Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

It's been a rough month, October. A bunch of things have happened to me and my family, none with horrific lasting harm but stressors nonetheless. To list a few my daughter had a car accident that bruised her, my son works in a congressional office that received a threat that didn't lead to harm, my wife (who works in a hospital) lost a long-term patient, and my car's engine had a serious defect that thankfully I have gotten confirmation will be covered by the warranty.  There's more but it's been that level of stressors. I am obsessively self-observant; hey, I write a blog. My body reacts to stress. I don't sleep as well, which given my apnea means I sleep horribly. I take my tension in my back, two specific spots in my lower and upper back. I have trouble focusing on complicated issues and obsessively run through checklists of things I need to do because of these stressors, not wanting anything to fall through the cracks. One of the hard lessons I've learne...

A friend of mine is dying.  He was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2025 and surgery, radiation, and chemo have put off his passing but the time is approaching. He has been in the unusual position of knowing that his time is limited more than it is for most folk and is making efforts to love his wife, children, family, and friends as much as he can with the time that he does have.  Some folk associate bravery with risking death and I certainly don't mean to devalue that kind of bravery, common in the military, police, fire departments, etc. There is also the bravery of living with the shadow of one's mortality looming. I have seen it in others, I am witnessing it now. This past week my friend spoke at our university chapel service about priorities. Because of his illness he recorded a video that was edited to allow him clarity; he introduced it briefly, having trouble speaking. The chapel service was full because he has been at our university for many years and is valued for his...

I recently posted about my daughter being in a car accident. Last night my son called my wife and me about a threat to the office where he works. His boss is a congressperson in Colorado; he provides support for her team in a number of ways.  In recent weeks a number of elected officials have received envelopes containing white powder. White powder in and of itself is not scary but the history of such mailings is.  Shortly after 9/11 someone started mailing envelopes to politicians containing white powder contaminated with anthrax. Automated sorting machines in central postal facilities shook the machines and five postal workers died of their infections. The FBI named a suspect (whose life as he knew it ended at that point) without providing satisfactory evidence of his guilt, without bringing a case to court. In any event that bout of terrorism ended. Mail security for politicians in the DC area was and is still very heightened. We live in a world where a significant portion ...

I've had my share of car accidents recently. Two years ago I side-swiped a car that had been abandoned on an inner lane of I-40, seeing it after the car in front of me changed lanes abruptly and reacting as fast as I could at 65 MPH.  Last November I hit two deer nine days apart.  This past Friday my daughter had a car accident. First the important thing: she was checked out thoroughly at a nearby hospital and while in some overall pain has no specific trauma from the accident. She was alone in the car and no other car was involved. Her car skidded off the road near her apartment into a ditch. Another driver stopped and stayed with her as she called 911. EMT's took her to the hospital to be checked out and the police filed a report. Before going to the hospital she called the family friend she was on her way to visit who met her at the hospital and stayed with her until my wife arrived. (Both my wife and I have hour commutes and this was mid-afternoon.) I am able to text hands...

Our son visited this past week from Colorado. I drove him to the airport today before dawn.  When I went away to university my parents (who had never been to college) didn't know what would happen to our relationship and insisted that I call them twice a week. All of us being organized we set regular times to call and occasionally we would adjust the days/times based on our schedules but I continued to do so for decades, past my father's death until my mother's dementia made her unable to converse on the phone. My parents weren't writers; during my engagement to my wife we spent over two years apart in different cities and wrote each other regularly to save on (expensive) long-distance calls, an option not really open to my folks. This was long before video chatting but fortunately mostly before cell phones as well. Landlines still seem to provide better audio if only because of the placement of the microphone near the mouth. I'll write sometime about my relationshi...

I've always been a reader. My first genre that I remember liking as a genre was biographies. I like learning about how different people led their lives as I tried to make sense of my own life. I gave a little more thought about that going to some family funerals when I was young but mostly I tried very hard to be respectful to the grown-ups around me who were grieving.  At some point once I left home I started going to more funerals. During the start of my teaching career I went many times a year to funerals for students (whether I knew them or not), almost of all of whom died in drunk driving accidents. The eulogies all sounded the same in their attempts not to address the role that drinking and driving played in ending a life full of potential. Eventually our university started a van program that students were encouraged to call and the number of student funerals dropped a good deal. I was first department chair in the 1990's; I felt responsible for my department members and ...

I have started taking cello lessons as a registered (non-degree) student from a member of my university's Music Department. I have been a part of music ensembles for most of my life since the third grade, now over 55 years ago. I played clarinet for thirteen years, classical guitar for nine months, and have been in choral ensembles almost all of my life. For each of these activities I started as a simple beginner and am one again. I think aside from growing personally in music that I adore I like to think that it is useful to students in these ensembles to see me be a student though I am a teacher in other contexts. It is sad to think of all the adults who chose to stop learning, that they know enough. I have long loved the sound, the timbre of the cello, both in ensembles and as a solo instrument. Its range feels right for my vocal range as a bass singer, and so these notes are familiar to me. Something about the agility of the instrument in the lower range seems to imbue its musi...

One of the things I've learned, very slowly, over the decades is that my subconscious is much smarter than I am.  It's very unsettling, like something out of a science fiction story. I'm a lay person with respect to psychology, although 37 years of marriage to a psychologist may help a bit. I use the term "subconscious" to refer to the processing that my mind does that I am unaware of and only observe in retrospect. I've had to do a fair amount of public speaking in my time. It is one of the greatest tensions of my life, being painfully shy but seeking opportunities for service that include a significant component of public speaking.   I prepare a lot for things; my rule of thumb has always been that the more anxious I am about a future experience the more preparation I do for it. For public speaking the preparation involves some time thinking about what I want to say and revising the list to include only what I need to say.  Often my list of wants includes di...

I have been teaching for a while now. It was clear early on that aside from the personalities of individual students each class has its own distinctive set of behavior patterns collectively.  Most groups do although in all cases it takes experience and contemplation to discern them. With any group the temptation is to identify the group with the members of the group that are most vocal. They provide a good deal of data quickly about the group but it is by definition not representative . Ideally I get to work with a number of student outside of class and get to know them a bit even if they are quiet in class. That adds to the overall picture and helps it be better informed. The same process applies to larger groups, such as the subset of the faculty that attends our faculty meetings. If you don't talk to the non-speakers outside of the meetings you have a non-representative sample of their behavior if you just rely on what is said. And yet, it is not the speakers in faculty meetings...

Every now and then I feel a professionally responsibility to send an angry letter.  I try not to give in to anger casually, so ideally this is when other attempts to conjole and convince have failed badly enough over serious issues to cause me to doubt that the recipient and I share the same values. I often try to modify the behavior of others; I am a teacher so that's a given. It's harder when you try to do so with others who do not share your values---there's far less of a common ground. Almost always my angry letters have a nontrivial audience, including at least one other person beside the target but not a large enough audience to make the recipient(s) feel cornered. In my experience people behave differently in front of witnesses. I was taught long ago that it is not enough to be angry; you must be angry enough to make things better. This is nontrivial and requires an anger that is pure, as free as possible of ego and other distractions. It is draining, the times that ...

My university has always preceded the beginning of classes with a week of planning meetings as long as I've been here. That begins today for this academic year. Traditionally we have the awarding of medallions to retirees of distinction, followed by an address from each of several administrators. They have yet to finish on time in my presence (year #38 starting) followed by an abbreviated time for break-out sessions on different topics in different locations. This afternoon the College of Arts and Sciences along with the professional schools will meet to introduce new faculty and discuss priorities for the coming year. I have had different roles (department chair, chair of Academic Council, chair of the Curriculum Committee) that involved me leading meetings with various groups during the rest of the week. Now that I am Faculty Ombudsperson I have a lower profile; I will send a gentle reminder of that role to the faculty via email later in the week. There is a loss of the peace and...

I have been a member of the Mathematical Association of America for 48 years. They hold a national conference called MathFest every August; this year it was in Boston. There are still events going this afternoon but I have a dinner with my brother-in-law tonight and a 1:30 AM wake-up time for an early flight tomorrow so I'm resting/napping this afternoon a bit. In my youth I was overly burdened with nervous energy and thought little of all-nighters for work, seeing friends, etc. But now I am about to turn 65 and one seventh of the planet's occupants are sending me mailers about Medicare Supplemental insurance plans and things are different. So I've changed over the decades of attending these events.  Some of the changes make me more grateful for the conference and the ongoing work of the MAA throughout the year. When I was younger I focused more on mathematical talks and avoided a lot of organization-related sessions for fear of boredom. Now that I am older and have a bette...

MathFest is this week in Boston. I've done a lot of work getting ready for classes beforehand hoping not to be too frenetic when I return. I have wonderful memories of MathFest and the Joint Mathematics Meetings over the decades and so there is a confidence that the time will be well-spent being challenged in the company of friends. One of my university roommates went to MIT for grad school and so between visiting him in the previous millennium and my brother-in-law and his family in a suburb of Boston, I have confidence that I will enjoy Boston, especially outside of its 11 winter months. As always it is a bit hard to focus on the here and now as the logistics of travel (flight schedules, hotel booking, compensation paperwork for the trip) take residence in my mind. I don't really unclench even after all these years until I am unpacked in my hotel room and feel free to explore. I am not as ambulatory as I was when I started my career, both in terms of stamina and in having two...

There is a pretty good reason we frown on people with financial interests in government policy giving money to the people who decide that policy. Primarily because those decisions may not be made on the merits of the choices but because of self-interest, and secondarily because citizens will doubt the wisdom of those choices even if they (occasionally) turn out to be good even with the bribery. One of the disappointments of adulthood was realizing how much white-collar wrongdoing is legal. Many policy makers are elected and the primary mechanishm in my adult years has been legal, through campaign contributions. John McCain was a mix of good and not-so-good intentions; one of his issues was campaign finance reform. He once stated that nothing could ever improve in government without such reform, and he and Russ Feingold passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 which made things better. It was often criticized by corrupt politicians for not fixing everything because since it mad...

I like building parsers.  For those of you unfamiliar with the word, a parser is a program that interprets an input string, validating that it is of the correct form and extracting data from it when it is.   When I ran my own website for my students, before my university started using professional content management systems, I regularly wrote small data files to describe the behavior of the website and used parsers to read them. Parsing techniques fascinate me. They all start with the notion of a grammar such as I was taught (in simple form) for the English language back in grade school. The language of acceptable input inevitably has structure and grammar seems to be an easy way to describe that structure. A sentence may be a simple noun verb  for example, and a grammar rule for this one kind of sentence would be of the form sentence -> noun verb . For any meaningful language there are many grammar rules (called productions) using nonterminals (names of structu...

Today is the 250'th anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. I do not know of any other national holiday celebrating the reading of a document prepared by a bunch of lawyers; I believe it is one of the many things that makes the US unique. What other day could we celebrate?  Washington fought a war of attrition against the British. Celebrating the conclusion of the Battle of Yorktown would perhaps lead to a discussion of how many years of battle led to it. The Treaty of Paris? More conclusive but, you know, French. In any event all of my life there have been many celebrations on the day but very very little discussion of what we celebrate. Fireworks, parades. Not much about the freedom from the parts of British rule that are explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights. Not that much about liberty most years, although my memory of the bicentennial fifty years ago seems to include a good deal of discussion of it throughout the year. But, we have Trump a...

Although I often fall short of my own standards I have led a fairly disciplined life. I've tried to keep my body in some kind of reasonable shape. I've acquired skills, studied several academic disciplines, yada yada yada. My leisure activities almost all involve some kind of self-improvement. People who know me sometimes comment that I plan ahead. I don't think that I do much planning. I try to anticipate outcomes that I can foresee and prepare for them, but one thing I've learned over the decades is how unlikely it is that a long-term plan will unfold the way I think it will. Rather I try to anticipate opportunities on my horizon and if I've had success at all it is a measure of my ability to see opportunities, quite often where others don't. For me that is the point of discipline; preparation, both mental and physical, to seize the opportunities that I've been blessed with. They rarely arrive with the skies parting and a dove flying down to the sound of t...

Some years ago, after reading a quote from the classical guitarist Christopher Parkening about being drawn to Christianity as a convert because of his experience with Bach's music, I found out that our university library had a boxed set (many boxes) of all of Bach's music. It took a couple of years but I went through that boxed set disk by disk. I knew of some of Bach's music beforehand; I am a huge fan of his Cello Suites and have many albums of Parkening playing transcriptions for the guitar. I knew going into it that I would not master that huge volume of music; how could I, even if I didn't already have a full life? But I was patient, and disciplined, and after a little more than two years of listening while working in my office I finished. Discipline is the word that appeals to me here; it was with intent from the beginning a spiritual discipline. I had a little familiarity with some of Bach's liturgical music, enjoying a live performance of his Weinachts Orato...

I'm unfazed by a lot of memorials; so many seem to be about remembering the person's name and some very brief reason for remembering them. Some, about famous people, assume you know why to remember the person (I'm looking at you Washington Monument) which seems to miss the point unless the point is a really huge phallic symbol. For me the peak memorial is the Lincoln Memorial, not because of the big seated statue but because of its proximity to inscriptions of the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural address, both classic statements of who we should be as a country. The words have meaning for me and have for most of my life. The inclusion of many more details in the museum underneath the memorial is icing on the cake; the words state a devotion to fundamental decency to all, and are truly inspiring. Others have felt so; Marian Anderson performed there after the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her a venue because of her skin color; MLK's "I Have a...

I am able to foresee the future pretty well about what's going to happen in my vicinity, going out about a half a second.  Further out than that it becomes a matter of subjective estimates of probabilities based on my life experiences. At a certain point in my life I found myself repelled by more and more pundits, for claiming that they knew what was about to happen or could read the minds of people they disagreed with. I just haven't encountered seers or telepaths in my life and assume if they existed they would find a better use for their talents than becoming opinion vendors. I do follow a few pundits; I mostly seek folk who provide context. I think of them more as journalists in that way but their job descriptions often downplay that identity. When folk talk of foreseeing the future they often refer to it in a way that feels disconnected, as if something will happen and nothing we do beforehand is relevant to that happening. Again, that just hasn't been my experience in...

All my life I have been familiar with the concept of a work ethic: a devotion to the successful completion of a set of tasks. My understanding of what that means has evolved based on my experiences but the notion of work ethic makes my life seem to me to be more of a vocation than a set of accidents that happen to me. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that a work colleague, Jim Drummond, introduced me to the notion of a leisure ethic. It clarified for me things I had felt for some time. Leisure, the part of life separate from our work, includes things that strengthen/weaken us, things that heighten/deaden our senses and perspectives, things that lead us to be more/less reflective, the list is endless. What is most important for a leisure ethic is the realization that along many different scales our leisure lifts us up (whatever that means) or helps us to sink (whatever that means). Exercise versus sitting still; seeking new ideas versus reinforcing old assumptions; viewed in the...

Recently a federal judge has pointed out that the Kennnedy Center for the Arts was created as a memorial to JFK, our slain president, and that by law it could not be used to honor any other individual. For most of my lifetime that seemed pretty straight-forward. But our petulant child-who-would-be-king was offended by a building that honored anyone but himself; fired the board governing the Kennedy Center and installed his own minions, who promptly renamed it putting his name in front. Artists performing there joined the chorus of complaints, bookings fell apart, and eventually our child molestor-in-chief ordered the thing closed for two years ("renovations") out of embarassment. John Thune and Mike Johnson, the Republican leaders of the Senate and House, refused to intervene for reasons that honorable people have trouble fathoming but seem to be consequences of their invertebrate nature. So: Joyce Beatty, a House democrat who had been on the fired board, brought suit in fede...

I've attended two commencements in the past eight days; the first was my son's and then yesterday my university had its commencement. University life, of which academics are a part, is a different phase then what preceded it (with some overlap in classes and other activities in secondary schooling but usually with family oversight) and what follows it. Afterward preparation takes a back seat to activity, and socializing required much more effort. When we make life transitions it important to note them and not pretend that they don't happen. It happens with relationships (some of which are long-term), it happens with changes of jobs, it happens with moving. We always hope that the transitions are for the better but there is never any certainty. So we celebrate the transition. Hopefully the celebration eases the transition, brings to the fore all the uncertainties and says that they matter less than the love and support present in your life from your various communities, fami...

Masters in Public Policy to be specific. 

It seems strange to me but I had more patience when I was young. I've heard that it goes the other way and I expected that.  In my youth it gave me an advantage in many discussions---many people who fervently felt things that seemed wrong to me often withered if I let them talk long enough.  But the world has shifted and now we are immersed in media and loud opinions that don't wither but just seem to go on and on and on. One of the differences between being an audience member and a participant in a discussion is the ability of the latter to ask follow-up questions. Loud opinions often fail the most basic standards of fact-checking such as the W's (who, what, where, when, why, how) and gently asking these words at the right moment often stops someone with hateful momentum if they can still hear them. But in the media none of the interrogators seem to ask these questions, permitting folk to talk around issues without ever actually discussing them. So much of discerning a mor...

I am a white male in my sixties as of this writing. I have never had trouble voting, although I have met older folk who were threatened for wanting to vote. Inevitably those souls were in bodies with darker skins. Throughout my lifetime political leaders have tried (with varying degrees of success) to maintain power for themselves and their cohorts by cheating. It has rarely been subtle. Parties extolling law and order strip felons of that citizenship right casually because no one cares that it is unconstitutional, jailed citizens not having much sympathy. Districts are drawn every ten years explicitly to support the ruling party who controls those maps. In my childhood a lot of this came to a head: incredibly brave people risked their lives and livelihoods to say that they were citizens and not second-class ones. As nothing gets better for any group without access to voting, their focus was on getting the vote as a color-blind right of citizenship. There was a time when shame of who w...

In my twenties I tooks some martial arts classes: Judo, Aikido, T'ai Chi Chuan.  My Aikido instructor made a point of telling us students not to offer our opponents handles to make it easier to throw us. I haven't been in a dojo for decades but that piece of advice has stayed with me. I have spent my career involved in the genteel world of campus politics. Outside this bubble conflicts continue over disputed regions, resources, presidents who hate many of our country's citizens based on their gender or skin color.  Very early on I realized that caring about what others think about me gave them handles with which to manipulate me. I'm human and so that constantly comes to mind as I interact with others, in conflicts great and small. I have my pride, more than an abundance of it. The times when I have been able to persevere in pursuit of a goal in the face of resistance and/or active opposition, it has always been when I stop caring about what others think of me. And so I...

I've always felt strongly that for most people their sources of incomes were gods (not their only ones) in their lives, and that how people spend their income is as clear and honest a statement of their values as you can get without being omniscient enough to read someone's heart. The Trump administration is burning money on the war that it launched against Iran; Trump wants to build a monumental arch to himself; he is negotiating with his own IRS to get ten billion dollars in some kind of damages for some leak of his tax records (God forbid we should know anything about the gods he worships, and what countries they may be located in), while funding for federal safety nets is slashed. No one voted for Trump thinking he would be compassionate; the only shock for his voters is thinking that he wouldn't turn on them. So: the leadership of the federal government is in the hands of folk whose values represent the cruelest greed known to humankind. We should change it.

I'm still struggling with how to put into words how I feel about my country committing war crimes and our leader threatening another country with genocide. My old friend (and much better writer) Michael Covington did a good job of it. https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2604/index.html#x260408

Um, not to be too extreme here, but if anyone thinks that is not totally evil they are a monster. Do not, do not, do not give power to sadists; it does not end well.

I have a wait at the airport for the first leg of my flight home.  It's been a strenuous but satisfying three days at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Assocation of America here in Alabama, at the University of North Alabama in Florence. I had a narrow range of choices for flights arriving on Thursday so I arrived long before my hotel room was ready. I had a chance to drive around the campus a bit in the sunlight which made wandering around by foot later much easier. Thursday night I was a guest of the Executive Committee (the officers of the Section) at their usual dinner meeting the night before the conference begins. There were various reports and discussions. I clarified the bylaws revision process, mostly for the newer folk, that I am leading and asked for a bit of input for presenting the revision at Friday's Business Meeting. I climbed into my hotel bed about 23 hours after I had gotten up out of my bed at home but I spent time with frie...

I've been part of the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America since 1988, so I'm coming up on 40 years soon. After seeing a number of talks by other people I decided that I could do that and so I've given talks at most of the 38 years that I've attended. The Southeastern Section consists of Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. In olden days we included Florida but they broke off long before I joined. In 1994 I was recruited and served a three-year term as NC State Director, responsible for keeping tabs on the math departments in the state and organizing dinner talks throughout the state. I was ambitious and bumped up the dinner talks from once a year to twice a year, allowing us to cover more of a big state. It was then I discovered my superpower of asking people to do hard things that they wanted to do already but just needed a nudge.  I thought I was out but they pulled me back in; I served as Section Webmaster 2003-2010, ...

I meet a retired friend monthly for breakfast. He asked me this morning how I was doing and I said the first thing that came to my mind: it's been a strenuous month. A long-term friend passed away at the beginning of March, someone who had been part of my created family, godmother to my daughter. On Saturday we had the memorial for her; I did a reading which was a comfort as it gave me something to focus on but the experience wiped me for the weekend. I also sang in a concert Sunday, further draining me but also giving me some strength as performing always seems to do. More and more funerals, more and more conversations about loved ones with dementia. As my breakfast companion noted, we used to go to more baptisms than funerals but the balance shifted somewhere along the way. In my youth when I had the knees I was born with I ran long-distance for myself, never as part of a school team but steadily from my teenage years through my twenties. I was never fast but I did keep going. Th...

Nancy has been a part of my family's life for many decades now; we were honored to have her serve as our daughter's Godmother. As with all of her family I was privileged to meet, Nancy was bright and found joy in many different things; it is not surprising to me that she served as a librarian (media coordinator) given the breadth of her knowledge and interest and that she served children in the public schools, given that she had so much love to give that it went out beyond her family to the children of Alamance County. On a whim during mass once during the sharing of peace I flashed a Vulcan salute at her and she returned it without hesitation. Our lives are diminished with her passing but her memory is a blessing and I am grateful for it.

I have flown to conferences for thirty-some years. I have had to deal with a lot of flight cancellations. Sometimes they are my return flights and I am effectively stranded waiting for the next available flight.  This has happened to me again, in Houston, this weekend. We had some nasty weather here last night and as always it's not just the local weather that interferes with flight schedules since the planes are in constant use before I get to board them. With the government shutdown there are still issues with having too few air traffic controllers and from what I've read online that may apply here. I was raised to take pride in my country but we've had several decades of penny-pinching politicians that want to make sure that ordinary people don't have quality infrastructure, and the voters keep putting them into office so that's who we are as a country. Early on rebooking a canceled flight required a lot of phone calls, often dropped just when you thought you wer...

It hasn't actually started yet, that's a little later today. So what is this post about? 1) Traveling grows more difficult with age, primarily in terms of stamina. I do have two artificial knees so there's that as well. 2) I still love seeing new cities. I've been to Houston once before in 1979 for a couple of days on a university band tour so it's nice to be back without a clarinet. 3) I love seeing my tribe en masse. I've made mathematics my career for many many decades and my folk have their own culture and way of looking at life. I anticipate seeing old friends and discussing things without the usual how-do-I-translate-my-enthusiasm-for-an-outsider preoccupation. 4) I live a very structured, disciplined life, by choice. I am greedy in what I hope to accomplish in the time afforded me and never presume that I've got time to burn, knowing more and more folk who do not make it to my age. Work conferences are about the only time when I'm off the clock fo...

From when I was a small child I thought the founders of the US made a good decision in separating the power to declare war (Congress) from the power to execute war (the President as Commander-In-Chief). Who in their right mind would want one person, possibly unstable, to be able to commit a powerful nation to bloodshed? In my lifetime Congress has ceded this power to presidents. They let LBJ commit us to war in Vietnam. They gave George W. Bush carte blanche to do anything he wanted in the "fight against terrorism", a remarkably nebulous phrase to guide our acts of violence toward something constructive. Now, under Republican leadership, Congress just doesn't care any more. Trump and Israel have started bombing Iran. Bombing is cheap (our soldiers don't risk anything on the ground) in terms of public outcry and despite self-serving uses of the word "surgical" by the military regularly kill non-combatants. It is the knee-jerk belligerence we have come to expe...

Tonight is another State of the Union speech by President Trump.  I haven't listened to an SOTU for decades; I never really learn anything from the performance of all involved, with the one party standing up to applaud every sound bite.  Policies that are offered are often forgotten within a week. Aside from the speech it is appropriate for we citizens to consider the state of our union. Our president has publicly and repeatedly separated us into righteous states who support him and enemy states that need to be tamed. FEMA no longer considers every state worthy of support in times of need along these lines. What about our citizens? The economy is in the toilet after Trump's playing with tariffs like children's toys, pretending that they are not taxes and pisssing off our trade partners. Trump and his minions keep telling us both that 1) everything is great and 2) it's all Biden's fault. There are apparently people that believe these two opposing positions at the sam...

One of the skills that Trump and his minions have is for distraction.  A while back there was the push to find evidence that he had used a racial slur starting with "N" used to hurt and harass people during his time on The Apprentice as if that were the only test if he was racist, despite his words and deeds specifically attacking people of color on a regular basis. Ignore this forest, see if you can spot a tree over there. It is that way with his pedophilia. Women have come forward accusing him of raping them (which is not new; over two dozen women have civil suits pending against him for sexual assault that he keeps managing not to have to deal with, the statute of limitations for criminal penalties for some unholy reason having expired) when they were underage, i.e., children. Raping children.  We keep going through the Epstein files (as we should) as if that, that will be the proof. Maybe it will. But maybe we could interview his accusers on the record and press charges b...

I voted in the primary this morning. There were a couple of choices to be made but in most of the races I knew who I wanted based on prior knowledge of the candidates. I had to show a photo ID to vote because of an election law. I have a photo ID because I am plugged into the mainstream; I have a driver's license. Many of the older residents of my state who might wish to vote do not. There are alternative ID's that are accepted and in different states there are filters in place; hunting licenses are good in Texas but not college ID's. To my knowledge no one from any government office is providing transport for the elderly to get them or offering to pay for the ID, which is a filter on folk who aren't very visible to the mainstream. One thing history has taught us is that when we increase the number of citizens who can vote politicians act differently. When only propertied white men could vote, government did not work very well for sharecroppers. When only men could vote...

My university closed its offices today and yesterday because of icy roads, so the title for this post is a misnomer. You really shouldn't trust what I write--- In my youth I would have probably driven in to work anyway, partly because I was a good driver used to driving in PA winters, and partly because if my car broke down I was a pretty good hiker and was always driving near something to walk to. Now I am older with artificial knees and know that I would probably need some assistance if my car broke down.  In this case wisdom and frailty seem to be opposite sides of the same coin. I taught my classes over Zoom and have met with several students that way, so the cost of the shutdown is less, both for me and for the university; if anything I think the accessibility of Zoom has made my university more cautious and more willing to close its campus. So: how the F are the Minnesotans able to protest ICE in full force with worse temperatures? I mean, wow. They decided they didn't wa...

 Sent to Senators Tillis and Budd of NC this morning: My uncle was a police detective in Philadelphia before he retired. He showed his face and his badge to all he talked to on the job; he gave his name and business card to the public he served. This is what law enforcement officials have done in this country as policy until now; what if anything has changed?   The violent thugs serving in ICE are not law enforcement. They do not protect and serve; they attack and refuse to identify themselves. They are a paramilitary force responsible only to President Trump and his minions, who reflexively desecrate the memory of their victims. All dishonor themselves daily, all lack integrity. Immigration is a serious issue. Using brutal thugs to deal with it is like using a chainsaw to remove an appendix. The appendix may need to come out but using a chainsaw is a silly solution that kills people. It is painful to think of all the children incarcerated by ICE. It is unthinkable to all...

I stopped feeling funny when Trump was first elected in November, 2016. While I knew that some folk really wanted him to destroy our nation's freedom, it felt as if he had conned (with so much help from Fox News and other Republican sources) many of our voters.  I still tell jokes and make folk laugh but there has been a difference inside. My wife has noticed it. In a week our classes will start for the Spring semester at my university and I will be more occupied. Right now images of ICE agents seizing a five-year old child to use as bait to seize his parents, of ICE agents holding cans of pepper spray close to observers' faces and firing point blank into their eyes to terrorize them into not filming the agents, of the ICE agent pointing his gun at Renee Good's head and killing her with no justification---only anger, well, they are running non-stop through my head. I know, I know, I know as a white male that police brutality is a fact of life for much of our country, that I...

Nothing has tested our values as a nation in the US as when we decide who can be a citizen. Aside from Native Americans all of us came from elsewhere. Often the decision as to who to bestow privileges upon has been explicitly racist, with the previous generation of immigrants wanting to exclude the next one. It is unpleasant and so we often delegate such decisions to our government and try not to think about it. A humane approach would be to identify who could benefit most from admission and become productive citizens, but bigotry has often triumphed. Social justice has been important to our children, making my wife and I quite proud. My son led pro-immigrant rallies in university and very early on pointed out to me the brutality of ICE during the first Trump administration. This time around ICE has been the defacto armed thugs suppressing freedoms of citizens and non-citizens alike. Masked and without badge or judicial warrant they have been terrorizing city after city, killing and in...

Five years ago I watched in horror as the mob that Trump called to a rally obeyed him and attacked the Capitol, killing police officers, desecrating the building, while Trump withheld forces from dislodging them as they sought to kill Pelosi and Pence. Last November I watched in horror as voters reelected Trump knowing that he had attempted a coup on January 6, 2021.

2025 has had its joys and its horrors. My country has taken the lead in worsening the climate, has increased childhood measles, has ended the rule of law to the point where armed goons grab people off the street if they don't look white enough. Cuts in USAID funding have doomed thousands to die of starvation for no particular reason. Billionaires like Musk decimate the folk in our federal government who actually help people and then just walk away. And yet we resist. I was born in the early 60's, raised fundamentalist, taught about martyrs facing violence and death to stand for what was right. My folks pointed me to Christian martyrs in history while I followed the Freedom Riders  and  other civil rights activists who were doing this in real time. I heard Bernard Lafayette of the SNCC, a surviving Freedom Rider, speak once about how the only folk who made things better were in it for the long haul, and that every loss was an opportunity. I try to have that kind of hope, the ki...