Further Dispatches from the Coup, Part 2

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.

This is Part 2 of the post I put up on Saturday, because by Zeus there is just so damned much to cover right now.

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1. Have you ever wanted to watch a prosperous and secure nation collapse from self-inflicted wounds? Yes, you say? Well, have I got the timeline for you! We are watching the end of the American experiment live and in real time this year both politically and, it turns out, economically. Last October The Economist ran a cover story that called the American economy “the envy of the world.” Unemployment was low, investments were rising, and thanks to the policies put in place by Joe Biden and his administration the US had recovered from the dislocations of the pandemic faster and more thoroughly than any industrialized nation on earth. And in a mere three months, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his crew of cannibals have destroyed all of that and then some. If this were a movie there wouldn’t be enough popcorn in the world to cover it, but since real lives are on the line and are already being lost because of this the humor wears thin pretty quickly.

2. Last week Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump went on live television to destroy the global economy. In a bizarre and stunted performance, he waved around a poster-sized graphic containing the names of a number of countries and some numbers that were apparently pulled from deep inside the lower intestine of some random administration flunky and then announced that he was unilaterally imposing punitive tariffs on, well, the entire world except for Russia because they’re special. The reactions from economists and global leaders were swift and unanimous. “Idiotic,” said one. “Worse than the worst case scenario” said another. “This is not a serious trade policy or a grand strategy” said economic historian Adam Tooze. Seriously – outbreaks of communicable diseases have gotten more support from experts than these tariffs.

3. The people who actually know how money works were horrified. Markets all over the world crashed. The Dow Jones lost over 3900 points in two days – more than 9% of its total value. The S&P 500 lost more than 10% of its value. NASDAQ lost over 11%. All of this meant the disappearance of trillions of dollars of wealth, and this was coming after the worst quarter for American stocks since 2022 as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s policies had already led to sharp declines in the weeks since he was inaugurated. NASDAQ is fully into bear market territory, down more than 20% since December, and the Dow is in correction. I hope you weren’t counting on that 401k to see you through retirement! Maybe get a burger with it.

4. On top of that global investors are dumping the dollar, which has fallen to a six-month low and is in danger of losing its status as the world’s reserve currency, in which case the US economy will collapse. Deutsche Bank is now warning clients to “beware of a dollar confidence crisis.” The dollar’s reserve currency status allows the United States to have far more flexibility with its finances than any other nation on earth and also allows the US to leverage the power of its currency as part of its national security. Pissing that away is going to cost us dearly.

5. Plus the latest economic forecast I looked at said that we face a 60% likelihood of hard times happening this year (i.e. more likely than not) thanks to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his policies. Consumer confidence – the key statistic in a consumer economy such as the one the US has had for a century now – is down 30% from where it was the day before Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was elected and is now at its lowest level in twelve years, anticipated inflation for the coming year was already expected to be over 6% even before the tariffs (which will make that much, much worse), and domestic manufacturing is actually contracting. US banking is heading for a crisis, with over a hundred billion dollars in “unrealized losses” this year, which at the minimum means the financial markets are heading for a major downturn. For those of us who remember the 1970s, all of this adds up to stagflation, a particularly difficult economic problem to solve even for people who actually know what they’re doing and such people do not work for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. He did say he’d run this country like a business and it’s just too bad that so many of his businesses go bankrupt – the man managed to bankrupt his own casino, for crying out loud, which is very hard to do when you think about it – and we’re just the next one to fall.

6. Well, yeah.

7. None of this should have been any surprise. First of all, mass tariffs always do this. This is the third time that the US has imposed this kind of irresponsible wall of tariffs on the rest of the world – it seems to be something we do roughly every hundred years, as the people who remember how poorly it turned out die off and nobody remembers just how bad it was. We tried it in 1828. We tried it again in 1930. Both times it destroyed the economy and led to a decade of privations and hardship, and this time the tariffs are higher than either of the previous tariffs at a time when global trade is a much bigger part of our economy. But hey – third time’s a charm, right?

8. The tariffs imposed in the 1890s could possibly be included in this rubric as well, since they’re the ones put in place by McKinley that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump keeps yammering on about. You know what happened with those? Yes! The collapse of the economy! Yeah, it’s a pattern.

9. Second, even if you support tariffs – which some economists, surprisingly enough, do, because in a nation of over 330 million people you can always find a couple dozen people who believe anything – the fact is that these were imposed in quite possibly the most irresponsible and slapdash way possible. If you’re going to do this you need to be very careful about how you do it, you need to be very precise in what you include and what you don’t, and you need to be very accurate in how you determine the rates. None of that happened here. The numbers for these tariffs are completely imaginary. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s method of determining how much tariff to impose on a country was to take our trade deficit with that country and divide it by that country’s exports to us. This is how he decided that Indonesia was charging us a 64% tariff on goods, which is hallucinatory as is the idea that the EU is somehow charging a 39% tariff on US goods. South Korea, with whom we have a trade agreement, is not charging us 50% tariff. None of those numbers are real. None of this is real. And then the Solons in this regime decided that the US tariff would be half of whatever that number was, with a floor of 10%. Every competent economist in the world is probably either drunk or dead of a heart attack now just from the sheer random stupidity of this. Furthermore, the tariffs were not imposed on specific goods or even categories of goods the way properly targeted tariffs work – they were simply imposed on nations as a whole. Given that this is the crew that thought waving a chainsaw around a stage was a genius move, nobody should be surprised by that.

10. And you know what? They not even by nation! No! This fucking idiot and his simpleton regime imposed them by top-level internet domain. They just used ChatGPT or something similar to generate a spreadsheet based on domain names and went with that. This is why, for example, Reunion (.re) is listed separately from France and Gibralter (.gi) is listed separately from the UK. It’s why Heard Island and McDonald Island are listed separately from Australia. Australia’s Norfolk Island, which does not actually export anything to the US according to its administrator, George Plant, got hit with a 29% tariff – nineteen percentage points higher than the one Australia itself is being charged with. And neither Heard Island nor McDonald Island have any human habitation living there at all – both are about 2500 miles southwest of Australia, accessible only by a seven-day voyage from Perth, and neither has been visited by a human in nearly a decade. The only inhabitants are penguins. Seriously – how brain damaged is this regime?

11. The penguins are not amused.

Peace was never an option.

12. Also, just for shits and giggles (as my dear grandmother used to say), Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has imposed a 10% tariff on all goods coming from the Chagos Islands, a remote chain of islands in the central Indian Ocean. Is anyone going to tell him that since 1971 the only human inhabitants of the Chagos Islands have been American military personnel at the US Navy base on Diego Garcia? That’ll show the Navy, won’t it.

13. The thing about the tariffs is that they cannot work as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump says they will. They can’t. It is logically impossible for them to do so. His regime is making two claims to justify this nonsense: 1) that it will raise six trillion dollars for the federal government over the next few years from countries paying the tariffs, and 2) that it will lead to a renaissance in American manufacturing as American consumers turn to domestically produced goods. Leaving aside the obvious – that these tariffs will not be paid by the originating country but rather will be paid by you, the American consumer, so if you thought these tariffs looked suspiciously like the largest peacetime tax increase in American history then congratulations, you get a star – these things are mutually exclusive. Either a flood of imported goods continues to come in so we can collect the tariffs from whoever is paying them – which means that American consumers will continue to purchase imported goods at rates equal to or exceeding what they did before the tariffs and there will therefore be no actual increase in domestically produced goods – or Americans will turn to domestic goods which will somehow magically start to be produced in sufficient quantity to satisfy current demand, in which case the amount of tariffs collected falls to zero so there won’t actually be that six trillion dollar windfall. One or the other. It's possible that neither will happen – it will take a minimum of four to ten years for American manufacturing to gear up to that level and in the meantime consumer demand will likely decline sharply due to the prohibitive costs of goods as importers pass along the cost of the tariffs to the end purchaser, or as inflation skyrockets as consumer demand holds up but manufacturers can’t supply it – but both? No. Reality doesn’t work that way. Whatever they’re smoking I hope they brought enough to share.

14. The sheer slipshod stupidity of these tariffs raises the possibility that the stated economic reasons for imposing them are not actually why they’re being imposed. And that, if you pursue it to its logical conclusion, is a daunting prospect indeed. Senator Chris Murphy recently explained that the point of these tariffs is not to generate income or spur American manufacturing, but rather to collapse American democracy in a way that the Founding Fathers would have understood intuitively.

The Founders lived in a world of classical republicanism, not Lockean liberalism, and for long and complicated reasons that I’ve explained on this site before one of the biggest fears of classical republicanism was that the monarch – the executive, in other words, which in the American context translates as the president – would use his taxation power to bankrupt his opponents and impose tyranny. That’s why the Founders put the power of the purse in Congressional hands, not the President’s. We don’t believe in classical republicanism anymore – haven’t since 1820 – but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

15. Another thing that is frightening if you follow the breadcrumbs a bit is the fact that tariffs are only supposed to be imposed by Congress, but Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump recently declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act which gave him authority over international trade and allowed him to impose these tariffs unilaterally. But as the Alt National Park Service explained, once the president invokes the IEEPA like that, the law grants access to a host of other expanded powers that aren’t necessarily connected to the original emergency (if there ever was one) but which can be used by the president for his own political ends. For example, by invoking the IEEPA Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump now has the power to:

a) take control of all telecom infrastructure, including radio, television, and internet.

b) freeze the assets and accounts of anyone he accuses of aiding foreign threats, which are undefined and can be applied to pretty much anyone he doesn’t like.

c) deploy the US military to suppress dissent, without the consent of the states.

d) arrest and detain any noncitizen for any reason for any length of time

e) seize control over all energy production and transmission, and as part of that seize control over US airspace

f) suspend all labor unions, regulations, and contracts for any federal worker or any industry deemed necessary for national security, a term that is not defined in the law and can mean whatever he wants it to mean

g) authorize warrantless searches and seizures, impose gag orders, and suppress dissent that way as well.

This is the beginning, folks. Not the end. Watch your back and look out for one another, because it’s going to get ugly.

16. Remember the quiet times of the Biden years? Good times, weren’t they?

17. Meanwhile, in Congress, the GOP is using the chaos of the tariffs (among other things) to push their own economic agenda through. Some of it is the usual cruelty that they delight in, such as overturning the Biden Administration’s rule capping bank overdraft fees at $5 – a rule that was expected to save American consumers some five billion dollars this year, but we can’t have that money not flowing into the pockets of the wealthy so they’re going to raise the fees that people who have already demonstrated that they don’t have the money to pay fees will have to pay. There’s also the tax plan that they’re pushing, which will have the same impact that every GOP tax plan ever has. Taxes on the rich will go down while taxes on everyone making $360,000/year or less will go up. And income will follow suit. Are we great yet?

18. You know what this economy needs? More child labor, amiright? Assholes.

19. Don’t forget the ongoing assault on Social Security being conducted by Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, folks – that’s still going on. They can’t get rid of it completely without getting Congress to go along with it – something nobody in Congress would agree to, since it is a) a critical piece of American society, allowing the elderly to avoid descending into poverty as was common prior to Social Security being implemented, and b) something near and dear to the hearts of the most numerous GOP voting bloc. But there are ways to get around it. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has labeled it a Ponzi scheme that needs to be destroyed – he’s the richest man in the world, and poor people are desperate people who will cause him no trouble – and he’s unleashed his feral teenagers on its systems. Some of this is illegally accessing the date on their computers (I hope you have your credit frozen, because – as a friend of mine in IT told me – there isn’t enough popcorn in the world for the flood of identity theft that’s going to result from that). Some of it is just making random bizarre claims such as the idea that there are 150-year-old people getting Social Security checks, which is what happens when self-satisfied tech bros can’t read COBOL. And some of it is just trying to backdoor the destruction of Social Security by making it collapse from within. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has implemented all sorts of changes designed to make the web site crash, make it difficult or impossible to access information or staffers, and generally prevent people from claiming the money they’ve been paying taxes for decades to receive. Like so:

20. Also, just in case you thought Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk had a soul or any redeeming qualities whatsoever, he discovered that there were children between 8 and 11 receiving Social Security benefits which he publicly declared were business loans and then ordered his feral teenagers to cut off those benefits. Except they were survivor benefits that these children were fully entitled to receive. Let’s put that another way: Elon Musk stole money from orphans. The guy is a fucking cartoon.

21. One thing to keep in mind is that the GOP’s long term goal of this assault on Social Security – as it has been since Reagan was in office – is to destroy the program and throw Americans out into the stock market so they have to create their own retirement accounts, which will of course provide a windfall of money to precisely the sorts of finance bros and wealthy fund managers who support the GOP. Did you notice what happened with the stock markets this week? You know what didn’t lose 10% of its value because of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s dimwitted tariffs? The Social Security Trust Fund.

22. In other domestic news … oh … what the hell? Seriously?

  

23. Let’s start with the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump (or maybe Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk – it’s hard to tell sometimes) canceled food aid for nonprofits such as the Food Bank of Delaware – nineteen truckloads of food ready to be delivered to provide over 900,000 meals for hungry Americans. One in eight people in Delaware deal with food insecurity and food banks across the nation are already stretched to their breaking point but you know, fuck those people I guess. This is part of the slashing of the Department of Agriculture’s local food programs that supported local farmers and communities, with over a billion dollars cut. Much of that food will now go to waste. But hey – those tax breaks for billionaires won’t pay for themselves, after all.

24. Seriously, they won’t. Supply side economics doesn’t work in a demand side economy. It’s just math. All of this is just oligarchy stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.

25. They’re also planning to destroy Medicaid – the health program that millions of Americans (especially in blood-red rural areas) rely on because the American health care system is the least efficient and most costly in the world. The GOP has been the Party of Performative Cruelty for decades now, and while there is a certain schadenfreude that comes with watching the people who continually put them into office face the consequences of their own actions, the fact is that treating people as expendable tools in an ideological war is immoral.

26. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump also issued an edict late last month claiming to invalidate union contracts for two thirds of the federal workforce – roughly 700,000 employees. Leaving aside the questionable idea that he actually has that authority, the fact is that this is another immoral assault on ordinary working Americans as well as the economy overall. Unions are tools that turn working class labor into middle class consumers, and they are very good at it. If you want prosperity, you’ll support unions. If you don’t, you won’t. It genuinely is that simple.

27. The regime is also planning to get rid of FEMA as early as October 1. “We’re going to eliminate FEMA,” said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noemi, who once proudly declared that she shot her own dog so why she was put in charge of an agency designed to help people in need is an interesting question. To all of you facing hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and the increasing destructiveness of a climate that is changing rapidly and violently, I guess you are just going to have to suck it up because your government just abandoned you.

28. Health Secretary Brain Worms continues to spread misinformation and lies designed to kill people. Doctors in areas where measles is spreading (and a dismal failure of leadership that is just to start) are reporting that children coming in with the disease are also presenting with liver failure because Secretary Brain Worms is pushing the idea that vitamin A can cure measles. Vitamin A is toxic in large doses and can cause liver failure. I suppose it makes sense that this guy was hired by the same president who told us to put bleach up our asses to cure Covid, but that doesn’t really help much.

29. Meanwhile Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk continue their war on women. I hope you or the women you know are in the lucky group that doesn’t have to deal with this, but if you are just know that your government just abandoned you too.

30. Get ready – it’s coming.

31. The Culture War continues apace. The GOP continues to persecute trans people because they don’t fit into the mindlessly simple version of gender that the American right is pushing. Folks, gender is complicated and people should keep their minds on their own genitals thank you very goddamn much. Look – if you’re in a public restroom staring at someone else’s dick, the pervert in the room is not them.

32. Yes, it really is complicated.

33. It’s fun when the tables get turned, though.

34. More importantly, it’s good when real leaders step up and declare that they will not stand for this kind of twisted immorality.

35. You know, people have noticed this assault on their nation and everyone in it. They really have. Over 1900 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine – you know, the experts who actually keep this nation moving forward – have signed a public letter warning Americans about the regimes assaults on their fields. “We see a real danger in this moment,” they said. “We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nations scientific enterprise is being decimated.

36. Meanwhile the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America published a letter condemning the regime as a threat to religious liberty. Apparently Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump published an edict in February establishing a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” because a faith that has buildings on almost every street corner in the US is clearly being persecuted. To quote the bishops:

We believe this executive order is a threat to the religious pluralism enshrined in the Constitution and does not actually protect Christians. Instead, this order aligns the federal government with Christian Nationalism, a dangerous conflation of fundamentalist Christianity, conservative politics, and fierce patriotism that distorts what it means to be an American citizen and an engaged Christian in society.

With this executive order, the federal government has given itself the authority to determine what might be considered “anti-Christian,” and therefore also the author to determine what is Christian — a power which belongs to the Church alone, not the federal government. This executive order violates religious freedom, corrupts the separation of church and state, and creates a more hostile environment for Christians and all citizens who believe differently than the current administration and its religious advisors.

Christian Nationalism is a dangerous ideology that distorts the Gospel and turn Jesus and Christianity into a weapon for power and division instead of a movement towards love and justice. It demands that a particular brand of Christianity be privileged by the state and impose that singular belief system in order to be a “good American.”

This is something the Baptists figured out in the 1770s. Read Isaac Backus if you want – it’s enlightening, and it would be good if more religious leaders understood the threat that the combination of religion and state authority represented.

37. Here in Wisconsin, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk tried to buy a Supreme Court election for his preferred candidate – dropped over $20 million of his own money, and it is obscene that he’s even allowed to do that – and still lost by over 10 percentage points because Wisconsinites have had enough of this. He even offered quid pro quo money to voters if they would vote for his guy and still failed. Every county in Wisconsin shifted left in this election. A more comprehensive “fuck you” could not have resulted.

38. To his credit, the guy Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk wanted to install accepted his loss gracefully and even shut down the conspiracy theorists at his election night event who tried to claim it was rigged. This was once a baseline expectation in American politics but now it is noteworthy. Progress is made in small steps.

39. Yesterday an estimated 5.2 million Americans – almost 2% of the entire population – took to the streets to protest the systematic destruction of their nation. That’s a lot of people. Look folks – historically any revolution that gets the active support of 3.5% of the people has succeeded. We’re about halfway there.

40. It’s going to be a long haul, though. Fixing this mess will be the work of generations and I likely won’t live to see it. But we have to start somewhere.

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.

This is Part 1, since it got too long to include anything related to the tariffs or domestic politics. Seriously, it has been a horrifying time to be an American and it will get much worse before it gets better. Sorry, world. Most of us have more contempt this clown than you do, if that's any help.

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1. So have you ever wondered what it was like in the early 1930s watching German democracy being annihilated from within by a Fascist movement? Well, now you know. It’s been another horrifying week or so to be an American and by the looks of things it will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future so buckle up, folks – it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I will stop calling them Nazis when they stop doing the things that Nazis did.

2. If you haven’t read Senator Chris Murphy’s piece “We Are Sleepwalking into Autocracy,” you should. He’s pretty blunt about where this is all headed.

Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That’s what January 6th was all about— regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end—which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election. So, this seems pretty purposeful and transparent—this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party, is rendered just weak enough, and the rules are tilted toward the majority party just enough, so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever. And, of course, this is not an unfamiliar system. This is Hungary, this is Turkey, this is Serbia. There are plenty of countries, all around the world, that hold elections—it’s just that one party continues to win. And that is, I think, the very concrete, very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now. … I think we are at risk of sleepwalking through this transition. We desperately want to believe that we can play politics as normal because it’s uncomfortable— really uncomfortable—to play politics as not normal. It involves taking really big risks.

There will be a time, probably in the very near future if Americans don’t stand up for their republic, when we will look back on this as a time when the world’s most powerful democracy collapsed because of the internal treachery of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves.

2. Laurence Tribe, one of the pre-eminent legal scholars in the US, is also blunt. We are heading for dictatorship. “The body politic is being hollowed out by a rapidly metastasizing virus attacking the underpinnings of our entire constitutional system. Make no mistake. This is how dictatorship grows.”

3. We are in the middle of a war of “the rule of law versus the rule of billionaires,” according to Alvaro Bedoya, who was recently illegally fired as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. “This isn’t about progressive versus conservative.” Bernie Sanders has been warning us about the oligarchs for decades now, and we’re definitely proving him right with every passing day.

4. Another authority on the end of democracies, Steven Levitsky, noted in an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, “We are currently witnessing the collapse of our democracy. Under Donald Trump, the U.S. is sliding into a form of authoritarianism. This will probably not be irreversible. But the fact is: Right now, the U.S. is ceasing to be a democracy. … The much-vaunted Constitutional checks are failing. Our Founding Fathers wanted to prevent an all-powerful tyrant. To this end, they created a series of institutions over 200 years ago: the Electoral College for electing the president, the separation of powers with an independent, bicameral legislature, and a largely independent judiciary. Not to mention a federalist system that grants far- reaching powers to the states. But they didn't foresee that one day there would be two strongly polarized parties, one of which is completely loyal to the incumbent president.” I don’t know about you, but that “probably” in the third sentence of his quote was not really all that reassuring.

5. One of the things I cover when I teach my early American history class is just how much we owe George Washington, a president who could easily have become a king but who wanted nothing to do with such a betrayal of the republic he had fought to create. He turned his back on power not once but twice – once at the end of the American Revolution, in the early 1780s, and again in 1797 after two terms as president. And now we have serving in that same office a two-bit grifter who sees himself as exactly the sort of absolute monarch that Washington rejected.

6. Understand something, folks: Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will not leave office while he is alive. He will either die in office when demographics and a lifetime of rage and cheeseburgers catches up with him, or he will go down in bloody violence when he refuses to accept that his time in office is over and has to be removed by an aggrieved people. He’s tried it once already and failed. Next time we will not be so lucky.

7. You can see Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s authoritarian design being played out clearly in his regime’s assaults on free speech – a cornerstone American value that he and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves find deeply threatening. His pet Attorney General – who hasn’t figured out yet that the Attorney General represents the nation and is not the president’s personal lawyer – warned a sitting Congressional Representative that criticizing Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk would lead to problematic consequences, and in an administration that was even within shouting distance of normal this would have resulted in her immediate removal and disgrace but which now seems to be standard for this crew of cannibals. The regime is also waging a war against any law firm that dares to represent anyone opposed to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s policies, a clear attempt to intimidate Americans into silence and obedience. Universities are being targeted for doing what universities are designed to do, which is encourage the free exchange of ideas, even – and especially – those that the powerful find uncomfortable. As David French, a former Republican, put it, “I think it’s fair to say that we can absolutely and totally dispense with the idea that Trump’s Republican Party defends free speech. We’re witnessing one of the most comprehensive attacks on political speech since the Red Scare.”

8. Speaking of Red Scares, we covered Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) in my US2 class this week. For those of you not up on your 20th-century political witch hunts, McCarthy was the blowhard who decided back in the 1950s that anyone who dared to oppose him was a Communist whose life needed to be destroyed, and he proceeded to do just that for several years all the while guided by his friend and mentor Roy Cohn who served as his lawyer and attack dog. McCarthy’s career collapsed when he overreached himself by accusing the US Army of being a haven for Communists in 1954 and he sank into alcoholism and died not long after, but Roy Cohn went on to become one of the most powerful lawyers in New York City in the 1960s and 70s before being disbarred for unethical conduct in 1986. In the 1970s he became a personal mentor to an up-and-coming young real estate developer named Donald Trump. Taught him everything he knew. As we are discovering.

9. The whole point of all of these attacks is to make Americans afraid. That’s why they’re attacking the legal profession. That’s why they’re attacking universities. That’s why they’re attacking journalists. That’s why they’re kidnapping people in the streets and disappearing them into hidden prisons. That’s the whole point. Frightened people don’t disobey. But the US was founded on disobedience, dissent, and revolution against those we considered tyrants. Fuck this. And fuck them.

10. Yeah, they’ll come for me too at some point, no doubt. I’m a small enough fish that it will take them a while to get down to my level and by then they may all have been removed from civilized society by more virtuous people, but don’t be too surprised if I suddenly stop posting. Fascists do not tolerate dissent and I regard it as my moral and patriotic duty to dissent from Fascism in any form. Clowns. Here I stand. I can do no other.

11. The latest casualty of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s war on free speech and independent thought is the Smithsonian Institute, part of a broader campaign against history in general. Last week there was another one of those imperial edicts that he’s so fond of vomiting forth, this one demanding that anything insufficiently celebratory of straight white men in general and right-wing notions of propriety in particular had to be purged and a more pliable propaganda put in its place. “It’s a five-alarm fire for public history, science, and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a historian at UM-Amherst. Other historians have noted much the same thing. “I take it as an insult, an affront, and an attempt to control what we do as historians,” said historian David Blight. “It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans didn’t have an official history; at least we’ve never tried to have.” Raymond Arsenault, a historian at the University of South Florida, was equally blunt. “It’s totalitarian,” he said. “It does remind you of a fascist state and makes us a laughingstock around the western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would proceed this far in terms of willful megalomania.” Never underestimate the willful megalomania of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, my good man.

12. Another unconstitutional Executive Order spewed out last week tried to hijack the American electoral process – something that the President has no legitimate say over. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has decreed that mail in ballots cannot be counted if they are received after election day even if they are postmarked on or before that day, and requires documented proof of citizenship in order to vote – something that millions of American citizens do not have and frankly do not need to have. Given that the Constitution explicitly gives the power to regulate the “time, place, and manner” of elections to the state legislatures and empowers only Congress to change laws regarding federal elections, this attempt to seize electoral control is a dictatorial move. This illegal order has already been challenged by multiple groups in court on the obvious grounds that it is not the business of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to make such pronouncements and we’ll see how that goes.

13. Illinois Governor JB Pritzger – who is rapidly making a name for himself as a beacon of anti-Fascist resistance in America – squarely informed Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump that he could go pound sand in this case. “We will not blindly follow illegal orders because Donald Trump wrote them down on a piece of paper,” he said. “Illinois follows the laws of the land – not the decrees of an aspiring king hell bent on disenfranchising millions of voters who deserve to have their voice heard.”

14. Seizing control of elections is not the only way that the regime is trying to destroy American democracy. The “SAVE Act” is scheduled to come up for a vote soon in the GOP-controlled Congress. Designed to disenfranchise trans voters, it declares that voters not only prove their citizenship – placing the burden of proof on the accused rather than those who would accuse someone of not being a citizen, which is counter to every facet of American law – but also denies the vote to anyone whose legal name does not match their birth certificate. So any married woman who took their husband’s name, for example, would be immediately disenfranchised. This is not an accident or the result of sloppy writing – it’s a known and sought after result. The GOP is a party of white male supremacy, and not even white women count in their world. Let alone anyone else. It’s not an accident that if only women voted the GOP would disappear in a single election cycle. This is the Republican Party’s way of getting rid of anyone who dares to oppose them.

15. Of course there is the more direct route of just bulldozing through Constitutional restrictions and having Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump run for a third term in office – something that has been banned in the US since the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951. This amendment flatly prohibits any such attempt (“No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”) and was passed to prevent an elective monarchy of the sort that Franklin Delano Roosevelt very nearly created with his four terms in office. Roosevelt at least was an intelligent man who did this country a world of good, but even that is not enough. You can’t run for a third term, and you can’t run for vice president and then have the top guy resign once in office because if you’re not eligible to run for president you’re not eligible to run for president. This was unconstitutional when liberals suggested Obama do it in 2016 and – barring a new Constitutional amendment – it’s unconstitutional now. Obama never sought nor discussed the idea of a third term – that was entirely the fevered product of some of his more deranged supporters. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is openly discussing it tells you a great deal about his derangement and his plans for dictatorship.

16. You know, other countries know how to deal with far-right wannabe dictators. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has been formally charged and his country’s Supreme Court has ruled he must stand trial on charges of insurrection. France’s Marie Le Pen has been convicted of embezzlement and unlike in the US when a politician is convicted of such crimes in France she isn’t allowed to run for office again (at least for a while). The US could take some lessons here.

17. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the police state that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is imposing on a once free country is that people continue to be kidnapped off the streets by anonymous thugs claiming to be from the government and spirited away to secret places without any due process of law or even notification for their families. The most recent high-profile case was Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey who is studying for her PhD in Massachusetts. Six masked men abducted her off the streets in broad daylight for the crime of having written an editorial affirming the “equal dignity and humanity of all people,” a statement that the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump disagrees with vehemently. She was taken to Louisiana in secret and nobody knew where she was for days. The junta continues to refuse to return her to Massachusetts despite Congressional demands and federal court decisions requiring them to do so. This is grotesque and evil, and everyone involved in this kidnapping should be rotting in jail already while Ozturk walks free.

18. Another grad student was kidnapped in Minnesota as well, and a man in NYC named Dustin West detailed the assault he received from ICE for trying to ask questions while they kidnapped a family walking their kids home from school.

19. Republicans are insisting that this is okay, and may God have mercy on their souls because the rest of us should not. Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN), a nobody who is apparently trying to make a name for herself by sucking up to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, expressly declared noncitizens were not entitled to due process of law because apparently their existence is a crime and criminals don’t get such protections. Folks, do you know how Fascist that is? People accused of violating the law are the ENTIRE REASON we have due process of law. Because without it, nobody is safe. All a dictator would have to do is accuse you of being a criminal and then kidnap you and without due process how would you defend yourself? To their credit, her constituents in blood red Indiana reacted with anger at the town hall where she said this and apparently booed her out of the building over it. As well they should have.

20. Maybe Representative Spartz (R-IN) should have taken some guidance from Antonin Scalia, one of the most right-wing Supreme Court justices in recent memory. Even he thought that was stupid.

21. As Robert Reich put it, “The Trump regime will round you up off the street and arrest you because you spoke your mind. And federal agents in plain clothes and unmarked cars who refuse to identify themselves will be the ones to do it. It’s fascism. Call it what it is.”

22. You are not safe. Do not kid yourself.

23. It’s hard to say whether this is the pinnacle of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s attempt at dictatorship or whether it’s simply groundwork, and that more than anything else should infuriate you if you are an American.

24. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution they specifically designed the Judiciary Branch as a coequal branch of government able to check the power of both the Legislative and Executive Branches through its power to block legislation and executive actions that violate the Constitution. This is a fundamental part of the American republic, and any threat to it is subversion and those responsible for it need to be severely punished. And if you want to see what those threats look like, you have only to look at Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves. The junta is on a catastrophic losing streak when it comes to the federal courts – they’ve lost pretty much every lawsuit that’s been brought to court against them, which is what happens when run roughshod over laws and Constitutional provisions and then try to justify those actions with bloviating nonsense. And rather than take the hint and at least pretend to give a rat’s ass about legalities or Constitutions the junta and its minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have gone on the offensive. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has threatened judges with criminal charges up to and including treason if they keep overturning his edicts, as well as more prosaic threats to impeach and remove any judge who doesn’t obey his commands. The Founding Fathers would have regarded Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump as a tyrant for such behavior and had him hauled off in chains.

25. And what does the GOP Congress have to say about this tyranny? They’re all for it, apparently, even though it undermines their own Constitutional position and renders them effectively meaningless. House Speaker Mike Johnson threatened to pass legislation eliminating entire district courts if they don’t fall in line, a clear assault on the Separation of Powers and further evidence that Johnson is both subversive and – let’s be honest here – delusional, since the GOP hasn’t been able to pass anything in over a decade. He’s also threatened to pass legislation (again, there he goes with the idea that he can get Congress do pass something) that would block the federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions, which is just a slightly fancier way of assaulting the Separation of Powers and just as subversive.

26. You have never in your lifetime seen anyone as fragile as the American conservative. If they can’t do whatever they please, they’re going to destroy the nation for everyone else. Seriously – such a bunch of snowflakes. Maybe stop doing illegal things instead? Maybe?

27. Last week the junta managed to pull off what is perhaps the most awe-inspiringly idiotic breach of national security in decades and it’s not even the worst thing they’ve done since St. Patrick’s Day. The bare facts of the matter are that a collection of the misfits supposedly in charge of this nation’s security put together a group chat on Signal to discuss bombing Yemen (in real time, as the bombs were falling) as well as any number of other side issues such as Junior Assistant J.D. Vance’s shocking ignorance about the importance of European nations to American security, and as part of this process they managed to include a journalist on the chat. When Jeffrey Goldberg published the story in The Atlantic, the junta went into Full Falsehood Overdrive denying it happened, minimizing that it happened, threatening the journalist, and denying that anything important happened. So when the junta declared that no classified information had been shared, Goldberg took them at their word and published all the screenshots in a followup story.

28. Let’s start with the most obvious problem with this whole situation, which is that these idiots are discussing classified information – and yes, they can say whatever they want and the fact that they denied it gives all the legal cover that Goldberg needed to publish it all, but by any rational standard of military security time sensitive attack orders and operational plans are highly classified – on an unsecured public app without bothering to check who they invited into it. If you’re a hostile nation looking to steal American secrets, this is your golden age – these people couldn’t hide a thumbtack at the bottom of the ocean. You can put money on the fact that every intelligence agency in the world celebrated that day, because they can stop paying spies and just listen to what this administration is saying. It’s a good thing the rest of the world loves us and would never with us harm, right? Because if there were a nation that wished us harm, they just got handed everything they need to do so in the future.

29. Even the folks at Signal thought it was stupid.

30. Although Gondor was no doubt grateful.

31. Since that story broke we’ve gotten updates that these security wizards were also sharing classified information on Gmail, an app so insecure that future updates will come with blankets and stuffed animals, because of course they were. Everyone of them should have been fired and prosecuted the day this came out and you know what? They’re still there, breathing free air.

32. Why are they using Signal, you ask? Because Signal offers end-to-end encryption and does not store messages on their servers which means that it is almost impossible for you, the American citizens, or any investigations that may follow to access these records. You can’t access Signal chats through the Freedom of Information Act. Federal law requires all conversations of this nature to be permanently recorded and archived, and if you don’t think this leads us into extremely dangerous territory you’re not paying attention.

33. If you’re not following Jim Wright (Stonekettle Station) on your various social media platforms, you should be. He served in the Navy as an intelligence officer and he has a lot of experience behind what he says. “It’s all there,” he said of this fiasco. “Time. Date. Locations. Weapons. Targets. Units. All of that, made public before or during a mission (and even sometimes after) can lead directly to mission failure and put our assets at risk.” If you are a member of the US military right now you probably realize just how badly your government has failed you, how casually they have risked your life for nothing, and how callously they have denied any problem associated with doing so. Pissing off the highly trained people with the heavy weaponry hasn’t turned out well for any previous government in recorded history, but maybe this time will be different? Let’s ask the Roman Empire about that.

34. Remember when people got all huffy over Hilary Clinton’s emails? Good times, man.

35. Meanwhile four American servicemen died in a bog in Lithuania and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump didn’t even acknowledge it for days and then when their bodies were returned to the US – a process that always involves the sitting president being at the airbase to see their return and acknowledge their service – our fearless leader chose to go golfing with his Saudi buddies instead. He is a disgrace and an embarrassment.

36. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is also destroying the foundations of American foreign policy, in case you haven’t noticed. He seems to think he is entitled to Canada – a sovereign nation and one of our closest allies in every sense of that word – and the Canadians are justifiably infuriated by this cavalier rejection of their independence by an unqualified moron. This will have long term consequences even if Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his entire regime drops off a cliff tomorrow and is replaced by actual thinking human beings who understand how the world works. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was clear on that. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over. It’s clear the US is no longer a reliable partner. It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we could reestablish an element of confidence but there will be no going backwards. … We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere, and we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.” The French Minister for Europe was similarly blunt: “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” No, no they cannot. I live here. I wouldn’t rely on the voters of this state to tie their own shoes correctly more than 45% of the time. Trust, once broken, is not easily repaired and the great lesson of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves is that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally.

37. There’s a reason why the number of Canadians visiting the US has dropped by over 75% in the last two months. This will cost the US economy hundreds of millions of dollars, not that the deadbeats running the US care about that. Why would Canadians come here?

38. Indeed, why would anyone? So many tourists with legitimate visas and passports have been illegally arrested and detained by US agents since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump seized power that at least half a dozen countries – including formerly strong allies such as Germany, Denmark, Finland, and the UK – have issued travel advisories warning their citizens against coming here. Welcome to pariah status, my fellow Americans.

39. This even applies to American citizens, by the way. A friend of mine (who I will not identify because look around you and ask yourself why I should) was traveling recently and expressed concern that they might be detained at the border because of their social media presence – they, like myself and the majority of Americans, are not fans of the current regime – and because they took part in several activities to express this, activities that are legal under both US law and the laws of the country they were in. And I had to go through the long list of precautions that Americans now have to take in order to avoid being disappeared by our own government, and the mere fact that I had to do this – that there are lists and graphics specifically designed to address this that I could just forward along to my friend – is an outrage. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves have perverted everything about this country and turned us into a tin-horn dictatorship and it is reprehensible that they continue to rule.

40. This will have consequences beyond tourism, though. As foreign nations realize that the US is no longer trustworthy they will abandon us and move on without the US. Europe, for example, has figured out that they need to create their own security apparatus to address a world where the US might be just as much of an enemy as Russia, particularly as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump continues to serve as Vladimir Putin’s meat puppet. NATO – the cornerstone of American strategic power since 1949 – is in disarray and European nations are now starting to envision a new security arrangement to replace it. This will include developing their own weapons systems, of course, which will further damage the US economy. Danish MP Rasmus Jarlov explained it well.

41. Denmark, of course, is on the front line of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s unchecked aggression, as they have sovereignty over Greenland and the junta has not ruled out military force to take it from them. Why the junta decided to send Junior Assistant JD Vance and his wife Usha over to Greenland is therefore an interesting question. As several Greenlanders reported, the advance teams for both Vances went door to door offering to pay locals to come out and wear the stupid MAGA hats and wave American flags and every single one of them told those teams to fuck off. This is why Usha and JD ended up making a lackluster appearance at a US military base there, a performance so deeply pathetic that there are now serious calls for Junior Assistant JD Vance just to resign and stop the pain.

42. If you missed Senator Jeff Merkley’s (D-OR) questioning of Deputy Secretary of State nominee Christopher Landau, you should fix that. He started off big and never let up. “I wanted to ask you, Mr. Landau, is President Trump a Russian asset?” Landau denied it, of course, but the follow ups were pretty damning. He listed actions that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already taken – repeating Russian propaganda, conceding critical negotiating points to Russia without getting anything back, cutting off Ukraine, discrediting Zelensky, undermining security relations with Europe, basically Putin’s wish list. “I can’t imagine that if he was a Russian asset, he could be doing anything more favorable than those five points. What else could a Russian asset do that Trump hasn’t yet done?” Either Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is on Putin’s payroll or he’s working for free, which seems out of character.

43. I think I’m going to have to continue this in a separate post because it has gotten exceedingly long and I haven’t even gotten to the most immediate crisis, which is the catastrophic and completely avoidable destruction of global trade caused by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s dumbshit tariffs. The US economy is crashing, the world is recoiling in disgust, and our Fearless Leader is golfing with his buddies. Yeah, we’re fucked.

News and Updates

1. I’m trying to put together another one of those lists that I write noting the crimes and immoralities of the current regime – it’s a target-rich environment, really, since every day Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves (including Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk) hit rock bottom and continue digging. I’ll probably finish it in a day or two, but right now it is just a hassle. I think we can all take it as read that this administration is doing everything in its power to destroy the American republic, our national security, our economy, our civil society, global trade, and whatever respect the rest of the world may have had for us at the beginning of the year. It has been an absolutely horrifying time to be an American and it does not look to be getting any better anytime soon.

2. But life goes on. It does that.

3. Every year we put together our March Madness Bracket despite the fact that none of us here follow basketball at any level and only Kim has any real idea of how the game works. Lauren also does, but she is away at school and not filling out a bracket these days, at least not with us. I don’t know how Kim chooses her teams. Mine are based on a few simple questions – 1) Did I go to this school? 2) Did any of my friends or family go to this school? and 3) Is this school in a city or state that I would like to visit? (or, put in the negative, is it in a place that I or my family would not be safe visiting?). Oliver is the most thorough, as he looks up all the mascots and picks the teams that have the best ones. There is still another weekend to go with this and not even the basketball fans care because all four top seeds have advanced to the Final Four and straight chalk is boring. We have even less reason to care as our brackets are officially busted and no further points can be obtained, so we have declared Kim the winner on points and she will receive the Fabulous Prizes as soon as those can be determined.

4. I have completed my Instagram project and will now have to find another project to keep my mind off the sad state of the world. Not sure what that will be yet. Further bulletins as events warrant.

5. On Friday it was 76F (24C) here. On Sunday night it snowed. Today we had a tornado hit the northern part of the county after a day of drenching rain. Tomorrow it will get cold again. The rabbits were out for a few days, and now they’re back in the basement to ride things out until things stabilize a bit. The weather has gotten very science-fictiony of late – another thing that does not look to be getting better any time soon.

6. All of this has made it very hard to read – I’ve been working on the same novel for a month now. It’s actually a well written book, but my focus just isn’t there right now. Too many other pressing things that require more attention, I suppose.

7. We took our paperwork over to the Tax People last week even though the idea of supporting this particular version of the government leaves a lot to be desired. It took a few tries since there were random paperwork bits that had to be retrieved over a few days to complete the full set, but all documents have been delivered now and pretty soon the taxes will be done and then all I will have to do is sign the forms and either wait for a refund or write a check. No, I do not accept direct deposit for any refund I might get. Unelected President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his crew of feral teenagers do not need my banking information on top of everything else. The government can just send me a check if it comes to that. I don’t expect it to do so – my income is so variable that it is hard to get the withholdings right and I prefer to err on the side of not lending money to the government interest free if I can help it. But there you have it. I tell you, though, having someone else handle all this has been just the most wonderful thing ever.

8. Is it just me or is everyone really tired about now?

9. It is a parenting win when your child messages you from the road to let you know that she has been listening to Woody Guthrie on the drive. Next up: Pete Seeger!

10. The rest of the old notes and notebooks that I took out of my little corner of the basement have now hit the recycling bin, which is kind of cathartic. I did find a few things that were worth keeping amid the paper, though. A small Scottish flag that had gotten tossed into one of the boxes. A couple of old books, including one on dinosaurs that my dad bought for me when I was about five. And a photocopy of a pamphlet-sized thing that I found tucked into a dark corner of the library at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 or so – a work of revolutionary scholarship by one “P. N. Oak” entitled Great Britain Was Hindu Land. It’s a virulently nationalist and vibrantly stupid tract dedicated to the idea that a vast Indian civilization once ruled the British Isles in sharp contrast with the situation in recent centuries. It is a textbook example of how not to write history and howlingly funny if your tastes run toward laughing at idiots, and it sold for a mere rupee when first published. I skimmed through it this weekend. It has not improved with age.

A Margarita and a Toast

The second to last picture I have of my mom was taken just a couple of weeks before she died.

She was in hospice care at that point, five and a half months into a four-to-six month prognosis, and we all knew where things were going. My brother spent a lot of time at her apartment in those last few months, with his family coming down to join him as they could, and we tried to get out there as often as we could manage as well. Between late August of that year, when we took Oliver back to college, and late October, when we cleared out my mom’s apartment, we put over 10,000 miles on the minivan. It was a long couple of months in a lot of ways.

This particular visit was in mid-September. There were a few of us there at the time, and we were just sort of hanging out and talking about not much of anything at all which is the best way to share time as a family, I think. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation turned to this particular topic but at some point my mom said that she’d really like a margarita.

And you know what? Why not. She’s in hospice. We’re not worried about any long-term health implications of anything. Hell, she could have asked for heroin at that point – what would it hurt? Get the lady a margarita. There were none of the component pieces of a margarita in the apartment, though, so I drove down to the nearby State Store (which is how you have to buy alcohol in Pennsylvania) and bought a bottle of margarita mix and a small bottle of tequila to go with it.

They were good margaritas, once we remembered to add ice.

I think we finished the mix that night, and I ended up custody of the tequila. It came home with me, when all was said and done.

We’re not teetotalers in my family but we’re not really much of a drinking bunch either and the little bottle of tequila sat in the closet with all the other alcohol for more than three years after that, biding its time. On our Pre-Tariff Stocking Up Mission a few weeks ago Kim and I discovered a lovely bottle of jalepeño margarita mix that turned out to be quite tasty.

We finished up the little bottle of tequila tonight.

It’s good to use things as they were intended. Food and drinks are meant to be consumed, after all. But you should not do this mindlessly. Sometimes you have to pause and remember.

Cheers to you, mom.

Organizing Saved Things

Sometimes you just need a pointless little project to get through the days.

I have an Instagram account. I’ve never actually posted anything to it because I have enough social media presence in my life without it and I’m not entirely sure what I would put there anyway, but it is a fun little account to lurk on. Mostly I follow accounts from friends and family, vintage photography, random musicians and Bake Off contestants, and meme pages because they amuse me, and whenever I find something that seems worth saving I’ll check the little ribbon-shaped box that tells Instagram to put it in my Saved folder.

I’ve been doing that for a while now, in fact, and I’ve reached the point where I no longer remember what’s there. This can be annoying when I come up on a situation where I think, “I have just the perfect meme/photo/whatever for that!” and then I can’t find it because there’s no search feature that I’ve ever noticed.

So I’ve decided to go through all of my saved images and download them onto my computer so I can organize them and find them when I want to do so. And yes, I am fully aware of how that sounds. Thanks for noticing.

I like this project because it has nothing at all to do with the current maelstrom of American politics. It is a nice break, and if it is ultimately kind of a nonsensical thing to do then, well, we need those now and then. I’m finding all sorts of things that I’d forgotten about and that makes me happy, so perhaps it’s not such a pointless project after all.

The thing about Instagram is that you can’t actually download anything from it – you have to screenshot anything you want to save – and this in turn means you have to name every file. My general plan has been to try to name things the way I think I’d search for them in the future – “If I wanted to find this again, how would I look it up?” And so far, I have to say, I’m doing a pretty good job of this. I’ve been saving those images for a long time now, and there are a lot of duplicates from when I’d forgotten I’d already saved something, and very often I go to put something in one of the various folders where I’m saving them and I get a notice that says “You already have a file with that exact seven-word phrase as its title, moron” although the last word is usually more implied than stated. Usually. And I go and check and, yep, there it is. I find this reassuring in a vague sort of way. That is indeed how I’d look for that image.

And yes, there are folders. Of course there are. Anyone who would embark on this sort of project is naturally going to have folders to put things in. I wrote a dissertation once. If that process teaches you anything it is that most of life is just organizing information. Also, that having a niche interest can be monetized for certain values of money that do not include a lot of it, but that’s a separate issue.

The biggest folder, of course, is the one that has all the images that I found funny because that was the whole purpose behind all this. I’ve trained Instagram’s little algorithm to show me mostly things that would fit into this category as well, so it’s kind of self-fulfilling. So I often find myself cackling maniacally over something that I’d forgotten about that I’m probably the only person in a fifty mile radius who finds it amusing but I’m okay with that.

This, for example:

Or any of these:

There’s another folder for things that I found thought-provoking. Most of them are rather long so I’m not going to put them in here, but some are fairly concise.

Like this one:

Or these:

I’ve also saved a whole pile of images that I might use for the PowerPoint slides for classes I teach, or simply because I like old photos.

I just missed being able to put this one into the slides for the Great Depression. I do mention the Dust Bowl, but I don’t think students really grasp what that meant until they see it.

Sometimes the photos are illuminating in a historical way.

And sometimes I like them because they’re just a little absurd and one of the things that students forget very easily is that historical people were just people and they weren’t always serious and they didn’t always do serious things.

I’ve got another folder for historical memes that I might, perhaps, put at the end of the exams I give because you need something funny to get through an exam. Most of the images in that folder are not really the sorts of things I can use without somebody getting all frowny-face at me in a humorless legal sort of way, but I can amuse myself anyway. These I might actually use someday.

And there’s a folder just for photographs that I found interesting for no other reason than I found them interesting. This one is clearly a composite image, but it is striking nonetheless.

We all need our projects.