As we head into Thanksgiving, and cast about for things to be thankful for in the midst of things we really aren’t, a few words about nothing in particular.

I have felt so tired lately, enough so that I did a little self-inventory. The older you get, the more likely tiredness can be traced to bad living. I’m still eating more or less well, maybe an excess of sugar this week (birthdays), still getting exercise, still sleeping more or less on schedule. It finally occurred to me the problem isn’t tiredness, it’s tension – the constant whipsawing between resigned long-term optimism for the future with the shrieking WE ARE DOOMED voice inside my head. It’s exhausting.

I have to relax. Current events aren’t helping.

Just a few statements of plain fact here: For the city of Detroit to recover, all agree that the woeful state of its public education must be addressed. For years now, the traditional Detroit public schools have been hemorrhaging students, not only due to population loss but also because charter schools have been allowed to grow unrestricted in Michigan, and they are draining students away. The problem is, there is no rhyme or reason to where and when they open (and close); the free market can sort out toothpaste fairly easily, but education of blameless children is another matter, who suffer when there’s market chaos. Forget also whatever you might believe about charters being inherently better than public schools, which is true in some places — where they’re tightly regulated, hmm — but not here. Detroit students in charters score only a little higher on standardized tests than their traditional-schools counterparts. Which is to say, abysmally. So, earlier this year, various city and education advocates came up with a plan to put an education commission in place that would have some braking and veto power on charters, just in the city of Detroit, so that schools could be located where they are most needed, and where the poorest children, in the poorest neighborhoods, the ones most likely to have no other choice, might be spared having to attend this terrible charter school, to cite but one example. Sort of like the certificate-of-need program for health care.

The plan was attached to a bill in Lansing to bail out the failing public system, which has been under state emergency management for 12 years and has, shall we say, failed to thrive. The governor approved, the state Senate approved, and the bill went to the House. The wealthy, powerful DeVos family did not approve, and their various policy operations went to work on it. The House gutted it, excising the commission, sent it back to the Senate, and eventually they caved, too.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your next Secretary of Education, most likely.

I have to be careful what I write here, but as I said, these are simply facts. The Freep ran a biting column about this situation, and linked at the top is Betsy DeVos’ response, which you can read.

I think I’m going to take the rest of the week off and just read and think and try to relax. There’s no going back, after all. Here are some links you might find useful, if Sherri and Jolene haven’t already posted them all.

The WashPost fact checker offers a helpful guide on spotting fake news.

Michael Kruse visits Trump country in Pennsylvania post-election and asks the winners how they’re feeling:

So this year, as the divisive, repellent 2016 presidential campaign came to a head, Cambria County—whiter, poorer and less educated than the nation as a whole—was ripe for Trump’s blunt, populist message. The most important word in his catchphrase, for people around here, was not make or America or even great. It was again. They changed their party affiliation in droves.

And Charles Pierce, as he is wont to do, takes them apart. Both pieces are worth your while.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

My Scarlett O’Hara face is not exactly firm right now. There are moments of groaning and pulling covers over my head. Like when I read something like this:

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday told a group of about 25 television executives and anchors that he wants a “cordial” and “productive” relationship with the media, according to one source in the room, but he still aired some grievances during the off-the-record gathering in Trump Tower.

The source said the meeting started with a typical Trump complaint about the “dishonest media,” and that he specifically singled out CNN and NBC News for example as “the worst.”

He also complained about photos of himself that NBC used that he found unflattering, the source said.

Trump turned to NBC News President Deborah Turness at one point, the source said, and told her the network won’t run a nice picture of him, instead choosing “this picture of me,” as he made a face with a double chin. Turness replied that they had a “very nice” picture of him on their website at the moment.

An infant. A child. Holy shit.

I have a big staff meeting tomorrow and don’t really feel like writing anything other than my end-of-year self-evaluation. Also, I have to see what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Later!

One of those days today. It was our family Thanksgiving/birthday dinner. Alan is working on the holiday itself, and we have no guests to invite to an evening feast, and with Kate now a vegetarian, it seems silly to make a turkey for two people. So it’ll likely be grilled cheese sandwiches and a couple of movies on Thursday. As the sole cook and baker, I can tell you it was a real shitshow. Every pot boiled over. I neglected to add baking soda to the cake, and the resulting pair of rock-like layers had to be pitched. The ensuing mess was epic — I think I did dishes five times — but it finally wobbled from the kitchen to the table. Fat roast chicken, mashed potatoes, Asian green beans and a big side of mac and cheese (for the vegetarian). And a lopsided, but homemade, birthday cake.

Plus a bottle of champagne. You really can’t wreck a dinner utterly and completely if there’s champagne. That might be the only smart call I made.

And now it’s Sunday night. The president-elect was up at 6 a.m., tweeting about “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.”

I watched parts of @nbcsnl Saturday Night Live last night. It is a totally one-sided, biased show – nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2016

I’m so far past the can’t-even stage, I don’t know what to say. Except maybe this: When Axl Rose is a voice of reason? I can’t even can’t even:

"Hamilton Cast harassed Pence." Do u ever stop whining?An apology?Seriously?!U won,this is the job,get on with it or get out of the kitchen.

— Axl Rose (@axlrose) November 19, 2016

And now I’m kind of depressed, but it might be the end of the champagne talking. Or it might be that I just realized how long four years really is.

We’ve now lived more than a week in Trump’s America, and I’m considering the limits of constant outrage.

One of the most dispiriting aspects of this election, for me, was how ineffective conventional journalism was at warning voters what they were buying with a vote for Trump. Say what you want about NPR, but the NYT and WashPost did spectacular work digging into the president-elect’s shady business practices, his failure to pay income taxes, his fake charity, his pussy-grabbing, all of it. If you didn’t know these things about the man before you pulled the lever for him, you simply weren’t paying attention.

If it made any difference, it didn’t make enough to keep him out of the White House. And so now we confront the most bizarre presidential transition in recent memory, and the stories are falling into our laps like ripe fruit. Top-secret clearances for the Trump kids, check. Press release on Ivanka’s bracelet, check. The man who won the White House and now doesn’t seem to want to actually live there, check. (I could look up links for all these, but I’m not. You can easily find them yourself. That’s sort of my point.) The new president has made it very clear: He will be running a kleptocracy, even feels he has a mandate to do so.

And with the exception of some demonstrations here and there, the country seems pretty fine with that.

So the question might be: Where do we go from here? Is this information so utterly irrelevant to millions of voters that journalists will simply stop gathering and presenting it? Or do we keep it up, at the very real risk that every bit of it can be used by the Trump camp as evidence of the terrible, terrible “bias” he labors under? And with the additional risk that with such a firehose of information in their faces day after day, most readers will simply go numb and tune out?

I’m not going to keep you in suspense. Of course we’re still going to do it. The job seeks an audience, but it doesn’t require one. But I worry about the numbness factor, and many other things, as well, including the whipsaw effect I feel almost every day. I think, OK, it’s going to be bad, but we can handle it, and then two hours later a surrogate floats the idea of registering Muslim immigrants, y’know, like they did with the Japanese in World War II, and my brain explodes.

I worry about pretty much everything these days. We haven’t had a literally shameless person in such high office before, not for years upon years. It’s terrifying.

But the right tone has to be struck. And it’s hard to sound an alarm with any nuance. It’s either ringing or it’s not. A few weeks ago I stood at a Detroit bus stop for 40 minutes or so, while a tired alarm at a long-closed business nearby wailed and wailed. “Do you take this bus every day?” I asked a woman. She nodded.

“How long has that alarm been ringing?”

“What alarm?”

So you see what we’re up against. How long before we become that alarm?

Something to think about.

A reader asked me, earlier this week, if I would make good on my pledge to offer some advice on how to tell the difference between real and fake news sites. As in so many things, it turns out that if you wait long enough, the internet solves the problem for you. Here’s a helpful Google doc, updated regularly, full of fake, distorted or clickbait-crap news from both the left and right. Earlier today, it had a list, but the list appears to be gone, but not permanently — it’s being updated, the author writes. In the meantime, it has some practical advice about common tells, including one that nearly tripped me up a while back, the “.com.co” suffix on URLs.

But here’s one from earlier this week. The site was called TheRightists.com. I’m not linking because hitting these sites, even to browse, feels risky to me; it always explodes a million pop-under windows and sets the laptop fans to whirring. But note the screenshot:

David Brooks, really? Assassination? So harsh. I read the story. There’s a paragraph from a recent Brooks column (I think. Anyway, it sounds like him.), followed by one where Brooks says, “dude.” I can more imagine my dead grandmother calling someone dude than Mr. Bobo Himself. This sent me to the About Us tab, which exploded more pop-unders and revealed this:

Oh, OK.

Note the ads. So many ads. The worse the ads, the less reliable the site. This is simply a given:

Meanwhile, for pure slow-burn irritation, you can’t beat these Silicon Valley d-bags, can you? These pieces, one from the Nieman Lab, one from MTV.com, illuminate our brave new world quite well.

It’s not enough that these people ruined my business. Then they ruined what replaced it, such as it was.

I think I better go to bed. Thanksgiving week ahead! We have so much to be thankful for, don’t we? Have a great weekend.

My workday today was precisely, I mean to the minute, 12 hours long. I rolled down the driveway at 5:50 a.m. and back up at 5:50 p.m. To be sure, I made a short detour to Ann Arbor to drop an amp off to a bassist I know there, but the rest of it was talking and driving.

This was the way west:

Super moonset through the windshield, sunrise in the rearview.

As you can imagine, I was off the internet pretty much all day, and I’m exhausted. But I think it’s important to share this, and share it widely:

On Monday, November 14, six days after Donald Trump’s election as the next president of the United States, and on the day that Trump had selected Steve Bannon to be his strategic adviser, I came home to a letter addressed to me personally, at my home.

The envelope contained four pages’ worth of anti-Semitic propaganda printed on three sheets of paper.

Here we go. Again.

Tomorrow I have a full day of reporting, complete with five hours in the car, and I have a couple decks of PowerPoint slides to get through beforehand, and… oh yeah — I have to leave at 6 a.m.

To reward myself in advance, I went on a kayaking jaunt Monday afternoon, to watch the sun set and the moon rise. The supermoon, in fact. It did not disappoint, but didn’t last long — we got maybe five or 10 minutes of a huge orange grapefruit before it slipped behind cloud cover and we paddled home. It’s difficult to photograph the moon with an iPhone, so here’s the sunset:

And that’s it for me, today. The week will unclench after Wednesday, I hope. I could use a break. We all could.

OK, I’m back. Thanks for keeping the conversation going in my absence, although my eyes were starting to glaze over there toward the end of the comment thread. But that goes with what I’d like to say, and it’s this:

No more memes, lefty America. Memes are a cheap, easy way to defer actual thought. When you see one, nod and think “I’m just going to hit this Share button,” don’t. In fact, I won’t say “no more,” but maybe “far less” social media in general. It’s a great way to catch up with old friends, to reach a lot of people quickly and cheaply, to just fritter away a lunch hour if you don’t have a magazine. But it’s a piss-poor way to stay informed, and its crack-like effect on our brains is something we should be deeply suspicious of.

And look at what social media has begotten: Slacktivism, the sort of feel-good, do-nothing gestures that help no one but ourselves. Change your profile picture to “support” the victims of the Paris attacks, or “raise awareness” of this or that. Check in to Standing Rock to throw the FBI off the scent of the protestors who are there. And so on. Fuck that shit. Use it if you must to see what people are talking about, but learn to tell the difference between original sources of news and the aggregators and rewriters who attach themselves to real journalists like agenda-bearing lampreys. Sites that have and pay actual reporters to knock on doors and make phone calls might not always tell you what you want to hear, but that’s going to be far more useful information than what the lampreys give you, spun and crafted to match all your prejudices. You have enough of those. If you have trouble telling which sites are which, I can offer some tips.

No more open letters. For the love of God, will someone put a sock in Aaron Sorkin’s mouth? Open letters are the original concern trolling, a way to direct a high-minded lecture, ostensibly to one person but really to everybody else in the room, to polish your own halo because you are so, so worried. Just stop it.

No more disruptions. Go ahead and protest — it’s the American way — but be advised that every time you shut down a light-rail line or plug a freeway, you are providing a useful video clip to Breitbart or InfoWars or whatever other shitbag propagandist is interested. And you are inconveniencing people who just need to get to work, where they may be doing something very important, like delivering babies or cleaning bathrooms. Fuck your agenda, whatever it is; respect people’s time. The same goes for vandalism, window-smashing and whatever other bad business a mob can get up to. It’s the very definition of counterproductivity.

No more hoax hate crimes. I know, I know — there have been dozens since last Wednesday, but take it from me as a journalist and as a human being with a working brain who has been around for several summers that at least some of them will be proven hoaxes. Humans crave attention, and some crave it enough to try to stage these things. We all had no problem seeing through the woman who, in 2008, claimed she’d been assaulted by supporters of Barack Obama, who wrote “B” and “O” on her cheeks, only backward, you know, like you’d see it in a mirror? Be suspicious of the ones that don’t pass the smell test, like the ones that went up on social-media sites (see above) before police were called, if they were called at all. Like the ones where there were cameras and witnesses all around, but somehow none captured or saw the incident. Like the ones where someone’s car is “vandalized” with conveniently non-damaging soap on the windows. I stress: Some of these attacks are real. Yes. Real. But some are not, and every one that isn’t undermines 10 that actually happened.

No more fear. Many of you may be members of groups that have very good reason to fear the coming presidency, but screw your courage to the sticking place and be brave. Find others in the same boat, organize, tend your networks. But the more you quake in fear and tell the world how fearful you are, the more time you waste, time that could be spent making progress. Remember the popular vote. They have the power stick right now, but if they start using it to club people, others are going to speak up. This isn’t Nazi Germany, for god’s sake, and even if it were, don’t you want to go down fighting? I do. I remember reading a story about Meyer Lansky, the Jewish mobster, and his lawyer said that if the Jews produced more men like him, there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust. You can argue that, certainly, but I take his point.

As for me, I’m going to do my job. If the people of rural Michigan voted for Trump because they thought he would make their lives better, well then I’m going to be monitoring the progress. I’m going to keep an eye on our Muslim population here, and see if anyone’s stirring the shit to harass or assault people there. I’m going to keep my eyes open, my powder dry and my bullshit detector turned up to 11. Useful skills for the coming era include an open mind, a fair and just heart and a willingness to confront one’s own assumptions — all of them. I’m not giving anyone a pass, but I’m done feeling sorry for myself.

Remember “Gone With the Wind?” I often call it the best bad novel in the English language, and I’ve read it several times. The scene in the movie that ends the first half — “as God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again” — plays differently in the book. Scarlett has just arrived at Tara, after the terrifying trip from burning Atlanta, only to find her home ruined, her father enfeebled, her mother dead. She walks to a neighboring plantation in search of food and finds a row of radishes in the garden, about the only thing left, eagerly unearths one and eats it, only to throw it back up almost immediately. She collapses in the garden and swoons for a long while. And then she pulls herself together:

When she arose at last and saw again the black ruins of Twelve Oaks, her head was raised high and something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever. What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. And, as Scarlett settled the heavy basket across her arm, she had settled her own mind and her own life.

Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to look back.

That’s way too dramatic for what we’re talking about here, absolutely granted. But that’s kind of how I feel now. Time to settle the heavy basket over our arm and go forward. We’re going to need everyone to help.

Still not ready to form coherent thoughts yet, so here, have a bunch of links.

I read this Jeb Lund piece Tuesday, marveling at the pungency of its language…

Why rail against the latest Donald Trump atrocity when simply waiting a day or two would see two or three more spatter across the collective consciousness like a goose shitting off a balcony? Donald Trump lies every other breath, with the mechanical dependency of a barfly sucking a Doral to offset the flavor of $2 well drinks.

…and thinking that whatever else this candidacy was good for, it was good for some pretty good writing. I read it early enough in the day that polls were still open. Well. Four more years of this, I guess.

So we got that going for us.

Little else, though. Lately I’m thinking of Ivanka, a woman whose acreage I want to see sown with salt, and all her works cursed. Maybe because I live among her minions.

Finally, I’ve been thinking about the young men who support Trump. I’m not sure where I’m going with that. We’ll see.

…I felt less sad and upset after 9/11. Everything gets more difficult for us (meaning me and mine) from here on out — work, finances, everything. I hope this isn’t going-on-2 a.m. drama, but we’re now in uncharted waters, and there be many, many monsters about.

I HAVE to get some sleep, because it’ll be battle stations at work tomorrow and god knows what thereafter. Talk amongst yourselves, and I’ll be back when the well refills.

You know what you have to do today, if you haven’t already. I’m grateful to have an employer whose collective managers call us a “citizenship company,” so if I have to wait in a long line to do my duty, well, so be it. Many people don’t have that, and the lines are long this year, especially in Detroit, which is not helped by having 64 (for realz) souls on the school-board ballot.

But I’ll be in and out fast, once I get through the line, if there is one. I’m-a vote so hard that tabulating machine gonna feel it.

Apparently someone decided in the past few days that Michigan is in play. I don’t think it is, but it hasn’t stopped the candidates and their surrogates from coming through like buses. Barack Obama was in Ann Arbor yesterday, Sarah Palin in Detroit Sunday night. (She stopped in at a bar near my old office. Called the Town Pump. Snicker.) Ivanka dropped in to Hudsonville, over by Grand Rapids. Hillary was here last Friday, her husband the day before — a surprise! The waitresses at the coney island where I have my Saturday breakfast were all showing off their iPhone photos of him posing with the gang. This douchenozzle was here on Sunday, too. Trump himself is ending his campaign with a stop in Grand Rapids.

Michigan is not in play, and if Hillary doesn’t win by at least three points here, I’ll buy you all a beer.

So, to leave the thread open today, or what?

Duh. Open thread. Nail-biting all the way.