Twitter: The burning library

This is my first post in nine months. I'm not entirely sure how that happened. For me, this has been a fairly uneventful time - no pets or family members have died, and my job continues as before, with the only change being that I am in the office every Monday, where the fraction of us in the building are all masked and physically distanced from each other. My dental issues continue - I have had two root canals in the last nine months, and am looking at at least two more in the next few months, assuming I can sort out some insurance problems (like my insurance company consistently telling my endodontist that I have no active policies with them, an insurance company that my endodontist will no longer be accepting after the new year.)

In the Big Wide World these have been an eventful few months. The January 6 committee has dropped bombshell after bombshell, though the practical upshot of their revelations remains to be seen. Russia went from conducting "exercises" on the border with Ukraine and pooh-poohing any suggestions that they were planning an invasion, to conducting a full-scale invasion and declaring it a "special military action," to claiming they were acting to save the Russian-speaking population of the areas they were busy bombing into dust, to getting their asses kicked by the Ukrainian resistance, to declaring the annexation of large swaths of Ukraine, regions which they have subsequently retreated from in the face of relentless Ukrainian armed resistance. Republicans declared their intention of a "Red Wave" in the November mid-terms, but so far it looks like they may at best have a tie in the Senate and have gained a slim majority in the House - a history-defying failure of the Party in charge to lose a large number of seats in the House and Senate.

And Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Historians will possibly have a better understanding of how this happened, but here's what I recall and what I have heard:

- Early in 2022, Musk wanted to buy his way onto the Twitter board. They said sure, as long as you agree to provide these disclosures, allow us to do these background checks, and promise to abide by these rules of conduct. Musk said no.

- Shortly after that, Musk put in a bid to buy Twitter outright at a preposterous price, an offer that could not be refused. He quickly tried to retract the offer when he claimed he "discovered" that the majority of profiles on Twitter are fakes. This resulted in months of negotiation and maneuvering, with many Twitter users wishing Musk would just go away, and many Musk fans wanting him to take control of the platform immediately. In the end Musk had two options: he could walk away from the deal if and only if he paid a penalty of one billion dollars, or he could follow through and purchase Twitter for forty-four billion dollars. 

- On October 28, 2022 Musk announced that he had purchased Twitter.

Almost as soon as he took over, Twitter was overrun by accounts posting racist and antisemitic slurs. Many of these were from brand-new, zero-follower accounts. The goal appeared to be to overwhelm the content moderation system, with legitimate Twitter users reporting the offensive accounts a dozen at a time. It was around this time Musk retweeted a right-wing conspiracy theory regarding the brutal hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, the eighty-two year old husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Twitter advertisers, already wary of buying advertising space on a site run by someone as erratic and unpredictable as Elon Musk, started to pull their ads and refrain from purchasing any more, leading Musk to threaten to "go thermonuclear" on companies that refuse to buy advertising space on Twitter.

The chaos that has ensued in the past two-plus weeks is a matter of record, and like much recent history, future students of history will find it almost completely unbelievable. In that short time Musk has managed to destroy both Twitter and his own reputation. Rather than doing the sort of things most non-CEOs of multiple major corporations assume that CEOs of multiple major corporations do, he has spent much of that time "shitposting," sending out tweets designed to earn the approval of his fans and attacking his enemies. He has tweeted out (and deleted) conspiracy theories. He has ballyhooed his commitment to free speech and even announced "Comedy is now legal again," and then permanently blocked the accounts of comedians who made him the butt of their savage humor. And he has fired thousands upon thousands of employees, many of them immigrants whose lawful presence in the U.S. is dependent on their continued employment.

Amidst all the chaos, many prominent and popular Twitter users have decided to close their accounts and move elsewhere.

The combination of an erratic new owner who seems uninterested in the continuing existence of the social media site he just bought for $44 billion, rumors about the ulterior motives of his financial backers, the loss of both advertising revenue and institutional knowledge carried by thousands of fired programmers and administrators, and Musk's tendency to announce "new rules" targeting those who criticize or challenge him, have led many users to wonder if they are living though Twitter's last days. Many have announced their departure for Mastodon, a competing social media site with some well-documented clunkiness and technical limitations. Others are heading to Instagram, or TikTok, or their Substacks and even old-school blogs.

In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams compared efforts to document species on the brink of extinction to someone running through the burning Library of Alexandria, furiously scribbling down the titles of burning books in an effort to save some fragment of what was contained within. It would be preposterous to compare the loss of Twitter to that, even with all the unique content and historical records contained in it. Others have compared the current situation to the classic movie trope of the 80's and 90's where a heartless developer is buying the local recreational center with plans to tear it down and replace it with an office building. Sadly, it's looking like this sort of thing won't be fixed with a dance-off or talent show. I'm collecting names and alternate site addresses for when and if Twitter ends.

When I first joined Twitter I hated it. It felt to me like a wide open space filled with people driving through and shouting snippets of conversation in passing through their rolled-down windows. But in time I have come to appreciate and embrace its randomness, its chaotic nature. Half the people I follow I have followed because of a single clever post or comment. I have become familiar with eel historians, geologists, birders, lizard biologists, pig fanciers, fabric historians, astronomers, crafters, a goofy ventriloquist camgirl/philanthropist, social and political activists, on-the-spot reporters, writers, artists, poets, humorists, comedians, musicians, and people from every walk of life. This is the unique site, the unique society, that Elon Musk is destroying through his capriciousness - or through his arrogant stupidity.

Will there ever again be anything else quite like it?

The Pandemic: Year One

Yellow crocus at cemetery, March 13, 2021

One year. One lost year.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been going on for longer than that. The dying started in late 2019. The early epicenter was Wuhan, China. By the time the world knew what was happening, it was too late to stop it from spreading across the world, and probably had been for some time.

COVID-19 is unusual. Highly contagious, yes, as any good virus should be. Kills quite a few of the people who get it and develop symptoms - not ideal for a virus, but acceptable as long as infected individuals do their job of spreading the virus before they die. Asymptomatic spread is a hallmark of COVID-19, and that's unusual. 

In the past, asymptomatic carriers of disease (like "Typhoid Mary") were unusual enough to make their way into the history books and national lore. Now the standard operating procedure for COVID-19 is: an individual gets infected by breathing in virus particles that an infected person has breathed out, the virus infects them, they spend about two weeks being contagious without showing any symptoms, and then they develop symptoms while continuing to be contagious. Some of the people who develop symptoms die. Some recover completely. Some recover and suffer lifetime consequences. 

And the symptoms! The consequences! Roll the dice, see what you get: lungs that look like frosted glass on an X-ray, "COVID toes," intense generalized pain, chronic cough,  difficulty breathing, loss of smell and taste, hair loss, and lots more. Maybe you'll get some. Maybe you'll get only a few. Maybe you'll die in just a few days. Maybe you'll hang in for weeks, months even, and then you'll recover. Or die.

In the first year, over 2.6 million people have died of COVID-19 worldwide, more than 530,000 in the United States alone.* The United States had an increase in deaths of 15%. in 2020 compared to previous years. In some countries, the rate of "excess deaths" for 2020, the number of deaths in excess of what would be expected based on past data, exceeds 50%.

And there are people who will dispute every one of these things. They will tell you that COVID is "just the flu." They will tell you that masks don't work. That no one has actually died of COVID. That it's the vaccines that are actually killing people.

Oh, we have vaccines now. Two, by Pfizer and Moderna, were developed during the Trump administration, though Pfizer was developed independently of the Federal government. The Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine was approved just a few weeks ago, and teachers began receiving it this week. There are other vaccines in use throughout the world. Mass vaccination programs are taking place worldwide.

We also have a plan now. A plan passed without a single Republican vote. During the Trump occupation, Trump pitted states against each other in competition for critical resources. Chaos was the order of the day. That day is over.

Joe Biden pledged to get 100 million shots into arms in his first 100 days as President. He got us there in his first 50.

We're not done yet. We can still snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. The "new cases" graph may** reflect certain societal movements: the final campaign rally push in September through early November 2020, Thanksgiving gatherings in late November, Christmas in late December. It's undeniable that since mid-January 2021, new cases have dropped dramatically, though the rate of decline has leveled out since mid-February. The CDC is advising a cautious approach, maintaining the rules of masking and social distancing, avoiding crowds and indoor events. Texas and Missisippi have essentially ended all COVID-related restrictions - and the Texas Attorney General is threatening legal action against cities like Austin that have chosen to adhere to CDC guidelines. St. Patrick's Day weekend is upon us. Spring is coming, and Summer is not far behind. The same people who demanded "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! REOPEN NOW!" a year ago are making that same demand again, after nearly one on every 600 Americans has died of COVID-19. New variations of COVID-19 have emerged. Small but significant portions of the population are rejecting vaccination, while larger numbers of people are trying to get vaccinated and cannot, either because they do not yet qualify in their state or they qualify but there are not enough vaccines available for everyone.*** 

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Or will things once again get worse before they get better? Time will tell.

*Last Spring, a friend who was involved in COVID response predicted 500,000 U.S. deaths by the end of 2020. His prediction was off by about seven weeks. My post-election prediction of 400,000 U.S deaths by Inauguration Day was almost exactly correct.

**Europe shows similar increases in the final months of 2020, without Presidential elections or Thanksgiving gatherings, so who the hell knows.

***My mom received her second Moderna shot on March 4, 2021. I received mine on March 6. My brother's entire family has already received both shots, some of Pfizer, some of Moderna. A librarian at a local school district, who also teaches classes and qualifies as an educator, received her Johnson & Johnson shot on Friday, while a librarian at the local library does not yet qualify. My sister, who lives in another state and has multiple health conditions, does not yest qualify for a shot, and other friends who live in the same state as me and who qualify are unable to sign up because of availability.

2021: Our story so far

Welp.

"Trump still has nineteen days in office, and can still do some damage." I wrote those words sixteen days ago. They seem so quaint and naive now.

Donald Trump has simply refused to accept that he lost the election. Cannot believe it, so it must not be true, or he can make it be not true. Two weeks ago he tried to convince the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia - a Republican - to "find" for him enough votes to win the state, two months after the election. The Lieutenant Governor refused. Trump threatened him, stating that by accepting the results of the election, he was acting illegally. The Lieutenant Governor promptly released a recording of the call.

Trump had been rallying his troops on Facebook, on Twitter, summoning them to one big gathering in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, the day that the Electoral Votes would be officially counted and certified by Vice President Mike Pence. Immediately the word got around: prepare for civil war. This is it, this is what they'd been waiting for. The votes from swing states that had gone for Biden would be challenged. Mike Pence would overturn the results of the election. Trump would be certified as President. Or else.

They came. They came in great numbers, from all around the country. Local political gadfly and frequent candidate for public office Frank Scavo ran a bus trip down from Pittston with over 200 participants. The people who showed up in Washington, D.C. weren't bound by the rules that had applied to other gatherings that had taken place there. Many of them carried weapons, and flags, and signs. Many wore combat armor, helmets and bulletproof vests. Many of them looked ready for war.

Trump addressed his troops. He expressed hope that Mike Pence would do his job and overturn the election. He then directed his troops to march down from their gathering spot on the National Mall to the Capitol itself. He would be marching with them - in spirit, anyway.

The counting began, barely. The votes were announced from Alabama. From Alaska. From Arizona - and there came the first objection. Minutes after the counting began it was stopped for two hours so the House and Senate could separately debate whether to accept the votes from Arizona.

That, apparently, was the signal.

The gathered crowd surged on the Capitol. They knocked down the barriers keeping them away - in some cases, the barriers were moved aside for them by Capitol Police. They stormed the Capitol steps, off-limits to visitors since September 11, 2001. They scaled walls. They rushed the doors and battered them in. They smashed windows and poured into the Capitol. Some looked like excited tourists caught up in the moment. Others looked like soldiers on a mission to infiltrate enemy headquarters and assassinate the general staff.

Frank Scavo posted excitedly:

The next day, Frank Scavo would tell his story to all the local newspapers and TV stations: he was there, but not so close to the action as to see what exactly was going on - despite his photo from the off-limits steps above. He had heard about the incursion into the Capitol, but such a thing surely must be the work of ANTIFA disguised as Trump supporters - no true patriot would defile the Capitol in the way that these people had! A day later, photos emerged of Scavo inside the Capitol as part of a mob. Over the next few days, the news stations would publish the photographic evidence. Scavo hasn't had much to say about the incident since then, not that anyone would believe anything he had to say anyway.

Each day, more and more photos and videos of the Capitol Insurrection have emerged, many shared by members of the mob itself in generous acts of self-incrimination. Parents have identified and reported their children, and children have identified and reported their parents. One was identified by an old high school classmate. The FBI have begun making arrests. Many of the members of the insurrection had fairly obvious intent, equipped with police-issue zip-cuffs. In the videos you see them going from room to room, looking for members of Congress, Nancy Pelosi in particular (though they had also chanted "Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!", clearly upset at his failure to overturn the results of the election.) 

While some members of the Capitol Police - the only force in position to defend the Capitol that day - welcomed the insurrectionists as friends and comrades, others did their jobs. One played Pied Piper, carefully leading a mob away from unsecured doors that would have allowed them access directly to the Senate. Others were severely beaten. One was killed, beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. Four members of the mob died - one, an Air Force veteran who smashed her way through a door and was shot by the police defending a secure position; another, a woman carrying a Gadsden "DON'T TREAD ON ME" flag, was trampled to death by the mob; two others died of heart attacks, including another local arranger of buses (and purveyor of the "Trumparoo," an adorable Trump/kangaroo hybrid.) Another member of the Capitol Police died by suicide a few days after the event.

Members of Congress and their staffers and family members engaged in an active shooter response - Nancy Pelosi ruefully noted that many of her staffers had learned how to respond in school. QAnon cult member Representative Lauren Boebert helpfully tweeted out the positions and movements of members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi. 

Hours passed before Trump allowed the National Guard to go in. Reportedly he was watching everything unfold on TV, and enjoying it tremendously. Joseph Biden wasted no time declaring the insurrectionists "domestic terrorists."

Congress reconvened at 8:00 PM. There were several more delays, including one over the validity of the votes from Pennsylvania. But eventually all objections were overruled. Despite Frank Scavo's excited assertion, the Electoral Vote was certified, and Joseph R. Biden was officially declared the winner.

Within days Donald Trump, in recognition of his incitement of the gathered mob to storm the Capitol in an act of insurrection, became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. He has been permanently banned from Twitter and Facebook, perhaps a greater personal blow.

A social media site, Parler, which was extremely popular with right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists, was shut down after they lost both their hosting and the right to continue to use the "free trial" versions of software they used to run much of their site. Some enterprising soul managed to archive all Parler content while it was still available - which is where much of the video and photographic evidence from the insurrection was housed.

December 7, 1941. September 11, 2001. January 6, 2021.

At noon on January 20, 2021, Donald Trump will be handing President Joseph R. Biden a country in flames. A collapsed economy. Over 400,000 dead of COVID-19. Trump himself won't be there; having broken the longstanding tradition of peaceful transitions of power, he intends to slink off early. He wants to be honored with a military sendoff, complete with a band and a twenty-one gun salute.

And he still has two and a half days to go.

We'll see what happens between now and then.

2020: A brief review

We knew it was coming.

I wish I had saved the tweet. That tweet that someone posted from when the news was just starting to leak out of China in December or early January, news about a highly contagious respiratory disease, a sort of superflu with deadly consequences, rapidly spreading beyond the major city (and international airline hub) of Wuhan. Someone wrote "THERE. That's it. THAT'S what was missing."

On Sunday, January 26, 2020 I was coming back to Nanticoke from a quick afternoon shopping trip. I decided to come through the newly-reopened new road that runs between Route 29 and Kosciuszko Street. Driving past all the newly-built warehouse distribution centers, I thought about all the low-to-middling-wage jobs that had been brought to the area, and wondered how long we would be able to hold onto them - and what it would take to disrupt them. I got home and was greeted with the news that Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and several others were killed in a helicopter crash. The next day, USA Today ran this on their front page:

Even then, we knew. 

We watched through February as the disease raged through Seattle, and New York, and Los Angeles, and San Francisco. We heard about the special affinity had for nursing homes, chewing its way through the captive resident populations. Prisons, too. We watched the first cases appear in Philadelphia, and then in the counties bordering New Jersey. We knew it was here in Pennsylvania. It would just be a matter of time.

One of the first deaths in the area was a man from Hanover Township - or was it the Hanover section of Nanticoke? - who had just come back from a trip to Italy, where the disease was burning through the highly sociable population. 

Saint Patrick's Day weekend came, and suddenly people realized there was a stark choice to be made:  go out like nothing was wrong, or stay home. A lot of people made one choice, a lot of people chose another. Everybody went back to the office on Monday, one big happy workplace family.

Las Vegas shut down, and we knew things were very serious.

Later that week we had a meeting. We would be leaving the building, going home to await further instructions. As I left the office on that last night, I told my friends we would be seeing each other in two weeks to eighteen months. I whistled "The End of the World" by Bob Geldof as I hobbled out on my slowly-healing stress-fractured leg. 

Two weeks later we were back to pick up our computers and headsets. We would be working from home for the indefinite future.

The Spring ground on, became Summer, all feeling like a unending slog - the Long March, some called it, because the world seemed to be frozen as it was when last we had believed ourselves safe and secure. Racial conflicts arose, fueled by a series of police abuses and outright murders. Protests were met with more abuse of authority, and the use of what could generously be called "irregulars" to supplement official forces. The police and their mercenary allies took particular delight in exercising their abuse against members of the media. News crews were attacked and arrested. A photographer was shot in the eye and blinded with a rubber bullet.  A Navy veteran who approached a line of mercenaries in Police gear to ask them on whose authority they were engaging in their unlawful behavior was beaten and pepper-sprayed for his audacity. An assault rifle-toting teenager who had crossed state lines in the hope of engaging in conflict shot and killed several protesters during a confrontation. Another individual was shot and killed by a private security guard for a media group after he attacked the guard and the reporters.

John Lewis died. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Over 345,000 Americans died of COVID-19. 

COVID-19 forced a rethinking of how elections would be run. Paper absentee ballots became the norm. But at the same time, Trump appointee Louis DeJoy took steps to destabilize the US Postal Service and reduce its ability to handle mail in a timely manner. Millions of voters took their votes to drop boxes. Hundreds of thousands of votes, perhaps more, were likely lost or delayed in the USPS system and never got where they were going. (DeJoy's trumpery would have long-lasting repercussions: I sent out three packages on December 14. One got to Florida on December 18. One got to Columbia, MD on December 26. And one did not get to Dover, PA until December 30.)

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by the same electoral margin that Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton. Biden also received the largest number of popular votes in history, and defeated Trump by a margin of over seven million votes. Trump, who had declared his defeat of Clinton to be a "landslide," refused to accept (and still refuses to accept) the results of the election.

...and that's pretty much it. Working from home. Ordering what we need online. Making furtive trips to the grocery store and elsewhere to buy the things we can't get online. Going to church online. Not letting my mom out of the house except for trips to the doctor and visits to the cemetery. My leg got better, since I wasn't hiking from the parking lot to my desk every day anymore, and was able to give it time to heal. 

The dying keeps going on. The Trump administration's response to COVID-19 has been a series of failures and disasters. Trump's failure to provide leadership has turned mask wearing into a political issue. The same people who are denying that COVID-19 is a real disease are also furiously denying that Joe Biden won the Presidential election.

The best guesses at when things might return to some sort of normal range from July to October. Other countries have been able to wrestle the disease into submission through stopping social transmission, through the use of bubbles and masks and public compliance with scientific guidance. Not the United States. Our spread is out of control. And still millions had no problem going out and partying to see in the New Year.

The dying isn't over. Trump still has nineteen days in office, and can still do some damage. Things won't magically change January 20, any more than they changed January 1. But we have hope.

Sometimes it feels like that's all we have.

Season of Lights

Jupiter and Saturn shine over Christmas lights

Christmas 2020 is in the books. Millions of people ignored the advice of the leading medical experts and decided to visit family and friends in spite of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic raging across the country. Someone decided to set off a truck bomb - an RV - in downtown Nashville, and took out telephone, internet, and 911 service for much of Tennessee and points beyond. Donald Trump has spent the days since he left Washington, D.C. golfing at his golf club in Florida, and finally decided to sign off on a spending bill - one day after missing the deadline to ensure that supplemental unemployment payments would continue uninterrupted.

Christmas lights are starting to come down around town. It's been my observation that the people who demand that everyone begin saying "Merry Christmas!" early in November, those who proclaim themselves to be the most fanatically devoted to Christmas, are the same ones who undecorate in a frenzy as soon as Christmas is past.

Fiber optic tree with blue LED lights and a miniature LED tree.

Crystal icicles and shiny ornaments capture the sunlight.

Spumoni in the window

Jupiter and Saturn continue their dance, much lower and farther apart then when they were at their closest in 800 years on Monday, December 21, 2020. This was the first clear night we had since Saturday, December 19. 

Jupiter and Saturn, 5:20 PM on December 27, 2020, six days after their closest encounter in 800 years. We have had solid clouds since December 18.

Sinking beneath the wires. This may be the last night I observe these two before they slip behind the Sun.

COVID-19 continues to rage uninterrupted. Vaccinations have begun, but there is a long way to go. As of this week, 1 in every 1000 Americans has died of COVID-19. Many more will die before this is over.

COVID-19 may be continuing uninterrupted, but testing and reports of deaths may have been interrupted by the holiday. This week's numbers may be low because of that.

Third Sunday of Advent

On Gaudete Sunday, we wear pink. Well, rose. 

No Advent Wreath image this week, so we'll have to make due with an image of Father Shawn Simchock, the new assistant pastor of Saint Fausrina Kowalska in Nanticoke, PA wearing the rose vestments that are worn twice a year - Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday in Advent and Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent.

The Third Sunday of Advent tells us that Christmas is almost here, and we'd better have our preparations well under way. It can be as early as December 11 (if Christmas is on a Sunday)  or as late as December 17 (if Christmas is on a Monday.) This year Christmas is on a Friday, so it falls on December 13.

Now things are reaching a frantic pitch. And the world isn't stopping or slowing down, not even during a pandemic. Personally, I received a bit of terrifyingly bad (not health-related) news earlier this week, something I haven't really been able to fully grasp yet, but something that will be waiting for me in the new year. Also: One of our cats appears to be dying. He is the last of the three animals we inherited from a neighbor, and is probably between sixteen and eighteen years old. Two other cats appear to have conditions that need to be looked at by a vet sooner rather than later. Bills past due are reaching their final due date. Things that have been put off too long need attending to. Donald Trump's last-ditch effort to have the Supreme Court overturn the election was rejected, 9-0, and tomorrow the Electoral College vote will make the Biden/Harris victory official.

Though that's not keeping Trump from ranting and raving. Looking forward to seeing his Twitter account shut down for TOS violations on the afternoon of January 20, 2021. (UPDATE: Trump was actually permanently banned from Twitter for repeated TOS violations on January 8, 2021.)

The pandemic is ramping up. Shutdown restrictions have increased, but so has resistance to them. The UK has started getting vaccines in arms. The first vaccines in the US have started shipping and administration is expected in two weeks.

I made Rocks yesterday, for the first time in about ten years, using whiskey from a bottle from my friend Marc's stash, four years and a day after he died.

I am shipping Christmas gifts tomorrow. Delivery is expected to be late. They may not be arriving before Christmas.

Saturn and Jupiter are moving closer together in the post-sunset sky, but visibility is getting more difficult. The weather isn't helping. I had two clear seeing days last week, December 10th and 11th. Maximum approach will be December 21. After that, they will quickly be lost in the glare of the Sun.

December 10, 2020, 6:16 PM. Moons of Jupiter: Left: Io (lost in glare of Jupiter); Right: Ganymede, Europa, Callisto

December 11, 2020, 6:00 PM. Moons of Jupiter:  Left: Ganymede, Europa; Right: Io, Callisto (distant, faint)

Christmas is coming, and coming fast.

Dream: Back to Work

Someone posted a question on Twitter the other day: Has anyone been having especially weird dreams lately?

It's a weird time in America. Deaths from COVID-19 continue to rise. Donald Trump, who somehow won the electoral college in 2016 and was installed as president, has managed, after considerable effort, to contract the virus, and while he received levels of treatment unavailable to us peasants, it is likely he is still infected - and he insists on having in-person campaign events, including one yesterday at the White House. (2000 were invited. About 400 showed up. Word is many of those who showed up were paid to do so.) Trump is trying to push through hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, the ultra-conservative activist judge (with three years experience on the bench) he nominated to fill the Supreme Court seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just days after Ginsburg's death and less than two months before the election. Right-wing terrorists in Michigan have been arrested for plotting to abduct Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government through armed violent insurrection. Huge swaths of the west coast are still on fire. We've run out of letters in the alphabet for hurricanes in the Atlantic, and Louisiana is currently dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Delta. Less than four weeks to the election, Luzerne County's mail-in ballots were (allegedly) just sent out on Friday from a facility in Akron, Ohio.

I'm still working from home, as I have been since March. My organization is taking this disease seriously, but there are concerns that the top management of our parent company may issue a business-as-usual order and call us back to the building at any time. And that's what my dream was about.

It didn't start off like that. Or maybe it did. It started off with me going to visit my cousin a block away, something I haven't done since the disease took hold in this area. While in real life she is holding a book for me that she acquired from the books-for-sale shelves at the library where she works, in the dream I think I was going up to pick up some plants. I got them from her father, who has been dead for fifteen years, and we spoke briefly, possibly about me going back to work.

Next thing I knew I was there, standing in line waiting to go back into the building for the first time in ages. (In reality I've been there two or three times since we bugged out.) I don't remember the process of getting inside, but I do recall that once inside I realized I wasn't wearing my ID - it was in my pocket. The building I went into wasn't the Kafkaesque office building that I actually work in, but seemed to be the nightmarishly complex factory building I last worked at in 2012 - and which was demolished earlier this year. I took a wrong turn almost immediately and realized I was lost. Looking down, I also realized I was barefoot, a startling and very odd detail.

I wandered the building for a very long time, well past my starting time, past areas where things that I couldn't comprehend were going on. (I am suddenly remembering that I have had several other dreams in a similar factory setting.) I finally found some people I could talk to and asked about directions to my work area. They tried to help me, but I wound up getting lost again, and at one point I stopped to scratch the belly of a large white wolf-dog that was casually stretched against a wall. Eventually I found my way to a security desk, and they had a helpful YOU ARE HERE map posted above their desk. I worked out that I was on the opposite end of the building from the area where I was supposed to be, an area marked SUTTON COMPLEX. I woke up wanting to look up where that name might have come from. 

Not pictured: The map from my dream

The facility in Olyphant, PA known as Specialty Records, WEA Manufacturing, CINRAM, and finally Technicolor. I worked here from 1992 - 2007 and again from 2007 - 2012. Technicolor closed down in 2018, and the place was finally demolished in June 2020. Fun fact: for much of the time I was there, my emergency evacuation spot was "the big oil tank in back," top center in picture - one of many places I would not want to be in the event of an emergency.

 

As far as dreams go, this isn't even in the top ten for weirdness. It seems like a variation of the standard "can't find my class" / "can't find the room for the final for the class I forgot to go to all semester" dream. The "barefoot" detail was something I've never had before.

(...I just remembered I had another dream a while ago, about being summoned back to Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences as an adult. While I had a hard time finding the classroom and got there late, I wasn't the last one to show up, and I quickly relaxed when I realized that this was a program solely focused on learning about cutting-edge science, in a non-competitive, ungraded environment. I meant to write about that, but never did.)

Note 1: Getting lost in the bowels of a building is something I'm familiar with in real life.

Note 2: There was apparently a sequence in this dream where I attempted to make eggs for breakfast and discovered all of our eggs were broken. Some had fractured shells, others were completely shattered, bits of shell floating in raw eggs in the egg keeper. I was pretty upset about this, and was relieved to see that in reality our egg supply is intact.

So much winning

Click to enlarge.

Note for future historians: This is during the longest shutdown of the Federal government in U.S. history, a shutdown being forced by Donald Trump, who refuses to end it until congress agrees to provide more than five billion dollars in funding for a little more than two hundred miles of border wall. This is also shortly after news broke that Trump had, to no one's surprise,been under FBI investigation for potentially being a Russian "asset." Trump is now serving fast food in the White House.

A most American shooting

Shooting incidents in America are happening so frequently that those that do make it into news reports tend to blend together after a while. Last week, there was a mass shooting at a hospital at about the same time another incident was happening somewhere else - I forget where. A few weeks earlier, the shooting of two random people in a Kroger supermarket was almost completely ignored when a gunman engaged in a premeditated mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. (Both of these stories managed to displace the story of the MAGAbomber, who sent out pipe bombs - none of which went off - to various critics of Donald Trump.)

This Thanksgiving, something different happened.

Thanksgiving was traditionally a holiday for getting together with family for a big feast. The next morning, fanatical shoppers would head out on "Black Friday" to score deep discounts on all sorts of stuff. Some stores remained open on Thanksgiving night, usually convenience stores and the like, and everyone felt bad for the poor slobs who had to work while everyone else was sitting down to the big meal.

Then some retailers had the bright idea to get a head start on Black Friday sales by having them on Thursday. Suddenly, lots of people, employees who were forced to work and shoppers looking to jump the line for bargains, were missing their Thanksgiving dinners.

Which is how we wound up with a crowd of shoppers at a mall in Alabama. (According to CNN, the Riverchase Galleria in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover.) Two people - a 21-year-old male and an 18-year-old male - got into an argument. What was it about? Who was in the right, and who was in the wrong? We don't know -  specifically, I don't know as I write this. What we do know - what has been reported, what I have read - is that the 21-year-old pulled a gun and shot the 18-year-old.

Now, you may be wondering: Who takes a gun to the mall on Thanksgiving? The mayor of the city where the shooting took place said "You just don’t bring guns to a crowded mall and that’s what happened tonight." Yet the same article notes "Several shoppers were seen with their guns drawn." So the answer is: several people, at least. In this particular mall, at least.

The 21-year-old fled the scene. He was approached by armed police responding to the incident, because of course there were armed police at a shopping mall on Thanksgiving, and he was shot and killed.*

The 18-year-old who was shot did not die, at least not yet. Neither did the 12-year-old girl who was shot in the back as all this was happening. No one is saying for sure who shot her - the original gunman, the responding police, or someone else.

The mayor also said "This was an isolated incident. Unfortunately, it happens all of the country." I think when something happens all over the country, it isn't an isolated incident.

This is America, and a 12-year-old girl was hit by a stray bullet during a shooting that followed an argument at a pre-Black Friday sale on Thanksgiving at a shopping mall.

Happy Thanksgiving, from One Nation Under the Gun.


*UPDATE, 11/25/2018:
Oh, it gets even MORE American. Police shot and killed the wrong guy.

From CNN:

(CNN) An armed 21-year-old man killed by an officer at a mall in Alabama on Thanksgiving night "likely did not fire" the shots that wounded two people and sent terrified shoppers running for cover, police said Friday. 

The shooting at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, about 10 miles south of Birmingham, happened Thursday, one of the year's busiest shopping days. 

Authorities mistakenly thought Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr. fired the rounds that left an 18-year-old and a 12-year-old hospitalized, Hoover police spokesman Capt. Gregg Rector said in a statement. 

Police initially said Bradford opened fire after an altercation with the 18-year-old and an officer fatally shot him as he fled the scene. But late Friday, police changed that story, saying that while Bradford was involved in "some aspect of the altercation" and was armed with a handgun, he likely did not fire the rounds that injured the two others. 

"We regret that our initial media release was not totally accurate, but new evidence indicates that it was not," Rector said. 

The error came to light after Jefferson County Sheriff's Office investigators and crime scene experts spoke to witnesses and examined evidence, police said. 

"Investigators now believe that more than two individuals were involved in the initial altercation," Rector said. "This information indicates that there is at least one gunman still at large." 

The officer involved in the shooting is on administrative leave pending an investigation, police said 

The Jefferson County district attorney informed Hoover police Friday that the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency will take over the lead role in the shooting investigation from the county sheriff's office, Rector said. Hoover police will "assist and cooperate fully" in that inquiry and will "conduct an internal but separate investigation" of the officer-involved shooting, he said.

From Facebook:

American police just killed another "good guy with a gun."

Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., better known as EJ, the son of a police officer, was an active duty officer for the Army, home for Thanksgiving.

Murdered by police yesterday in a mall shooting in Alabama.

Not only did police in Hoover, Alabama murder EJ, for 24 hours they plastered his face all over the news saying he was the mass shooter.

They did a press conference saying they killed the shooter, showed his picture, then said the community was safe.

THE SHOOTER IS AT LARGE.

EJ's family and friends reached out to me this morning. They are not just devastated, they are furious.

Police publicly and local media both publicly blamed him for the mall shooting.

He never fired a single shot.

After police shot EJ, he was still alive, struggling.

Family and friends just sent me a horrendous video of police not only refusing to provide EJ first aid as he fought for his life, but literally abusing him on the ground thinking he was the mall shooter.

It was heartless.

EJ Bradford, Jr. was beloved all over Birmingham. This morning I have heard from neighbors, friends, even teachers from elementary to high school - who LOVED this man.

Served safely in the Army, then shot & killed by American police in Alabama while home for Thanksgiving. #JusticeForEJ

The day after, and all the days after that

I keep seeing these posts that express sentiments along the lines of "I'm so glad the elections are over. Now we can forget about these things that divide us and get back to normal."

That is, to put it politely, nonsense. Unlike Trump's army of illegal aliens coming to invade us ("caravan after caravan!"), the real issues that divided us during the election aren't things that just go away the day after the election. Trump is still in office, and the once-proud Republican party is now entirely in thrall to him.

Democrats did well, as well as I dared to hope, and maybe a little better. They took the House. Pennsylvania kept its Democratic governor (Wolf, who defeated the Trump-backed Scott Wagner, who had pledged to stomp on Wolf's face with golf spikes), its Democratic Senator (Casey, who defeated Trump-supported Representative Lou Barletta, who now will be neither a Senator nor a Representative), and my redistricted district got to hold onto its Democratic Representative (Matt Cartwright,who defeated longtime New Jersey resident John Chrin, who managed to lose even without Trump's support.)

Voting irregularities abounded. Native Americans in North Dakota were effectively disenfranchised by new voter ID laws. Voters in one precinct in Detroit arrived to find their voting machines locked up and inaccessible. Early voters in Florida found that their precincts had run out of ballots. On election day, other voters in Florida discovered that their polling places had been moved to inside gated communities - and while no ID was required to vote, it was required to get access to the polling place. In Georgia voters arrived to find that someone had forgotten to provide power cords for their voting machines.

Georgia's voting irregularities were the most egregious. The person in charge of making sure the election was free and fair - the Secretary of State - was also one of the candidates for governor. Unsurprisingly, he has declared himself the winner. His opponent has not conceded.

The survivors of Marjory Stoneman Douglas traveled the country and organized and rallied. In the end their efforts paid off: numerous NRA-backed candidates went down in defeat. But in their home state of Florida, they found that the majority of voters - more than half, at least - just didn't care, and voted for the same politicians whose policies helped make the mass killing of seventeen of their fellow students, teachers, and coaches possible. In the end I fear that they will be faced with the same choice that anyone born and raised in Northeastern Pennsylvania must eventually make: leave for brighter opportunities and greener pastures, or stay and fight to try to make things better at home.

Trump is in full panic mode, knowing full well that Democrats in charge of House investigative committees will not give him the free ride that he has had from the Republican house for the last two years. He fired his Attorney General and placed a political crony in charge of the Mueller investigation. He held an epic, rambling, eighty-seven minute long news conference today, with he opened by using the term "we" to refer to Republicans and "they" to refer to Democrats and members of the media - making it clear that he does not consider himself to be president of all of the United States, but only the bits that support him unquestioningly. He also lashed out at CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta in an imperious tantrum that ended (as of this writing) with Jim Acosta's access to the White House being revoked.

We now face an uncertain future, more uncertain than when Republicans controlled everything, and we could only be certain that nothing would be investigated. Trump is a cornered rat, lashing out viciously. Things are going to get a lot worse before they will get any better.

So please don't imagine that now that the mid-term election is over, everyone will just forget about all the things they care about.

Cat therapy make-up post

I missed a post yesterday.

The whole world has gone insane, the (nominally) United States of America in particular. A white male Trump fanatic sent more than a dozen bombs through the U.S. Postal Service t o politicians, public figures, and a news network - all of whom had previously been critical of the God Emperor. A white male with a gun tried to enter a predominantly black church in Kentucky, but found it locked, so instead he went into a local Kroger and murdered two elderly black shoppers. And that story was knocked out of the headlines shortly thereafter when a white male with several guns (including that darling of mass shooters, an AR-15) entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh (about a mile from where I lived when I spent five weeks at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984) and murdered eleven people while shouting anti-Semitic statements. (In each case, the white male was taken alive.)

Fuck it. Good luck, future historians. Some of us tried to stop this. I know, I know - we should have fucking tried harder.

So anyway, here's a picture of me with one of my cats - Joey, who is over eighteen years old, and probably won't be with us much longer.

Changing fortunes

Today has been a messed-up day. Yesterday George Soros, billionaire and favorite boogieman of the Party of Trump, received a pipe bomb in his mailbox. This morning additional pipe bombs were intercepted on their way to Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama - and then, in the middle of the morning broadcast, the CNN New York offices were evacuated because the, too, had received a bomb in the mail. Former Attorney General Eric Holder - sent to an incorrect address, and returned to the sending address of Debbie Wasserman Schultz; Representative Maxine Waters - two bombs for her; Joe Biden - well, no bomb yet, but a strong suspicion that there's a bomb already in the mail for him.

I don't want to talk about that.

I'm about to run out of space in my check register, which came free with my checkbook refills. Whenever I run low on checks, I automatically get a new set of checks, I believe four checkbook refills (each with fifty checks) and a new check register. In the past this system worked fine. I usually had check registers that went unused, though what I did with them I'm not sure.

Right now I have quick access to five check registers. The oldest I used for eight years, from September 2004 to March 2012, and it has records of three hundred and twenty-six checks. I didn't buy my house until 2006, so there weren't as many monthly bills from 2004 to 2006, but this still works out to an average of about forty checks a year. (I believe I was also writing a lot of checks during this period from a separate account with a credit union.) The next register covers just two years, from March 2012 to July 2014, and three hundred and forty-five checks. The one after that also covers two years, July 2014 through March 2016, but only has records of one hundred and ninety-three checks; by this time I was increasingly embracing online payments, and writing fewer physical checks - but each payment was duly noted in the check register. The next register spans a single year, March 2016 to August 2017, and only ninety-seven checks. The current one covers August 2017 to the present, and so far has records of thirty-six checks.

Which brings us to the sixth register. I needed a new one, and none of the big box office supply stores stock anything quite so downscale. Neither does Walmart. I can order them online - three from OfficeMax/Office Depot for $3.99, or a pack of ten from Walmart (or Amazon) for $4.99. Do I really need that many, all with the same three year-at-a-glance calendars on the back?

My mom rummaged through some stuff and found an old check register I could use. Very old. The three year-at-a-glance calendars on the back are 1990, 1991, and 1992...which, in a bizarre coincidence, correspond exactly to the calendars for 2018, 2019, and 2020. So, with this twenty-eight-year-old check register, I should be set for a while - or the next twenty-five checks or so.

We'll see what madness tomorrow brings.

Sears, Roebuck, and bankruptcy

It is sadly ironic that Sears is declaring bankruptcy during what would have been Wish Book delivery season a few decades ago.

I don't remember when exactly Wish Books, the special edition of the Sears catalogue with an emphasis on toys and gifts, were sent out. It was after school started, and probably no earlier than late September. I believe they were delivered before Halloween. As kids, we had several weeks to go through page after page of toys and imagine what fun we would have once Christmas came, as long as we got our preliminary lists to Santa before the Thanksgiving deadline.

(Postal carriers must have hated Wish Book delivery season, almost as much as they hated delivering the much thicker seasonal Sears catalogues, which were full of...well, mostly clothing. But all those things got delivered by the United States Postal Service, along with lesser catalogues from places like Montgomery-Ward and local retailers Stroud's and Jewelcor.)

Sears is being described as the Amazon of its time, and that's an apt comparison, except Amazon, as far as I know, has never offered houses - house construction kits, really. But you could order all sorts of things from Sears. Toys. Clothes. Housewares. Major appliances. Jewelry. Tools. Lawnmowers. Sheds. Tires. Glasses. Ventriloquist dummies. Houses, in kit form, in the early part of the twentieth century. I think my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide came from Sears. And while the stores were a wonderland of available items, much more was available through the Sears catalogue.

(Historian Louis Hyman has written some amazing stuff about how revolutionary the Sears catalogue was for opening up retail markets to blacks and people of all ethnicities. You can find him at @louishyman on Twitter, or visit his website https://www.louishyman.com/.)

Once upon a time it might have been inconceivable that Sears would ever go out of business, as inconceivable as it would be to think about Walmart or Amazon going out of business today. But even a few decades ago, Sears was feeling...stodgy. Hidebound. Old-fashioned. You knew it was a place your parents had shopped at, and your grandparents. It wasn't the coolest place to shop.*

Sears is on its way out, and earlier this year toy retailer Toys 'R' Us, which until recently had dominated the toy market after putting competitors Kids and Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby (later KB Toys) out of business, closed its doors. Both may have been victims of their own success. Sears and Toys 'R' Us each  dominated an older business model based on catalogue sales or bricks-and-mortar stores, and were unable to transform themselves to the new reality of online sales - and someone else muscled in and took their spot. I had a friend who worked for Toys 'R' Us in the late 1990's when they decided to try selling stuff on this newfangled "internet." The site that they had rolled out for the Christmas shopping season was quickly overwhelmed and crashed. They tried to keep a focus on online sales for a while but eventually gave up and ceded the online sales crown to (what was at the time) bookselling giant Amazon. Similarly, Sears, the king of catalog sales, should have been able to easily transition into online sales. But again, Amazon dominated.

Part of the problem may have been the same thing that happened in the CD/DVD manufacturing industry. For decades, places like my employer - Specialty Records, later WEA Manufacturing - were innovators, investing heavily in developing new technologies, new forms of media storage, new manufacturing techniques. But other companies were able to come along and build on what we had done without taking the risks or making the capital investments. And while streaming was clearly the next big thing in the early 2000s, WEA Manufacturing was sold off in the aftermath of the debacle of the AOL Time Warner merger** and bought out by CINRAM, a Canadian replicator with no interest in non-disc technologies. Any plans for streaming technology went out the window. CINRAM eventually sold the facility, which was permanently closed earlier this year. Now CDs and DVDs are rapidly losing market share as most consumers stream their movies and music. (Frankly, a facility dedicated to streaming technology would have probably employed 100 or so people at most, anyway. Most of the people employed at WEA Manufacturing and CINRAM were in the business of making discs. Without discs to be made, a lot fewer people would have been needed.) Other people were able to build on our experience and do what we did for far less. And when the world changed, we weren't able to respond to the change.

*A few years ago I shepherded a soon-to-be-orphan through a difficult spot in her life, and I found myself at a Sears store several times with her, trying to resolve an issue involving a bed that her mother had ordered before she went into the hospital. The order became terribly confused, bits were delivered, other bits were backordered, and the whole thing had been paid for in a way that couldn't be refunded easily. While the two of us were at Sears trying to get this resolved one Friday night, we noticed a group of teens idly hanging around the store and wandering its aisles. We decided that there were few places less cool to hang out as a teen on a Friday night than Sears.

**A quote from this summarizes this whole post:

The business was up against a phenomenon I refer to as transient advantage; namely when a combination of capabilities that at one point made a firm a leader, erodes and is replaced by the next form of competitive advantage.

Which is either terribly insightful or terribly obvious.

The global slide into fascism

One of the questions that bugged students for years when they first learned about Nazi Germany and Hitler's rise to power was: How? How did Germany, a nation world-renowned for its scientists, philosophers, musicians, and artists, slide into Nazism? How did the populace of Germany stand idly by or tacitly support the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party? And could such a thing happen again?

The second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century has been an object lesson for us all. Now we are much closer to understanding what happened eighty years ago - because we're watching it happen again, all over the world.

This is another thing that future historians are going to try to puzzle out. They will be viewing these years from a privileged position, but will also be getting their information in fragments, seeing only those bits that survived, or those that can be extracted from the great data midden. Their position will also be prejudiced, informed and distorted by whatever happens between now and then. Good luck with that.

All over the world, democracies are voluntarily transforming themselves into authoritarian regimes. The United States of America went from being a nation that overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama - twice - to a nation that allowed Donald Trump access to the White House through an Electoral College victory and popular vote loss. The United Kingdom elected to leave the European Union through the "Brexit" vote - the consequences of which many voters did not even try to understand until after the results were announced. All across Europe and elsewhere, strongmen are rising to power through demagoguery. The trend seems to be gaining momentum.

(In the United States, the Republican Party - which once proudly called itself the "Party of Lincoln," but has now devolved into the Party of Trump - has settled on a new boogieman: ANTIFA, or AntiFa, a contraction of "anti-fascism" or "anti-fascists" - which, depending on who you ask, is either a violent and dangerous mob dedicated to destroying all that is good and true, or a catch-all term for any group or individual that stands against neo-Nazis, white nationalists, "Proud Boys," the tiki torch brigade, and other fascist groups that have allied themselves with the Party of Trump, and Donald Trump in particular.)

Is it zeitgeist (the German term for "spirit of the time," literally "time ghost," which I find so much cooler) - a sort of global unspoken mutual agreement that the time of democracy is over, and a new era of strongmen and authoritarian regimes is upon us, and something to be embraced? Is some master manipulator (*cough*Vladimir Putin*cough*) pulling strings and swaying public opinion through a relentless and sophisticated campaign run through social media, but ready to be backed up with military action? Or is something else going on, something no one even suspects yet?

I don't know. I don't know if anyone does. So for the time being, some of us will continue to stand for democracy and against fascism, and others will continue to do their best to suppress voter participation and embrace strongmen and authoritarianism.

Which side will win?

That remains to be seen.

Current events: Lynzy Lab, "A Scary Time"

Blogs serve many functions. Online diaries, citizen journalism, street level history, and many more. I've been using mine mostly to document my own life, and I've been ignoring most of the large-scale things going on around me.

There is so much going on. Donald Trump. Mass shootings and their aftermath. Voter registration, voter suppression, and voting rights. Record setting storm after record setting storm. Jamal Khashoggi, an exiled Saudi Arabian journalist living as a a permanent resident in the United States and working as a columnist for the Washington Post who was frequently critical of the current Saudi rulership, entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and was allegedly murdered and dismembered by an organized hit squad. Numerous critics of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin have been found dead - the most recent, Nikolai Glushkov, strangled with a dog leash in London. Viktoria Marinova, a journalist investigating corruption in Bulgaria, was found raped and murdered.

Brett Kavanaugh, a beer-drinking, whiny, arrogant, entitled frat boy accused of sexual assault when he was seventeen (and very drunk) and she was fifteen, was approved to the Supreme Court over the objections and concerns of many people who had known him well but were not included in his background check. The fight was blistering, with hours of testimony by his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and Kavanaugh responding by having a meltdown while reading from prepared remarks and engaging in conduct that demonstrated his lack of judicial temperament. After his second, ceremonial swearing-in, Donald Trump apologized to Brett Kavanaugh for everything he had been put through. He referred to Dr. Ford's testimony as a "hoax set up by the Democrats," and, noting the current climate of intolerance of sexual assault and unwillingness of women to lay back and take it without complaining (or reporting), Trump stated that this is a "very scary time for young men in America."

On Sunday, October 7, Lynzy Lab (@mercedeslynz on Twitter) released a song called "A Scary Time" that tries to capture the feeling of the time.It went instantly viral on Twitter. Tonight she will be performing it on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Here it is from YouTube (https://youtu.be/N34hehRgw9g):

 

Someday historians will try to make sense of what happened in and to the United States in the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I can't offer them any shortcuts. All I can say is: pay attention to everything. This time is a mess, and the explanations may be in the details. And...we're sorry. We're sorry we couldn't stop all this from happening. We tried. We failed.

We should have tried harder.