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Sorry, I just have to vent somewhere.

We’ve been moving Mom and my stepfather into assisted living because after stepfather’s last stay at the hospital, the senior community where they were living said they either had to go into assisted living or they’d have to move somewhere else because of the liability issue.  That was about three weeks ago.

Stepfather’s daughter then got involved since she is his legal caretaker, and unilaterally arranged for them to move into assisted living at another community on the other side of town, for about the same amount of money they were paying in the other place. Which was huge, because a) their rent comes out of a trust stepfather owns, so we don’t control that anyway, and b) his daughter lives nearby and her husband is retired so he can help drive them around when needed (we’re trying to get Mom to give up her car — another story). Moving them into assisted living with 24/7 caregivers available gives me and the wife the warm fuzzies, because the old place didn’t have a nurse or doctor on staff, let alone 24×7 (and they do assisted living there — go figure how they do that without local, dedicated medical staff).

Mom, of course, has been fighting this move the whole way, primarily because she didn’t get a say, and also because she maintains she doesn’t need assisted living. To which my wife and I are both privately saying, “Tough shit, and you’ve fallen so many times that you damn well DO need assisted living.”

Case in point:  We don’t even really know if either one of them were getting all their proper meds, because wife and stepsister found loose pills all over the apartment.  At the new place, the aides come around to the apartment and make sure they get their pills.  Well, stepfather, anyway; Mom is resisting letting them do that for her.

So they got moved in last Sunday, and stepfather came over from rehab to join Mom in the new apartment. All seemed well.

Stepfather had what appears to have been a stroke yesterday and is in the hospital. Mom is not freaking out, but might as well be.

So.

This morning at work, we had a major crisis that had to be fixed “immediately, immediately, immediately — and I didn’t get a harumph outa that guy!” I found out about this at 8AM when I logged in and started trying to wrap my head around that problem.

Mom called at 8:30. “Did I wake you up?” “No, but I’m working, and we have a big problem, and I can’t talk right now.” “Oh, well then, never mind.” CLICK.  As if it were my fault.*

So I kept working on the problem at work, tried to call her around 10:30 and she wasn’t there (I imagine she was at the hospital), and we just finished fixing the problem about a quarter to noon.  I’ve tried to call her twice since, I guess she’s still at the hospital.

But I’ve been sitting here fuming about it all day while trying to fix a major problem that affected half of our hosting customers, while fielding angry emails from the boss the whole time to boot.

If this is excitement, I much prefer the sedentary life.

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* To provide a sense of proportion, the major crisis was only affecting half of our hosting service customers, none of whom could reach their hosted services.  You don’t screw around for family crap at that level, you fix the problem and then you worry about the family crisis.  Sorry, but I need my job worse than I need to deal with my mother’s problems at this point.

Good, solid WSJ article this morning about how Jim Mattis is fitting in as Secretary of Defense “despite policy differences”, which is WSJ-headline-speak for “there’s a little tension between Trump and Mattis because Mattis wants to appoint people in DOD who aren’t/weren’t necessarily Trump fans, but who, regardless, would be the best people for the job.”  Of course they go on to say that Trump seems to listen more closely to what Mattis has to say than he does to what his other political appointments do.  The writers say that “the defense chief seems to have had the most success in prodding Mr. Trump away from some of his positions.”  OK.  Makes sense.  He didn’t appoint Mad Dog to be his military butt boy, he appointed him to do a job that badly needs doing and that Trump doesn’t even begin to understand.*

A reasonable, balanced story, nevertheless.  Except maybe for this graf:

To a degree, Mr. Mattis’s divergence with the White House reflects his lack of political experience. He is a retired Marine four-star general, and military officers, American officials note, don’t always have much experience with the political aspects of their jobs.

Say what?

I don’t think the writers have much military experience, even if one is based in Baghdad.  Because once you get past a certain level in the American military, EVERYTHING is political.  I suspect that’s partly because of the mandatory lobotomy undergone by all candidates for the rank of major, but it’s also because once you reach that level, unless you are actively deployed (and maybe not then), everything is political because everything can affect your future advancement.

Anyone who thinks Jim Mattis doesn’t understand politics is badly mistaken.  He didn’t want to be president because he didn’t want to deal with the politics, not because he didn’t understand them.  And as a Cabinet secretary, he apparently believes it is better to speak bluntly and realistically rather than cozy up with what would be a more political approach.  Again, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand politics; it means he hasn’t got the time or the patience for that kind of bullshit.

I’m no military expert, but I’ll bet that’s the response you’d get from any Marine.

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* This is part of the genius of Donald Trump.  Most think it shows weakness.  It doesn’t.  Trump knows what he knows, and knows what he doesn’t know, and he knows that Jim Mattis knows more about the military in his little finger than Trump knows in his entire body.  And he’s showing great intelligence and savvy by choosing the right man for the job, pointing him at the problem, and staying mostly out of his way.  He did the same thing with McMasters, whom he probably should have appointed NSA in the first place, but every administration (including the “sainted” Obama’s) has its bumps and potholes.

I’ve switched hosting providers and this should be a lot more snappy now.

I’ll never understand the problems people have with Windows 7. I’ve never had a problem with Windows 7 that couldn’t be attributed directly to failing hardware. We run an exclusively Windows shop at work and we just don’t have these problems.

A friend posted a warning on Facebook whose provenance I haven’t been able to track down, but apparently there MAY BE a new hack out there for Internet-connected Windows XP machines, that downloads a file that crashes your machine.  Apparently this happens even if you have Windows Updates turned off on XP, which should be your first clue that whatever this is, it isn’t coming from Microsoft.  He posted this picture of the dialog box that appears asking you to OK the download:

Which to me would be automatically suspect and set off a number of mental alarm bells, particularly if it popped up out of the blue.  I’d click “cancel” on that so fast, I’d probably break a nail.  If I had an Internet-connected XP machine, that is.  Which I don’t.*

Then he goes on to say, essentially, screw XP, screw Microsoft since he’s never been able to get Windows 7 to run without crashing, and hello, Apple, I’m off to MacOS.

OK, rather than get all religious and anti-fanboi here, let’s break this down a bit.

If you are still running XP and connecting to the Internet, you get what you deserve.  And that’s because Microsoft very specifically warned people that there would be no more software updates for XP after the extended end of life.  It’s not like they just up and abandoned you; they pleaded and begged and all but got on their knees in the dirt asking you to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 before XP end of life.  They even extended their usual support lifetime for XP by a couple of years when it became clear that people (generally businesses with large farms of XP machines) were clinging to XP.  Continuing to support an obsolete operating system that was over a decade old when they finally said, “enough” cost Microsoft a shitton of money.  Who does that?  The answer is that nobody does that.  But Microsoft did, because they knew the switch to Vista or Windows 7 was going to be a pain in the neck for users (which it was, because there was no simple upgrade path to Vista or Windows 7 from XP, but at least it was a one-time pain in the neck).

And after that, people wonder why they literally wrote automatic “upgrade me to Windows 10” code into Windows 7 and tried (and in many cases, succeeded) to force people to upgrade. While I completely disagree with their method — which to me was sneaky and probably actionable, even if Microsoft was offering an upgrade for free that would later cost $100+ — given the XP debacle, I can fully understand their business case for doing it.**

And the one Windows 10 machine I have? It’s going to be kicked back to Windows 7 as soon as I have the time. And I’ll fight attempts to upgrade until it isn’t feasible to run Windows 7 anymore. But I have three years left 🙂

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* I have one XP laptop left, and it’s only used for packet radio.  It never connects to the Internet, not even to my own local intranet.  It’s strictly a “sneaker-net” machine today.

** I also very quickly found the GWX Control Panel software that stymied Microsoft’s attempts to upgrade my work machine to Windows 10, which would have been an absolute debacle, and still would be.

When you’re wearing all black, and a mask to boot, you shouldn’t be surprised, going forward, if you get shot.

And I don’t mean with a rubber bullet, either.

Only fascists bent on the violent overthrow of the government dress in uniforms and are afraid to show their faces.  If you’re not going to demonstrate peacefully and non-anonymously in a republic, you should be prepared to die, because you have made yourselves into an army of revolt.  And the people of the republic should be satisfied that such is the response to your assholishness.

In a world where every action is deemed to be speech, the only real hate speech is that which you promote — you hate America and everything about it.  The rest of us are not amused.

When we say that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants, we’re not just talking about kings and dictators — we’re talking about YOU, viz., the fascist wannabe army who prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking in Berzerkley Wednesday night.

It’s past time to crack down on these revolutionary idiots and show them the error of their way.  As the old saying goes, they should be dealt with as wolves are.

Museums Across the World Are Collecting Women’s March Signs

I just read in the WSJ that “Mr. Trump won the election with only 46% of the vote, leaving more than half the nation to come to terms with his victory in the electoral college.”

This meme continues to be tiring on many levels, not the least of which being that the popular vote doesn’t elect presidents, and that’s how we’ve done things since the Constitution was ratified.  It’s not my fault that more than half the nation is deficient in their knowledge of American Civics.  (It’s probably the fault of the teachers’ unions and local boards of education, actually.  But I digress.)

So, let’s look at the facts.  Only 58% of the electorate bothered to show up on Election Day and cast a ballot.  42% sat home on their dead asses, or otherwise avoided the voting booth.  But there is no way to know how many of them have come to terms with Mr. Trump’s election and are accepting of him as president, at least partly because the polls are based on false assumptions regarding the electorate (see below).  Indeed, one might quite plausibly make the assumption that the 42% who didn’t vote would have been happy (or at least non-caring) either way — and that’s a reasonable assumption, this election cycle.

If you take the 42% who didn’t vote at all, and the 46% of those who did who voted for Trump, you get about 161,786,941 votes vs. 73,779,367 who voted for Hillary or other candidates.  Huh.  That’s a Trump landslide.

What?  You didn’t vote and you don’t like me calling you wishy-washy, and therefore a Trump supporter by default?  Or you voted for Hillary and still think she should have won because reasons?  Or you just think I’m full of shit?

OK, sure, you got me.  My methodology is just as valid as the methodology of the professional pollsters who had this race safely in Hillary’s pocket until 2AM November 9, 2016 (the same professional pollsters who now claim that a majority of the nation supports the ACA, given that the GOP is in a position now to deep-six it).  In other words, it’s bullshit, but it’s useful bullshit.  The fact is that neither side was able to convince nearly 99 million eligible voters to show up at the polls or even to cast an absentee ballot.  Those 99 million non-votes could have resulted in a landslide either way, so since Trump won, I’m assigning them to him on the assumption that those 99 million people either don’t care at all or are perfectly (or even cautiously) happy with the way the election turned out.*

The bottom line is that continuing to snark about Trump losing the popular vote and bemoaning the Constitutional system that establishes the Electoral College as the way we elect presidents in our Federal system is completely non-productive, makes the left sound like a bunch of fools, and angers people who support the Constitution and the rule of law.

But sure, keep up the moaning and groaning, the posting of snarky anti-Trump memes, and most especially, PLEASE keep up the violent protesting, including blocking freeways and city streets, smashing up and setting fire to cafes and bank offices, and ambushing and shooting cops for no good reason.**

You want more Trump?  Because that’s how you get more Trump.  Every time a protester howls, or a brick flies through a window, or a cop gets shot, a new Trump supporter gets its wings.

Choose the form of your Destructor, indeed.

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* If you didn’t vote and that doesn’t describe you, gee, maybe you should vote next time.

** You do understand sarcasm, right?  Because that entire paragraph was sarcasm.

Comment on Facebook

Our long national nightmare is over.

Godspeed, President Trump.

I just ran across a discussion regarding how the rednecks down in the holler don’t care much for MLK Day and the person who started the discussion believes they’d get violent if it were called that, so they call it a teachers’ in-service day instead.

And I nearly posted this:

Dr. King’s legacy is all around us. The day itself is basically unimportant so long as we understand and apply the principles that he taught. Becoming upset over a small number of small minds who choose to ignore that doesn’t advance his legacy at all.

After some thought, I decided they’d just tell me to check my white privilege, so I said fuck it.

But this is why we still have racism — on both sides.  Dr. King would be sad.  If I can say so without having to check my fucking privilege.

Comment on Facebook

Dad’s been gone 15 years tonight.

That’s a long damn time.  Hard to believe.

I still miss the old man, but not in the I-can’t-breathe way it used to hit me.  We do move on; but we are still the sum of those who brought us into the world and taught us the way to go.

Ave atque vale, pater meus, requiescat in pace.