I have good news, and I have bad news

The Iowa primaries were held yesterday. Great news: rabid racist and white supremacist Steve King is out on his ass. Finally!

The bad news: he was defeated for the Republican nomination by Randy Feenstra, who promises to be more of the same, except he just won’t say the quiet parts out loud anymore.

But there have been notable changes of heart in Iowa, too. Among those who backed Feenstra was activist Bob Vander Plaats, a GOP political kingmaker in western Iowa who once was one of King’s staunchest allies. In an ad funded by the Priorities for Iowa super PAC, Vander Plaats said King was “no longer effective” in Washington — echoing Feenstra’s central campaign message.

“He can’t deliver for President Trump, and he can’t advance our conservative values,” he said. “Thankfully, Iowa has a better choice.”

Craig Robinson, who runs the website TheIowaRepublican.com, said Feenstra offered the district everything King did as a conservative, but with no baggage.

New boss same as the old boss, I guess, just with slightly more discretion.

Progress on Linux

Thank you to everyone for your suggestions! I’m still plugging away at Linux, and mostly adapting just fine. My major complaints right now are with my reflexes: cut/copy/paste are handled with the control key in Linux, while in Mac OS X you have to hold down the command key, which means that every time I intend to copy some text, I instead delete it and replace it with the letter “c”, followed by a panicky attempt to undo it by adding a “z”. Also, Pop!_OS uses the command key by itself to switch to a system menu and a display of running apps, so it’s like the screen explodes in confusion every time I make an elementary mistake. Lesson learned: stop making mistakes. Or get my pinky trained to press the correct modifier button.

I’m also experiencing the joy of non-Mac klunkiness. I tinkered with KDENLive as a replacement for iMovie. It’s got some things iMovie lacks, like as many track layers as you want. On the other hand, iMovie is easy — you click on an object in a layer, tell the program to apply the green screen effect, and everything green turns transparent. In KDENLive, you do the same thing, and in addition to requiring that you set a bunch of parameters to define what “green” is, it turns everything else transparent. I’m going to have to go through a bunch of tutorials to figure it all out, while with iMovie I just ran it and everything was intuitive and obvious.

I’m committed at this point, and will master it all eventually, since this is the only laptop I’m using now. Sink or swim! Bye, Apple!

Good Morning, America! The sun is shining upon us!

I took a break from everything yesterday. It felt good. Today, I woke up, stretched, and noticed all the wild and crazy things that are going on with fresh eyes, and thought everyone would appreciate a little reminder.

  • The Republicans still want to dismantle the one reliable government institution, the US Postal Service!
  • The Republicans are engaging in ongoing acts of voter suppression!
  • Trans people are still getting murdered for being who they are!
  • Did you remember…we’re still in the middle of a pandemic? That one slipped my mind!
  • Republicans have shut down women’s medical services all across the country because they don’t want them to control their own reproductive health!
  • Misogyny! It’s still a thing!
  • The Republicans hate education, especially higher ed, and would like to shut it all down!
  • Uh-oh. Climate change hasn’t stopped to give us a break — the planet is still warming!
  • The Supreme Court is still in the hands of Republican ideologues!
  • Mitch McConnell is still controlling the senate, blocking responsible legislation right and left!
  • Our president is still a tyrannical narcissist!
  • The Democrats are in the process of nominating an incoherent geezer in the pocket of the banks and insurance companies to run against him.
  • Black people have been oppressed for at least 4 centuries, and white people like it that way!

I probably forgot a few crises and institutionalized horrors, but I just started on my first cup of coffee. AMERICA!

Looking for Linux advice

Today’s the day. After a miserable experience trying to handle an interview last night with an old Mac that is apparently drowning in molasses (huge lag issues, computer fans howling while I was running nothing but Zoom), I decided that today was the day I had to do something about it. My first thought was a clean wipe, erasing the drive and reinstalling the system and restoring from my backup, but that was going to take many hours and wasn’t a guarantee that the problems would be repaired. Then I took a hard look at my laptop: keys falling off, blotchy dead spots on the screen that only display green, dinged-up case, and a power cable that’s a frayed fire hazard. If I have to, I could make do with it for some undeterminable time longer before it died outright, but it’s frustratingly ugly and unreliable.

I could just buy a new Mac laptop, but I browsed the Apple store, and yikes, a Macbook Pro would set me back $2500-$3000. Nope. By the way, it’s the first of the month, so on top of paying my mortgage I have to send a good chunk of money to pay off lawyer fees. It’s good to have won that case, but the money I’ve sent off to our lawyer in the last 4 months could have bought me a new computer with all the bells and whistles I could dream of.*

So…making do. My wife has an old Asus laptop we got several years ago for cheap, when her old Mac was fritzing out on her. Again, we tried to save money to get functional. It was a bad idea, because it was a Windows machine, she hated Windows (as should we all), and was so repulsed by the OS that she decided she could make do by using her phone for all of her online interactions. She’s like a teenager that way. The Asus was left to gather dust.

A short while back, as I saw the handwriting on the screen of my Mac, I dusted it off, puked on Windows, and then erased it and installed Linux. I’ve been puttering around with it since, installing software, taking it for a test drive, and have been impressed. It’s an older Windows machine, but it outperforms my antique Mac with a clean install of Pop_OS. I could get used to it. While the hardware is nothing special, I could upgrade it to something shiny and chrome for half the price of a Mac, if ever I manage to crawl out of my financial hole.

But now I’m ready to commit. Farewell, Mac, you’ve served me well for 36 years, but the time has come to jump ship. Now I just need to find replacements for a few tools. Tell me, O Linux Experts, what you recommend as replacements.

Keynote. This is the one that hurts the most. Keynote is kind of the pinnacle of Apple software design philosophy — clean, elegant, powerful. Comparing it to the Windows alternative, Power Point, is one of the key factors that quickly steered me away from considering anything Windows. The Windows design philosophy is to tack a hideous, giant toolbar on everything and fill it with little cryptic icons — see also Microsoft Word. I’m still trying to find Linux presentation software comparable to Keynote. This is important to me, since one of the things I often do is put together presentations.

iMovie. iMovie has limitations, but it is also clean and elegant — I don’t need super-powered video editing software. I might be willing to work with something high-powered, aware that there’d be a bit of a learning curve. I’ve been looking at…KDENlive, I think? But I haven’t buckled down to figure it out.

I gave up on Photoshop long ago when it went to a subscription model, so I’m used to klunky old GIMP. Linux has no shortage of good text editors. I’ve been using Pages, but I guess any cleaner alternative to Word would be good. I may just switch to Google docs — ditto for a spreadsheet, which I don’t use for anything fancier than a gradebook. There is an office suite that comes with Pop_OS, which I might just settle for, since there’s nothing exciting about any of those applications.

I’m guessing now that all the nerds on the internet are going to flood me with suggestions.

*Richard Carrier is such an asshole.

I am antifa

As much as one can be, given that antifa is not an organization. I don’t have a membership card. I’ve never paid dues. I’ve never attended a meeting. I’m not part of a cell. There is no hierarchy. I have failed to punch any Nazis.

I am thoroughly anti-fascist though, so I guess the president is going to have to send some cops to my door.

I will, as a certified academic pedant, have to explain to them during the whole ride to the prison that being anti-anti-fascist means you’re a fascist. I’m not too worried, though, since the threat is just blustering bullshit from a bully.

If this is restraint, just wait until the cops are unleashed

All of you prophets out there — who among you predicted that in the final (we hope) year of Trump’s presidency, the country would be crippled by a pandemic, the police state would run wild, our cities would be on fire, protesters would overrun the White House lawn, and Trump would be hiding in a bunker? Anyone?

Over four centuries of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation are finally coming home to roost and we’re going through a well-earned paroxysm of pain. The only questions are how much worse is it going to get, and will the nation survive it? We know already that it’s going to get much worse if Trump is left in charge.

As cities burned night after night and images of violence dominated television coverage, Trump’s advisers discussed the prospect of an Oval Office address in an attempt to ease tensions. The notion was quickly scrapped for lack of policy proposals and the president’s own seeming disinterest in delivering a message of unity.

Trump did not appear in public on Sunday. Instead, a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the plans ahead of time said Trump was expected in the coming days to draw distinctions between the legitimate anger of peaceful protesters and the unacceptable actions of violent agitators.

On Sunday, Trump retweeted a message from a conservative commentator encouraging authorities to respond with greater force.

This is precisely what we don’t need. The American police have effectively delegitimized themselves with their brute force tactics and their alignment with white supremacy, and American justice has compromised itself with decades of oppressive laws that mean that 2½ million citizens are now imprisoned, mostly for drug-related crimes, and the law is unequally applied to black and white people. Money has poured into law enforcement to the point where they’re buying army surplus armored cars.

What we need to do is defund the police.

If Congressional lawmakers are serious about reining in abusive policing, there are things they can do at the federal level. They can start by eliminating the Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) office. Created by the 1994 Crime Bill, it has been the central conduit for funds to hire tens of thousands of new police and equip them with a range of surveillance technology and militarized equipment.

One of the projects they currently administer is Operation Relentless Pursuit, the Trump administration’s signature crime fighting initiative, that is set to flood seven major cities with scores of federal agents in partnership with local police to go after his favorite bugaboos of gangs and drug cartels. Congress approved $61 million dollars to pay for it, and that money should be taken out of any future appropriations. They can also take more steps to undo the damage done by the 1994 Crime Bill, like defunding school policing in favor of providing more counselors and restorative justice programs; investing in harm reduction strategies, like safe injection facilities and needle exchanges as well as high quality medically based drug treatment on demand; and rethinking the use of the criminal justice system to manage the epidemic of domestic violence.

It is time for the federal government, major foundations, and local governments to stop trying to manage problems of poverty and racial discrimination by wasting millions of dollars on pointless and ineffective procedural reforms that merely provide cover for the expanded use of policing. It’s time for everyone to quit thinking that jailing one more killer cop will do anything to change the nature of American policing. We must move instead, to significantly defund the police and redirect the resources into community-based initiatives that can produce real safety and security without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system.

Take away their toys. Stop rewarding cowboy cops. End the us-vs-them attitude, don’t attack communities with paramilitary thugs, but do engage with them as fellow citizens. Unfortunately, if you turn on your TV or go to the movies, you’ll discover that the renegade macho cop is valorized, that car chases and crashes are routine, and that every conflict is resolved with a gun. Cops are somehow above the law, and their job involves getting the bad guy even if it means turning a neighborhood into a burning wasteland.

Does this look like “protect and serve” to you?

It’s not like I expect change to happen. Trump is fulminating in his bunker, raving about sending the army to take care of his enemies, and the Democrats are little better — note that the 1994 crime bill, mentioned above, was written by Joe Biden and signed into law by Bill Clinton. The instinctive response of the establishment politician is alway to crack down hard on any threat to their power. We’re going to have to tear it all down first.

We should start at the top and work our way down.

You want to see the problem?

The police are seeing this as an excuse to demand more money to do their job poorly.

Here come the grooms

This morning, we were gathering Parasteatoda around the house, and I guess that it’s that time of year, because we found lots of active males cruising around. We got four males right here! I just brought them in to the lab to join the lonely, love-starved females there. I’ll check back again in a few days and hope I don’t find that they were hungry for something else, leaving drained corpses everywhere.

I put a few photos of these handsomely endowed males (really, their palps are huge) on Instagram and Patreon.