I've been hampered by another, quite maddening, computer problem this week. It helps to understand that every program has its own private piece of screen buffer memory, updating the entire image whenever it wishes to change what you see. Whether you actually see the changes depends on the layering of the windows. You usually see all of the current (active focus) window, but other windows may be partially or wholly covered by the top window, or by other windows in an overlay stack. This means that every possible view of every window is stored in memory somewhere -- either the main computer memory, or dedicated screen memory on a video controller card. The computer (or the video card) keep a display list of everything that is to be shown. What's happening on my computer is that this display list is getting corrupted, so all of a sudden I'll see some screen chunk appear when it shouldn't.
The result is very disorienting. For instance, while I've been writing this in an emacs editor window, the screen to my window's left has decided to show a big chunk of a Pitchfork review that I closed from my browser a couple of days ago. I can make it go away by moving the mouse over it and using the wheel to scroll whatever the proper window there has in it (a Wikipedia page). I'm able to work around the problem by using little tricks like that to force proper screen updates, but it's a trial, a real nuisance. This started happening a week ago when I was experiencing heavy load problems. I cut down on the loads by installing an ad blocker and rebooting. That did indeed help on performance, but within a day I started experiencing this phantom screen ghosting (not a technical term, but that's what the screen fragments feel like; just happened again).
I'm guessing that the problem is in the video card, and hoping it will go away when I replace the card (new one on order). Before I installed the ad blocker, I ran into another serious problem: I kept hearing random pops from Napster (although not from Bandcamp, which also plays through the browser, or from VLC, which is a separate ap). No such problem with the ad blocker installed, so that problem was clearly due to the added overhead of processing all those annoying ads. Good riddance to the visual distraction, as well.
I've been working on a side project this past week. I started this last year, spent a couple of days on it, and let it sit, moving on to other, seemingly more urgent, tasks. The idea is to collect all of the political notes from my online notebook. This starts back in 2001, before I started my blog, and continues to archive all of my blog posts from 2005 on. Originally I was thinking of one file for the whole roll, but as I got into 2006, I realized I need to split it into multiple volumes: one for the Bush years, a second for Obama, and probably one for Trump as long as is necessary. Prime determinant was length, but it also makes more sense subject-wise.
Of course, the writing will need a lot of editing to turn it into anything useful. And it's not clear even how it should be organized: day-by-day, or sorted out into subject areas. Good news is that compared to the jazz guides, this one is going pretty fast. Unless the computer situation deteriorates further, I should finish the first pass compilation up to 2008 this coming week. Currently have 465,000 words, up to Feb. 2007 (930 pages of 12 pt. type).
I'd like to say a few things about the material I've been reviewing, but don't have much time and the circumstances aren't conducive. Suffice it to say that the one clearest lesson is that nearly everything we've found so galling and appalling about Trump had previously appeared as a big problem under GW Bush. For instance, I have a lot of material in 2006-07 on North Korea. I have a report on a mass demonstration against ICE excesses. I even have a disgusting story about the president and the Boy Scouts. It's not that nothing never changes, but it is very much the case that Trump's agenda is a direct continuation of the shit Bush tried to pull until he flamed out in 2008, leaving the economy in shambles.
Some scattered links this week:
Umair Irfan: Why Scott Pruitt lasted so long at the EPA, and what finally did him in. Irfan also wrote: Scott Pruitt is leaving behind a toxic mess at the EPA, and Scott Pruitt gave "super polluting" trucks a gift on his last day at the EPA. Pruitt's successor at EPA will be coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler. See: Alexander C Kaufman: Scott Pruitt's Replacement Is Even Worse. One thing I'm surprised we haven't seen yet is calls for a special prosecutor to look into Pruitt's numerous scandals. During the Clinton administration a half-dozen or more special prosecutors were appointed to look into various cabinet-level appointees. One might argue that was excessive and wasteful, but none were accused of anywhere near as much wrongdoing as Pruitt.
Jedediah Purdy: Trump's Nativism Is Transforming the Physical Landscape.
Matt Taibbi: Why Killing Dodd-Frank Could Lead to the Next Crash, and We Need a Financial Transactions Tax Before It's Too Late.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Capital Gazette Shooting and the True Valule of Local Newspapers.
Alex Ward: We need to talk about the fact that Trump seriously considered invading Venezuela. Little known fact here: "Trump's increased use of the military in part led to at least 33 US military deaths in war zones in 2017 -- the first time US war zone casualties rose in six years."
Matthew Yglesias: Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics: No "big poitical stories" summary this week. Here he coins the term "normcore politics" to refer to critics who think that the major problem with Trump is that he routinely violates established norms for political discourse and conduct. Those critics are usually centrists, and their focus on norms gives cover to an agenda that is as much anti-left as anti-right. (However, you sometimes find echoes of normcore coming from the left; e.g., Gary Younge: Despite all the warnings, we are normalising Donald Trump.) Yglesias makes a couple of important points. One is that we tend to take a kinder view of the past than of the present, so what we think of as norms today are simply whatever we wound up accepting in the past. The other is that Republicans for decades been have playing fast and loose with rules and conventions whenever it suited their agenda, even if on occasion that meant they were the ones accusing Democrats of violating norms. As outrageously bad as Trump has been since 2016, he's been doing pretty much the same things that his Republican predecessors have done, at least as far back as Nixon. Going back and re-reading my notebook from 2001-07 I'm finding the same stories, the same ploys, over and over again. I won't deny that there are differences: Trump is cruder, less devious, easier to embarrass, more shameless. But those aren't just personal traits. They're characteristic of the party Trump adopted and now leads, one which responded to the Bush disasters by doubling down, by only getting meaner, greedier, and nastier. On historical memory and aging, Yglesias cites: Corey Robin: Forget About It; e.g.:
When Bush left office in 2009, he was widely loathed, with an approval rating of 33 percent. Today, 61 percent of the population approves of him, with much of that increase coming from Democrats and independents. A majority of voters under thirty-five view him favorably, which they didn't while he was president. So jarring is the switch that Will Ferrell was inspired to reprise his impersonation of Bush on Saturday Night Live. "I just wanted to address my fellow Americans tonight," he said, "and remind you guys that I was really bad. Like, historically not good."
Robin goes on to note a corollary trend, where some liberals manage to find each new event even more shocking than previous ones -- examples include Ezra Klein and Philip Roth. On the latter:
The truth is that we're captives, not captains, of this strategy. We think the contrast of a burnished past allows us to see the burning present, but all it does is keep the fire going, and growing. Confronting the indecent Nixon, Roth imagines a better McCarthy. Confronting the indecent Trump, he imagines a better Nixon. At no point does he recognize that he's been fighting the same monster all along -- and losing. Overwhelmed by the monster he's currently facing, sure that it is different from the monster no longer in view, Roth loses sight of the surrounding terrain. He doesn't see how the rehabilitation of the last monster allows the front line to move rightward, the new monster to get closer to the territory being defended.
I feel like adding that, based on re-reading notes I wrote on the deaths of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, that I have managed to keep a pretty level and consistent perspective over my lifetime. Other Yglesias posts: