Archive: March 2025
Trudging onward as dystopia looms
Hot Spot
I've not had a good go of things lately. I mean, nobody has, really, what with President Convicted Felon and his coterie of criminal henchmen wreaking havoc on the country and destabilizing the world and kidnapping people off the street and declaring only voters approved by the White House will count and breaching security in blatantly stupid ways and intimidating universities and law firms and and and and...
That's bad enough, but mix that in with my frakked up brain chemistry and rained out umpire shifts and I have idle time for my mind to go round and round on the hamster wheel of contemplating the state of the world and giving up on fighting the gravity of the Black Hole and just submitting to depression.
It's been intermittent; most of last week was bad and then the last few days were better with some activity (no rain, so I umped a couple of games Monday and was treated to some Molly Moons ice cream by one of my favorite softball players). Yesterday and today, back to the struggle. It's very tiring.
Anyway, to distract and focus on things that don't relate to the fall of America, I've been watching a lot of Japanese TV. I like to watch the Japanese shows to give my language skills a little test/exercise, try to work on my vocabulary and comprehension. Usually the characters speak too quickly for me to follow whole sentences, I just get words here and there, but now and then I'll turn the subtitles off and try and follow along. The subtitles come back on in short order, though, it'd be better if I could slow down the line deliveries.
The latest in my show choices is one that translates as Shinjuku Field Hospital. It's on Netflix. Among it's principal characters is a Japanese-American former army doctor named Yoko that ends up working at a run-down private emergency room in the Kabukicho neighborhood in Shinjuku (greater Tokyo); the woman playing the role of Yoko has a thick regional accent—think of an American speaking English with a thick Mississippi accent or severe Boston-Irish accent—and will often shift to speaking English, and when she speaks English, the subtitles go away since theoretically no translations are needed. But her accent is so thick that sometimes I have a harder time understanding her English than her Japanese and have to back up the video two or three times to understand what she says. Curious how we interpret the spoken word, you know?
Other shows I've enjoyed of late are (English translations) Hot Spot, Extremely Inappropriate, The Rookies, and Unnatural. All fun in their own ways. Hot Spot is a small-town story surrounding the staff at a hotel near Kawaguchi-ko, a lake near Mt. Fuji, where one of the staff is half-extraterrestrial and over the course of the season a couple of other residents/guests are revealed to be other odd sorts. Extremely Inappropriate is a time-travel tale wherein a schoolteacher from the 1980s finds himself in the 2020s and has to adjust his anachronistic intolerant attitudes to the overly-PC modern standard while another character from modern times goes to the ’80s and has the opposite experience. Oh, it's also a musical sometimes just to make it weird. Rookies is an overly-dramatic series about a high school baseball team that gets suspended for being hooligans and their redemption under an inspiring new teacher; a lot of Japanese TV is a bit over the top in terms of melodrama, but Rookies kicks it up a notch with near-constant music and Shatner-level emoting from everyone. Unnatural is a CSI-like drama with a medical examiner sussing out mysteries of unexplained deaths in Tokyo.
It's fun, engages my brain in multiple ways, and lets me forget about how we're living in a failing state and the people who have the power to right the ship are choosing not to do it.
Gonna spin up some more Japanese TV now. Ikimashou.
Posted on March 26, 2025 at 9:29PM | Permalink | 
| 
How not to do business
I'm probably not one to talk, as in my own business I can get a bit forgetful and lazy when it comes to the paperwork and the marketing stuff. You know, the part I don't like. But that aside, as a consumer I have critiques of others.
For the past couple of weeks I've been catching up on more-or-less routine stuff one has to do healthcare-wise. I brought Zephyr in for his booster shot and check-up with Dr. S. I went to the dentist for the routine cleaning. Had my doctor renew my prescriptions. And I have been looking for somewhere to get an eye exam/glasses Rx update. I definitely need new lenses, particularly for the right eye, plus that damned floater that popped up last summer still hasn't gone away and it's super irritating and I want an actual optometrist to tell me what my options are even if all s/he says is the same as what I learned from WebMD.
I wanted someplace within walking distance, and there's a super-convenient place just a couple blocks from here, but it turns out they charge about $100 more for an exam than other places and I'm as thrifty as ever given the complete chaos being wrought on our economy (thankfully, I dumped all the mutual funds/stocks/etc. in my IRA last month and just have everything in a money market now while the Dow dives off a cliff; I'll have to give that whole thing some thought later on). So I opted to try a place that operates out of the complex with the local Costco that's walkable if I have 30-40 minutes.
They have a not-bad website, and it has a form for scheduling appointments. So I submitted it. Instead of a confirmation or rejection of my chosen time or anything like that, all it did was generate a phone call the next morning at 8:00am. Do you think I answered the unknown number at 8:00am? Of course not. The message they left was not to confirm my appointment but to ask if I wanted to schedule one and if so to call them back.
What do you think the form was for?
I called back the next day. No answer, left a message. Then I forgot about it for a few days.
I tried again, submitted the appointment form. Again, all it did was generate a phone call the next morning. Worthless.
I just called them again a short while ago, and just as I was about to hang up after the 7th ring someone answered; hearing my request for an exam, she said the next available appointment is in April.
I stopped short of just saying "you guys suck" and hanging up, I was more polite than that, but I did say no thanks and will go somewhere else. I instead bit the bullet and made an appointment for tomorrow back in my old neighborhood that I'll have to drive to, but it's tomorrow and the scheduling was easy and only took one attempt and it won't cost me $200.
The takeaway here is that if you have a business that involves scheduling appointments, you should only make that a feature of your website if you're actually going to let people use it. If you want to only do such things by phone then just say that on the site and don't bother with the psych-out form. And maybe either return your own phone messages or have someone dedicated to reception/telephone appointments.
This was a tiny, minor inconvenience really, and one I rectified by going to a different provider. Imagine that magnified by a factor of 100,000 and you might approach what many American seniors will be experiencing with the Social Security Administration now that Elon has started taking his blowtorch to it.
Posted on March 21, 2025 at 3:45PM | Permalink | |
Schumer II: The Wrath of Dems
Following up on my post from yesterday, I had some thoughts after listening to Chris Hayes interview Chuck Schumer this evening.
First off, Hayes was outstanding in pushing for better answers and bringing the things Schumer seemed to be missing to the fore. As a journalist, he did a great job here and I'm embedding the segment below, please to enjoy.
My takeaways from the conversation are that:
- In isolation, considering only the situation of the moment last Friday, I've come to agree with Schumer that the vote to allow the so-called Continuing Resolution to pass was the better of the two unacceptable options, mostly because of the effect a shutdown would have had on courts. I don't fault him for that vote or for lobbying others to his position in isolation at that point.
- I do very much fault him for his lack of foresight in the weeks leading up to last Friday. That Hobson's Choice of a vote came to be without Schumer having any plan, contingency, bigger-picture strategem, anything at all in mind surrounding the issue. It was entirely predictable that the CR would arrive in the Senate and have Republican support to pass, yet Schumer was caught flatfooted and unprepared. His plan seemed to be "Hakeem gets the House to vote it down and it won't get here."
- My position that Schumer should step aside as leader was reinforced by the second half of this interview segment. Not only was he caught with his metaphorical pants down on the CR, he has articulated that we have not reached crisis point yet (boy howdy, is that wrong) and his strategy going forward relies on politics-as-usual that no longer applies.
- The 47 regime is defying court orders now, is kidnapping legal U.S. residents and paying another country to abuse them as prison labor, but Schumer is waiting for the regime to defy a Supreme Court order before he will consider us in crisis. He is relying on public opinion and approval ratings to catch up to reality in advance of his taking any real action. He does not appear to realize that POTUS47 does not care about polling because he does not intend to allow fair elections. He further does not seem to recognize—and this is, sadly, a common problem with my party—that as a U.S. Senator (party leader, at that) he needs to lead public opinion, not follow it.
As Hayes points out in the interview, this stance might be fine if we were dealing with President Mitt Romney. But we're not. Schumer is emphatic (for him) when he indicates he knows this is a far different situation, yet there's a disconnect there. We can't wait until the midterms because we can't depend on there being midterms. We have to fight tooth and nail to make sure they happen and that they're legitimate.
Chuck is failing as leader. He'd better step aside or get a clue right fucking now.
Tagged
Politics,
President VonClownstick,
Posted on March 19, 2025 at 12:24AM | Permalink | |
The Schumer problem
Senator Chuck Schumer counts down the seconds left in his political career
For those of you that have checked out of current events (like my veterinarian, whom I saw the other day with Zephyr and who told me she just can't handle awareness of the news since January), let me bring you up to speed on the latest round of Democrats Fighting Themselves When They Need to Have a United Front. Last Friday there was a key vote in the Senate, whether or not to invoke cloture—that is, end debate and proceed to a vote—on what has somewhat euphemistically been termed a Continuing Resolution to fund the government in lieu of an actual budget bill. Without approval of this resolution, the government would run out of money and go in to shutdown at midnight of that day.
Cloture is not a commonly used word outside of the DC beltway, but you might be familiar with a correlating term, "filibuster." The modern use of a filibuster in the Senate is not the Jimmy Stewart version, or even the Howard Stackhouse version from The West Wing, which requires a Senator to hold the floor indefinitely to prevent a vote from taking place. Nowadays it's much simpler and all that needs to happen is to oppose cloture—if fewer than 60 Senators vote for cloture, either debate continues or the bill is shelved or abandoned and thus "filibustered."
This bill is not really a Continuing Resolution—a real CR simply continues the existing budgetary framework for a predetermined time (six months in this case) as a stopgap. This bill has radical changes to the budget and is only "continuing" for some things—it cuts funding to myriad programs already approved by Congress; gives Elon Musk clear avenues for corruption with more government contracts; devastates DC's municipal budget; and, not to be overlooked, slashes funding for election security measures. And that's just for starters. It's really bad.
So, Senate Democrats were faced with a Hobson's Choice of allowing this so-called CR to go to a vote and thus pass, because Republicans had 52 declared votes in favor already, or filibustering it and thus creating a government shutdown, which is bad under normal circumstances and could be devastatingly chaotic under this current regime. Either option is unacceptable yet one will happen; so the real choice boiled down to accepting horribleness that is spelled out and predictably nasty, or not accepting it and venturing into unknown territory that may or may not be worse.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, decided the known horrors would be better than the chaos of the unknown and got nine other Democrats to agree with him and cloture passed with 62 votes. Other Dems, both in the Senate and out—including very vocal members of the House—are understandably outraged at what is seen as capitulation to the regime at a time when no quarter should be given and are calling for Schumer to either step down as minority leader or resign from the Senate altogether.
I tend to side with the outraged Dems, because we are in the second American Civil War—it's a cold war for the moment, thankfully, but make no mistake, the insurrectionists are in the White House and the administration is staffed with traitors to the Constitution—and putting up a fight is thus required.
That said, I don't entirely fault Schumer's logic on this particular decision. There are legitimate concerns about what the regime would do under a shutdown, real dangers that can't be ignored. But I do fault his leadership and am among those calling for him to step aside. He was adamant about opposing this CR at all costs, then completely switched gears once it passed the House; there was clearly no forethought to what to do if the bill failed even though that was the stated goal earlier on, and his behavior throughout this sequence of events suggests he does not understand the gravity of the moment. There has always been a milquetoast quality to Schumer's speeches, he seems to think that if we just wait things out that Republicans will come back to respecting their oaths of office all by themselves somehow, and he appears to be operating as if this is still normal U.S. politics.
We can't have weak leadership right now. The caucus cannot be led by Neville Chamberlain. I don't know if we have someone in the Senate who could fill a Churchill or FDR role instead, but we damn well gotta try.
Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Sheldon Whitehouse, or Tammy Duckworth would each bring fight to the leadership position in their own ways and would be leaps and bounds better than Schumer. I don't like it when we're battling amongst ourselves, especially now, but we need a change and it better be soon so we can get to that united front and so we can have a leader that leads rather than one who waits for public opinion to catch up to reality.
For the moment, anyway, this is still a representative democracy, which means we vote for officials to be our agents in DC. They are there to do the work that we don't necessarily have the time or inclination to do ourselves, they need to be more informed and more discerning about governing than the public at large, and thus should be leading and shaping public opinion as much as they can rather than following it. Republicans figured that out a long time ago, but Democrats by and large have been squeamish about it. It's why the election wasn't a blowout in favor of Kamala Harris—old-school consultants preached playing things safe, toning down attacks, and courting Republicans instead of getting in people's faces about what the stakes were.
Chuck Schumer went with the path of least resistance this time and while I can't say for certain he was wrong in this specific instance, he cannot even appear to be capitulating to the regime and claim to be a leader. In the absence of a few Republicans growing a spine and supporting impeachment, the job of Democratic leaders, particularly in Congress, is to get us to next year's midterms in a way that we can actually hold those midterm elections fairly. That's going to require fights, it will require support for the courts, it will require pushback on many, many things that have not been adequately pushed back on thus far.
Get out of the way, Chuck.
Tagged
Politics,
President VonClownstick,
Posted on March 17, 2025 at 11:05PM | Permalink | |
Working through the rust
Somehow I've let myself go another stretch of months without doing any sketching. This past week or so, when I thought I'd be away for a few days but then wasn't, and when I was between seasons for umpiring, and when work-work was minimal, I finally cracked open the sketchbook again.
Unsurprisingly, in retrospect, it hasn't gone well. I did a few attempts at portraits that will never see the light of day because I dislike them (one got ripped up pretty good), and then I thought I was getting somewhere with a drawing of Ming-Na Wen. Ming-Na was a topic of conversation between me and my friend Stacey a couple weeks back as one of our common "age-appropriate TV crushes," so when I started to run into trouble on that one—I just wasn't getting the spacing right on the eyes, plus they weren't flat enough, plus the nose was too wide, plus plus plus—after a couple of erasures and revisions that still didn't look right I was in that headspace where I couldn't tell if I was right that it looked wrong or if I was just in hypercritical mode. So I took a photo and texted Stacey. "Is this recognizable at all?" I figured if she didn't even know it was Ming-Na then I'd know for sure it was time to start over.
She ID'd the subject OK, but since she still posed it as a question—Is that Ming-Na—I put it down and let it be for a couple days, then I started over. This attempt is much better, but I admit to cheating—I had so much trouble with spacing the prior time I used a light panel on the photo I was working from this time to spot the features first. Sadly, I'm using this new pad of "marker paper," which turns out to be enough unlike the marker pad I had before that handles pencils well in addition to inks (a very nice surface from Bee Paper that I'll have to hunt for again) that I'm not getting the tones I want. This paper just won't handle soft pencil any differently than hard pencil and it smudges differently and my blending stomps don't do what I want them to, so I think I'm going to switch gears and turn this into an ink drawing.
But in case it goes horribly wrong I wanted to preserve what I've got, at least as a scan that I can play with later should it all fall apart.
Assuming it doesn't, the final product will go on the sketchbook page, which is still awaiting rescans of some older stuff to go with the more recent selections already there.
UPDATE: It's as done as it's going to get.
Posted on March 8, 2025 at 8:23PM | Permalink | |
Living through history
History is upon us.
Well, duh, obviously. History is the past, and every moment is history by the time the next moment arrives. But right now, this year, this time, this is history happening in the sense of "university courses will be taught about this time in history" the way courses are taught about The Great Depression or the Vietnam war or Japan's Taisho era.
I first took a university level American history course in 1987. It was a survey course, covering everything from colonial times through basically Watergate. The history I was living through in that present, the waning days of Reagan's term in office, was, unbeknownst to us all at the time as it almost always is unbeknownst in the moment, a pivotal era. The Reagan administration had begun a movement in U.S. politics and government that in many ways brought us to our current nightmare scenario. Reagan showed the conservative political machine that you can inflict gigantic levels of pain on the American public, but as long as you do it while telling them how wonderful life is, a large percentage of them will not only take the abuse but thank you for it and ask for more.
But the damage done in the 1980s was (comparatively) subtle. Slow-moving. Certain segments of the populace were hugely impacted in the short term, but in the aggregate things deteriorated over years. Even when that decline was temporarily arrested with Democratic governance, influence of the Reagan years persisted and prevented any real reversals (though Joe Biden did a valiant job in trying).
The damage occurring now is not subtle. It's careening along at breakneck speeds. This time, 2025, is such an obvious inflection point that we do know in the moment that we're witnessing, and participating in, critical history.
The current President of the United States has been in office just 43 days, and in that time he has:
- Abdicated the United States' status as leader of the free world;
- Effectively abandoned 80-year-old international alliances;
- Eliminated countless humanitarian and soft-power functions of the U.S. government;
- Engaged in an almost wholly lawless decimation of the federal workforce, crippling important agencies at all levels including the IRS, NOAA, Air Traffic Control, NIH, CDC, FDA, and is threatening to cripple USPS;
- Given an unelected, unvetted, corrupt billionaire access to every American's personal information;
- Assembled a Cabinet of fools, traitors, neo-Nazis, rapists, and idiotic cosplayers that appear to have been put in place to sabotage their departments and ensure no attempt to invoke the 25th Amendment would succeed;
- Begun tanking the domestic economy;
- Begun selling off/opening for destruction our national forests and public lands
And that's just off the top of my head.
Then last night he went on national television to tell the American public that he was some sort of messiah while spewing a breathtaking number of lies and droning on incoherently for 99 minutes.
After that debacle of a speech last night, Congress would have convened an emergency session this morning and removed this man from office today by overwhelming votes to impeach and convict if we lived in a sane and healthy America. Instead, we live in this time of utter corruption and stochastic terrorism and blackmail and stupidity, and when we come out on the other side—for those of us who do, because not everyone will—it's anyone's guess what the world will look like.
Some people, it seems, are beginning to see the light. Some of the dupes who voted Republican last November are regretting it. Pushback from constituents to Congresspeople has been largely on the side of righteous outrage. But the people who could stop this madness right now are not listening. Party leadership has told Republicans in Congress to stop holding town halls and meeting with constituents. That's their solution—just don't listen to them.
A not-insignificant portion of the Republican caucus is batshit crazy and/or cruel misanthropes and therefore unreachable—your MTGs and Boeberts and Jordans and Holy Mike Johnsons and that-other-John-Kennedys—but others are reachable. Some via appeals to their self-interest; the corrupt always look out for themselves. Others know they're on the wrong side but stay there out of fear. Fear of the mob, fear of the unofficial militia of pardoned insurrectionists, fear of the weaponized Justice department, fear of Presidentially sanctioned thuggery.
I have no doubt that among the boxes of documents POTUS45 stole when he left office and that as POTUS47 he has again taken to his home in Florida are records and FBI files and such on Senators and members of Congress. I have no doubt that he is using mob tactics to pressure Senators to confirm his nominees, to threaten Congressmen, to do whatever he can to put the metaphorical boot on the neck of anyone he thinks he has leverage over. It's these people that are going to have to wake up to the big-picture reality that their cowardice is enabling the Fall of America. That their willingness to be terrorized means they are traitors to the nation.
Because they are. Right now the President of the United States is a Russian operative, whether he is fully cognizant of it or not (that's a 50/50 bet, I think). He is also so staggeringly corrupt that he has no problem bankrupting the country for his personal gain and the gain of his donors and "friends." He is also, without question, the dumbest person to ever run for that office (and I include Jill Stein and Joe Exotic in the list) and contemptuous of the Constitution itself. Yet instead of doing their duty as elected officials and just representatives of humanity, those Republicans in Congress are instead huddled in a corner begging "please don't hurt me." Putting whatever personal scandals or threats to their bodily safety above the lives of countless people all over the world who are already dying due to this president's actions and will continue to as war in Europe rolls on and poverty rises at home and thuggery of all sorts gets a free pass.
This is a pivotal year.
If we can, while political forces still matter, convince the cowards and malleable part of the Republican caucus to do their jobs; if we can, while law-enforcement remains at least tacitly an instrument of public protection, bring the atrocities being committed by this administration to the notice of the apolitical checked-out masses; if we can, while courts remain faithful to the Constitution and the rule of law, arrest the runaway train of treason out of the Oval Office ... then we mark 2025 as a turning point that begins reforms to strengthen democracy and civil rights and free society and protect against the future elevation of tyrants. If we don't ... then we have years of steady descent into catastrophe and possibly that war Captain Pike told us about.
We're living through history.
The Trump Voter's Lament, from the band Talking Heads
And you may ask yourself / What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself / Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself / My God!...What have I done?!
Tagged
Politics,
President VonClownstick,
Posted on March 5, 2025 at 9:04PM | Permalink | |
Speak your mind
Yesterday I sent yet another letter to my Senators and my representative in the House. It's super simple to do, you just follow this link and put in your address and that links you to your three Congresspeople. Paste in your letter and send. Easy-peasy.
You, too, can speak your mind to power. I recommend it. Especially now, especially if you live in a red district or state.
Not sure what to say? Feel free to adapt mine. Here it is.
Dear Senator Murray / Senator Cantwell / Representative Jayapal,
Friday's Oval Office meeting between Ukrainian president Zelenskyy and Donald Trump & JD Vance displayed horrific, outrageous, and thoroughly unacceptable behavior from the United States government.
It was, of course, just one of many examples of horrific policy and behavior from the Trump administration. The sheer volume of lawlessness and cruelty and overt corruption present every single day from this administration is enough to warrant removal from office.
But today the president and vice-president of the United States insulted an ally fighting for his nation's very survival, lied repeatedly both to him and to the American public, bullied President Zelenskyy, and behaved like petulant children—all in the service of an attempt to extort Ukraine.
Trump is an embarrassment and profoundly dangerous. It's barely been one month since his inauguration and he's shown his contempt for the United States Constitution, his profound ignorance of international relations, and a corrupt agenda intended to cripple the government and enrich himself and his billionaire cronies. Today he destroyed the United States' standing as leader of the free world and made clear his intent to abandon Western alliances.
If this is what he's done in a month, what will he do in a year, two years, four years?
Trump is a criminal, an idiot, and a tyrant.
I realize the current state of Congress doesn't offer much hope for a successful impeachment. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying. What are you waiting for? How bad do things have to get before impeachment becomes a consideration?
I don't ask that rhetorically, I am genuinely curious as to whether or not a strategy has been discussed. Does it depend on congressional Republicans? They are not going to move on their own, they've shown themselves to be feckless toadies and/or MAGA zealots; they will only come around if they feel pressure from outside. Pressure them. Find out what's making them betray their oaths by supporting this anti-American administration. If they are bowing to terrorists, call them out.
Republican, Democrat, or other, everyone in congress is supposed to be an American. Americans, those who support our constitution and history and ideals surrounding a more perfect union, would remove this president as soon as possible, before the level of destruction at home and damage abroad becomes catastrophic.
If not the immediate introduction of articles of impeachment, then work to lobby and whip support for such must be happening right now. The longer Trump is allowed to hold office the greater the chance that this country ceases to exist as we know it.
Sincerely,
Tim Harrison,
Seattle, WA
Tagged
Politics,
President VonClownstick,
Congress,
Posted on March 1, 2025 at 8:43PM | Permalink | |