I’ve got 300 pages left in A Court of Silver Flames, which means that I ought to be ready to start A Court of Splintered Harmony by bedtime tomorrow at the latest, so hopefully the damned thing shows up on time, as my luck with packages lately has been absolutely atrocious. This is going to be a really weird week; tomorrow is a relatively normal day but it’s a Tuesday after a long weekend. Wednesday the 8th graders have a field trip all morning and then the afternoon is going to feature a reward party for kids who got through the first quarter without being idiots or assholes. Thursday and Friday will be practice tests for the ILEARN, and then the first actual checkpoint is next week, after an election-related e-learning day. Maybe I’ll go to the training on Tuesday and get arrested! Maybe there will be civil unrest too! Who knows.
Oh, and we have parent-teacher conferences for the boy on Thursday and a meeting with a lawyer on either Wednesday or Friday. (Adulting stuff. Nothing to worry about, but one more thing in the context of the rest of the week.)
One way or another I’m hoping the next fourteen days soar by, and this week is going to be fast no matter what, I think. We shall see.
I can’t post a picture of the sticker I didn’t get, so have a picture of a co-worker’s car and feel free to come up with an explanation. I have none, and I don’t know whose car it is, so I can’t ask.
I voted today, in case that wasn’t already clear, and judging from the size of the crowd at just past noon on a random Thursday a couple of weeks before the election, I feel like turnout even in Indiana is going to be decent. We are having a singularly boring election this year; the most high-profile race is for the Secretary of State, for God’s sake, where polling indicates that Democrat Beau Bayh may actually have a chance– the current Republican SoS pissed off his entire party something fierce in a manner I’m not clear on, and came in third in the primary, with less than ten percent of the vote. The election I’m most concerned about is for my State House representative; I know the guy I voted for, and his opponent is an odious piece of bigoted garbage who sponsored a bunch of anti-trans bills. I’d hit him with my car if I had a chance. Fuck that guy.
There were two proposed Constitutional amendments: Should We Be Able To Lock People Up Without Bail Whenever We Want (no) and Should We Be Able to Use Rural Judges in Cities with Democratic Mayors (also no). My School Board member is up for re-election; he is one of the two current Board members whose picture can be found in dictionaries next to “local crank”; sadly, he is running unopposed. I’d run against him myself were it not for the small detail that I absolutely do not want to be on the School Board. I have been to School Board meetings, and if my life in any way involved having to attend them and having to pay attention and having to be there the entire time, suicide would swiftly follow. I simply cannot.
But yeah. No Senate, no Governor, it’s the midtermiest of midterm races. I suppose the latest Democratic sacrificial victim for IN-02 doesn’t seem entirely incompetent, and if there’s a sufficient nationwide Blue wave she might be swept into office, as my current rep is a replacement-level MAGA NPC who has not distinguished himself in any way while in office, but I’m not holding my breath.
Money isn’t real, so let’s not bullshit: I’m totally ordering one of these fucking things next month. I didn’t realize I was going to until today. Seriously, if you’d asked me yesterday I’d have said buying first-gen Apple tech isn’t always a great idea, I’ll wait another year, and after remembering the launch event and going to apple.com earlier this afternoon I was halfway done with my preorder before I realized that I couldn’t actually preorder yet.
Basically my trade-in (for a phone, remember, that I bought last year) is going to be enough that it makes the unreasonable price for the 256gb model slightly less unreasonable. So … fuck it.
I had something else. Pardon me for a moment, while I stare at the screen.
… yeah, dammit, it’s gone. I can always post again if I remember whatever the hell I wanted to talk about, right? Not only is money not real, rules about blogging definitely aren’t real.
Shit, right! Tomorrow is dead asshole day! I am not especially looking forward to being a middle school teacher on dead asshole day. Most of my kids had no idea who Charlie Kirk was until he got his head blown off, and his entire existence is literally a joke to them right now. I still occasionally will hear kids singing the We are Charlie Kirk song quietly to themselves in the hallway; most of them, if presented with the opinions of the actual smirking shitstain behind the song, would correctly identify him as a horrible person, and then would sing the song again. I continue to believe that him getting shot in the fucking neck three seconds after making a racist joke about gun violence is the most objectively funny thing that has happened in years; the fact that it was a groyper nitwit who did it just makes it even better.
There’s a lot of people online who are promising to convert to Christianity or return to God if It Happens tomorrow; I am not one of them, but you will hear me laughing regardless of where you are in the world, and you will likely hear news stories about the middle school math teacher who got fired for taking off his pants and running through the hallways cackling and yelling blasphemies immediately afterward.
So. Y’know. You’ve got that to look forward to. Cross your fingers.
WordPress just inserted an apostrophe into “Pahlavis,” and did it again right there, and it makes me want to fight someone.
I finished this tonight, and I got home from work intending to finish it quickly, but got sidetracked by some– ahem– electrical work in the shell of our old closet, so when I say “I finished this tonight,” a more accurate statement would be “I finished this ten minutes ago,” and given that it’s already almost 9:00 I maybe should have found something else to post about, because this book probably deserves more careful consideration than I’m about to give it. So take that into account; I’m kind of rushing here.
The short review: this was an excellent read, and right on the edge of being detailed enough that I constantly felt like I was learning things without burying me in details and Farsi words and names– although the fact that the two Shah Reza Pahlavis and the Crown Prince Reza have nearly identical names definitely caused some trouble at times– but I am not convinced that Andrew Scott Cooper is as unbiased as perhaps a historian might strive to be. Entertainingly, this has managed to slip into the official Goodreads description of the book:
The book’s page on Amazon has “immersive, gripping” before “account,” and otherwise is identical, so someone is playing shenanigans here, but the fact is that Cooper really seems to like the Shah, and tries really hard to make everything that happened in Iran seem like it wasn’t his fault. (To be clear: every time in this post I say “the Shah,” I’m referring to the middle Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the first Shah Pahlavi and the father of the Crown Prince. He occupies most of the book’s attention.)
Iranian history, even fairly recent Iranian history, is fantastically complicated, and I think particularly for Americans, who maybe like things to be able to be boiled down to “who is the good guy?” and “who is the bad guy?” too much, it’s already difficult enough to sort out motivations and moral culpability in Iran in the twentieth century without an author putting his thumb on the scale. Every novel I’ve ever read about Iran during this time period has more or less treated the Ayatollah Khomeini as an irredeemable evil, which I don’t have a problem with, and have cast Mohammad Mossadegh as a sort of savior figure who almost saved Iran from the Shah. Pahlavi managed to be perhaps the best example history has of the “enlightened despot,” someone who genuinely wanted to liberalize and modernize his country, educating his people, raising the standard of living, and ensuring rights for women and religious minorities … except he did it by forbidding dissent and trampling all over most people who disagreed with him … except when he didn’t, and The Fall of Heaven is really quick to assert that the Shah was almost pacifistic in his refusal to shed Iranian blood in the pursuit of his goals.
I think a lot of the Iranian novelists whose books I have read– not that there are a ton, but there have been several– would disagree with that, but then the biggest counterpoint is that he let Khomeini live, which … God damn, having that fucker shot in the sixties would have saved Iran, Pahlavi and the entire world a whole lot of trouble. And there was a weird overlap between leftist critics of Pahlavi, who tended to like the liberalization stuff except they didn’t really believe he meant it, and wanted democracy, and the religious lunatics who thought he was too liberal and wanted Iran to be the theocratic hellhole that it eventually became under the Ayatollahs. It’s messy as fuck, is what I’m saying, and when you throw in things like leftist women walking around in chador to demonstrate that they were against the regime, and the fact that somehow the CIA thought that Khomeini would lead a moderate, secular government … God, nobody knows anything about this place.
One way or another: this was a worthy read, despite having some issues. I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Iran that you start with some fiction– I’d recommend anything by Marjan Kamali— and maybe then move on to this. But it’s well worth the time you’ll invest in it.
Today was more or less the exact same day as yesterday– got up, went to work for a few hours, argued with no one in particular about my classroom furniture, got home, worked on school shit for a bit more. We met some family for dinner at a place that is traditional for my wife’s side of the family, and I think I am going to push back the next time it is suggested they go there, but “Luther didn’t like his dinner” is not the most engaging of blog posts.
So instead, I’m going to go read for a while. My suggestion to you is that if you have never heard Abdul el-Sayed speak, you should do some Googling and watch a speech or two. He’s been all over my TikTok lately and I’m starting to get serious Barack Obama 2004 vibes from the guy. I’m going to try to embed an appropriate snippet, but I’m not convinced it’s going to play nice with WordPress. We’ll see:
Announce that Mitch McConnell’s office has until the end of the week to respond in a satisfactory fashion to your entirely reasonable letter about his health. If they do not, at noon on Monday you’ll be holding a press conference on the front steps (or equivalent thereof; the hospital probably doesn’t have a lot of steps) of George Washington University Hospital in DC, which is supposedly where he is. After that press conference, you will be entering the hospital and demanding to see Senator McConnell.
If you are provided sufficient evidence that McConnell is alive and able to perform the duties of his office, you will come out and tell everyone that. If you, the governor of Kentucky, the state that McConnell represents, are denied the chance to see him, either by hospital staff, DC police, McConnell’s staff, or literally anyone else, you will be notifying the still-gathered news media of that fact and then you will immediately either appoint a new Senator in McConnell’s place or name the date of the special election, depending on which method your office has decided you’re able to utilize this week. I feel like this part keeps changing.
They will sue you, if you do that. An awesome thing about facing a lawsuit, though, is that they would have to prove he is alive in order to sue you for unlawfully replacing him. Which happens to solve the exact same problem that you already had, so it’s all good.
It’s time to make an ass of yourself, Governor. Do it.
This novelty ruler has been in the wrong room in my house for months. Every time I have looked at it, for that entire time, it has annoyed me. Today, I picked it up, carried it through a hallway, my kitchen, my laundry room and the master bathroom and placed it right there, where it belongs, and where it will be used to make sure that all of my books are lined up perfectly.
Months. It took fifteen seconds to move and has annoyed me multiple times per day for months.
But now it is in the right place.
Also, because that wasn’t much of a post, sometimes I say things on more ephemeral websites that I don’t think are completely stupid. With that in mind, I offer you the following screenshot, and invite you to comment on its wisdom or lack thereof, either here or at the original source. I’ve talked about some of these ideas before, but some of them are newer, at least in terms of being expressed by me:
I will freely admit I have not done the math, which may need to be tweaked, but I do genuinely think something like this would work for more accurate, proportional representation. Am I dumb? Call me dumb!
I hate that I have to write this. I hate every fucking second of it.
I don’t have the tools, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with a world where things like video and photography are not, in any way, helpful in determining what is real or not. Combine that with a political apparatus that is primed to lie at every given opportunity regardless of whether lying makes any sense and I exist in a world where a former Speaker of the House just released a photo and a statement to prove he was still alive and I still have legitimately no idea whether he is still alive or not.
Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I have opinions, I suppose. I have no rational basis for those opinions, unfortunately. No actual evidence. Just … fucking vibes, I guess, and I don’t really want to live in a world like that.
So, just in case you’ve been under a rock or you’re reading this in 2032, Mitch McConnell went into the hospital in early June and completely vanished from the public eye. It is July 14, as I’m writing this, and he just resurfaced yesterday (Christ, was that only yesterday??) with a statement and a picture where he is rather conspicuously sitting with a copy of the sports section of yesterday’s Washington Post.
The statement has literally no value at all in determining reality. Statements from politicians are routinely written by staff members and are just as likely to contain lies as anything else they say. It’s genuinely meaningless. It also doesn’t really match up with what we’d already learned, or at least thought we had– weren’t there recordings of the 911 dispatch? Reports that they’d administered CPR to someone on site? Any real explanation of why they waited a month to give the public any information at all about McConnell’s condition other than “he’s fine”? Even if he’s completely telling the truth, and wrote the whole statement, pneumonia in someone that elderly is not trivial. That’s not “doing fine,” and hospital-induced pneumonia tends to be a lot harder to eradicate than other kinds.
(Remember Herman Cain? He was doing fine too, until he was dead.)
No, even if the statement is real, it’s wildly insufficient, and part of the problem is that now I want to know more about where the 911 information came from, because if thatwas made up, we still have a large problem.
And then there’s the picture.
Now, to be clear, I think a lot of complaints about the picture, most of which have been uttered with the entire chest of the utterer, are bullshit. To wit:
“Why is he in street clothes? Why isn’t he hooked up to an IV?” He literally said in the statement he was in rehab. You get to wear regular clothes in rehab.
“Where’s the fingernail on the middle finger of his right hand?” Probably attached to the third knuckle of his finger, which is curled underneath his hand.
“His wife’s in China!” You sure about that? Show me where you have access to her schedule. I have no idea whether any part of the story about her “fleeing” to China three days after he went into the hospital is true or not, for the record, and I wouldn’t know how to look up any part of it if I wanted to look into it.
“The Washington Post doesn’t even have a sports section any more!” Yes the fuck they do. I genuinely saw someone alleging that, along with several claims that it was from some other date, or a different newspaper.
“The pillow is floating in the air behind him!” You can literally see part of the chair behind the pillow, idiot. Top left corner, level with his mouth.
The one complaint I’ve seen that makes sense to me is that he looks healthier in that picture than he has in months, and honestly I can’t argue with that one. There have also been some people pointing out that his hair looks less white than it has lately, which I also can’t dispute. But one way or another a still photo is not enough to dispel a month of complete absence from the public eye that only ended when another Republican senator died. I’ve seen this guy go to la-la land on camera enough times that as far as I know somebody’s waving a stuffed unicorn around behind the camera and they got a smile out of him. It’s simply not enough evidence, which disgusts me.
And of course, with all that comes tons and tons of different versions of the photo that we know have been faked with varying degrees of obviousness and varying levels of intent. Some of them are clearly people clowning; other people appear to be faking the picture better, like a few that I’ve seen that have added some hallucinating AI text into the newspaper. There’s a whole rant here about how people will yell “IT’S AI” at literally anything nowadays; it’s rapidly becoming a phrase that very well might not mean anything more than “I don’t like that.” There is lots of talk that the photo matches one that his staff released in 2023, just with the newspaper changed, but I’ve not seen any sourcing to that claim, nor could I really believe it if I did.
What’s the solution? In the short term, I want a Goddamned press conference, or at least an interview recorded on video. He doesn’t have to put on a suit and parade out behind a podium. Drop a laptop in front of him and have a few reporters ask him some questions over Zoom, I don’t care. And of course that would be something that could be faked too, so pick a couple of reporters with decent reputations. I don’t need hard-hitting questions. Thirty seconds of the fucker telling us what happened in such a way that makes me think he’s alive and he’s mentally capable of doing his job. A whole lot of people won’t believe it anyway, but I think it’d be good enough for me, and right now this photo isn’t enough.
And we need to put an age cap on Congress, too. Not term limits. An age cap. You shouldn’t be allowed to pass laws that fuck up a future you won’t be alive to see. But that’s a whole different post.
