^H

Going through my notes on this in preparation for the BARPod book club meeting. (Yes, I did listen to the audiobook, but I am actually going blind; I don’t get disability accommodations for anxiety.)

The reviews on this are absolutely mixed. I would say that, overall, I enjoyed it, but there were so many instances where I could not at all relate to her experiences.

So much of many of my formative years were spent just trying not to screw up, not embarrass the family, that I really never did anything reckless.

There’s a whole late-GenX thing there, too. We weren’t coddled, but we were constantly in danger. If you did anything, sexually, you were either going to get someone pregnant, or give someone AIDS, that it was better to keep things completely to yourself. Being around the military, too, saw the fallout from Tailhook, Bob Packwood, etc.. Whatever you might desire or enjoy, along with any fluids that might be created therein, were to be kept to yourself.

Laura being younger, and of much more affluent means, was spared of those sorts of worries.

As I’ve been thinking through this, along with the uncorked anti-ICE protests, I’m confused.

How the fuck do you afford this? As I tend to listen to Apple Music’s top songs in the workout room, Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us kept floating through my scarred brain.

On further consideration today, this popped in, but it’s also not completely there.

This is the sort of thing I just never would have considered; too expensive. How do you afford your own apartment in MassholeLand?

In a similar vein, I’m watching the protests from a high school near where I lived for a long time.

When I was in high school only a bit north of there, (Bad Newz reprushent, yaknowwhatimsayin?) the consequences for walking out of school would have been: suspension from school, not being allowed to attend prom, and not being allowed to walk with the graduating class. Will these kids face any negative consequences for leaving?

And, if you screwed up too royally, your parents or the Commonwealth would pull your driver’s license. Would the kids today even care about those things?

“How do I reach these kids?”

How do you reach these kids? What rewards are they getting for doing dumb shit, and who’s putting them up to it?

Some angry teachers? Unpossible. They’re not the sort of people who’ve been put on the sorts of drugs discussed in the book for years?

Not being able to drive was a big deal to me. Not being allowed to play sports was a big deal to me. If I’d misbehaved, those would have been off-limits completely.

Would any of my counterparts have received similar treatments? Would someone who’s been on Medicaid since before Obamacare made it okay have gotten meds and psych counseling?

Rich People Problems

Or would we have just gone and done something else to keep our heads above water?

But I’m looking forward to the discussion tomorrow.

Even without tariffs. Though I doubt any of the high-tariff countries produce anything funny.

1. I think tariffs are a bad way to run things. You want a general tax on imports, that’s fine. Congress should pass it. The attempt to use them as rule changes in a never-settled jigsaw game is….I can’t even find the words. Taxes, which tariffs are, should be uniform regardless of product.
2. Two-thirds of the SCOTUS appointees from Trump voted against him. Obviously, this means that the institution is broken, needs to be expanded and packed by the Party of Jim Crow. If you don’t understand that, you’re $TERMOFDERISIION
3. Rand Paul’s take was very important

In defense of our Republic, the Supreme Court struck down using emergency powers to enact taxes.

This ruling will also prevent a future President such as AOC from using emergency powers to enact socialism. https://t.co/M55CZgz4By

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) February 20, 2026

This actually might push the governing0-by-emergency strategy so often employed since 9/11.

4. Though I need to more-closely examine the opinion, I’m wondering if this is actually a furtherance of Roberts’s actions against arbitrary power. Regardless of what you thought about the decision on Obamacare, he really threw a monkeywrench into the Democrats’ oft-used assertion that government can regulate just about anything. no, Congress has the power to tax. The “individual mandate” was a tax, so it’s contituaionally-acceptable. (I do disagree with him that the penalty isn’t a capitation, but that’s a separate discussion. I really enjoyed Justice Kennedy’s dissent on that…)

So, as is so often the case, I’m ultimately okay with this.

“Both Sides” are wrong for different reasons.

Ice is falling out of the sky here inside the Beltway Swamp.

Still feverishly working to get stuff moved to new/old VM. No idea what I’m doing with mailman yet, but at least the WordPress stuff for HRGeeks is kinda-sorta moved.

Getting there, but today was started with a full filesystem on the hold host.

I should have coffee, see if I can calm down a bit.

i was trying to do things this morning to really get back on schedule, perhaps get the thinking working.

And, voila — two things to write about.

• Tariffs — Reflexively I’m opposed because they are a tax. But, with that understanding, they’re a middle class tax increase, something that’s been needed since the Clinton Administration. This plays, in a way, with what Boortz and Linder were proposing with the “Fair Tax,” which implemented a big value-added tax (VAT) on everything; a national sales tax. Some quick SingTFWeb shows that a big percentage of filers pay zero income taxes. I’m going to need to dig more into that to get better information on what those numbers actually look like. Gemini has some good output on it, but I need to run it to ground more
• The Reason Roundtable from yesterday talked about OrangeManBad’s EO basically invalidating state-level laws (and regulations) over AI. Again, instinctively, I’m opposed to the EO, and the states’ regulations. But I understand the arguments about the need for uniformity. The discussion unearthed a painful memory about the UCC. I’m also thinking about all of the states that ended up adopting California Air Resources Board (CARB) emissions standards. Whether the California standards make any sense is a matter of debate, and I understand why the climate catastrophist Democrats want those implemented nationwide, so just have everybody adopt the California crazy standards. Pitch it as a benefit to the automakers and unions for making it so only one type of car is needed for sale nationwide. Again, it’s a way to backdoor things that Congress isn’t doing.

So…things to consider as I look to write this week.

Since I finished NoJoMo, I’ve really had it.

I need to write something for OWT. I might need to update resumes.

But I’m fumbling around with other things, and waiting until I can update hosting, etc..

So, what am I up to that’s filling my brain?

• Trying to get a stable platform, again, for my various tech bits. While my current configuration has worked for a while, and will continue to keep working, I’m running into issues with things surrounding PHP, etc.. I want something that’s RHELish to align with where Loonix has gone. I’m not sure I like it, but it’s how things are set up. I’ve also been looking for someone who can handle the mailman stuff; mailman3 is such a PITA. I also need to redo my DNS setup, and want some more-reliable setup for my mail archives. Oddly-related, I did find a nice tuide from FreeBSD about how to use mutt with gmail.
• What to write about with OWT. Obviously, after yesterday, there’s so many things I could write about. The shooting at Boston University gives a couple of thoughts. Then there was the situation in Australia. Australia is basically a gun-free zone, as was the campus at Boston U.. Virginia’s esteemed governor-elect put out a Post about how outrageous it was, and she was thinking about the tragedy. She didn’t go into the verboten “thoughts and prayers,” but the sorts of gun regulations are the sort of thing that she, her Lt. Governor, and AG candidate want to see instituted in Virginia. Jay Jones actually said he’d like to see a political foe’s children assassinated to get similar laws in VA. Those sorts of laws work so well that he’s willing to kill children to pass them. And when they don’t work, noi a single politician who ever supported those laws will be held accountable for government not working.

More later, maybe.

In the 1990s. Keep that at the front of you mind. I’m watching paying a big of attention to the coverage of the WAR CRIME that was the attack on the remints of the Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean.

WORST THING EVER
HEGSETH IS A MURDERER
TRUMP PHONED IN THE ORDER
LITERALLY HITLER

(God, I miss the Blink tag….)

From “the other side,” you have Megyn Kelly essentially cheering the survivors’ deaths in the additional strike.

Hmmm.

Yeah, I’m not sure I’m 100% comfortable with all of this. At the same time, I’m also very, very, very uncomfortable with the Maduro regime, and what they’re doing in many areas.

The Fifth Column had an interview with Thor Halvorssen
where he discussed what’s going on in his home country. Then María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize.

There’s a ton of information that’s come out courtesy Milei in Argentina about some of the stuff the Iranians, Russians, and Chinese were trying to do there under the Peronists. Venezuela was a friendly place to the north sitting on a ton of oil.

You get into some of the ancillary conspiracy theories about things like the coding of the electronic voting machines originating from .vz, etc.. I’ll leave that to Lara Logan, but there’s more than a little smoke about what’s happening.

OrangeManBad points the finger at Fentanyl, but I suspect the boats were probably carrying cocaine smuggled in under a compliant Maduro government. Do whatever y’all want so long as we get our cut. Oil ain’t selling all that well, now. Those stupid Americans and Canuckistanis learned a new way to coax oil of the ground. Imperialists!

After several cuts, we’ll hold fast, even as the price keeps dropping.

But on the drug boats, I was reminded of the Iraq No-Fly Zone from the Bush41 and Clinton years. (Okay, I’ll admit that I was thinking about some of the A2A glories of the F-4, and that was probably one of the last times it was used in combat, but…)

Pappy Bush justified it under another UN resolution. The UN Security Council couldn’t block what the Americans, Brits, and French were doing. Several other countries went along with it.

This is what the Air Force was doing when Khobar Towers happened. (I know, I know, Libertarian Institute; this was only to sell weapons to defense companies, and was all a par5t of a regime-change operation aimed at Iran from Saudi Arabia. Complete. i get it. I listen, Jersey Dave. I understand!!1!)

To me, what’s happening looks an awful lot like a maritime version of the no-fly zones.

Hmmm.

Yeah, I’m okay with it.

I should probably work on an OWT entry on it.

Maybe this weekend.