Infinite Quack

I have a buddy who’s an alien. I don’t mean an “illegal alien”. I mean that he’s not from this planet. You can picture him as tall and green-skinned, but if you do, just know that “green-skinned” is kind of a racist way to picture an alien. In this case it happens to be true. I’m just saying it was rude of you to assume. I’ll call my buddy Allen, not because it’s his name (although it is) but because it’s almost the same word as “Alien”. Allen has studied English and developed a pretty good vocabulary. He’s having a harder time getting a grasp on our culture. He visits periodically in his spaceship, which used to be silver before he watched “Barbie” and got the idea of painting it bright neon pink, and he picks some bit of media he’s absorbed and asks for my help to understand what it’s about. He’s rather methodical about this. He wants to understand everything. When it’s a movie, we sit down to watch it together, and he has questions about nearly every scene. When it’s a song, we pick...

I’m writing this in 2023. I figure, if you’re too young to be President of the United States (less than 35 years old), you probably can’t imagine what it was like before the Internet. I’m a 1974 model. When I was six, my grandparents left their TRS-80 home computer at our house, to watch it for them while they went on vacation. They also left the manual. I read it. I learned how to use BASIC to write a program. That was it. I was hooked. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. My parents bought it for me shortly after my encounter with the TRS-80, because they could see how entranced I was. Obsessed, really. For whatever reason, I got computers. The goal was always to push the machine’s boundaries, to see what I could make it do. Even on these very early machines, whose capabilities were laughable by today’s standards, their possibilities seemed endless to me. There was a universe contained inside a small box. I would invent a project for myself, then another. Most went unfinished, ...

Franklin described our system as “A Republic… if you can keep it.” Any system of government only survives if it proves able to stand up to the endless series of challenges. If it fails those challenges, it doesn’t die or disappear; it mutates into something else. The Stormy Daniels case against Donald Trump isn’t about to topple America’s democratic institutions overnight, but it could, depending on its outcome, deepen some pre-existing cracks in the foundation. The details of the case aren’t terribly relevant here. It’s not about the events of January 6th. It’s not about Trump’s attempts to “find” more votes, or putting pressure on public officials whose job is to determine the outcome of an election. Nor is it about suggesting to the President of Ukraine that he “do [Trump] a favor” by digging into his political rival. All of those actions are much more central to the operation of our democracy. The Stormy Daniels case isn’t really about the porn star, or paying for sex. It’s about c...