News and Updates

1. The semester is well underway here, at least for the most part – I have multiple semesters this semester and they all start at different times, but beginning February 1 they will all be in motion. I’ve got four classes with a total of 140 students on top of my regular job as an academic advisor and it’s just going to be a busy time.

2. I took the opportunity tonight to watch hockey, since I likely won’t get much of a chance to do that for a while. The Flyers won in overtime – apparently for the second night in a row, in this condensed schedule of a year – so that was a nice way to spend some time.

3. I also taught Lauren how to make gravy (spaghetti sauce to you non-Italians) today and we had a lovely dinner. It’s nice to pass down these family traditions, and it makes the house smell good.

4. It snowed again here in Our Little Town this weekend. It’s been a snowy though not particularly cold winter here in Baja Canada – we’ve had snowfall worth shoveling (the over/under on snow in Wisconsin is 2.75” or about 7cm; less than that and we just ignore it) pretty much twice a week all year now and the mounds at the end of my driveway are tall enough to make backing out into the street a treacherous proposition, but we haven’t gone below zero Fahrenheit (-17C) all year, which is unusual. I gather that this will change by the end of the week, though.

5. I’m actually good with all the snow and cold. I like winter. I like the cold. I like the grey skies.  I like the long nights.  I’d much rather have two winters than a hot summer, and if there is any silver lining at all to the lockdowns and quarantines it is that I don’t have to venture out if I don’t want to. I’ve got my tea and my books and my broadband internet and I’m good.

6. It turns out that my new email program can only send emails from one account rather than both of the ones I use, so there will be further adventures in technology soon. I have resolved the Webex issue, and the Mother Ship Campus IT folks figured out how to restore my access to the VPN, which is nice. I keep going back to the fact that, with the exception of Webex, all of this worked just fine before I upgraded. Oh well.

7. It has taken every ounce of restraint I have not to respond with unmitigated rage and vitriol to some of the plaintive cries of disillusioned right-wingers now that Constitutional order and responsible government has been restored in the United States. Sorry, folks. You spent four years shitting on everything worthwhile about this country and calling the rest of us names when we pointed this out, then staged a coup when the majority once again rejected you, because you just aren't mature enough to handle the idea that you lost a free and fair election by a landslide – you don’t get to complain about anything for any reason ever again.  Shut up, step aside, and let the grownups try to fix all the things you’ve fucked up if we can.

8. Sometimes I am grateful to past me for being a little more forward thinking than I suspect I might be at times. It hit me this afternoon that the real estate taxes were due today. This is not something I generally had to worry about for the last quarter century, except that we paid off the house last year and now the escrow company won’t handle that for us anymore. So there was this moment of panic as I tried to figure out how to get them paid without having the county sell the place out from under us, until I looked at my checkbook and realized that I’d paid them at the beginning of the month. Nice going, past me.

9. The soundtrack for the last few days has been Leon Redbone. This has been a public service announcement.

10. Lauren has been accepted into one college already, so we know she’s going somewhere next year. We’re still waiting to hear back from most of them, however, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s a strange time to be applying to colleges and I hope she can have something like a normal year next year. I hope we all can. I’m glad she’s in, though. Congratulations, Lauren! I’m proud of you.

Adventures in Technology

It’s been an interesting week in technology here in Our Little Town, in the liberal arts sense of the term, the way three-headed frogs are … interesting.

Last week I was on the phone with our Internet Company trying to get a different question answered when, for some reason, the person on the other end of the line suggested I do a speed test on our service. “Huh,” he said. “You are paying for a lot more than that. We need to get a tech there to take a look at this.”

Say what you will about their billing department, but the tech support has always been top notch.

They also said they’d send a new modem, which never quite happened and eventually Kim had to go to the Internet Company’s office here in Our Little Town and pick one up directly. It turned out they had no record of this but cheerfully admitted that this did not mean that Kim was wrong and they gave her a new modem anyway, which it turned out did not actually solve the problem.

So last Friday an amiable tech fellow showed up at my door, took a thorough look at everything coming into the house and out of the splitters, replaced the modem again, and said that as far as the Internet Company was concerned everything was fine. He even had me download a speed test app for my phone which showed me getting exactly what I should be getting.

“The problem is somewhere between the router and your computers,” he said. “I think your router’s probably fine, but if you want to check without spending the money for a new one you can rent one from us for a month for $5, and if it solves things you can either keep it and keep paying rent or return it and buy your own. And if it doesn’t solve things you can return it and it’s probably the fact that your computers are So Old.”

Sometimes you can hear the capital letters.

Not that he was wrong, mind you.

So Kim took the old modem back to the Internet Company and the next day she went back and got a new router and we plugged that in and it solved things for Kim but not for me. So the problem was kind of both problems, and if we get a new router for ourselves we can return the Internet Company router and why does this begin to sound like an electronic version of three-card monte? Guess where the connection speed is! This machine? That one? Oooh, sorry, mate – maybe next time?

I do get enough speed to do what I need to do, though, so that’s good, even if my computer is objectively old. So am I, after all.

Which brings us to our second tech crisis, which is that for some time now I have been unable to update my Office software. Microsoft forces you to do that periodically, because if you don’t then you can’t actually use the programs to do anything. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy getting messages saying that I don’t have permission to access files I actually created. But for the last month or so I’ve been getting other messages saying that I can’t update these programs because my OS is too old.

It was, admittedly, three generations back from the current Mac iteration.

I did a little research on macOS11, which is the one that Apple is flogging now. It’s new! It’s wow! It’s shiny! It has no back compatibility with things that are 32-bit! Your bits must be 64 in number! 64 is the number of the bits, and the number of the bits shall be 64! 65 is right out!

I have a lot of older programs, much to nobody’s surprise. I’ve known for years that I need to upgrade my email program, for example, because it hasn’t been supported since 2013 or so, but it took until last week for me to figure out how to transfer all of the thousands of messages over to a different program that would be updated from time to time now. Format changes and all that. But I got it done! It works!

Kind of.

I can read my old emails and receive emails in one program, but I can’t figure out how to send them from there. So I have a different, also updating program, that sends them.

With this I have kicked the can of this problem down the road and can worry about it some other time, probably in 2026.

Also, half the meetings I go to these days are on Webex, which does not function with my old OS anymore. The crashing every 8 minutes or so thing kind of tipped me off about that, and it turns out that this was a known issue.

Why if something is known is it not fixed? I don’t know. Ask the IT guys.

I didn’t really want to upgrade to macOS11, since it is new and therefore not terribly well tested. But it turns out that when you go to Apple’s web page and click on the links to take you to either of the two OS versions between mine and 11 you get taken to either iTunes (if you click on it in Firefox) or the App Store (if you click on it in Safari) and in neither of those places are you actually allowed to download those OS programs that Apple insists are there.

So OS11 it was.

I bit the bullet and downloaded it on Friday. I probably should have done this two weeks ago, prior to the semester starting, but so it goes.

It downloaded and tried to install and kept getting hung up and I went to bed convinced that I had bricked my computer at the start of the semester and trying to figure out how to work around that. This is not a good place to be. Fortunately the next morning the computer had figured things out and was happily booting up just fine.

I’ve been using OS11 since Saturday, and so far it’s been okay. Not many changes that I can tell, which is a recommendation coming from me. The alert sounds are different and I’m sure there are all sorts of features that I am pointedly ignoring, but otherwise it looks and acts mostly like my old computer, which is really what I wanted.

Except that every video chat software program I own (and I have to use three different ones for my various jobs) forgot how to access my mic and camera and screen and required a restart to fix that, including once in the middle of a class I was teaching.

And the program that the Mother Ship Campus uses to allow us to get access to work files from home is incompatible with OS11 – another “known issue” that somehow hasn’t been fixed. So that has been entertaining.

All I want is for it to do what I want. I don’t need it to do everything. Just certain things.

Every time I upgrade, it is a constant struggle to get back to where I was.

We’ll see.

Four Days

It’s been four days since Joe Biden was inaugurated.

Four days without a Constitutional crisis. Four days without the fear of whatever damned fool authoritarian cruelty the previous president would no doubt have spouted in that time period. Four days of knowing that there are adults in charge of the government, that they are giving actual serious attention to the problems this nation faces, and that they intend to pass this nation on to their successors in better shape than they found it.

All of which is a refreshing change.

Honestly, even the air feels cleaner.

Law enforcement is arresting the treasonous insurrectionists who staged the Trump Coup. Various radical right-wing groups, including the Republican Party itself, are either tearing themselves apart or attacking other various radical right-wing groups. The second impeachment trial – this one to be conducted by a Senate that might hold an actual trial rather than simply dismissing the charges without a hearing like the last time – is scheduled to begin shortly, and if our former president is called to defend himself under oath there won’t be enough popcorn in the world.

There are still problems, of course. The pandemic is getting worse and Biden’s administration has to start from scratch in its efforts to fix things because as it turns out there was no plan whatsoever under the previous administration for doing that – none at all. Der Sturmtrumper apparently felt we could all just go ahead and die and quit bothering him for all he cared. The economy is teetering and if things don’t improve soon may well collapse – something that I have no doubt the GOP is actively working toward so they can blame the current administration. Tom Brady is going to another Super Bowl, which in a just society would not be allowed. All sorts of problems.

But there are, as noted, adults in charge again and if they can’t solve everything all at once at least they’re making serious efforts to do so rather than creating more problems to distract us.

I’ll take that. It beats a sharp stick in the eye.

I have no idea where things will go from here.

But for the first time since November 2016 I am going to allow myself to think that maybe, just maybe, things will get better in my country. Maybe not soon. Maybe not everything I want to happen. But a start, at least.

And after four years of overt Fascism being rammed down my throat, yes indeed I will take that.

Truck Stop Memories

Sometime in August 1993 I found myself in a rented truck in Peru, Illinois, with my dad, my brother, and all of my worldly possessions.

This made sense at the time.

The day before my dad and I, along with a couple of my best friends, had cleaned out my Pittsburgh apartment and loaded up the truck in preparation for me moving out to Iowa where I would begin my doctoral program. I had an apartment lined up and ready to go in Iowa City, but there remained the difficulty of getting all my stuff from where it was to where it needed to be.

I had a lot of stuff, much of it books – and if you think books are just paper and therefore ought to be light, you really ought to reconsider and start thinking of them as finely sliced lumber and therefore not light at all. But we got it all into the truck and then hung out in the echoing space of my tiny apartment for a while.

The next morning my dad and I got up early, drove out to the airport to pick up my brother, and then headed west.

The plan was to stop somewhere about two or three hours from Iowa City and spend the night there before traveling on. The midwest was flooded that summer and there was only one bridge open over the Mississippi between Minneapolis and St. Louis – the one we needed on I-80. We figured if we stopped before the floodwaters we would have a better chance of finding a hotel. Plus we’d have the whole day once we got to Iowa City rather than trying to unload in the evening.

Peru was – and for all I know still is – a truck stop town, the kind of place that exists for weary travelers to spend a night before moving on. It has hotels, gas stations, and the sorts of restaurants you’d expect in a truck stop town. There may well be a prettier and more residential Peru somewhere beyond the immediate neighborhood of the interstate exits, but we never found it. Can’t say we looked for it either. We were, after all, weary travelers, and all we needed was a hotel, a gas station, and the sort of restaurant you’d expect in a truck stop town.

The hotel was sufficiently full that they had to open up a wing that had been tightly sealed in order to put us somewhere. They never did turn on the ventilation system that night. It was a hot night. But we gassed up the truck, unloaded our overnight bags, and wandered across the parking lot to a steakhouse called The Pine Cone for dinner.

The Pine Cone had $4 steaks, greasy hash browns, and a teenaged waitress who spent a good portion of the evening at her station a couple of booths over loudly discussing with her colleagues the guy she had fallen asleep under the night before. It was entertainment, I suppose.

We sat there, the three of us, enjoying our meal and our time together.

At some point my dad looked around at the place, paused, and then said to us, “You know, sometimes you just have to stop and ask yourself – how the fuck did I end up here?”

It was a fair question.

We end up in all sorts of places, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. We go where we need to be to do what needs to be done, or sometimes we just end up there. Sometimes it’s a combination of all that.

But in the end there is the story because that’s all there ever will be, and those who remember the story are part of it for as long as the story is told.

My dad would have been 82 today.

Happy birthday, Dad.

News and Updates

1. Less than two full days before der Sturmtrumper is tossed out on his seditious ass and onto the trash heap of history. He leaves behind a diminished nation, a fragmented system of alliances, a faltering economy, a raging and deadly plague that he actively made worse, a treasonous and growing right-wing extremist movement that has already staged one failed coup and is eagerly working toward the next, the lowest job approval of any president since recordkeeping began, a desperate desire to destroy everything that is worthwhile about the United States that will have him actively sabotaging this nation’s future right up until the nuclear codes are ripped out of his palsied hands and replaced with subpoenas from half a dozen active criminal investigations, and a culture of slime and corruption that will take decades to remove. Naturally his base continues to worship him. It’s going to be a long few years coming up, yes indeed.

2. Now you know why companies escort fired workers from the premises immediately and don’t give them time to wreak havoc. We may need to amend the Constitution (again) to make the inauguration of the next president happen much, much faster.

3. In the meantime, life goes on, as it must.

4. The semester is about to start for at least one of the campuses where I teach. Another never stopped. The third one doesn’t start for two weeks. It has been very difficult to maintain a focus on class prep when there is treason in the air, I have to admit, but I have my nearest classes ready to go and my other class is just waiting for a bit of information that someone else needs to provide, so all in all it’s not a bad position to be in.

5. I’ve managed to get through about half of the bookshelves in my office for my weeding project. I have now conceded that I will never get a tenure-track position – that the adjunct life is for me, whether that was my goal or not – so a lot of books that “might be useful someday” have now lost their “someday” and can go to someone else. I’ve got eight boxes of books in the mudroom waiting to be donated to somewhere and honestly you can’t really tell. I consider that a sign of a life well lived, to be honest. I still need to go through the other half of the bookshelves, but as noted the semester is about to start and there will be precious little time for such projects.

6. Which is a shame because my computer has now reached the point where I must update the OS if I want any of the other programs to update. I had planned to make that change over break, but of course never did. So now I’m sitting here thinking about whether I want to go from macOS 10.13.6 to macOS 11 at the beginning of a term and what the odds are that this will convert my computer into a shiny paperweight. I threw this problem out to my Facebook friends and got some good advice, so perhaps I will follow it. We’ll see.

7. I did manage to get my email transferred over from Entourage (which hasn’t been supported since 2013 or so) over to something that will actually get updates for a while. I consider this a victory. Someday I will figure out how to archive these things, which will make me happy even if most people have no idea why anyone would want to do that.

8. While there were some very nice gifts exchanged among us this holiday season, perhaps the one that has gotten the most use so far is the pet heating pad that we got for our 16-year-old cat. It’s always on at a nice low temperature so it’s not a fire hazard, and the cat has barely moved from it in weeks – “sitting there like a gas station hot dog,” according to Oliver. I’m thinking of changing her name to Ballpark.

9. For several nights last week we had pretty thick fog and below freezing temperatures, which meant that you’d wake up and everything was rimed with ice. It was really beautiful. You need that these days.

10. I took Oliver back to Small Liberal Arts College yesterday. On the one hand, it was nice to spend the time with him in the car, and he’s happy to be back with his group now. On the other hand, it means that we’re down a person here. Also, I had to stop in some tiny little town on the way back to get gas and use the restroom and there wasn’t a single person in that place wearing a mask and seriously what the hell, people? Oh well. I did get to see a bald eagle fly overhead – the second one in less than a week, in two different states – so that was cheering.

11. Now that Lauren is 18 she has officially reached the point where she can make some decisions without us, and the one that she had most been looking forward to making was getting her nose pierced. I realize that I am Old and Uncool but I think it looks nice, really.

12. It’s amazing how many people still have their Christmas lights up. I think people need them more than usual these days.

Thoughts on the Trump Insurrection

On January 6, 2021, the United States of America was attacked by internal enemies.

A violent mob of insurrectionists, called together and urged forward by a seditious president, stormed the Capitol and attempted to overturn the legitimate results of a free and fair election in order to install the defeated president in power against the will of the American people. It is the first time in this nation’s history that the peaceful transfer of power was assaulted.

This attempted coup is treason. It is precisely why we have laws, courts, prisons, and armies.

Right-wing mobs roamed the halls of Congress on that day, intent on assassinating elected Representatives, Senators, and the Vice President because they would rather live in a Fascist dictatorship than see the Constitutional process of installing the next president play out. They shit on the floor, stole equipment and artifacts, and demonstrated a level of barbarity that should embarrass any rational adult.

It is telling that at no point in this insurrection did the defeated president consider leaving the White House, a mile and a half away. He knew very well that this was not a threat to him, after all. He refused to do anything to fix the problem for a long time as well, for the same reason.

Every single insurrectionist who set foot inside the Capitol is guilty of treason and subject to arrest, trial and punishment.

The Capitol Police were overwhelmed – at least some of them seemed to welcome the assault – and one of them was killed by an insurrectionist while resisting it. That makes every single insurrectionist who set foot in the Capitol guilty of felony murder and subject to arrest, trial, and punishment.

Every single individual who encouraged the insurrectionists, starting with the outgoing president of the United States, is guilty of sedition at the bare minimum and treason if their participation can be shown to extend to more than just verbal encouragement, and is subject to arrest, trial and punishment.

The more we find out about this assault on the United States, the worse it gets. The tentacles of treason reach far higher than the brute mob that broke into Congress, and as information trickles out it is clear that the mob was simply the most visible sign of a deeper attack on democracy and the American republic itself.

There must be consequences.

These consequences must be swift, thorough, and harsh. Every single insurrectionist, seditionist, and traitor must be made to feel the full weight of justice. They must be face the cold determination of American patriots. They must be reduced to where they will never again trouble the peace of Americans.

During the previous treasonous uprising against the United States, General William Tecumseh Sherman declared that “those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” This is a lesson we must heed today.

There must be no pause in the pursuit of justice against this right-wing insurrection against the United States. Insurrection must be crushed and those responsible for it brought to heel.

There are more American troops defending Washington DC today than there are in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. This is what you get when you tolerate Fascism for too long.

The tide turns here, however.

We say to the Fascists, you will not win.

We say to the Fascists, you will not intimidate us.

We say to the Fascists, your time is over.

We Were Warned

Eleven months ago, the man who had been Donald Trump’s personal lawyer testified before Congress that Trump would not turn over power peacefully to his successor.

He was roundly dismissed for this as being alarmist.

Today the United States is in the middle of a right-wing coup led by its outgoing president and supported by a disturbingly large portion of the Republican Party and much of his base. The Constitution, the law, and the survival of the United States as a republic hang in the balance.

Trump has repeatedly sought to overthrow the election in the courts, but when the courts demanded evidence of his delusional accusations and received only further delusions they threw out his challenges in some of the most scornful decisions I have ever read, many of which were written by judges Trump appointed. Trump then turned to hysterically tweeting conspiracy theories, fleecing his supporters for donations, shaking down state officials like some third-rate mafioso, openly calling for violence from his right-wing extremist base, and demanding that his vice president simply appoint him to a new term in office.

His minions in Congress have sued to allow the vice president to do this, only to have the courts throw that out as the stupid and seditious nonsense that it is.

And now 12 Republican Senators and over a hundred Republican representatives are going to try to have Congress overturn the freely expressed will of the American people at an event where they have don’t even have the authority to ask questions, let alone take action.

Today Congress and the vice president have exactly three tasks laid out for them by the Constitution.

The Vice President opens the envelopes containing the certified electoral votes sent in by the states and attests that these are the votes sent by the states. It is the states, after all, who control this process under the Constitution.

Congress then verifies that those are indeed the votes certified by the states.

 

The votes are then counted and the winner reported.

 

So long as one candidate has a majority (clearly true in this case), that is ALL they are empowered to do.

In the absence of any controversy within the states (and there is no such controversy in existence since every state has certified one slate of electoral votes in accordance with their state laws at the time of the election) Congress has no right whatsoever to question those votes or to disenfranchise the majority of American citizens who voted. The vice-president, contrary to Trump’s delusional assertions, does not have the authority to decide whether to count the votes or not. The people have voted. The states have certified. The electors have voted. There are no legitimate controversies. There is nothing actionable for Congress to base any demand or motion on. For Congress to do anything other than accept these results and report them out is a clear violation of the law and the Constitution and a treasonous assault on the legitimately elected government of the United States of America.

18 US Code Sections 2384 and 2385 prescribe penalties of fines and up to twenty years imprisonment for such crimes. Just pointing that out for future reference.

 

This didn’t start with Trump. It goes back a long way and is just the culmination of a trend decades in the making.

The right-wing fringe of the Republican Party has been very clear for nearly half a century that it has little use for democracy – that the only legitimate votes are Republican votes, the only legitimate candidates are Republican candidates, and the only legitimate victories are Republican victories – and in recent years that fringe has become the mainstream of the party. We saw that with decades of systematic voter suppression by Republican legislatures and officials. We saw that when the GOP legislatures of Wisconsin and North Carolina threw toddler-level tantrums at incoming Democratic governors in the last few years. We’re now watching the GOP legislature of Pennsylvania refuse to seat a Democratic state senator despite the fact that his victory has been certified by both Republican state officials and the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, the only bodies who have any say in that matter.

There are Republican officials who have realized that this has gone too far. Who are belatedly fighting back against the Trump Coup. There are Republican voters who understand that their candidate lost and that's just what happens in a democracy. But they are fighting against their own party and their own leaders, and how that will end is an open question. It is late in the game and the outcome for the United States is not certain.

This is an attempted coup against the United States of America by Trump and his supporters.

It must be opposed by all patriotic Americans, across the board. It must be put down, firmly and utterly. And there must be consequences for those who brought rebellion to this nation.