Monthly Archives: May 2017

First ‘Drunk History,’ now Trump History…

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Yeah, he looked pretty ancient in 1845, the year he died. Imagine how grim he looked when the Civil War was ticking him off 16 years later.

Yeah, he looked pretty ancient in 1845, the year he died. Imagine how grim he looked when the Civil War was ticking him off 16 years later.

Or perhaps I should say, first there was the miracle of Frederick Douglass, who’s doing a terrific job getting noticed out there, and now there’s Old Hickory:

Donald Trump expressed confusion in an interview published on Monday as to why the civil war had taken place. He also claimed that President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the war started, “was really angry” about the conflict.

Trump also said Jackson, a slaveholder and war hero who led a relocation and extermination campaign against Native Americans, “had a big heart”.

The president made his remarks in an interview with the Washington Examiner to mark his 100th day in office, which fell on Saturday. “It’s a very intensive process,” Trump told his interviewer of the presidency. “Really intense. I get up to bed late and I get up early.”

His remarks about Jackson and the civil war appeared to arise from a discussion of a painting of the seventh president that Trump moved into the Oval Office after his inauguration. Trump has called Jackson “an amazing figure in American history – very unique so many ways” and said that he identifies with his populist forebear…

Yes, he certainly does sound, um, “very unique” (why look up to someone who’s only a little bit unique?) and… completely “amazing.” And what, precisely, did this dead man think about the war?

“He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the civil war. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the civil war – if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a civil war? Why could that one not have been worked out?”…

I’m going to make up some history myself, and invoke the clause that the terrific Alexander Hamilton slipped into the Constitution that says that no one who knows nothing about anything can serve as president of the United States. It’s in there, trust me….

I’ve called this guy an “ignoramus” a number of times, but I had no idea just how deep the chasm of ignorance went. It just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?

Um… this Family Tree Maker rollout is kind of surreal

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Would my ancestor Ragnar sit patiently for such frustration?

Would my ancestor Ragnar sit patiently through such frustration?

This will only interest those among you who maintain family trees on Ancestry, and back them up with Family Tree Maker.

But among that small subset, I’m wondering how many are as uneasy as I am.

As y’all know, I’m a bit… obsessed… with genealogy these days. I’ve never been much of one for hobbies, but this one has taken over almost all my leisure time, when I’m not hanging out with grandchildren.

But while I’ve continued to add people to the tree at a good clip, I’ve been uneasy the last few weeks.

Several months ago, as my Ancestry tree grew by leaps and bounds, I wanted to have a hard backup in case something catastrophic happened out there in the cloud. So I asked for, and received (for my birthday, I think) a copy of Family Tree Maker, so that I could see my tree offline.

Once I had that, I got in the habit of syncing the two versions after each session working on the tree. This gave me peace of mind that all that work wouldn’t go for naught.

But the last time I was able to sync was March 26 at 9:15 p.m. That’s when FTM stopped allowing syncs to its old software, because it was releasing an update.

Fine. Except the update still hasn’t been released, more than five weeks later.

Does this make sense to anyone?

FTM puts out an update on how things are going — about once a week! (Here’s the latest, from Friday evening.) You’d think they’d be coming at a rate of several a day. But they seem to be a lot cooler about the situation than I am.

Anyone else in this fix? And does it bother you the way it does me?

I’ve continued to add people to my tree — 327 of them since my last synch. When will I be able to safeguard those the way I have the other 3,486?

(And yes, I could become one of the beta testers, but since they were having only 89 percent success in syncing back on April 14 — it’s better now, I believe — I hesitate to join in…)

Last synced more than a month ago...

Last synced more than a month ago…

Robert Samuelson reminds us vegetables must be eaten

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I wish to call to your attention this piece by Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post Writers Group.

An excerpt:

SamuelsonLet’s be clear: America is an undertaxed society. Our wants and needs from government — the two blur — exceed our willingness to be taxed. This has been true for decades, but it’s especially relevant now because the number of older Americans, who are the largest beneficiaries of federal spending, is rising rapidly. Unless we’re prepared to make sizable spending cuts (and there’s no evidence we are), we need higher taxes.

To the extent that President Trump’s proposed “tax reform” obscures or worsens this inconvenient reality, it is a dangerous distraction. We cannot afford large tax cuts, which are pleasing to propose (“something for nothing”) but involve long-term risks that are not understood by the president or, to be fair, by economists. Piling up massive peacetime deficits is something we haven’t done before. We cannot know the full consequences….

Looks like Samuelson’s bucking to be named patron saint of the Grownup Party, noting matter-of-factly that not only are vegetables good for us, but we must eat them.

By the way that line, “America is an undertaxed society,” goes double — no, triple, nay, 100 times — for South Carolina. I just thought I’d point that out for those still confused, especially the senators who think you can’t raise a tax that badly needs raising — the gas tax — without lowering some other taxes that has nothing to do with it.

Sorry to see Bret Stephens get rough reception at NYT

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The last couple of weeks, it occurred to me briefly to wonder why I hadn’t seen any Bret Stephens columns in The Wall Street Journal. I chalked it up to the fact that I don’t look every day, and maybe I wasn’t looking on the right ones.

That wasn’t it.

It seems that Stephens, the WSJ deputy editorial page editor whom I’ve been praising over the past year for his principled criticism of Donald Trump, has left the paper.

He left to write for The New York Times, where readers have not made him welcome, according to a third paper, The Washington Post:

The New York Times thought it was bringing a fresh voice and some ideological diversity to its influential op-ed pages when it hired conservative columnist Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago.

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Bret Stephens

Readers weren’t impressed by Stephens’s debut column, to say the least.

The cancel-my-subscription outrage flowed freely after Stephens challenged the certitude about climate science in his first piece for the newspaper on Friday. While acknowledging that the planet has warmed over the past century and that humans have contributed to it, he wrote, “much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future.”…

This news prompts three reactions from me:

  • Why did Stephens leave the WSJ for the NYT? Was it merely a better opportunity, or had he been made to feel unwelcome at the Journal? I would hate to think it was the latter, because he had been one of the best reasons to read the Journal, especially over the past year.
  • What caused him — and, to the extent they had involvement, his editors — to choose this topic for his debut column? Was an anti-Trump column considered, but rejected as seeming like pandering to his new audience? Did he deliberately decide to be more in-your-face, to announce his presence as a new voice? Perhaps these questions don’t interest you, but as I’m someone who has spent years thinking about such things — which message to go with and when — they do me.
  • As for all you howling New York Times readers: Get over yourselves. Has your safe space been invaded? Good.

In searching for more info about Stephens’ move, I ran across quite a bit of fulminating against him and his first column, describing the latter as weak and poorly reasoned.

I thought the piece was fine. Its point, for those who claim to have a problem finding it, was this: If you find yourself being 100 percent certain, or close to it, about something, perhaps you should question yourself more.

Seems like a good choice for a first outing, considering the writer and his new venue. It was even prophetic, in the part where he wrote, “By now I can almost hear the heads exploding….”