I was making a new recipe for chicken curry and threw the seeds and trimmings of a jalapeño pepper down the disposal, then made the mistake of turning it on and not immediately running to the other side of the kitchen. Been coughing ever since. Instant pepper spray! How many times have I learned this lesson? Too many times to count. Sometimes I feel like the world’s stupidest home cook.

The curry was…C+, I guess. Splendid Table recipe, used yogurt. I think I prefer coconut milk, but it was good enough for dinner and it’ll be fine for next-day lunch.

The carnage in Kentucky was awful, as was some of the social-media snark about Rand Paul strutting on the floor of the Senate in 2012, talking about how “other people’s money” was going for relief from Hurricane Sandy. The response to a 180 in a dim-bulb libertarian may well be jeering, but maybe we can point this out another time, eh? The response to a disaster in the United States is to relieve the suffering. Yes, Rand Paul is an hypocrite. Yes, the people of Kentucky elected him (and Mitch McConnell, oy). No, the response is not to tell them “sucks to be you” when tornados kill them and destroy their homes, businesses and towns.

However, we’re in a sucks-to-be-you moment right now. I read a little over the weekend about Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania. Lia swam for the men’s team for two years of her college career. She transitioned during the Covid-cancelled season, and is now swimming as a woman, and winning. “Breaking records,” in fact, but here is one place where I have to part with Sherri, to name one person in our readership, who has said that any advantage to being a biological male in sports disappears after a year of hormone treatment. I simply don’t believe that, at least in this case.

Thomas isn’t just breaking records, she’s obliterating them. Winning by 7 seconds in the 200 free, and 38 in the 1650-meter free, to name but two. These aren’t normal new-record margins. Swimming is a sport where records fall by fractions of seconds, not seven of them. (Unless she is Katie Ledecky. Lia Thomas is not Katie Ledecky.) There is an advantage here that comes from being taller, stronger, more broad-shouldered and from having trained and competed all your life as a man. The photos of her are crazy. She’s a hulk.

As you would expect, the right-wing media has picked up this story and is shaking it like a dog. I had to scroll down in the search results to find a source I thought could be fair — Swimming World magazine, which I am confident knows more about the sport than, say, the New York Post or Fox News.

And this piece is pretty evenhanded, explaining that while Thomas is swimming slower on female hormones than when she was a male, she suddenly catapulted from an Ivy League finalist to an Olympic-level contender, threatening records set by the greatest women in the sport, including Ledecky and Missy Franklin. Swimming World also had the decency to ask for decency, after getting the expected onslaught of reader abuse following their reporting. And they’ve also done sensitive reporting on F-to-M trans swimmers like Schuyler Bailar, so I feel like I can trust their editorial judgement.

But even SW editorialized against allowing Thomas to compete in the NCAA championships in March:

Athletes transitioning from male to female possess the inherent advantage of years of testosterone production and muscle-building. There is also the advantage (in many cases) of larger body frames, hands and feet. All of these traits are beneficial in the sport of swimming. In the case of Thomas, she had nearly 20 years of this testosterone-building advantage, something cisgender women could not attain. Although she took part in the testosterone-suppression process, a look at her performances clearly reflects that she is benefitting from the genetics of her birth sex.

“There’s absolutely no question in my mind that trans women will maintain strength advantages over cis women, even after hormone therapy,” said sports physicist Joanna Harper in an interview with WEBMD Health News. “That’s based on my clinical experience, rather than published data, but I would say there’s zero doubt in my mind.”

…Now, Thomas is stalking Ledecky’s 500 freestyle record, a chase that reveals the unfairness in her racing against cisgender women. A look at the all-time rankings in the 500 free shows that Leah Smith is the second-fastest female performer in the event. Yet, she is almost five seconds back of Ledecky. The fact that Thomas could break the record of such a once-in-a-generation athlete confirms the biological advantages she possesses, and their power.

The stories of Thomas’ meet performances are agonizing: She finishes first by a wide margin, and the crowd sits on their hands. When the cisgender female touches the wall second, they erupt in cheers. This may be a cruel reaction, but it is also honest. These are not fair competitions. The question is, what do we do about them?

The floor is open. I’m honestly interested in what some of you have to say.

The fallout from the school shooting continues to be felt. Everywhere. The county prosecutor has her hands full with a shit-ton of copycat threats to other schools in the area. I have no doubt they’re all bullshit, but it certainly suggests kids kinda…hate their schools? Yes, that seems to be it.

Of course, lots of kids “hate” school, but they miss it terribly when they’re not there. It’s the center of their social lives, but even kids like me — stable home, lots of support, did well in what was indisputably a first-class public school district — had days when, if the building had burned to the ground, I would have stood outside, roasting marshmallows.

Lots of the threats are at the middle-school level, which tracks. I mean: Middle school, amirite? Others are more serious, leading to evacuations, dismissals for the day, and the expected messages to panicked parents: Don’t panic!

Well, we’re all on edge. I think it’s not just because this shooting happened close to home. Rather, because we look at those mugshots of the Crumbleys and realize: I know 25 people exactly like this. How many of them leave guns lying around for their disturbed teenagers to pick up? Probably more than a few, because really, what good is a “properly secured” weapon worth in a tense situation? Home invaders don’t send advance notice; you wake up in the night and think you heard something. Or you walk into the kitchen on a warm summer day and realize someone’s there who shouldn’t be. Do you say, “Hold that thought while I unlock my properly secured weapon?” Or maybe you don’t have children, so you leave the gun in the nightstand, or on the nightstand — badass! — or somewhere else. And then someone breaks in while you’re gone, and steals it.

Someone called in a threat to my high school, maybe a year before I arrived there. Only there really was a bomb, a homemade thing made of fireworks, as I recall. It blew up a toilet, and a kid was injured by flying porcelain. The perpetrator was expelled, the only permanent expulsion I’m aware of during my time there. He wasn’t a terrible kid, just one lost in the dark tunnel of adolescence. I just looked him up on Facebook, and he appears to be fine. Has an interest in general aviation. Who knows what Ethan Crumbley might have become, with different parents? A question for the ages, I guess.

I once saw a cop show that featured a middle-of-the-night home invasion, of Regina King’s house. She played a cop. Leapt from her bed to the closet, quickly keyed in a four-digit combination on her gun safe, and took out a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, which which she dispatched the bad guys. Now there’s a well-secured firearm. I’ve heard police say a shotgun is actually the safest home-protection weapon you can have, because the rounds won’t fly through your walls or windows into the neighbor’s nursery, and you can keep it loaded with rock salt rounds (do those even exist outside of southern gothic fiction) just in case you accidentally shoot your daughter’s boyfriend, sneaking in for some middle-of-the-night shenanigans.

OK then! Must run — the Deadline Detroit holiday party is tonight, and I have to throw together my contribution to the buffet. And get a Covid test first, which is scheduled in about 30 minutes. Probably be crowded, too, what with our heedlessness and surging case load. Best get moving. Happy weekend to all.

Kate and Alan had a father-daughter date Friday night, which left me on my own. So I ran an errand, had a solitary dinner at the bar of a spot I’ve never tried before, and went to a record release show in Hamtramck. Leaving around 11:30, I was rolling east on Mt. Elliott when a bunch of flashing blue lights were suddenly coming up fast behind. I pulled over, and three DPD units went by so at such a speed that I could barely catch that they were, indeed, DPD.

I got home, checked Twitter, and realized where they must have been headed: To the Crumbley manhunt, because news here doesn’t just happen, it warps and metastasizes and becomes SuperNews, a school shooting where the perp’s parents are accused of involuntary manslaughter and try to lam it, despite what their lawyers say. (The lawyers say they always intended to turn themselves in. They were simply “getting their affairs in order” and spending the night in an artist’s studio 40 miles from their home, nbd.)

Yes, it was a week where the news just didn’t quit. The Crumbleys iced the rancid cupcake. I’m sure you’ve all seen the pressers by now, the prosecutor explaining that the Parents of the Year not only bought their 15-year-old a semiautomatic handgun for an early Christmas present, they blew off school reports that young Ethan was exhibiting disturbing behavior and, on the day of the shooting, came to school for a conference and refused to take their boy home. And the school, for its part, didn’t exactly cover itself with glory by allowing him to go back to class without searching this backpack or locker.

This case is going to be with us for quite some time. I also have a feeling the gun people are simply biding their time and waiting until some of the spotlight has dimmed before they Well-Actually into a defense of the Crumbleys. It’s gonna be ugly.

Time will reveal more, but I’ll say, just to wake up on Saturday and see the entire family arrayed in mugshots, all occupants of the same county jail, was surreal.

Then I ran my Saturday-grind errands, had dinner with a friend and watched U-M win the Big 10 championship. So it was a good weekend after all.

Now it’s the week, and I have no energy. Half the people I know have Covid now, so I’m hoping it’s not a prelude to that. Pfingers crossed and pfaith in Pfizer, anyway. I’ve been careful, but not 2020-careful.

Fresh thread for now, and we’ll hope for something more stimulating in a day or two.

Jeez, what a fucking week. The local news is still filled with the Oxford school shooting, as you might imagine. I wish I could be impressed by the journalism, but it’s just depressing. A local PR maven took to his blog to proclaim that breaking national news here always causes local reporters to rise to the occasion and “punch above their weight.” Gotta say, I don’t see it so far. Chasing breaking news is 101-level stuff: Go to the press conferences, knock doors, that sort of thing. I’m not seeing incompetence, but brilliance hasn’t arrived yet.

Maybe on Sunday, you never know.

But the news out of the shooting has been all, ALL bad. The four dead students. The ones still fighting for their lives, with chest wounds and similar trauma. And the shooter, oy. Kind of a moonfaced kid with glasses, young-looking for his age, an only child as far as anyone can tell. He lawyered up immediately, and so did the parents, and for good reason – the gun was bought only four days previous. Yes, on Black Friday.

(“Do gun stores do Black Friday sales?” I asked Alan. “Are you kidding? Of course,” he replied, and followed up with links.)

Not only that, it was apparently not secured in any way in the household; the Crumbleys (that’s their name) were leave-the-guns-lying-around sorts of people. With a disturbed adolescent in the house, because that was another detail: the school had spoken to young Ethan, the shooter, about some “concerning behavior” on Monday, and on Tuesday both parents came in for a conference that morning. Ethan had the Sig Sauer 9mm semiautomatic in his backpack, and put it to use later that day.

So far, it’s just one depressing fact after another dropping, but as always, our state legislature goes the extra mile in dipshittery:

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan Rep. Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers) announced Wednesday a plan to allow teachers and school staff to arm themselves.

…“School and state authorities must be fully prepared if, God forbid, another violent attacker targets students at school,” said Carra. “Teachers and staff care for their students’ safety, and some of these professionals are willing to use their gun or taser if a tragic need for school defense arises. I am putting together a plan to enable educators to protect their students with lawful weapons, stored securely for an emergency we pray never comes again.”

Thanks, asshole.

I feel bad because I don’t feel sad. Instead, I am simmering with anger. How many years have we been doing this? My first mass shooting was…I guess Charles Whitman, but I was a kid then. The first one I remember as an adult was the McDonald’s massacre in 1984. Then the Luby’s shooting, in 1991. Then Columbine, Virginia Tech, and oh wait, can’t forget the post office shootings, which originated right here in Metro Detroit** (like carjacking!) and gave us the term going postal to describe titanic anger followed by violence.

Today I found a two-day-old Washington Post piece about the Oxford shooting that had more detail than I’ve seen so far. A girl in her AP Statistics class had bullets coming through the classroom door, so she handed out the closest weapon-like object at hand – calculators. Another girl crouched next to a toilet in the bathroom, holding hands with two others. And this was the reaction of our state Senate majority leader:

WATCH | @9and10News @SenMikeShirkey asked about what action people can expect after the #OxfordHigh shooting, outside of 'thoughts and prayers.'

"If we get obsessed with eliminating all risks, we will then develop and evolve into a country we won't recognize."

SOUND⤵️ pic.twitter.com/QLTdhTGFYF

— Eric Lloyd (@EricLloyd) December 1, 2021

I hate to say it, but this country is so fucked. Personally, I’d welcome living a country I don’t recognize, maybe one where people don’t throw shit fits over wearing a piece of cloth in the name of public health in a grocery store, or where children don’t have to consider whether a Texas Instruments calculator is what stands between them and death. But that will never happen. Nothing ever changes. Time to move to Barcelona.

I hate to leave you with a bummer tonight. I’m headed to some craft shows this weekend, just to see pretty things and breathe a little. In the meantime, another France photo, the load-out of a classic car show near the Louvre.

Later, all.

** Hank, in comments, is correct. The first one Wikipedia notes was 1970, but it was targeted, in that the shooter went looking for one individual and shot him. What we later came to consider the mass, untargeted shooting with many victims started in Oklahoma, with 14 dead.

You may not see much of me midweek, for lo, I am going to the Rolling Stones concert Monday night here in Detroit.

Don’t ask me why. I don’t know why. No, I do: A friend asked if I’d like to go, and I said sure, why not. At the time, we thought we were buying tickets for a summer 2020 show, and I liked the symmetry: 25 years after the first (and only) time I’d seen the Stones. Five years after Kate’s first (and only) time seeing the Stones, both of us in the days after our respective high-school graduations. I figured it would be the last time (maybe the last time, I don’t know), but why not? Have the Rolling Stones ever disappointed us? Who cares if everyone is old? Isn’t that a triumph in and of itself? Isn’t that worth an evening of my life?

So I’m going to see the Stones with two friends. Kate, flying in from a weekend gig in Seattle, might be there with another friend — depends on whether everything is on time. Our seats won’t be close, but we’ll be under the same roof, and that’s symmetry enough.

But I’ll probably be very tired on Tuesday, fading into Wednesday. You never know.

On to more depressing topics: There’s a missing man in East Lansing, a 19-year-old who disappeared the weekend of the MSU-UM game two weeks ago. Last seen leaving a dorm. He wasn’t a student there, but at another school, in Grand Rapids. Since the last anyone saw or heard from him, his phone hasn’t been used, ditto his credit cards. As you can imagine, his family and friends are devastated, and there are prayer vigils, searches and fundraising for rewards and such. You can’t give up, they say, and I absolutely agree. It’s the not knowing that’s the worst, they say, and I agree with that, too. But I have a feeling I know where he is, and it’s not good. You tell me what your conclusion would be, factoring in that the football game is always a blowout party weekend, that the red dot is the dorm he left to walk back to his car and his phone last pinged on Beal Street:

I think he’s in the river. It’s terrible.

I can’t go further than speculation, because I don’t know the depth of the river there, and how hard it is to get to from the roadbed. But it puts me in mind of the deaths at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse some years back:

Between 1997 and 2006, La Crosse experienced tragedy after tragedy as 8 separate college students were found to have drowned in the Mississippi River. The deaths, contrary to some “serial killer” theories put forth, were determined to be the results of excessive drinking combined with a close physical proximity to Riverside Park, bordering the Mississippi River.

You don’t say. The 2006 victim had a blood-alcohol level of .32. I was thinking of these deaths when I worked on the college-drinking project for Bridge some years back. That year, there had already been three in Michigan – a Chinese freshman, a girl, who died of alcohol poisoning before classes even started (BAC >.40); a kid who thought it would be fun to cross the glass roof on Nickels Arcade in Ann Arbor (.20), and fell through; and a weekend visitor to Central Michigan who got lost walking late at night and stumbled into a pond in a garden and drowned (can’t recall his BAC, but he was drunk).

One might think, “But why would he go down to the river? That makes no sense.” But drunks often do things that make no sense. That’s one of the side effects, you drinkers might remember from the last time you were overserved. As I recall from our reporting, the single most dangerous time for college-drinking misadventures is the first semester of freshman year. All of this lines up with the missing 19-year-old here.

Rivers flow, and bodies flow with them. Cold water holds them down for a while, but eventually they get caught on something, stop their downstream progress and, in time, reach the surface. I expect his parents will get him home, soon enough. You always hope for a miracle and who knows, maybe he’s in Florida, having slipped the bonds of civilization’s expectations and lighting out for the territories. But I doubt it.

When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

On a cheerier note, random French picture, this one sunset at Arles after a long, dreary storm:

I’ll say hi to Mick and Keef for y’all. Back whenever.

One of the pleasant side effects of travel is a continued interest in the places you’ve visited. I’m not going ape over French politics, but I started following an English-language website called the Reykjavik Grapevine after our trip there and will check in from time to time. This week’s top story: Tragedy at Reynisfjara.

No, I don’t know how to pronounce it. But we went there. It’s a magnificent place. Here’s 19-year-old Kate, looking like just another crag among many:

The crags are part of the attraction there, and the caves, but mostly it’s the beach, which is comprised of millions of the smoothest black pebbles you ever saw:

This is the southern tip of Iceland, and the sea is ferocious and unpredictable there. There are signs — so many signs — in multiple languages — so many languages — warning of “sneaker” waves, which live up to their name, and can sweep those who come too close off their feet and, quickly, out to sea.

And yet, YouTube is full of videos of tourists walking right up to the edge of the foam, ha ha, then getting hit by a sneaker wave and, within seconds, in dire peril. Someone usually is able to get them out. This week, it didn’t work. Someone died.

The Reykjavik Grapevine interviewed a tourist guide who often takes groups there:

“Once people are off the bus, as a guide, I always go down there,” David told the Grapevine. “I’m there the whole time. I go down ahead. My standard thing is I tell them how dangerous it is, and I tell people that where the waves are finishing on the beach, you give it at least 10 metres. You don’t go any closer and you always, always keep an eye on the ocean. I tell them that I will be there, and I don’t expect them to go any further than I say. I’ll tell them that they will see people doing really crazy stuff; playing chicken with the ocean, thinking it’s fun. You are not sheep. Use your brain, use your instinct, and listen to my words. To this day, I’ve had a few people get wet feet and that’s it, and I’ve been taking people there for over 15 years.”

While he says that this is common practice for experienced guides, there are limitations to just how much power they have over their groups.

“The problem with being a guide is, I have no authority,” he said. “After the last big incident, we’d be down there, screaming at people to get away from the ocean. Some people listen to us, but then there’s some people who will confront us and say ‘What are you, police?’ They’ll be swearing at us, telling us to f*ck off and all this.”

Who among us hasn’t done something stupid? But I look at this and think: Man, swept out to sea in the far north Atlantic while on vacation is a pretty stupid — but undeniably dramatic! — way to go.

Speaking of decidedly less dramatic passings, I’m remiss in not mentioning the loss of Ann Hilton Fisher’s mother, Miriam. Ann comments here, but not often, and is far more active on social media, particularly Facebook. Over the years, I’ve been charmed by her stories about Miriam, who is — was — something of a love dervish, serving her community (Marquette, Mich.), her church (First Presbyterian) and her friends and family. She was a firecracker to the end of her life; one of my favorite pictures is of her and Ann swimming in Lake Superior not many years ago, as the last of the winter’s ice bobs around them. She was one of those women who took in boarders at her house, students at Northern Michigan University, and some of their stories about her abundant kindness will move you to tears. Anyway, Miriam finally went to her (surely abundant) reward at 96 while we were in France, and her memorial was this week. There’s a site called Padlet that compiles all the ephemera of these events, and Miriam’s is worth poking around in. I wish it allowed hyperlinking to individual bits of it, but you can’t have everything. If you control-F to “Carrier,” you’ll find one of her boarder’s testimonies, which I think gives you a sense of what Miriam was all about. I also loved her story called “The Gift of Water,” about her life as the child of a missionary working in Iran.

OK, then. We’re enjoying a warm day that will end in rain, and then Indian summer will be over for good, they promise us. Had to happen eventually. Good weekend, all.

People tell me I need to be empathetic, to meet people where they are, to not give up hope for our divided country. Then I read something like this, a comment Dexter left in the last thread:

When a farmer at his roadside vegetable stand began chatting small talk to me last August, he began loudly with all Trump supporters’ talk. “We all know Trump is our President”, and every other point, to the point, even, that the Covid19 is a hoax. I paid him for my goods and just wanted away from this maniac. I told him calmly of Carla Lee’s death from Covid19. “You mean she had the FLU!!!” he blurted out.

I found another place to buy my sweet corn. The gall that bastard showed, just after telling me he was a lay preacher in several little churches there.

And then I think: Nah, fuck these turd-juggling idiots.

I just read this in the NYT, which I am confident that farmer does not read. This is David Leonhardt writing here:

(The Covid vaccines) proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged. I have covered that gap in two newsletters — one this summer, one last month — and today’s newsletter offers an update.

The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

And I am thinking very cruel thoughts right now, which I am not proud of, but honestly, what else can you do with people like this? A guy I know has a number of doctor friends who serve rural areas in Michigan’s Thumb, and hears this stuff all the time. “I’m sorry, but your father has Covid and we’re putting him on a ventilator.” “Daddy has the FLU, there ain’t no COVID!” You can lead a horse to water, etc.

How was everybody’s weekend? Mine was fine. Watched two movies — “Pig” and “The Green Knight,” as different as can be, but both worth watch, although I don’t recommend the second after a full meal and a couple glasses of wine. It’s…strange and contemplative. But beautiful. And “Pig” is similarly unexpected in almost every way. Good to see Alex Wolff, half of the Naked Brothers Band, which Kate used to watch on Nickelodeon. We also went out to a Detroit News farewell for one of Alan’s old colleagues, and that was nice. I also re-upped staples at Costco. Good to know we’re entering winter with all the laundry detergent we’ll ever need.

And it’s a beautiful day. What more can you ask of a Monday?

Another random France picture, below, of a volume of foot-fetish photography we spotted at a flea market, along with my own foot, which would not pass muster with Elmer Batters because I stop using nail polish after Labor Day. But it was published by Taschen, known for their outre subject matter and superior photo reproduction. The price started at 10 Euro, and immediately dropped to five. Reader, we bought it, shlepped it home and now it sits on our coffee table. It’s porny in places, but honestly, almost all the attention really is paid to feet. Foreward by Dian Hanson, described by her ex-boyfriend Robert Crumb as “sort of an Albert Schweitzer of filthy perverts.”

Oh, yesterday’s election was dreamy. Like one of those dreams where you keep telling yourself wake-up-wake-up-it’s-just-a-dream but it keeps going on and on and on. Which is to say: Abysmal turnout, yet again. Thirty-eight voters all day. When that happens, you find yourself staring at the animation on the voter-assist terminal screen. It recycles every three seconds. There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, so it played 1,200 times in 60 minutes. Times…13 hours of voting. It played at least 15,600 times.

I think I watched 12,000 of them. It was in my eyeline.

This is my last year in this precinct, I think. Next year I want a new assignment. Absentee vote-counting, maybe. The same insanely long shift in a mask – because we will be wearing masks forever and ever, that’s clear to me now, get used to the smell of Purell – but constant work, no idleness.

Every so often we’d remark on the lack of voters. I’d say, “Mayor’s race a foregone conclusion. City council the only real races. Low-income precinct. It’s just not an exciting election.” And one of my fellow poll workers would say, every time, “With legalization of psychedelics on the ballot? How can you SAY that?” And I’d laugh, and watch the animation 500 more times, and two hours later, we’d have the same exchange.

It wasn’t a good day for Democrats. I’m not an optimist. I think, in three more years, we’ll have a Trump-Biden rematch (because Biden won’t yield, because…I don’t know why). Trump will win, and American democracy as we’ve known it all our lives will be effectively over. Is that too strong? Maybe so, but you know what the Michigan Secretary of State did this week? Announced that starting soon, non-binary residents can choose X on their drivers’ licenses, instead of M or F. What a victory. What timing. She ran on reducing the wait in license branches to 30 minutes or less. Then the pandemic hit, and they went to an appointment system, which she announced would now be permanent. However, appointments are impossible to get unless you know how to game the system (basically, go on the site at 10 seconds past 8 a.m. or whenever the system goes live and try to snag one of the same-day appointments). So now, instead of waiting in line for an hour to renew your driver’s license (which can now have an X on it!!!!), you can have the experience of sitting in your own home, renewing your driver’s license the way you used to buy U2 tickets.

But in all of this, it’s key to remember that the other thing the secretary of state does? Run elections.

Just once, I want Democrats to behave as though they understand what the stakes are, and stop behaving as though saying “pregnant people” is some sort of landmark in civil rights. And stop handing their opponents the clubs to beat them with.

To be smarter, in other words.

It’s time for me to counter the degradation of all that sitting and snack-nibbling with a workout. Discuss.

I hate to say this, but we’re in for some very very bad elections in the future, thanks to you-know-who. This week, the Michigan secretary of state suspended a township clerk from running the election next week. Why? Because she’s all-in on the Big Lie, or is at least Big Lie-curious enough that she wouldn’t participate in routine equipment checks, required by law before the polls open:

(The suspended clerk) said she is worried about the security of the tabulators — including in relation to their performance in the November 2020 presidential election — and believes they were connected to or had the ability to be connected to the internet in past elections.

This is a Big Lie cornerstone, especially in Michigan, where one of the local grifters calls himself a “cybersecurity expert” and has been running around the state saying he could tell the tabulators were connected to the internet because he saw some cable, or something.

I ran the tabulator the last couple of elections. If you’ve ever taken a test where you filled in bubbles on an answer sheet, you know how it works: It’s set up to read certain patterns and assign votes accordingly. In Antrim County, where the infamous OMG-how-is-Biden-winning-in-this-red-county screwup happened last year, it was an inputting error, quickly corrected; essentially, someone told the machine the wrong pattern to read.

You open the polls by plugging it in, starting it up and printing an initial tape (called the zero tape). When the polls close, there’s a shutdown procedure, the totals tapes are printed, and then and only then do you take a small cellular modem out of its cubbyhole on the machine, plug it in and transmit the returns via cell signal back to the Board of Elections. Then you shut it down, follow all the closing procedures, etc., and push it back against the wall, to be picked up by the Board of Elections workers the next day.

This was all explained to the clerk by the state’s elections chief, of course:

Michigan election protocol prohibits connections to the internet, and Hillsdale County has denied any connectivity between the machine and the internet. Brater also notified Scott in an Oct. 15 letter that, while the tabulator has a modem physically attached, “the modem is disabled while polls are open.”

“Tabulator programming does not allow any modem communications to occur while voting is in progress; the secure transmission can occur only after the election is complete and the tabulator tape has been printed,” Brater wrote. “Additionally, data transmission is one-way.”

What’s more, all those paper ballots the tabulator was reading? They’re preserved. In Antrim County, once the tabulating error was corrected, the clerk held a hand recount, and had the correct totals checked and double-checked. All the tabulator is, is a set of eyes.

Doesn’t this sound reasonable? And yet, the Big Lie continues. Now, imagine scores of clerks like this, aided and abetted by the true-believer canvassers who are stepping into vacant slots all over the state. Imagine a future where every election that a Republican doesn’t win, they just say FRAUD and refuse to accept the results.

And we’re supposed to “understand” these people? You maybe see now why I’m a little nervous these days.

The architecture of the present crisis and the ominous waypoints ahead are clear. No matter the outcome of the next Presidential election, the GOP nominee, likely Trump, will refuse to concede a clear defeat. Allegations of fraud will be made without evidence.

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) October 26, 2021

This tweet is the first of a thread that gets worse as it goes on. Read it. Have a nice day!

My, I’ve been neglecting you folks since my return, no? I plead…jet lag. I always thought it was easier to travel west than east, but my experience is the opposite. I’ve been flattened with fatigue by 8 p.m., wide awake at 3 a.m., and these are not conditions ripe for productivity. My brain was so confused that for the first couple days, I’d doze off, then wake up and think, for a few seconds, “Man, this room in Paris looks a lot like my own back home.” That’s how tired I was.

Add to that the other chores that go with returning from a month away — sorting a pile of mail, paying bills, restocking the fridge, telling 1,000 people “yeah, we had a great time, it was just great, really great,” etc. and you can maybe see why I’m a little discombobulated at the moment.

Oh, and going back to work, and having to hit the ground running because I deprived my colleagues of 20 percent of the workforce for a month.

But I seem to have handled most of that stuff now, so. Back to the grind here.

Confession: I’ve been doomscrolling again. Talk me down.

It starts with this message from you-know-who. It’s really astonishing, in that it is almost entirely untrue. I mean, all the words, except for “rally in Michigan yesterday.” It wasn’t even that big of a rally. And then he says:

Detroit, considered for many years to be one of the most corrupt places in the United States for elections (and many other things!), had large-scale irregularities so much so that two officials, at great risk to themselves and their families, refused to certify the results, and were sadly threatened.

Nope. There were no large-scale irregularities. Much hot air was puffed over “unbalanced precincts,” but in truth, all were out of balance by fewer than five votes, which totaled fewer than 500 out of more than 200K cast in the November election. (We’ve been over it and over it here, so I won’t belabor the point.) But what kills me is the fixation on Detroit, which isn’t even where Trump lost Michigan. He actually outperformed his 2016 totals in the city, by a narrow margin. But he was slaughtered in the suburbs, in Metro Detroit but also in Grand Rapids. White people, especially white women, stampeded out of the GOP in 2020, at least at the top of the ticket. You don’t hear him talking about Oakland County, because he can beat the BLACK Detroit BLACK corruption BLACK bass drum and the message comes through loud and clear.

Again, though, we know all this. And yet, to this day, I see emails and comments on stories and elsewhere, echoing this bullshit:

Wasn’t it a fact that aside from other things, there were far more votes than voters? Even the RINOs on the Senate Committee found 289,866 absentee ballots that were sent to people who never requested them, “something that would be illegal.”

Nope, it’s not a fact. None of it. But as our own Jeff Gill mentioned when I tweeted about this last week, this is how the Trumpian rhetoric is going — simply unhitched from reality.

All of which would be easier to ignore if it weren’t driving policy. In Michigan, the GOP is replacing troublesome canvassers on the county boards, with “troublesome” indicating “able to read numbers and interpret their meaning.” The canvasser in Wayne County who first refused to certify was bounced just last week for one who flatly said he wouldn’t have certified the 2020 vote count. Because, that’s why.

I wish I could find a quote from Hillary Clinton, something she said after the August 2020 primary here, when there was, again, a hoo-hah raised over unbalanced precincts. It’s true that too many were unbalanced, but again, most were by very small numbers, attributable to human error, and didn’t affect any races. Having worked the polls now for three elections, I can tell you the procedures are filled with fiddly bits and little details and detours and side roads to cover every conceivable voting situation, and when the people working the precinct are doing it once, maybe twice a year, it’s a miracle that any of them come out balanced. In August, I caught two or three errors in my own precinct that were caused by nothing more than confusion or assumptions made in error. We easily corrected them, but still. It happens.

And Hillary said something to the effect of, “You watch, this unbalanced-precincts thing was a test run. They’re going to try it again.” And what do you know, they did. I have Googled and Googled, and can’t find the source, but I clearly remember her talking about it.

So bottom line: I’m waiting on 2022 with some trepidation. The talking-down I’m giving myself is that this is a very loud minority who will not succeed. I hope. Fingers crossed. Check me after next year. I may be selling my worldly goods and investigating expat life in a pleasant climate.

But for now: Back to work! Glad to give you all a new thread.