmful parts, but don’t run around madly trying to deal with it all at once. Soon enough it will run down. The wave of cruelty and sedition will crest, and there will be a period where Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves will try to consolidate their gains.
And this is when they will be vulnerable. This is when the counterattack in defense of the republic begins.
Stand firm. Do not be baited. Protect those who need to be protected and actively minimize harm whenever possible.
And then when the opportunity to respond effectively arises, take it.
Sunday, January 26, 2025
News and Updates
1. There is much to discuss regarding der Sturmtrumper and his Blitzkrieg assault on everything of moral value in the American republic and the larger world, but part of his goal is to overwhelm and disorient so I am going to take this post to discuss other things. Rest assured that my contempt for him and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves remains unlimited, my rage at their calculated evil is unabated, and my plan to stay malevolently well informed regarding their moral, legal, and political failings remains intact. But sometimes you have to talk about other things.
2. The Eagles are going to the Super Bowl, which is a marvelous thing if you are a fan. Somewhere my dad is smiling. My interest in football has declined over the years, but I will always support the Birds. As of this writing I don’t know who they will be playing but I’m really hoping it’s Buffalo because the Chiefs are this decade’s Patriots and nobody needs to see them win anything again for a very long time. Fly, Eagles, fly.
3. I have now acquired a Reddit account. It has been deeply underwhelming so far, but perhaps this is because I still haven’t figured out how to make that site work. I’ve joined a forum (something about 1920s vintage photographs) and tried to browse it but it seems to repeat the same two dozen photos on a loop so I’m not sure what good it’s for. People insist that I can find anything I want on this site and maybe they’re right but at the moment it’s just another task.
4. I’ve also returned the Sleep Machine as it was not for me. I promised that I would give it an honest effort and I did – even swapped out the mask at one point – but I never did manage to make it work for more than 90 minutes. When not using the sleep aid provides better rest than using the sleep aid, it’s really not much of an aid, is it?
5. Classes start up at Home Campus tomorrow. On the one hand I’m pretty set for them – I’ve only got one class to prep (in addition to the one that never actually ends) and that’s set to go. I’ve gotten my advisees as prepped as I can at this point and now it’s just a matter of getting them in for appointments. And yet on the other hand, it feels like I’m going in blind. I suspect that the catastrophic avalanche of current events is just poisoning the air a bit, but we’ll see.
6. Last week we had a demonstration of a new software system that will replace some of (but not all of) another software system and we were assured that it is Amazing and Zowie and All Things To All People and I gotta say I didn’t leave that demonstration thinking that but perhaps that’s just me. Wouldn’t be the first time.
7. Sometimes you just have to drive an hour to go to an Italian deli and clean the place out, because the only way we’re going to get through the next few years is by treating ourselves and each other well. One must fight the revolution, but one should also have snacks if they are available to you.
8. We weren’t going to make very many plans for the summer, but it looks like plans are being made anyway. I will enjoy them, I have no doubt. I will be glad I took part in them. But at some point I will rest.
9. I really need to sit down and make a list of all the personal projects that I am trying to accomplish because yesterday I remembered a whole other project that I’d completely forgotten about and it’s not good to let them disappear like that. Either do them or dismiss them.
10. When all is said and done, we will remember the people who stood up for others, and we will remember the people who didn’t.
2. The Eagles are going to the Super Bowl, which is a marvelous thing if you are a fan. Somewhere my dad is smiling. My interest in football has declined over the years, but I will always support the Birds. As of this writing I don’t know who they will be playing but I’m really hoping it’s Buffalo because the Chiefs are this decade’s Patriots and nobody needs to see them win anything again for a very long time. Fly, Eagles, fly.
3. I have now acquired a Reddit account. It has been deeply underwhelming so far, but perhaps this is because I still haven’t figured out how to make that site work. I’ve joined a forum (something about 1920s vintage photographs) and tried to browse it but it seems to repeat the same two dozen photos on a loop so I’m not sure what good it’s for. People insist that I can find anything I want on this site and maybe they’re right but at the moment it’s just another task.
4. I’ve also returned the Sleep Machine as it was not for me. I promised that I would give it an honest effort and I did – even swapped out the mask at one point – but I never did manage to make it work for more than 90 minutes. When not using the sleep aid provides better rest than using the sleep aid, it’s really not much of an aid, is it?
5. Classes start up at Home Campus tomorrow. On the one hand I’m pretty set for them – I’ve only got one class to prep (in addition to the one that never actually ends) and that’s set to go. I’ve gotten my advisees as prepped as I can at this point and now it’s just a matter of getting them in for appointments. And yet on the other hand, it feels like I’m going in blind. I suspect that the catastrophic avalanche of current events is just poisoning the air a bit, but we’ll see.
6. Last week we had a demonstration of a new software system that will replace some of (but not all of) another software system and we were assured that it is Amazing and Zowie and All Things To All People and I gotta say I didn’t leave that demonstration thinking that but perhaps that’s just me. Wouldn’t be the first time.
7. Sometimes you just have to drive an hour to go to an Italian deli and clean the place out, because the only way we’re going to get through the next few years is by treating ourselves and each other well. One must fight the revolution, but one should also have snacks if they are available to you.
8. We weren’t going to make very many plans for the summer, but it looks like plans are being made anyway. I will enjoy them, I have no doubt. I will be glad I took part in them. But at some point I will rest.
9. I really need to sit down and make a list of all the personal projects that I am trying to accomplish because yesterday I remembered a whole other project that I’d completely forgotten about and it’s not good to let them disappear like that. Either do them or dismiss them.
10. When all is said and done, we will remember the people who stood up for others, and we will remember the people who didn’t.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
The Week That Was
It’s been an absolutely horrifying week to be an American and it’s only Wednesday.
For those of you who live under rocks or who have somehow managed to remain in a drunken stupor since 2015, on Monday a twice-impeached convicted felon who somehow managed to escape the only proper punishment for treason was inexplicably sworn into office as this nation’s 47th president on a platform of revenge, bigotry, and open Fascism.
He wasted no time in proving the worst fears of patriots true.
He’s decided that he can unilaterally rewrite the Constitution and has announced the repeal of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. For those of you keeping score at home, that was put into the Constitution in 1868 to drive a stake through the poisonous heart of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision – the one that declared that only white people could ever be citizens of the United States because that’s how the white supremacists liked it. By making American citizenship dependent on the simple observable fact of being born here, the Constitution denies any attempt to make that citizenship dependent on the whims of assholes. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves wish to undo that so they can be the assholes who decide who gets to be an American. In any normal year this would be seen as the steaming bag of horseshit that it is but remember that we currently have a Supreme Court that has already declared that “it’s not illegal if the President does it,” which Richard Nixon would have killed for, so who knows whether their blind partisanship will be enough to give even more absolute power to this authoritarian bigot. It will be a close call, I suspect. This unilateral declaration of absolute authority is the kind of tyranny the Founding Fathers started a revolution over.
Although, there is the fact that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship is the only place in the Constitution where American citizenship is defined and thus provides the link that makes the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. And should it be overturned, I expect to see individual states imposing gun bans immediately.
He’s declared that he’s going to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – a law that the Federalist Party foisted off on John Adams as a way to destroy the Democratic Republican Party and which Adams was smart enough never to use – as a tool to deport millions of immigrants in violation of the plain text of that law. We are not in a “declared war” with any foreign nation and there is no “invasion or predatory incursion … perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.” Not that laws ever stopped this guy or are important to his minions, cronies, lackeys, or slaves.
He's decided he’s going to “take back” the Panama Canal because reasons. This would be a war of aggression against a sovereign state very similar to the grotesque violation of international law that Putin’s Russia is engaged with in Ukraine and would serve only to destroy the international order and what good standing the United States may still have across the world.
He’s pardoned over 1500 insurrectionists from the Trump Insurrection of 2021, some of whom murdered cops (so much for the party of law and order, I suppose). This is unbridled lawlessness and a sign of far worse to come. An insurrection that goes unpunished is called a dress rehearsal, after all.
He’s declared that there can only be two genders, as if that’s any of his concern and in blatant disregard of biology. Anyone who has studied biology past middle school knows that sex and gender are far more complicated than that, and it’s not anyone else’s concern what people want to call themselves anyway. Although he and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves are sufficiently stupid that the actual text of his executive order means that biologically that all Americans have been defined as female since male sexual organs don’t emerge until at least six weeks into pregnancy and it defines gender to be what it is “at conception.”
He’s removed all of the Spanish language web pages from the White House site, so congratulations all you Latinos who voted for him – you got played. FAFO.
He’s withdrawn from the World Health Organization, a spectacular own-goal in an age where Covid is still thriving and new epidemics are emerging on a regular basis. He understands that his supporters see preventative medicine as the enemy and are happy to volunteer to die in bulk from easily curable problems. They've served their purpose now that he's been elected and are now expendable, after all.
Just in case they prove more resilient than he thinks, he’s rescinded Biden’s executive order capping prices for medications. So enjoy not being able to pay for lifesaving drugs again, I suppose. Did he not get the message last month? Most Americans cheered when a health insurance executive was assassinated in broad daylight, after all.
He’s attempted to fire anyone in the federal government who dares to acknowledge that there are more people in the world besides straight white men.
At his inauguration his co-president gave the Nazi salute not once but twice, prompting exactly zero shame or remorse. When people show you who they are, believe them.
When an Episcopal bishop addressed the issue of mercy in her sermon while Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was in attendance he responded by howling in outrage and calling for vengeance against her, thus proving her point. Frankly, the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump set foot in a church and was not instantly reduced to a smoking cinder is fairly conclusive proof of the non-existence of God.
There’s more. Lord above, there’s more.
It is going to be a vile and grotesque four years and I put the odds of the survival of the American republic at about 20% during that period. But I will be damned if I am going to let that asshole and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves do it without resistance.
It’s my country. They can fuck off.
For those of you who live under rocks or who have somehow managed to remain in a drunken stupor since 2015, on Monday a twice-impeached convicted felon who somehow managed to escape the only proper punishment for treason was inexplicably sworn into office as this nation’s 47th president on a platform of revenge, bigotry, and open Fascism.
He wasted no time in proving the worst fears of patriots true.
He’s decided that he can unilaterally rewrite the Constitution and has announced the repeal of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. For those of you keeping score at home, that was put into the Constitution in 1868 to drive a stake through the poisonous heart of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision – the one that declared that only white people could ever be citizens of the United States because that’s how the white supremacists liked it. By making American citizenship dependent on the simple observable fact of being born here, the Constitution denies any attempt to make that citizenship dependent on the whims of assholes. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves wish to undo that so they can be the assholes who decide who gets to be an American. In any normal year this would be seen as the steaming bag of horseshit that it is but remember that we currently have a Supreme Court that has already declared that “it’s not illegal if the President does it,” which Richard Nixon would have killed for, so who knows whether their blind partisanship will be enough to give even more absolute power to this authoritarian bigot. It will be a close call, I suspect. This unilateral declaration of absolute authority is the kind of tyranny the Founding Fathers started a revolution over.
Although, there is the fact that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship is the only place in the Constitution where American citizenship is defined and thus provides the link that makes the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. And should it be overturned, I expect to see individual states imposing gun bans immediately.
He’s declared that he’s going to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – a law that the Federalist Party foisted off on John Adams as a way to destroy the Democratic Republican Party and which Adams was smart enough never to use – as a tool to deport millions of immigrants in violation of the plain text of that law. We are not in a “declared war” with any foreign nation and there is no “invasion or predatory incursion … perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.” Not that laws ever stopped this guy or are important to his minions, cronies, lackeys, or slaves.
He's decided he’s going to “take back” the Panama Canal because reasons. This would be a war of aggression against a sovereign state very similar to the grotesque violation of international law that Putin’s Russia is engaged with in Ukraine and would serve only to destroy the international order and what good standing the United States may still have across the world.
He’s pardoned over 1500 insurrectionists from the Trump Insurrection of 2021, some of whom murdered cops (so much for the party of law and order, I suppose). This is unbridled lawlessness and a sign of far worse to come. An insurrection that goes unpunished is called a dress rehearsal, after all.
He’s declared that there can only be two genders, as if that’s any of his concern and in blatant disregard of biology. Anyone who has studied biology past middle school knows that sex and gender are far more complicated than that, and it’s not anyone else’s concern what people want to call themselves anyway. Although he and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves are sufficiently stupid that the actual text of his executive order means that biologically that all Americans have been defined as female since male sexual organs don’t emerge until at least six weeks into pregnancy and it defines gender to be what it is “at conception.”
He’s removed all of the Spanish language web pages from the White House site, so congratulations all you Latinos who voted for him – you got played. FAFO.
He’s withdrawn from the World Health Organization, a spectacular own-goal in an age where Covid is still thriving and new epidemics are emerging on a regular basis. He understands that his supporters see preventative medicine as the enemy and are happy to volunteer to die in bulk from easily curable problems. They've served their purpose now that he's been elected and are now expendable, after all.
Just in case they prove more resilient than he thinks, he’s rescinded Biden’s executive order capping prices for medications. So enjoy not being able to pay for lifesaving drugs again, I suppose. Did he not get the message last month? Most Americans cheered when a health insurance executive was assassinated in broad daylight, after all.
He’s attempted to fire anyone in the federal government who dares to acknowledge that there are more people in the world besides straight white men.
At his inauguration his co-president gave the Nazi salute not once but twice, prompting exactly zero shame or remorse. When people show you who they are, believe them.
When an Episcopal bishop addressed the issue of mercy in her sermon while Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was in attendance he responded by howling in outrage and calling for vengeance against her, thus proving her point. Frankly, the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump set foot in a church and was not instantly reduced to a smoking cinder is fairly conclusive proof of the non-existence of God.
There’s more. Lord above, there’s more.
It is going to be a vile and grotesque four years and I put the odds of the survival of the American republic at about 20% during that period. But I will be damned if I am going to let that asshole and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves do it without resistance.
It’s my country. They can fuck off.
Monday, January 20, 2025
Thoughts on the Inauguration
In just a couple of hours, the United States will once again be governed by a grossly unqualified, deeply corrupt, easily manipulated conman who slid into the Oval Office on the votes of a minority of Americans for the second time in eight years and who has openly vowed to spend his time enriching his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves while using the powers of the federal government to persecute anyone who has ever crossed him – a group that will, given enough time, eventually include everyone.
It's going to be a long four years.
The Founding Fathers understood that republics were fragile things. Historically, they tended not to last very long for reasons that they saw as obvious. Republics have to meet very high requirements in order to survive, and in the end those requirements are not all that compatible with the whims and desires of the powerful.
Perhaps most importantly, they understood that a republic required leaders with virtue, which was defined very differently in the 18th century. We see virtue as a private moral quality today, often having to do with sexual matters though sometimes taken more broadly to mean a person’s individual ethics overall. This would have made no sense to the Founders, who saw virtue as a public quality. Virtue, to the Founders, was the ability of a man (always a man – there is a reason why “virtue” and “virile” are so similar) to rise above his petty, private interests and work for the common good of the whole. A proper leader was one who did what was best for the country, even at personal cost.
The paragon for this, of course, was George Washington. Washington was by no means a perfect person and there are legions of modern critics who delight in pointing this out, often at great length, but he was by the standards of the day virtuous. Twice in fifteen years he walked away from absolute power and returned to his home as a private citizen, and the United States owes him more than we could ever repay just for that precedent. He refused to enrich himself or his friends through his office, and the idea of using the powers of the federal government to persecute his enemies never occurred to him because he was neither contemptible nor petty.
We’ve come a long way since then.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will come to office already disgraced by his actions and character, and he has promised to continue that trend during his regime. He plans a barrage of executive orders for his first day in office, a sign of someone who knows very well his agenda couldn’t survive even a Congress theoretically controlled by his own party and who has little if any use for Constitutional government anyway.
He is, as many of his own former administration members including high-ranking military officers were screaming at the American people to understand before the election, an outright Fascist who plans to rule as an absolute dictator. He has openly vowed to be the worst president this country has ever seen, and 49.8% of the 64% of American voters who bothered to cast their ballots in November will no doubt be cheering him on.
I will not.
I will do whatever is in my power as an American citizen and an American patriot to block his reign of terror. I fully expect that, given long enough in power, his administration will eventually turn its attention even to small fry like me and I will not survive that. Fascists do not tolerate dissent. Perhaps I will simply outlast him, though. Perhaps we may even win in the end, though nothing is guaranteed. But here I stand. I can do no other.
During World War II the United States of America gave medals to my ancestors for shooting Fascists, and I will not disgrace their memory by supporting it here at home now.
It's going to be a long four years.
The Founding Fathers understood that republics were fragile things. Historically, they tended not to last very long for reasons that they saw as obvious. Republics have to meet very high requirements in order to survive, and in the end those requirements are not all that compatible with the whims and desires of the powerful.
Perhaps most importantly, they understood that a republic required leaders with virtue, which was defined very differently in the 18th century. We see virtue as a private moral quality today, often having to do with sexual matters though sometimes taken more broadly to mean a person’s individual ethics overall. This would have made no sense to the Founders, who saw virtue as a public quality. Virtue, to the Founders, was the ability of a man (always a man – there is a reason why “virtue” and “virile” are so similar) to rise above his petty, private interests and work for the common good of the whole. A proper leader was one who did what was best for the country, even at personal cost.
The paragon for this, of course, was George Washington. Washington was by no means a perfect person and there are legions of modern critics who delight in pointing this out, often at great length, but he was by the standards of the day virtuous. Twice in fifteen years he walked away from absolute power and returned to his home as a private citizen, and the United States owes him more than we could ever repay just for that precedent. He refused to enrich himself or his friends through his office, and the idea of using the powers of the federal government to persecute his enemies never occurred to him because he was neither contemptible nor petty.
We’ve come a long way since then.
Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will come to office already disgraced by his actions and character, and he has promised to continue that trend during his regime. He plans a barrage of executive orders for his first day in office, a sign of someone who knows very well his agenda couldn’t survive even a Congress theoretically controlled by his own party and who has little if any use for Constitutional government anyway.
He is, as many of his own former administration members including high-ranking military officers were screaming at the American people to understand before the election, an outright Fascist who plans to rule as an absolute dictator. He has openly vowed to be the worst president this country has ever seen, and 49.8% of the 64% of American voters who bothered to cast their ballots in November will no doubt be cheering him on.
I will not.
I will do whatever is in my power as an American citizen and an American patriot to block his reign of terror. I fully expect that, given long enough in power, his administration will eventually turn its attention even to small fry like me and I will not survive that. Fascists do not tolerate dissent. Perhaps I will simply outlast him, though. Perhaps we may even win in the end, though nothing is guaranteed. But here I stand. I can do no other.
During World War II the United States of America gave medals to my ancestors for shooting Fascists, and I will not disgrace their memory by supporting it here at home now.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Birthday Birds
The Eagles managed to hold on and beat the Rams today for the right to play at home next week in the NFC championship game. It was an ugly win in an occasionally blinding snowstorm, one that came down to the second-to-last play in large part because the Eagles kicker managed to miss not one but two extra points, but any win counts in the playoffs. It will look like a blowout in tomorrow’s papers.
Somewhere my dad is smiling.
My dad was a huge Eagles fan. They were his team the way the Phillies belonged to my grandfather and the Flyers belong to me. Whenever I hear people talking shit about Eagles fans I automatically think less of them, because he was the finest man I ever knew and they’re trying to talk shit about him. This does not fly with me, though today the Eagles did.
My dad would have been 86 today. The world has become a different place in many ways since he died in early 2016, some good and some not, but there are a lot of things have remained constant over that time.
I’m still an Eagles fan, just as he was.
And he is still the finest man I ever knew.
Happy birthday, Dad.
Somewhere my dad is smiling.
My dad was a huge Eagles fan. They were his team the way the Phillies belonged to my grandfather and the Flyers belong to me. Whenever I hear people talking shit about Eagles fans I automatically think less of them, because he was the finest man I ever knew and they’re trying to talk shit about him. This does not fly with me, though today the Eagles did.
My dad would have been 86 today. The world has become a different place in many ways since he died in early 2016, some good and some not, but there are a lot of things have remained constant over that time.
I’m still an Eagles fan, just as he was.
And he is still the finest man I ever knew.
Happy birthday, Dad.
Saturday, January 18, 2025
A Birthday on Ice
We had the last of my birthday celebrations for the current birthday cycle last night, and a good time it was.
My birthday present from Lauren was tickets to see the Madison Capitols, the minor-league hockey team that plays there. I looked it up and they’re roughly the equivalent of a top-tier Single-A team in baseball, which means that you have a lot of guys playing who are at the very beginning of their careers and still learning some of the basics but are capable of flashes of great play. They’re one notch above the team that plays here in Our Little Town. Lauren even got an extra ticket so Kim could come along with us and make it an evening. We had to schedule it for after all of the various holiday trips and travels were over – the Movable Feast Tradition in our family says that holidays happen when you have time for them, after all – and yesterday was the day.
But first there was dinner, because nothing in my world happens on an empty stomach. Wouldn’t be seemly. Probably wouldn’t end well. And since I got to choose and my tastes run toward the “order at the counter and go sit down” end of the restaurant spectrum, we went to a place called Stadium Takeout which has the best cheesesteaks in Wisconsin.
This is, of course, a relative term.
By Philadelphia standards these rise to the level of “acceptable,” but here in Wisconsin that is high praise indeed. I don’t know why, in a state full of beef and cheese, you can’t find a good cheesesteak, but there it is. I tried this place last summer and liked it enough to come back when my cheesesteak yen got big enough, and they were tasty enough to satisfy that craving and thus a good way to start a birthday celebration, especially when in good company.
My birthday present from Lauren was tickets to see the Madison Capitols, the minor-league hockey team that plays there. I looked it up and they’re roughly the equivalent of a top-tier Single-A team in baseball, which means that you have a lot of guys playing who are at the very beginning of their careers and still learning some of the basics but are capable of flashes of great play. They’re one notch above the team that plays here in Our Little Town. Lauren even got an extra ticket so Kim could come along with us and make it an evening. We had to schedule it for after all of the various holiday trips and travels were over – the Movable Feast Tradition in our family says that holidays happen when you have time for them, after all – and yesterday was the day.
But first there was dinner, because nothing in my world happens on an empty stomach. Wouldn’t be seemly. Probably wouldn’t end well. And since I got to choose and my tastes run toward the “order at the counter and go sit down” end of the restaurant spectrum, we went to a place called Stadium Takeout which has the best cheesesteaks in Wisconsin.
This is, of course, a relative term.
By Philadelphia standards these rise to the level of “acceptable,” but here in Wisconsin that is high praise indeed. I don’t know why, in a state full of beef and cheese, you can’t find a good cheesesteak, but there it is. I tried this place last summer and liked it enough to come back when my cheesesteak yen got big enough, and they were tasty enough to satisfy that craving and thus a good way to start a birthday celebration, especially when in good company.
The birthday card made it even better, as Lauren had gotten a number of friends to send birthday greetings and then combined them all into a short video. It was an astonishingly lovely thing, really.
After dinner we headed over to the ice rink, which is technically outside of the city by a small bit and thus has actual parking. It’s the little things!
The joy of minor league sports is that you can almost always get good seats right up on the action, and we certainly did. We were in the second row, maybe four feet from the ice, and right up on the action.
If I turned to my right, I was staring directly into the opposing team’s bench. Their backup goalie was maybe an arm’s length from me, though the chain link fence between me and him kept us both honest, I suppose. This seating meant I couldn’t really see the near corner of the ice to my right, but then very little of the game seemed to happen down at that end anyway. It also meant that when the opposing team pulled their goalie at the end of the game he came over and stood more or less next to me and I could read the back of his helmet – “My goal is to deny yours” it said, and I hope that kid makes it to the NHL someday just for that.
It was a pretty good game. The home team led 1-0 after the first period and 3-0 after two, and Lauren and I agreed that this was a good margin to be ahead by since less than that was worrying and more than that was kind of rude. And then the third period started and suddenly goals were everywhere – there were three goals scored in the first two minutes of the period – and when it was all over the Capitols had won 6-3 thus preserving the three-goal margin after all.
After the game we met up with Maxim at the cocktail bar where Lauren works and sampled some of the roughly three thousand different kinds of martinis that they make there. I can personally attest to the fact that the Chocolate Cherry Martini was wonderful. Since we were, technically, celebrating my birthday, they also threw in a half-size vanilla martini for me and it was similarly tasty. Add in a plate of mixed stuffed olives, a chicken pesto flatbread, and a lovely evening of conversation and it was a fine birthday celebration indeed.
Happy birthday to me, once again!
Friday, January 17, 2025
News and Updates
1. I’m enjoying the last few days of the American republic. I suspect I’ll come back to these memories a lot in the coming years.
2. Why is it that every trip to Costco requires an entire shopping cart and costs $400 even if all you initially wanted to buy were cheese puffs? They didn’t even have the cheese puffs this time. We made up for this by purchasing a lifetime supply of shredded cheddar and citrus fruit, and a package of the world’s longest beef sticks. Please note that I am not complaining about any of this, just observing.
3. We now have a new sofa, which Kim has been wanting for years. Our old sofa was a maroon leather Sam’s Club model that we got because we figured it would be easier to clean when the kids were little and in fairness a) we were right about that and b) it held up pretty well for over two decades. But now we are old and wanted something we could sit on for more than an hour at a time without back pain, so last month Kim asked me to go look at sofas at a local furniture store – “just to look!” – and we ended up buying one, as I knew very well we would. It’s grey and comfortable and three much younger people delivered it last week and set it up and so far it’s really nice. Oliver and I took the old one down to the Gamer Nook in the basement where it will likely be passed on to whomever buys this house from us because that thing is heavier than it looks and we’re not bringing it back up. He says it’s nice to have it there.
4. Midgie has decided that the new sofa is acceptable, which is good of her.
5. It is a strange in-between time down at Home Campus, where I am mostly working from home because there is precious little for me to do on campus until the big campus retreats start up next week and the students return the following week. I can do pretty much everything I need to do here while not having to leave the house – three cheers for remote meetings, I suppose – and the few students who need to see me I can handle by going in one or two days a week. That counts as a win in my book.
6. Anniversaries come and anniversaries go and what are you going to do about them, that’s what I want to know.
7. Our tollway transponders are being phased out in favor of stickers, and I am sure someone can explain how that works even if I don’t particularly want them to do so. I’m not convinced about this at all and I expect that I will get nastygrams from the toll agency about that, but so it goes. We’ll have that conversation as needed.
8. Having now picked up three different people from two separate airports in the last three weeks, I think I am done with that for a while. It’s nice to see people and hear their stories, though. Lauren had a good time visiting Arden and that is a lovely thing.
9. I need to get my next class up and running for the spring, which means putting it all into Canvas and deciding how much of it I want to change. There are at least two discussion assignments I want to replace and if I can get about four years further in lectures then I will arrive at a good stopping point. So, work to be done. At least it’s fun work.
10. I also have several long-term personal projects that I need to work on, some of which involve other people and outlays of money and some of which just require me to sit in front of a computer and move things around into files. Also, tea.
2. Why is it that every trip to Costco requires an entire shopping cart and costs $400 even if all you initially wanted to buy were cheese puffs? They didn’t even have the cheese puffs this time. We made up for this by purchasing a lifetime supply of shredded cheddar and citrus fruit, and a package of the world’s longest beef sticks. Please note that I am not complaining about any of this, just observing.
3. We now have a new sofa, which Kim has been wanting for years. Our old sofa was a maroon leather Sam’s Club model that we got because we figured it would be easier to clean when the kids were little and in fairness a) we were right about that and b) it held up pretty well for over two decades. But now we are old and wanted something we could sit on for more than an hour at a time without back pain, so last month Kim asked me to go look at sofas at a local furniture store – “just to look!” – and we ended up buying one, as I knew very well we would. It’s grey and comfortable and three much younger people delivered it last week and set it up and so far it’s really nice. Oliver and I took the old one down to the Gamer Nook in the basement where it will likely be passed on to whomever buys this house from us because that thing is heavier than it looks and we’re not bringing it back up. He says it’s nice to have it there.
4. Midgie has decided that the new sofa is acceptable, which is good of her.
5. It is a strange in-between time down at Home Campus, where I am mostly working from home because there is precious little for me to do on campus until the big campus retreats start up next week and the students return the following week. I can do pretty much everything I need to do here while not having to leave the house – three cheers for remote meetings, I suppose – and the few students who need to see me I can handle by going in one or two days a week. That counts as a win in my book.
6. Anniversaries come and anniversaries go and what are you going to do about them, that’s what I want to know.
7. Our tollway transponders are being phased out in favor of stickers, and I am sure someone can explain how that works even if I don’t particularly want them to do so. I’m not convinced about this at all and I expect that I will get nastygrams from the toll agency about that, but so it goes. We’ll have that conversation as needed.
8. Having now picked up three different people from two separate airports in the last three weeks, I think I am done with that for a while. It’s nice to see people and hear their stories, though. Lauren had a good time visiting Arden and that is a lovely thing.
9. I need to get my next class up and running for the spring, which means putting it all into Canvas and deciding how much of it I want to change. There are at least two discussion assignments I want to replace and if I can get about four years further in lectures then I will arrive at a good stopping point. So, work to be done. At least it’s fun work.
10. I also have several long-term personal projects that I need to work on, some of which involve other people and outlays of money and some of which just require me to sit in front of a computer and move things around into files. Also, tea.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Christmas II: This Time It's Ukrainian
We completed our annual round of Family Christmases this past weekend in style, with a day of good food, good company, and a fair bit of driving because this is America and that’s just how we roll.
There was much baking in the run-up to this, of course. There always is. Kim made bread and a poppyseed cake, and I figured out why my pizzelles were coming out too thick and fixed that so this batch of pizzelles was nice and crisp. Pizzelles are my entry ticket to this otherwise Ukrainian festival. I’m the DEI baker that way. There is a certain “coals to Newcastle” quality about bringing all of this food along with us, but in a tasty way.
We arrived not long before dinner, and there was much preparation in the works. Many cookies. Borscht. Sausages. Pierogies. Halupchi. Potato pancakes. And so on. If a sudden blizzard were to strand us there, we’d have been in good shape. We might not have even noticed. Honestly, we might have cheered.
There was much baking in the run-up to this, of course. There always is. Kim made bread and a poppyseed cake, and I figured out why my pizzelles were coming out too thick and fixed that so this batch of pizzelles was nice and crisp. Pizzelles are my entry ticket to this otherwise Ukrainian festival. I’m the DEI baker that way. There is a certain “coals to Newcastle” quality about bringing all of this food along with us, but in a tasty way.
We arrived not long before dinner, and there was much preparation in the works. Many cookies. Borscht. Sausages. Pierogies. Halupchi. Potato pancakes. And so on. If a sudden blizzard were to strand us there, we’d have been in good shape. We might not have even noticed. Honestly, we might have cheered.
There was a certain amount of hanging out while everyone filtered in. Naturally we – being the furthest away – arrived first, because that’s how it always is with any group. You have to plan ahead when you live a bit away and take into account possible delays along the route. When you’re right there, you can just roll out and head on over. But the hanging out is the point, really – holidays are meant for gatherings and conversations.
And eating. There is always the eating part. That’s important too.
We are professionals that way, and we endeavored to live up to those standards. You can’t get everyone around the same table for these holidays so there were two tables and even then there was a certain amount of hot-seating as people finished and got up and were replaced by other people. It is a constant swirl of motion with new seatmates to talk with on a regular basis. It keeps things interesting.
There are enough small people on this side of the family that we still do the traditional Christmas gift time, though it’s a fairly informal thing. When enough people have finished eating and the little ones can wait no more the gifts come out and then there is a Festival Of Unwrapping And Exclamations and all is right with the world.
Of course, for the rest of us there is the Dice Game, a tradition on both sides of my family now. In the wake of last year’s results we implemented a new rule for this year: no kitchen items. It was mostly obeyed, which meant that there was a wider variety of things in the mix, the most fought over being a calendar of pictures of things found in nature that look like penises because who would object to that on their office wall? Nobody, that’s who.
The dice went around and around and eventually we all had our gifts. I don’t remember who ended up with the four-foot-tall Santa but I suspect we’ll see that again in a future year.
And so our Christmas is mostly done now. All we have left to do is our Christmas card, which might get out by Valentine’s Day this year if we focus on it. Might not. Never a bad time for a card, really.
To all a good night.
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