Uncategorized
Declutter Your Devices to Reduce Security Risks
David Murphy at Lifehacker has a good idea I’m going to try and implement: a digital declutter of my digital devices.
Everyone should set aside dedicated time to review what they’ve installed on their various devices—typically apps, but that can also include games and addons. In fact, this should be an annual cleaning, at minimum. I can’t stand digital clutter, so I do it every three months, and that means actually setting a calendar reminder so that I remember to do it on a regular basis.
I’m going to try to do this all year.
Star Wars — Everything Coming in 2021!
Star Wars Explained has a video outlining everything Star Wars for 2021.
As you may already know, we are going to see more Star Wars “stuff” than ever before — movies, TV shows, comics, novels, games… you name it. For example, on Disney+ we are going to be getting The Book of Boba Fett, Ashoka, and Rangers of the New Republic as well as a new season of The Mandalorian. The Bad Batch animated series will debut sometime in 2021.
Also in 2021, we’ll Star Wars: Visions, a series of animated short films. There’s the High Republic stuff too and I’m sure a bunch of video game stuff I’m not really into. So, so much.
My inner twelve-year-old is really happy.
How We Will Talk About 2020 In the Future
Will Leitch contemplates how we will reconcile 2020.
We will be dealing with the ramifications of 2020 for as long as we live. We’ve lost nearly two million people worldwide, 340,000 of them (and counting) Americans, and millions more have contracted Covid-19, a disease, I remind you, no one knows the long-term side effects of. Businesses have been closed, forever, and millions have lost their jobs and their livelihoods. Children across the country have had their educations disrupted or even stopped all together; expect all sorts of “Generation Covid” stories around 2028, about the generation that never got caught back up. And we have learned so much, too much, about how our country today, both its leaders and its citizens, reacts to moments of national strife. (It turns out that We Are Not All In This Together.) How do you put pieces like this back together? How do we ever go back to normal after this?
And more to the point: How do we deal with processing this year and what it was like to live through it? Future generations will look back at this year and conclude that we were all going through a collective trauma-induced psychosis. I have tried to remember throughout 2020 that everyone is under extreme stress, that every day is a challenge, that no one is at their best right now. Those viral videos of people having breakdowns are so hypnotic because we’re all living on that edge, day by day. We’re all just barely holding it together.
Only time will tell.
KISS Alive-streamed
“Wearing more makeup than your Mommy”
I’m a massive KISS fan. In fact, for Christmas, my wife bought me a new turntable and a 180-gram vinyl copy of Destroyer. It’s been fun to spin the old vinyl records and reminisce a bit about being in my bedroom and dreaming about what it would be like to see the “hottest band in the world.”
Over the course of my life, I’ve seen KISS nearly ten times, and while that may seem like a lot, there are obviously fans who have seen the band many hundreds of times. I’ve been about as far away as possible, and I’ve been center stage, about four rows back from the front. I’ve seen them in and out of makeup. I know what I’m getting when I see a show.
All three volumes of KISSOLOGY have amazing concerts from various points in the band’s nearly 50-year career, and I can watch the 70s, 80s, 90s, or 21st-century versions of the band anytime I like.
In the before-COVID-times, KISS was on their END OF THE ROAD tour, counting down to their last ever concert event. I had not seen a show on the tour because I was hedging my bet that they might bring the show to the State Farm Center here in Champaign, where I would beg and plead with my wife and her DIA co-workers to get a good seat and maybe a backstage pass. I also think the band will set up a long-term residency in Las Vegas sometime soon, but I digress.
To finish off this horrible year, KISS has decided to put together a New Year’s Eve PPV streaming show on a massive 250-foot stage constructed at the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai. It looks sort of like a mashup of the Metallica: Live at Slane Castle stage and the Rammstein — Sonne Dresden stage. It certainly looks like it’s going to be the largest show of 2020.
However, I won’t be watching. At least not live. The KISS 2020 Goodbye concert experience will not be any less exciting when I watch it on New Year’s Day on YouTube instead of paying $30 or $50 on New Year’s Eve. Because it will absolutely be on YouTube the very next day, and I don’t feel like parting with any cash for the rights to watch it “live.” Seriously, the global start time is cool and everything, but that means it’s actually live at 11 am on New Year’s Eve, and nothing says rock and roll like watching KISS play a big concert over lunch.
Maybe I’m just getting old.
There’s obviously going to be a DVD and supposedly a behind-the-scenes documentary too. I’d say a live recording is in the works as well. I don’t “need” to see it now and I’ll be happy to purchase the products when they come out in March, probably around the same time the END OF THE ROAD tour kicks back up.
Better to rock and roll all night instead of rock and roll over lunch.
One Lie
Shattered lives
Last Sunday morning, Jimmy Collins died at the age of 74.
Will Leitch, in his weekly newsletter, discusses the life and the lies of Jimmy Collins. He tells the story of Deon Thomas and Bruce Pearl and how one lie changed the trajectory of one person’s entire life. Pearl’s lie cost Collins more than just a chance at becoming the University of Illinois head men’s basketball coach. It practically destroyed him.
That was one lie, just one, just one opportunistic moment from someone who had only his own interests in mind and didn’t care what happened to anyone else because he wanted what he wanted. And that lie affected lives forever. Thirty years later, a man died full of regrets and unfulfilled dreams, with his reputation still bleeding, all because of that one lie. One lie can change everything. One lie can destroy an entire life.
He then smartly pivots to what might happen when we are subjected to thousands of lies.
What do thousands of lies do? What does an endless parade of lies, a cascading cavalcade of lies, just an eternal stream of bullshit … what does that do? I would love to believe that—while we will look back at this time with sadness, anger, frustration and despair—we will in fact be able to look back upon it. Because to look back upon it will mean that it is over.
I would love to believe that it will be a dark, awful period in a history, sure, but one we can tie up and place neatly away, in some storage space where we can hide from it, claim it’s something we can all move on from. I would love to believe that at some point we’ll be finished with it.
But I’m worried that’s not how any of this works. The results of the lies, the ramifications of this time, will reverberate for the rest of our lives, and surely the rest of our children’s lives. There are people who were destroyed by this time, by these people, who will never recover. It will be 30 years in the future, as they lie dying, and they will still be thinking about what happened to them and the people they loved and the world they cared about back in 2020, the years before, how their lives were just never quite the same after that.
This is the legacy of Donald Trump and the Republican party. They should be shunned into oblivion.
Tenet
“Don’t try to understand it”
Joshua Rivera, writing for The Verge, has the best review of Tenet I’ve read.
That’s perhaps the biggest disappointment of Tenet: it wants to be an unusually clever spy film, but Nolan isn’t terribly invested in the fun of spy movies. You know: cool outfits, flashy gear, people pushed to their absolute limit and managing to wear it incredibly well. And because the mechanics of the film’s plot require a lot of explanation just to follow what people are doing in a scene, it’s very easy to miss why they’re doing it. This is a shame because the reason for all this time-warping and subterfuge is actually compelling as hell!
Just so we’re clear: I am pretty good at watching movies. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours, per Malcolm Gladwell’s absolutely airtight metrics, and that makes me an expert. Yet, I was still confused by the time the credits rolled. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of the beautiful things about movies is how they can immerse us in stories that are bigger than us that defy easy comprehension. What unmoors me is the nature of my confusion.
Tenet is a film that explicitly encourages you to feel a thing and not think about it, but it doesn’t offer any emotional anchors. It’s a disorientation that comes when you don’t feel you’re in the hands of someone with complete control over the narrative. You might be able to call some twists before they happen, but even if you do, it’s no more satisfying than a coin toss. Sure, you may have been right. But unless you had money on it, does it matter?
Tenet is an absolute mess of a movie that stumbles doing all of the things I like about Christopher Nolan films. Directors are allowed missteps, obviously — this one is even pretty humanizing — but the whole situation is complicated by the circumstances surrounding the film’s release.
Seriously, all I wanted was a cool spy flick, and I got this crap. Sure, it looks beautiful, but it makes not a lick of sense. Inception is complicated and probably needs repeated viewings to understand it, but there is a narrative flow. Tenet has none of that, and so it makes no sense. I’ve read complete “This is what happens in Tenet” pieces, and I still can’t follow the story. There are beats that are never explained in the story. I’m sure there are James Bond movies where the plot loses all connection to reality, but that might even be the point here.
I love Inception. Tenet… I don’t love it, and I’m not even sure I like it.
There Is No Such Thing as Normal— So Stop Waiting for It
Time is a flat circle
Ryan Holiday, writing on his site, has some excellent advice for everyone about how the world should react to the “new normal.”
Why should I pine for it to be over or different? What matters is right now. What matters is the quiet hour we had together on that road. What mattered was the sunrise coming up behind us. What matters is that the last eight months have been eight months of being alive—and I chose to live them.
How much longer will it be like this? How much longer until the next change?
No one can say. Nobody knows anything for certain except that change will eventually come.
If people could manage to find happiness and purpose and stillness amidst war, under the rule of tyrants, through plagues far worse than this one, what excuse do we have?
None.
This is normal.
This is life.
Yup.
The Force is With Them
This is the way
Star Wars is an important touchstone in my life. I saw the first movie in 1977 in a crowded theater in Florida on vacation. Just shy of my 9th birthday, this event was monumental in creating my fandom.
As fans speed to the ending of The Mandalorian on Disney+, I have not been more excited for the future of Star Wars. The reason is the two men at the helm of the show: Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. It is neon-flashing obvious those two writers/directors/producers/actors are who should get complete and absolute creative control over the Star Wars franchise.
The Mandalorian is by the best live-action Star Wars when viewed next to the last few movies. There’s really no comparison. Disney and Star Wars are blessed to have true visionaries in Favreau and Filoni, who have written a lot of Star Wars and “get” the franchise at the helm. J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson created competent films that have a “feeling” of Star Wars but don’t quite hit the mark.
One big advantage, I think, is the character creation. Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo Ren are pretty good characters. The problem lies in the feeling that they are less original and more just ciphers for the original Luke, Han, Leia, and Darth Vader.
On the other hand, Din Djarin, Grogu (Baby Yoda), Cara Dune, Greef Karga, Moff Gideon, Bo-Katan Kryze, and Ahsoka Tano do not feel like retreads. Sure, at first glance, our protagonist in The Mandalorian looks like Boba Fett, and Moff Gideon is giving off a strong Darth Vader fanboy vibe, but scratch the surface, and you will see something else. A uniqueness that has flowed out of the mind of Filoni and Favreau. Heck, we even get to see Fett and Djarin in this season, and there’s a distinct contrast.
Ahsoka Tano is one of the most realized characters in all of Star Wars, and her character arc is defined by her creator, Filoni. Seeing a live-action version was everything a Star Wars fan could want.
It seems inevitable that Favreau and Filoni are going to have full creative control soon. The question then will be, what happens next?
I can’t wait to see it.
Thanksgiving 2020
Surprisingly, I did not eat too much
This is the first Thanksgiving I have not celebrated with my Mom and Dad and my brother and his family. My wife made an amazing meal. We had turkey and ham, corn, Hawaiian dressing, and mashed potatoes. We had pumpkin and apple pie. It was wonderful.
An attempted video call with everyone was a comedy of errors and bad internet connections. We certainly tried.
At the end of the evening, I started getting depressed. The pandemic has not affected me personally as much as so many others. I have a good job, and my company is doing well. I get to go downstairs to my basement office and do my work in practically the same way as before. My wife changed jobs to a much more challenging one. My stepdaughters are coping as best they can, and my daughter across the state has found good friends, and I’m grateful. I still got depressed because, finally, the pandemic affected me personally. How selfish of me, I realized. How short-sighted. I needed to count my blessings.
As for blessing counting, I’m grateful I have a safe place to call my home, plenty of food, and a family who loves me. It’s easy to overlook how lucky I am. I am eternally thankful for the patience my friends and family possess when dealing with me, and I hope I can bring that same selflessness to them.
I hope your Thanksgiving was as wonderful as mine, and I hope next year we see a glimmer of hope.
Scar
Remember when Tiger King was a thing?
Will Leitch, in his weekly newsletter, talks about time and 2020.
It is clear that we will be talking about 2020 the rest of our lives. The thing is, though, when we say things like that, “we’ll talk about 2020 the rest of our lives,” we act as if it will be able to be separated from the rest of our lives, like it was a bad vacation, or a unhappy relationship we were fortunate to eventually extricate ourselves from.
But that’s not what 2020 will be. It will not be a tumor we’ll be able to cut out. It’ll be with us, forever—emotionally, physically, intellectually, a traumatic shock to our collective system. Families have seen their entire foundational structures upended. Careers and business have been wiped away. Kids have grown six inches while staring at their friends and teachers on a computer screen. My hair’s turning green and my heart is pounding out of my chest. The more we go through this, the harder it gets, the farther away the end seems … the less this feels like something to be endured and then discarded, and more, perhaps, the point where it all does in fact tip. We will survive this. We are surviving this. But we are not the same. We are not what we were in March. And years from now, I suspect we will still be changed because of this.
This does not have to be a reason to despair. Enduring strife and struggle can focus the mind, allow us to concentrate our attention on what truly matters, to appreciate each moment while we have them, while we can. I’m going to be proud of the people I care about, of all of us, for making it through this.
But it’s going to scar. It surely already has.
I’m so tired of this year. The exhaustion is real. I came back from a vacation in Florida in March and immediately started working from home. The mental energy it has taken to simply continue has been staggering.
Election Day 2020
I don’t know what’s going to happen today and the rest of the week and, frankly, neither do you. The not-knowing is not fun. The anticipation, one way or another, is disquieting. It’s disconcerting.
I’ve been home for more than 230 days and the continued fear of the unknown is almost paralyzing. With COVID-19, we have no idea when it will end, what will happen, how it might mutate into something worse, and what life looks like on the other side.
The election of 2020 is exactly the same.
I have no doubt Joe Biden will win the popular vote, and he will probably win by a huge number. If you look at the 538 Election Forecast , you see Biden with a 90% chance of earning the required 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency. All that being said, I’m still anxious and nervous.
The Electoral College is absolute bullshit and it should be abolished as soon as possible. Election Night would be simple if we would choose our presidents by popular vote. There would be no more swing states or contested votes, or hanging chads. There would be none of this Supreme Court deciding the outcome crap. Voter suppression would go away. Having this Electoral College is an outdated and stupid concept that does not reflect what the majority of 330 million people truly want in a representative democracy.
Right now though, none of that matters.
I sincerely believe Joe Biden is going to get the most votes and, consequently, is highly likely to have 270 plus electoral college votes. All the polling says so. It has been steady for months and nothing Trump has tried has stuck to Biden.
However, the polls can tell us nothing about the absolute bullshit the Trump campaign is about to do regarding court challenges, honest counting, and judicial decisions in dozens of states. I’m fearful of not having a clear winner by Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. I hope I’m glaringly wrong, but I think it will be bad and could turn violent and ugly.
What will people do who live in an alternate reality where they are being told time and time again that their side cannot lose unless by some rigged rules? There will be anger in the streets, but what will actually happen?
Honestly, I’m not going to think about it all that much. Coming up with dozens of theories and guesses is not particularly healthy. I can play “what if” games until January 20, but I shouldn’t. Sure, there are people on both sides who have been gearing up for this fight for months, but I’m not one of them.
I’ve resigned myself to, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And that’s probably the healthiest thing I can do.
See you on the other side. Vote.
Nobody Did It Better
You’re the man now, Dog
Sean Connery is gone. He was 90. He died peacefully in his sleep.
My father loved Ian Fleming novels and, of course, the movies. I was named after Connery, and I was keenly aware of him through his cinematic career. When I was younger, it was always a knowing nod when I saw him in other films like Highlander, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Untouchables. He famously turned down the role of Gandalf, which undoubtedly would have given him tremendous accolades. Of course, when you’re James Bond, you don’t really need them.
When I watch the Connery Bond films today, they feel very much of their time. Frozen in amber, it’s almost funny hearing Connery’s Bond make fun of the Beatles playing music just a bit too loud.
I always wanted him to come back into the Bond franchise playing the villain. Of course, he’d be a former Double-0 from the 60s disenchanted with the world he saved many times over.
This year has taken so many of the icons I looked up to in my youth. Eddie Van Halen will live on through his music. Lou Brock, through his contributions to baseball. Sean Connery will, of course, always be James Bond.
That’s more than most of us ever get.
I Voted
I’m currently in line to vote early. I have never experienced a line to vote early before. I don’t know for sure what this means, but my gut tells me it’s not at all good for the incumbent.
I’m lucky my line is entirely indoors. While it is a crisp, sunny day, standing outside would be uncomfortable for any amount of time. Not unbearable, just uncomfortable.
The people in line at the early voting location look like a cross-section of Champaign, Illinois. Some older voters, many in their 30s-40s, but not many young people in their 20s. Behind me is an elderly Asian gentleman. I passed an African-American couple walking out when I walked in. They are all here at this early voting location a half an hour after it opened on the first day it opened.
I’m going to be here for a while.
To no one’s surprise, I will cast my vote for Joe Biden for President of the United States. I was not very political until I was in graduate school, and then it was because I saw my professors scared to death about the ramifications of the first Gulf War. I liked Bill Clinton’s way of presenting and voted for him twice. I don’t remember voting for Gore, but I do remember the craziness of Florida’s hanging chads. I don’t believe I voted again until Obama in ’08, and I’ve voted ever since.
As I’ve gotten older, elections have mattered more. However, this one seems even more critical. The fact that I’m in an early voting line 15 days before November 3 tells me the American electorate feels the same way. The American people are voting and voting early. This feels like a movement.
I have an affinity for “what if” games. If Joe Biden had run in 2016, I think he would’ve beaten Trump. I understand why he did not. Hindsight being 20/20, we would’ve been so much better off with him or Secretary Clinton as President.
As it stands now, I’m happy to vote for Joe Biden. I would’ve been just as delighted to vote for Harris, Warren, Sanders, or any of the Democrats who ran. Ultimately, I’m glad it’s Joe Biden. He is an honest, good man whose life has been marked by tragedy and pain, and he’s used it to bring immeasurable empathy to others. He is exactly who we need at this moment to heal this nation.
He isn’t perfect. He’s a tad bit slower since he ran around the White House as VP. He can be awkward. However, I also see a man ready to take on this job. A man prepared to help champion the next generation of leaders. He’s a bridge. In fact, he might be the absolute perfect personification of a politician we need right now.
Joe Biden will be a fine president. If he has the full House and Senate, I think he can accomplish a great deal of good and begin the healing process. He was not my first choice or even my second choice. He did, however, pick my first choice to be his Vice President and, honestly, heir apparent. He won’t be a transformational kind of candidate the way Barack Obama was, and whoever becomes the first woman president. He’s an old white guy who rides down the interstate at 69 miles per hour and not a tick over. Still, the bottom line is he understands the President’s role and truly understands it isn’t about him at all.
It’s going to take forever to pick up the pieces of these last four years. Joe Biden is the right person to be that bridge to the 21st century. With him at the helm, I see a period of transition into a new progressive government. He will gladly take the hand of the next generation and bring them up the ladder.
A Biden administration will not be a non-stop, runaway train of crisis after crisis. You won’t go to bed wondering what illegal, racist, misogynist, ad infinitum crap he will have pulled overnight. How wonderful it will be to see that haze of melancholy finally burned away.
This country has been ill-served by having Donald Trump as president. We are not better off than four years ago. The world is not better off. And as much as I’d like to not lay the blame solely at the feet of this ignorant, self-serving bully, it’s all his. This moron never wanted to be president. Look at the photos when it was announced he had won. His face says it all: “Oh shit.” He hates every second of being president, and if he could have left somehow without losing face, he would have done it. Not to mention the criminal charges that are just waiting to be unleashed on him on January 20, 2021, at 12:01 EST.
Donald Trump is a horrible person. I can’t even begin to remember all the awful things he’s done since becoming President. He is venal, corrupt, and quite likely a criminal. He should never have gotten close to the nomination, let alone the Oval Office. He’s going to go down as the worst president in the last 50 years and maybe of all time. I literally cried when it was announced he had won in 2016. I might lose my mind if he wins another four years.
I have faith that he won’t.
I have finally finished casting my ballot. The line never got shorter when I was in it and has now grown larger and larger. There is an apparent hunger to make our voices heard. We get to decide between four more years of corruption, criminality, incompetence, maleficence, and white supremacy or four years of the exact opposite. I feel confident in my choice.
I voted for Joe. I hope you do too.
Eddie Van Halen, 1955 — 2020
Andy Greene, writing for Rolling Stone, has the story that has just gutted me. Eddie Van Halen has passed away at 65. When I heard the news, I cried.
I love this little tidbit in Greene’s story about what he wanted his guitar playing to do to people.
Were it not for his titanic influence, hard rock after the late 1970s would have evolved in unimaginably different ways. He may not have invented two-handed tapping, but he perfected the practice and introduced it to a mass audience. Yet despite his complete mastery of the electric guitar, he never learned to read music.
“I don’t know shit about scales or music theory,” he told Rolling Stone in 1980. “I don’t want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should be melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”
His sound was everything. All the heroes of my youth are leaving, and I’m left with my memories of playing air guitar to “Eruption” and playing “Jump” in my high school “air band.”
My heart goes out to his family and loved ones who lost more than just a rock guitar god.
Move Forward
Will Leitch, writing in his weekly newsletter, had a paragraph that spoke to me directly about this day and age we are living in:
When you are at your darkest moments, when you are exhausted and collapsing and at your wit’s end, remember that continuing to move forward in the midst of all this, continuing to survive and someday tell your story, is courageous. More than anything else, it is strong. Every day is a struggle. But we keep getting up and doing it, regardless. I looked around and saw people fighting their own battles just to get through it. And you know what? Just by picking themselves up and continuing to move forward, they were winning those battles. So am I, I realized. And, dammit: So are you. Be proud of yourself for however you’re handling this. You deserve it. We all do.
Moving forward is the default. We can try and stand still, but the world keeps plodding away second by second into the future.
However, some days I wish I could thrive in the midst of
A New Covenant
I’m a writer. Most of the time, I write sales copy for product boxes and websites. I’m a writer and editor of a couple of publications for my company that is also focused on selling not only products but a lifestyle as well. My point is not the company I work for but what I’ve done for decades: write copy that sells.
If I was writing copy for the Biden campaign to help sell the candidate to the American people, the following is what I’d write for an ad. I’d let the graphic designers and videographers take care of the visuals, but this is my voice-over copy. Imagine hearing Joe Biden speak these words:
My fellow Americans… in these last few days before Election Day, and while millions of you are already voting, I’d like to make a new covenant with the American people. This new covenant is predicated on one thing… I will do everything in my power to bring normalcy back to the United States of America. These last three and a half years under this administration have been nothing but normal. And the last six months have been worse. The American people have lost so much. From your workplace being closed, losing employment, losing connections with friends and family. Your health care in the middle of a global pandemic is at risk. Your kids are unable to go to school. Every day, something new comes along to remind us that this is not normal. Donald Trump has no plan to bring back normalcy. He’s pretended we were already there, and look where it got him and his Republican friends. Vote for me, and my administration will do what it takes to get through this crisis together. It won’t happen right away, but it will happen. There will be a morning when the sun is shining on that great city on the hill. Won’t you join me there?
It’s the first draft, but you get the idea.
Careless People
There’s a tendency to think of crime families in terms of cinematic ones. We call Donald Trump, Jr. “Fredo” as a comparison to the dumbest, most inept of crime family boss Vito Corleone’s sons. The problem with that analogy is Donald Trump isn’t Vito Corleone. The Trumps may be a crime family, but at best they are Fredo. Well, maybe not poor Baron.
If you are looking for a more accurate description of the Trumps, the answer is not in The Godfather , but in The Great Gatsby .
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is an examination of the perversion of the American Dream and considered a prime example of “The Great American Novel.” As major characters, Tom and Daisy Buchanan do whatever they please, getting several people killed by their indifference or actively causing it. They are horrible people who do horrible things and then simply walk away.
There’s a quote late in the book where our narrator, Nick Carraway, describes Tom and Daisy.
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
These are the kind of people we have in charge. Callous, dismissive, and holier-than-thou. They were contemptuous of people much smarter than them because they believed, mistakenly, that having money made you instantly smarter. It does not. They believed people who contracted this virus were suckers and losers. Perhaps, now they will understand the virus doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, a Democrat or a Republican, or smart or dumb.
Now, we have a deluge of members of this administration testing positive for COVID-19. Some might get seriously ill.
These people dismissed the calls for masks. They actively made fun of people wearing masks. They politicized the very act of trying to minimize the spread of the virus.
They’ve ignored more than 200,000 people who have died of this virus. They didn’t care. They still might not care.
President Trump is in a hospital room at Walter Reed Medical Center and no one knows just how sick he truly is which is a nightmare scenario. His health could quickly take a turn for the worse over the weekend. We don’t know.
Earlier today, I saw a man at the grocery store walking around with a Trump 2020 mask on. Alanis Morissette could not have asked for a better simile of irony. All I could do was shake my head and try hard not to look upon him with disgust.
The Election That Could Break America
Barton Gellman, writing in The Atlantic, has the scariest piece on the 2020 Election I’ve read. Entitled, The Election That Could Break America, it explains a wide variety of tactics the Trump administration and enablers in Congress and states could pursue to create unprecedented chaos on November 3 and the days and weeks after all in an attempt to stay in office.
The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un-certainty to hold on to power.
Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.
There are so many scenarios of what could happen, including the obvious voter suppression but also using the expired consent decree governing “ballot security” operations at polls, deploying the military to “Democrat-run cities” to “protect ballots,” and my personal horror: using hand-picked electors in Republican-controlled swing states to overturn the will of the people. This story, more than any other, made me uncomfortable and a bit frightened.
I’ve always thought that Trump would never concede. He would fight with everything at his disposal, legal and illegal, to stay in power. As I’ve said in the past, he needs the Presidency to shield him from Federal and State charges that will undoubtedly be presented as soon as possible.
Some of this is going to happen. Probably not all. Hopefully, not enough to cause a real constitutional crisis. It is smart to be ready when this comes down. I believe the Democrats are lined up to fight the disruptions and the legal issues. Reading the story makes me feel like there’s going to be a real fight for the future of our country. Don’t lose confidence in the democratic process.
And vote.
Never Know
WASTED OPPORTUNITY
I’ve never read a Bob Woodward book. I haven’t seen All the President’s Men. However, I do know you don’t speak to Bob Woodward and think you are going to “beat” him at his game. Everyone always says something stupid. Donald Trump is no exception.
I’m sure you’ve read or heard the quotes from Donald Trump as he sat with Bob Woodward for a book that will ultimately be more fuel to the fire that is this bonfire of an administration. The only thing I learned is that Trump is far worse than I feared. I already knew he was nothing more than a con artist, misogynist, and racist pig. His handling of this pandemic was bad enough when I believed he was just too stupid to understand the dangers of the virus and did the worst possible things. Now, everyone knows that he did know how bad the virus would be but did nothing. Much worse.
The thing is… I don’t really care that Woodward saved the material for his book. What I wanted him to do was release the audiotapes in late October. Imagine if he would have simply released the quotes in print. Promote the book as factual. “These are the words of the President.” Watch the Republicans and Fox News hanger-ons scream Fake News and bleat that Trump would never have said any such thing. Always and continue to say these are the President’s words. Stand firm.
Then on Halloween, release the audio.
Can you imagine the outrage in having to scramble against these actual quotes from Trump tearing through the media cycle? Right before the election?
They didn’t do this because Woodward and his publisher weren’t trying to take down a corrupt President. I seem to recall a time when that was what made Bob Woodward famous.
Wouldn’t it have been fun to do it again? We’ll never know.
Star Wars Meets Rock and Roll
In the summer of 1981, I turned 13. My life revolved around comic books, Star Wars, and KISS. I’m pretty sure my brain would have exploded if I had heard about Halyx.
Live From the Space Stage — A Halyx Story is a crowd-funded documentary about a band that only existed for one summer, but what a band. A spectacularly weird concept that might have really been something if things had turned out differently. Just imagine if their first album masters wouldn’t have been trashed? What if “Hey There Boys” was slipped to a few rock stations? What if?
Watching this incredible documentary, I longed to be 13 and living in the shadow of Disneyland. I always wondered what it would have been like growing up where a major amusement park was located. Season tickets would have been a forgone conclusion. If I had been 13 and stumbled onto this band, I’m positive I’d be just like Rick Damigella, who opens the documentary.
Mind blown. Hooked for life.
Matthew Serrano’s film made me tear up and feel a longing for something I never experienced. I would love it if somewhere out there, a full concert show existed, and it was posted to YouTube.
If had a time machine, there are lots of places I’d want to visit and experience. Seeing a Halyx show would be one of the top ten.