Twenty-five years ago today, Americans—along with the rest of the world—woke up to a new century date…and to the discovery that the years of work computer programmers had put in to stop what was known as the Y2K bug from crashing airplanes, shutting down hospitals, and making payments systems inoperable had worked.
Averting the Y2k disaster wasn't that easy, it took a lot of work and preparation. And it will take work and preparation to strengthen our democracy and avert another disaster in 2026.
Thank you for ‘splainin’ Y2K, Lucy!!! Kidding aside, thank you over and over for the “deep state” (you know, the public “servant” employees) for keeping us safe in all manner of areas (food, safety, medicine, transportation…and on and on). I do hope with the upcoming admin, that public service workers stand their ground, do their job in what maybe fraught times….THEY are my heroes.
These are the folks that keep our country running! Day in and day out. They are a totally nonpartisan workforce and this country could not run without them!!! Thank you for recognizing them.
A bit late, I found Bob Lewis's Polytricks: Slight of Mind,Part 2 of The Norwegian Resistance Movement at https://ki6mnk.substack.com/
It covers the 80% of teachers that refused to conform to the Vikund Quisling power structure that Hitler thought would peacefully keep Norway from being a major weak point on his Atlantic Wall.
I do hope many true American public servants can be as strong against the similar abuse from the new malicious administration
You must be a professional educator who knows the ins and outs of curriculum, brain development of the various levels of our youth and the most effective teaching methods. You must be an omnipotent scholar of what constitutes American education because if you aren’t you are blowing major disinformation out of your ass.
As a retired Special Educator, thank you Maureen. Once again, I will repeat, I had no time to indoctrinate anyone. I was too busy teaching the state approved curriculum, developed and approved by a very red state.
In 1990, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, partially out of fear of Y2K issues with computers. The H-1B program was started at this time to address the shortage of computer programmers and engineers due to the demands of Y2K. Heather's overview is correct about Y2K. A friend of mine and I started a consulting firm in 1990 focusing on the life insurance industry. The 1970's and 1980's had seen an explosion of new products which were created mostly to address the high interest rates caused by stagflation in the US. New interest-sensitive products like universal life, interest sensitive whole life, instant cash value, indexed annuities and many other variations came on the market.
Congress felt the need to tax the capital gains on many of these products and so they came up with several new tax laws to insure people were paying the Federal income taxes they owed.
The modifications to the various life insurance systems was a major effort taking several man-years to analyze and implement. Companies combined their efforts to insure they got their new products to the market ASAP.
And then came Y2K.
In 1962, IBM wrote the first life insurance administration system mostly to help sell "big iron" to the largest life insurance companies like New York Life, Mass Mutual, etc. It was written in a long dead language called autocoder. It wasn't especially robust but the architecture was sound and most systems since that time are built on the basic architecture IBM developed.
One of the smartest things the did was to store dates in a 3 byte field in a packed format. But they didn't store the date as MMYY. They stored it as the number of months since January 1900. So January, 1990 was stored as 90 x 12 + 1 or 1081 which = '01080F' Although it only saved one byte of storage, calculations were faster because you didn't have to convert MMYY to a different format.
The bottom line was that because of IBMs foresight, the Y2K job of converting dates was much easier than in many other industries.
Back to the H-1B status. Tens of thousands of programmers were brought into the US on H-1B visas, mostly Indian and Russian. Most were just out of school with limited experience. But, it didn't take much skill to modify programs for Y2K. There was also the language barrier as many of the H-1Bs did not communicate well in English.
Fast forward to Elon Musk and his wanting to bring in engineers from other countries, mostly because they are less expensive as Congress set a hard minimum wage for H-1Bs at $60K and this has never changed.
If Congress were to raise the minimum wage to say $100k to be fair to American engineers and programmers, Elon would likely change his tune.
Regarding H-1B engineer “imports,” doesn’t Musk know that we have schools like MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc., that produce fine young engineers? Sure he does. He just wants to pay his workers as little as possible while he uses his brining billions to corrupt and render ineffective our government.
The poster boy for employer sanctions for illegal hiring was Trump. The Employer Sanctions Act, also known as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, is a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that prohibits employers from hiring unauthorized workers.
Several of his golf clubs hire workers on the H-2B visa program. Hiring records show that Trump clubs don’t try too hard to find US workers in the high season, and the company’s recruiters usually say that no Americans even apply for them. If a prospective American is denied a job, there may be a cause of action.
In the computer field my husband, as a hiring manager, rarely saw an American candidate. When he did their resume didn’t fit the job requirements at all showing that H.R. was deliberately avoiding American workers. Putting stringent requirements that candidates be the top 10 from the top 10 schools while ignoring the great programmers turned out by schools like UCSD right in our area indicates this program needs some regulation.
They don’t pay them less, they give massive hiring bonuses and relocation packages. But they do get employees who can’t jump to other companies to move ahead and who are willing to work ungodly hours. They can treat them poorly and get away with it.
When Musk bought Twitter and began making inhumane demands these are the employees that didn’t desert him.
We had tens of thousands of cases. Microsoft files covered a staff attorney's office. All their jobs were listed in Bellingham, WA.
Some whistleblowers make a living turning in violators. Most companies use labor pools of computer engineers, that can be shipped around from company to company.
Daniel, the poster boy being death star does not surprise me. I also think that the super wealthy will continue to have the undocumented work for them as house and grounds staff. Thank you also for your information on the visa programs.
Indeed! And include IIT where I started my college education. Many foreign students there, but much more Americans. Including women. One of my friends made local news when she became the nation's first female FPSE.
Yes, ironically - a rare example of a wee bit of a functioning market in today's price-fixing, monopolistic and vertically integrated industries - which effectively extort the consumer via advertisements and other behavior mod disinfotainment.
People are no longer the consumers - they are the raw materials from which surveillance capitalism information products are made.
I worked in what everyone now knows as IT for many years, with insurance and finance industry, and later government, clients. So many systems were developed with what became archaic languages often because development timelines were decades long from RFP to full implementation The efforts made to 'fix' the Y2K bug may have been invisible to outsiders, but multitudes of people were involved.
H1B was a 'fix' at the time. Thanks to Heather for connecting it to today's news. Your insurance clients were oddly lucky due to that archaic system.
Gary, thank you for posting this explanation. I confess to being a computer dolt, so I had no idea exactly why Y2K was going possibly to be a problem. Re the last part of your post: no surprise that Muskrat wants cheaper skilled labor. This is one of my problems with super wealthy people. Many of them get that way partly because they exploit the system when they could afford to pay the full and fair price. Selfish and greedy. I also note that they are no different than most of the world's elite who have always managed to waltz off with most of the wealth while the peons did the work and paid in various ways.
I always say I have forgotten more than I ever learned so it is good that I read people like Heather every day to recompute my brain (old age does that to you).
In the 1980s, the bank I worked for was considering writing a mainframe system to automate safe deposit box rental and access across 500+ branches. We ALWAYS required business case support. I remember well that disk storage (then called DASD) was so expensive that the business case became positive when we reduced storage requirements by 5 megabytes by falling back to a 2 digit year (the year was carried several times in each record, plus once for each access).
When I left that bank in Ga in 1987, it was the 11th largest bank in the US. It had the most powerful (at the time) IBM mainframes and the most data storage of any shop in the state.
You’ll laugh when I tell you it was 8 meg of program memory across two mainframes, an early form of sysplex, and 20 gigabytes of DASD.
Ah, you're young! I wrote my first chess program in ForTran-II on an ancient IBM 1130 with 12K of macroscopic ram (visible magnetic donuts on multiplexed wires).
Punch cards. A 15" deck of them. Played legal chess, slowly; printed out the position of the board on fanfold paper via a LOUD line printer. This was 1971 at Earlham College in an enclosed glass room with elevated floor for AC and cables. And a false ceiling for after hours access. (finally graduated with class of '77). ;)
A bit younger, yes. My first project (automated online teller machines) was on a DEC PDP-11, programming in Assembler. Total program memory was 96k, storage was a twin 8” floppy disk drive, one disk for program and one for data storage.
Wrote my first program of any type in CoBOL, c 1970, in high school.
Beat the GM-Fisher plant computer in a game of 3-D tic-tac-toe, 1968.
Played King of Sumar (early Civ 3 type game) on Atlanta Area Tech computer summer of 1966, where my oldest brother worked.
Build a plastic and metal rod calculator from a kit ~ 1965.
Toured computer room with big reel to reel tape 'RAM' at Plasma Physics Laboratory about 1963, where my dad worked, on take your kid to work day.
When I finally finished school in '88, I developed systems for the CDC, first of which was WONDER (Wide-ranging Online Database for Epidemiological Research) running by early 1989, still in use (google it); EDITS (Exchangeable-edits, Data-dictionary, and Information Translation Standards) as part of implementing Bernie Sanders first bill (which I helped proof at CDC), for a national population-based breast cancer registry ~1992; I incorporated & was Chair of MATCH (Metro Team for Child Health, an immunization registry with The Atlanta Project 1995 (my eldest brother wrote this software, funded a wee bit by The Carter Foundation), was Louisiana OPH Dir Dept of Health Information (& State Vital Registrar) where my team implemented a nurse entered Medicaid billing system (PH9) to replace a $1M/yr OCR contract; helped write a bill requiring hospitals to provide line-listed patient discharge data to the OPH, then implemented a state-wide hospital discharge data registry; and began publishing state health reports, vital statistics and research online.
Then I spent the better part of my career, 14 years, in Zambia doing epidemiologic surveillance for HIV and implementing the first African electronic health record system (initially using 'sneaker-net' JIT communications via smart card EHRs, in the absence of telecom) as part of PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). US did good.
Ended my career assisting the implementation of the Hanoi EOC (Emergency Operations Center) for the detection and response to viruses emerging from China, for 6 months in 2015, and consulting with WHO and UNAIDS on health information standards in developing countries, thru 2016.
By the time I retired I found I was mostly talking AGAINST the national collection and warehousing of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) online, in the absence of sufficient (more) legal safe-guards, something I'd worked most of my career to enable. It seems our technical capacity and greed has outstripped our ethics and policy-making capacities.
Proud to have been a civil servant, and part of the deep state.
"...One of the smartest things the did was to store dates in a 3 byte field in a packed format. But they didn't store the date as MMYY. They stored it as the number of months since January 1900. So January, 1990 was stored as 90 x 12 + 1 or 1081 which = '01080F' Although it only saved one byte of storage, calculations were faster because you didn't have to convert MMYY to a different format..."
Reminds me of the way the DoD Supply system used only the last digit of a decade and three digits of the day of the year to identify a date within a decade in 4 bytes instead of 5.
Though it was just an extra duty for one of the techs like me earlier in small detachments, one assignment in a Systems Command Project, let me contact anyone in the supply chain without having to go through the base supply officers. That came in handy in knowing how to track a lost shipment of a large antenna feedhorn to a base 70 miles south of us. When I called them they said it wasn't there and got rather rude about me insisting that was where the trail went cold (with no location listed for where the part should be). Instead of arguing with the Senior NCO on the phone, I got our base supply to provide an Airman to drive their truck (and me) down to the other base. When the Senior NCO saw the truck and realized I had come down to look for it myself, he got really angry insisting it wasn't there until I asked him what the object he was resting his foot on was. It was outside on the dock since it didn't fit in the space it was designated to be in.
That was a rare incident, though, most of the time we could get what ever we needed anywhere in the world we went within 3 days.
So if it's this intricate and specific, do the entrepreneurs learn the parts that benefit their bottom line and preserve their reputations, and politically hew to those details, and hire underlings to run the programming and to mind the details and "comply" with the law?
Not in any well-run IT shop. Though we’re 25 years removed from the days when new products or features were programmed (in COBOL) into huge posting systems, good management requires that changes due to regulation, new needed features, process change and maintenance are all coordinated. Otherwise you run into circumstances where further changes and quality testing are virtually impossible.
B, it's true that avoiding disaster 25 years ago wasn't easy and took a lot of work and preparation but it was done timely. We wasted our preparation time ,we didn't react forcefully to the two impeachment ,it took forever to start the trials against a dangerous demagogue and we,literally run out of time . All we can do now is to resist, forcefully and timely through our leaders and legislators and putting pressure on them to prevent as much damage as possible an be prepared for the midterm elections.
Ricardo, I think that both of those events you mention (impeachment and trials) were intentionally slowed down or circumvented. I don't think it was as much "time wasted" as it was "willful delay/denial".
Agree with your premise, Ally House, that the blame and shame should not be placed on those of us who were stunned by the ineffectiveness of the impeachments and trials and the success of the wilful delay/denial process by those whom we had elected as our representatives only to discover that they were really representing Russia and our own oligarchs. One of the failings also of the media seemingly working alongside those who would blind and disable American citizens.
Steven (Stephen?) Beschloss quoted John Kennedy speaking about manned space flight to the moon: “We do these things not because they are easy. We do them because they are hard.” The Y2K preparation was hard, in a sense. The next few years will be hard…but we all are up to the task.
We can also say that a lot of people held their breath for a full minute, then complete relief. This one will take a lot more work from a lot more people; however, we must keep working on it.
Wouldn't it be nice to know the identity of the person who first realized the Y2K potential problem and alerted the world. My wife and I, with our two teenage daughters, spent New Year's eve in Puerto Vallarta bringing in the new century, with nary a concern. I would love to know the name of the unsung hero.
I would bet everything I own it was a woman. Since humans crouched around fires and grunted their comments, women have done the work that made progress possible and men claimed all the credit.
Thank you, Dale, for this link to Katherine Johnson. I think that you are probably right - a woman recognized the 2000 issue. For millennia we failed to utilized the brains and talents of the females among us. I am a 1973 grad of Harvard Law - 10% of the class was female. My wife was a 1978 grad of Stanford Med School -10% of the class was female. Our daughter was a 2012 grad of Santa Clara Law School. More than 50% of the class was female as now with Harvard Law and Stanford Med School, female grads are 50% or higher. I was lucky in that I didn't need to compete against all those more qualified and brighter females.
A good friend once explained it to me this way: Men think vertically and women think horizontally.
Imagine that everyone's lives are spreadsheets, with columns for Work, Immediate Family, Friends, Extended Family, Household, etc., etc. Each column contains rows designated for every component of that column. The Immediate Family column might contain rows for Husband, Eldest Child, Second Child, Pet, etc.
My friend suggested that when men are at work, their focus is entirely on work-related matters and it is difficult for them to think of anything outside that "column."
Women, however, may be concentrating on work, but their minds are also monitoring several other "columns" in their lives. In other words, they are better "multitaskers."
It stands to reason that that while that lone female computer programmer in a room full of men was working on the program at hand, the thought suddenly occurred to her that Y2K could be a problem.
Half the programmers in the country had known about it, some for decades. It’s also one of those things that doesn’t lend itself to the moronic, overused but trendy idea that men are credit-grabbing dullards and women are society’s heroes. Life is not a 90s sappy sitcom.
The only care of the new incoming administration is how to jerk off the nation and suck it dry for all they can personally enrich themselves with. This is their only goal. Unless there is an awakening of sorts, we will head fr a recession and a loss of wealth unheard of since the 1929 crash.
You may well be correct. If that happens, then it is my fondest hope that the millions of non-MAGAts who voted for Trump will realize they bought a pig in a poke and actually pay more attention the next time they vote.
Not very likely. They will still blame “the libs” for their misery, even if Emperor Musk personally pisses them in the face. Just read the comments here by the likes of Rick Sender and you’ll realize they will never, ever blame their idols for anything.
Only thing we can hope is that the masses who didn’t vote will finally get off their asses.
Geez...did you have to mention that guy? His built-in misspelling, syntax melting megaphone is loud enough as it is. Why remind us of him? His theory of "substance of his words" over efficient and effective writing is embarrassing enough to have on the quality pages of HCR.
Sorry to have made you nauseous. But it just shows how deep the programming can go. Guys like these will gladly bend over, have their backside thoroughly plowed by the orange blob, and they will be cheering and waving their MAGA flags all the while. And afterwards, they will blame the libs for the pain in their bum.
No worries, Dutch. I know he's paid his 50 USD just like the rest of us. If he continues to, as you say, "gladly bend over, have their backside thoroughly plowed by the orange blob, and they will be cheering and waving their MAGA flags all the while", I just wish he wouldn't communicate in gobbledygook and make a little more sense. Best wishes.
Rick is obnoxious, but a lot of his misspellings are the result of the "voice to text" feature that he has to use. I gave him a pass on that aspect of his posts once he explained it to me. However, I no longer acknowledge him because he refuses to cite evidence for his opinions.
I hear what you're saying, Joel; however, I can't give him a pass. If one wishes to debate an issue, it is on that individual's dime that he/she has to find a way to make sense. Voice to text is an important feature for many, and there are many from which to choose. Physicians many times have to use them, and they know how important it is to get spelling correct and the syntax absolute. If *they* screw up on a voice to text scenario, the shit will almost definitely hit the fan. His excuse is flimsy. Simply, he needs to upgrade. If he can't do so, then he needs to get the hell off the pot.
until the libs decide to fight like the conservatives, we will continue to be in retreat. for conservatives, every problem is liberal policies and every solution is a hammer. liberals need to do the same and start hammering the conservatives.
But I am not trying to raise a family, both of us working full time and can't afford child care. I'm not one healthcare emergency away from losing my home. I'm not bitter because I know my generation will NEVER have a better life than our parents. I'm not carrying onerous amounts of student debt which prevents me from buying a fixer upper starter house. And saving for retirement? What are you smokin'?
There is a systematic rigging of our national economic system that holds hard working families down. It is crushing and it is depressing. It's why many of the 90 million eligible voters stayed home.
"Libs" and Democrats and Independents - people of all stripes need to join together in a battle to achieve Economic Justice.
Mark Zuckerberg has a mega yacht. He has a second mega "support" yacht. Both yachts have helicopter hangars. And we are still debating whether everyone should have minimally basic life saving health care.
We need to get pissed off and make some "good trouble".
45 is not a pig in a poke. He did not hide who is. He just flat out lied about anything and everything. The #45 voters chose a stupid, evil criminal who was sane washed by corrupt corporate media and corrupt politicians—all for a buck.
I think the sane-washing by public media wasn't too much of a factor. As for the "pig in a poke" characterization, I meant that he was elected not just by his core base, but by habitually uninvolved and uninformed people who weren't paying enough attention. But if we are to adhere to the letter of the phrase, you are correct.
This might upset a few people, but it's my observation that the evangelicals are by far the most gullible, conspiracy theory believing folks around. Pat Robertson's headlines are only one of hundreds their media constantly publishes. Remember the "Satanic Panic," the rumors they spread about Proctor & Gambles' 13 star logo, etc.? There's a direct line between that (lack of) thinking and MAGA.
I not only agree with you, I'll go further. Christian zealots, because they believe they are acting for God, are very, very dangerous. i recall when Charles Colson became "born again" in prison. One of his Watergate co-conspirators said this: "Colson said he would run over his own grandmother for Richard Nixon. Just imagine what he'd be willing to do for Jesus."
If the current media shit-storm on the right persists, Faux!, they will here nothing but excuses…like the idea that the New Orleans ‘terrorist’ arrived from Mexico. Rather than the truth.
Sometimes people, especially those on the right, simply won't believe the truth, no matter the evidence. I read a number of stories about right-wingers dying of Covid who asked their doctors what was killing them. When the doctor told them it was Covid, they swore, literally on their death beds, that Covid didn't exist.
That is a huge fear of mine. Have discussed finances quite a bit with my spouse since the election.. we are braced and worried. At this point I just hope I’m hurt less than his voters on the financial end, petty as that sounds.
What I said is more likely hyperbole. But we are overdue for a recession and the stock markets have gone way up. I don’t dispense financial advice but the analysts are predicting choppy waters and there is a feeling that within around a month if markets rise that it will take a quick downturn. Who knows.
Sooner or later, everything "regresses to the mean". Two years in a row of over 20% gains for the S&P 500 is a message. Unsustainable. Regardless of politics.
And...there are two economies. The "markets" and everyone else. They don't always work in tandem.
Example: right now. Families all over the country are struggling in the best "economy" this nation has seen in decades. Great unemployment "numbers". Solid GDP. Lower inflation.
But who cares about those numbers? Not the people who still haven't recovered from the housing debacle of 2008 or the Pandemic.
I'm less worried about the future of the markets and more aware of the pain being felt by our working class citizens right now.
It's not petty SR B, the more those voters fee the pain of voting against their interest the more chances of regarding Congress and being able to prevent, obstruct and build coalitions more effectively to defeat them in 4 years.
We are prepared to sell all of our stock and let it sit in cash if the markets take a turn. Our other retirement money is in protected annuities. I am grateful we know how to do this without financial advisors.
The question is timing. Do you do it now or when? When the markets start dropping and "everyone" bails out? This caused many people to lose money back in 2008 which they never recouped.
I am not at all criticizing you, Sharon! I've been talking this over with my financial advisor for months now. I'm nervous, but we are very well diversified with our investments.
I have a good friend I've spoken about on this forum, who voted for Trump but is not 100% MAGA. Her entire portfolio--which is seven figures--is invested in ONE stock. This was never a good idea but this stock did well for her. She is supporting several family members (all MAGA) so this could get dicey.
I have a determined sell point and watch the market daily. Just being prepared and having a plan gives us peace of mind.
We had friends that lost everything in the dot com bust in early 2000. I can even set up a number that if the stock hits it, it will automatically sell.
I sold all of it before when Trump was messing with the numbers with all his rhetoric and bought it back after Biden took office. Sold Tesla the day Musk bought Twitter. Maybe I’d have more if I stayed in it but it wasn’t worth the risk or the ethical dilemma.
You do sound well prepared, and good luck to you. I have no doubt that a correction is coming as well, and it's going the hurt the billionaires, too. Or maybe it will hurt them? They always have a way of coming out on top. :(
Bill ,they been preparing for that for years and they planned to stay long time not just 4 years and then see what happens. We have no time to waste. Obstruct, oppose, don't let them consolidate.
Yes, and it all started with Genesis: Build relationship with God and one another and exercise dominion/stewardship over God's creation. Not hard to comprehend until greed, lust, and all manner of sin take hold. Leaving matters to others gets us here.
The idea that we humans have "dominion" or the more palatable word "stewardship" over everything on earth is what has brought us to the environmental extinction crisis we now face on the entire planet. We are not the apex of creation. Humans are part of a wondrous interdependency of all life. If humans had collectively accepted "stewardship" over the planet we would not have allowed companies to continue saying that making money is more important than protecting the environment. But it has become so and because of profits, the planet is warming and the continuation of life on this planet is threatened. Dominion over the planet has been used to defend slavery. It is used to justify agribusiness using chemicals that increase profit but which also poison the earth. It is used to justify keeping animals we use for food in inhumane conditions that cause fear and suffering. It is used to justify destroying the Brazilian rain forest to create grazing land for the meat industry, to destroy water sources with mining and manufacturing.
Humans do not have permission from any deity to destroy the planet. Religion has been used by people who only care about making money. It is also used to justify making money by saying that being rich is a sign that God loves you.
If there were a caring god, that god would not allow humans to destroy the life that the god created. To believe that god gave humans dominion over the earth is to agree that money is more important than life. No caring deity would allow humans to destroy life on an entire planet.
I’m reading Dan Brown’s book, The Templars. It’s astounding how religion has been used to manipulate the masses and line the pockets of those who lead movements, regardless of the “god” chosen.
You know all those Evangelicals pray, too, right? Their prayers and ours are for different outcomes. They prayed for Trump to win; ours were for Kamala. We need to do the hard work.
I experience and "believe' in a greater power/dimension that we humans do not have a reliable, refined or well tuned sensory organ to grasp. So "religions" step in to define and interpret whatever magic this force may be. Physicist Lisa Randall has studied and discussed this phenomenon. In the meantime, it's for sale and open to manipulation by the well intentioned ministers as well as the gifted charlatans.
Or ... people of faith could call out to Allah, Jupiter, Odin, Zeus or the thousands of lesser-known gods men have created over millennia. They always demand that their worshipers become beggars. And the effect is the same: a 50/50 chance that they get what they asked for, which happens to be the same odds as if one didn't pray at all.
I really do not want to be an antagonistic non-theist, but when I read comments like this, I am troubled by recommendations that people should waste their time and energy on unproductive activities rather than actually doing something that will affect outcomes.
Dale, I respect your opinion. As a lapsed Catholic, I still pray and this is where I disagree with you--sometimes in thoughtful prayer, answers pop into my mind. Perhaps for other people, meditation produces the same results. Anyhow, it isn't unproductive for all. I'm sure that you have an internal method of problem solving as well.
And btw, I appreciate you saying you don't wish to be antagonistic! That is what I appreciate about this forum--that people here (with the exception of the occasional nasty trolls!) can discuss and debate each other respectfully.
Miselle, I appreciate your comment. I want to elaborate on my intent to be non-antagonistic. I acknowledge and appreciate that following religions – not just Christianity – has helped millions of people be their best selves. (I also note that religion has brought out the worst in people, and this column is likely more weighty, unfortunately.)
I would never want to prevent people who benefit by practicing their religion of choice from having that privilege. I only wish that they would afford "non-believers" and "different-believers" the same respect and courtesy.
Moreover, scientific research has indicated that prayer has a beneficial effect. However, the benefits are not derived from a deity granting favors, but rather the calming effect of personal quietness, contemplation and so forth. Time spent in this state is assuredly productive and beneficial.
My disagreement comes with people who act on the belief that their deity is better than others because he is like a rich uncle who doles out gifts or an ATM that dispenses cash on demand. An unfortunate majority of religious folk apparently think that's how it works, and once they have prayed, they've done all that is required.
Dale, good answer. Thank you. I appreciate the dialog on this forum where most people do provide their well thought out reasoning, as you just did. And I totally agree with that last paragraph.
We need millions like you Carole. Just put pressure on our legislators to do the right thing. And start being loud and repetitive about denying their claim of a landslide and a mandate!!!!
And not only that; as much as I hate to say it, he was elected. His legitimacy of election may be in doubt to some; however, no evidence to that point has yet been provided.
Not the kind of electoral game Dems want to indulge in, the GOP has already done too much, and I'm not sure if there's an end in sight. MAGA plans to rubber stamp the Stolen Election into cement once they're in.
My understanding is that conviction doesn't matter. When the Colorado Supreme Court ruled ineligibility for the ballot due to insurrection, the U.S. Supremes didn't address that, only that states didn't have the power to remove someone from the ballot.
By the Senate along political lines. I will still give voice to the visual & facts by the House Jan 6th committee & someday , hopefully in the future hx will set the record straight.
Reading THE REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT, kind of like the 100th monkey. Can enough of us persist & resist the coming administration ? When no one wore car seat belts to now 91.9% of front seat passengers do; when everyone smoked & now most public places are smoke free.
Instead the current divisions within the GOP who can't agree by tomorrow who the Speaker of the House can be, whose responsibility it is to swear in all members of the House before the January 6th day to officially count and certify the votes for President and Vice president is more pressing. That it has taken votes and influence of Democrats to accomplish much of anything in legislation these last few sessions of the House is revealing. These dates are important to the functioning of government and until these dates confirm the ongoing legislature Mr Biden is president.
"Popular televangelist Pat Robertson ran headlines like “The Year 2000—A Date with Disaster.”
And so began, in earnest, the re-emergence of the snake oil that the GOP has been selling since (that got us Donald Trump 2.0) At the time I remember posting on the Delphi forum this scripture for supporters of Robertson:
2 Thessalonians 2:11: "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie."
This verse is in the context of Paul discussing the end times and the coming of the lawless one (the Antichrist). It suggests that those who refuse to love the truth and be saved will be allowed to fall into deception as part of their judgment.
I had just started a career in science education- which has felt like using a broom to keep back a sea of misinformation and ignorance for the last 27 years, honestly- and those years were my first exposure to the extremist religious lunacy that grips so many in this nation to this day. I was raised in a secular household by a nurse and computer programmer. It was a real shock.
Best not to wade into Apocalyptic thinking in the first place. I remember dear senior Baptist ladies solemnly predicting Final Judgement when i was still a teenager in the 60s, 1960s of course ! Many human beings have been credulous and delusional on this one for a couple millenia now. Beliefs like this have viral power, sad to say.
Growing up Jewish insulated me from such ideas, but adulting as an atheist I am never surprised by the “sky is falling” narrative on infinite repeat from the Bible thumpers. Heather’s tale of Y2K is entirely different. A definable threat, a resolute response, and objective success in averting disaster.
You are referring to the Prophets, like Jonah, Jeremiah and Isaiah? The difference is in Biblical narrative, the sky does fall, and prophesy is vindicated. In the modern world, catastrophic events occur, but the moral of the story is lost…and repentance never prevents the next one.
I'm afraid i take the OT prophets stories with a huge grain of salt, though the idea that catastrophes are the moral fault of the victims eg the Assyrian conquest of the Hebrews is a familiar and much used one "ever since". They probably didn't originate that idea. A similar one was if your deity was overthrown it just showed your local deity was weak and also overthrown. Exampled in the OT as well.
And when I was in catholic grade school, and being the only kid with a Jewish last name, I was sent to Mr Macken’s studio who was the janitor and he made a set of cardboard donkey horns to wear for talking in class. Boy did those nuns Sisters of Mercy love to punish converters.
I'm a product too. C'mon Bill...surely it wasn't your name that go you there...odd thing to do, tho. Perhaps you were a bit too "independent and active?" We had one, out of all my teachers, who had a rather odd solution to unruly behavior. Aimed mostly at boys and employing a paddle. Not surprisingly, its aim was to shame the disruptive behavior out of them. So many decades later, I remember it well. And what a shame it was and still is..but on that one disabled woman. A few of those women were extraordinary people, and inspirational. I sure hope that "technique" was not employed by all your teachers!!
I didn't attend Catholic grammar school but did attend "CCD" back then. I still remember one extremely disruptive boy who got solid whacks on the knuckles with a ruler by one of the nuns. I could see him blanch and wince in pain but he never cried. In retrospect, I think he was the first example of ADD or perhaps being on the spectrum that I can recall. He was the child of Irish immigrants, and I can't recall how many siblings he had, but there were a lot of them. I won't use the real name, but my childhood friends and I still refer to him as
"---- ----- with the green teeth." Yup, no lie, the kid had a line of green against his gums. I doubt he ever brushed his teeth and I doubt the parents had the time or money to install dental hygiene. I think about it now and feel badly for him. No idea what ever happened to him, but I think the family may have returned to Ireland.
I think we are wading into Apocalyptic thinking because, rightly so, a T&M administration will be apocalyptic. It's easy to get confused about the realities we face with all the sane washing that is/has occurred.
This misses a major point of HCR's post: The transition into Y2K was virtually seamless because experts realized the potential problem years in advance and serious resources were devoted to solving it. What's the connection? Too many USians didn't realize the country was in trouble till Trump was elected the first time. Certain Republicans, white Southern Democrats (who ASAP started turning into Republicans), and eventually white Evangelical Christians realized the country wasn't going their way with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, followed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. They got Reagan elected in 1980, whereupon the country started sliding backward -- a slide that was interrupted in a few bright spots but that basically continued for four decades.
And despite the heroic and essential work of the Biden-Harris administration, the damage done in those four decades continues to have serious (one might say "catastrophic") effects. Consider the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton administration, the packing of the Supreme Court with right-wingers, and the Citizens United decision of 2010. In short, "we the people" didn't do the work that could have averted the first Trump presidency, and now we're facing a second.
Excellent points, Susanna. I recall a comment thread a few months ago (anywhere from 3-8 months, my brain is all wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey) where Y2K was discussed at length. I suspect that has given Professor Richardson her ideas for this topic.
My personal Y2K experience was being the watch commander for my department as the clock rolled over. Admittedly, in the Pacific time zone, most of the impact was minimal, since we'd had the 8 hours since GMT had rolled over to realize that Armageddon wasn't going to happen then. I ended up in that role because the other sergeant on my shift (8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m.) was on the SWAT team, and was deployed with them, and Command Staff was "on call" from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. While I am sure each of them was awake, I was the only supervisor on the street at that time, and I was "acting in capacity" (working one rank above my actual rank) because we had a lieutenant at the FBI Academy in Quantico, and my regular supervisor was AIC as a lieutenant. Quietest NYE I worked in 28 years.
I sure wish I understood more as about WHY there was not a huge political pushback to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the conservative judicial push and Citizans United at the very time they were introduced. That is to say, I do not remember a strong negative political reaction.
I don't get it either, nor do I recall a strong political reaction. OTOH, I didn't understand at the time what a big deal it was, in part because I was so disgusted with Bill Clinton and electoral politics in general that my expectations were low and I wasn't paying much attention.
However, I recently read an account of the Clinton administration that criticized the role of his business-oriented economic advisers like Robert Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan (who was all in with the despicable "free market" advocate Milton Friedman). It's beginning to make sense, but I want to learn more.
Start by not watching it, maybe? I urge that you read the piece published last night by Robert Reich (Substack) , in which a recent survivor of three authoritarian regimes offers very good, and timely suggestions we would do well to consider. These suggestions gave me a large dose of relief after reading the piece. Time well invested with this one. Promise! Good New Year everyone !
No one (or at least very few) pays much attention to the hard work of governing. The day in and day out work of hundreds of thousands of government workers who actually keep this country running. These workers are the ones that Project 2025 is set to replace not with equally skilled and experienced replacements. No, the replacements will have only one qualification: loyalty to Trump. The chaos that will ensue will be devastating.
Our only hope is that bureaucracies don’t move or change quickly. Implementing new or changed policies could take years; hopefully more than four.
As a former government worker, this is my nightmare. I know from experience that it is the expertise of government specialists that prevents chaos. Elected officials (those with any sense) know that government workers know community issues, can project the outcomes of both good — and bad — policy. The elected officials rarely have any interest or ability in identifying the unintended consequences of the laws they pass. They frequently rely on employees to figure out how to make sense of the conflicting, incomprehensible or just plain awful statutes they pass. Without those government experts, all hell would break out. And if the Trump Administration actually fires thousands of employees who don’t pass the loyalty test, all hell will break out.
You say: "The elected officials rarely have any interest or ability in identifying the unintended consequences of the laws they pass."
I say: Truer words have never been spoken! One need look no further than the pro-birth asshats whose votes interfere with medical professionals trained to assess pregnancy and child birth and end up killing women in the name of saving "babies."
Considering that this group is made up of mostly evangelicals, whose ethos is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures (aka The Old Testament), only obedient, child-bearing women have any value, though far less than any man. So yes, the implication is that disobedient women do not deserve to live.
Since I’m an old lady who has no children, I’m doodoo to these guys. (Since I don’t have a cat, maybe they’ll miss me in the roundup?) And of course no grandchildren to make me useful enough to continue to live. As the Wicked Witch said: “what a world, what a world.”
Marge, I have bad news. According to Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of that great humanitarian state of Texas, even if you had grandchildren, you should still die so the kids can go to work and make money during a pandemic.
Speaking of kids working ... there's Sarah Huckleberry Sanders advocating for child labor from behind her $19,000 lectern.
My impression in the run-up to 2000 is that many IT workers were keenly aware of these looming problems, but their concerns failed to impress management until things got to an emergency state. The corner-cutting that made sense when computing power was constrained and very expensive had gradually becoming neither necessary nor wise, and could have profoundly impacted society if not sufficiently addressed.
I never believed a lot of the scare stuff in the media that practically all digital devices would shut down; because why would they if the critical programming did not need to know the correct date? Yet enough did to require urgent updating. I don't know to what degree government officials were seeing this coming. They should have been, as well as on top of any threat to society. I don't trust the "invisible hand" alone to have sufficient foresight and oversight when it comes to protecting the common weal.
I refer you back to today's Letter from Heather in which she details all the work that went on for a very long time; not on an emergency basis but an urgent one as there was so much work to do.
We started Y2K fixes at my company in 1993. All testing showed clearly those systems would fail if the date was not corrected. The calendar is a critical element in every computer program.
As a former employee in federal court, I know exactly what you mean. Taking an oath of loyalty and protection to a person rather than the Constitution means that person is above and over all every.single.other.person in the country and the planet, and governing means nothing, it’s just a criminal protection racket. I would NEVER have taken an oath like that.
Reading Michael Lewis's book "The Fifth Risk" made me really appreciate the work federal employees do every day to keep us safe, & in some cases, keep us alive!
Great point Marge. We have been living with many "unintended consequences" of the 1990 Immigration bill. Congress has never been able to fix many of the problems with the H-1B program and the H-2B program.
Like In 2024 when Trump blocked passage of the immigration bill when a bi-partisan committee had spent months hammering out the details.
Trump's little Johnson killed it when Trump told him to. Anything to get elected.
It is comments like these that gets the Democrats labeled "elites" and cause us to lose elections. It is a safe bet that those millions who elected him were not all living hand to mouth. Take a look at who is bending the knee to him these days. The oligarchs could not line up fast enough.
All voters will suffer one way or another beginning January 20 at 12:01 pm.
I understand J D’s sentiment, because I have these feelings as well. A casual friend of mine (from church, ironically) commented when I said I was apprehensive about 2025, that she “knew” it was going to be a great year. Why? Well her next statement says it all: “then again, I’m a Republican.” The ignorance and actual underlying malice in that statement really got to me. It encapsulates this myopic worldview that as long as there’s a Republican in charge, Republicans will be okay. What about Democrats? Apparently the answer is: who cares? Also, no understanding of how government works (or doesn’t) depending on the competence of the Administration. This is Heather’s critical point today. I didn’t feel like getting into a fight, so I decided not to tell this “friend” that Republicans, especially those, like her, who are on Social Security, with a disabled grandson, will suffer every bit as much as the hated Democrats when we have an unfit, incompetent lunatic “running”everything. It sounds mean to say it, but people like this apparently have to experience personal pain to have their eyes opened to reality.
Our individual and collective challenge as people who voted for Harris is to resist gloating. We can take this as an opportunity to build bridges as hard as this may be. We can keep factual track of the things he is doing and make sure the Democrats don't get blamed.
Given that JD, like myself, is dependent on SS/Medicare, it is not an elitist statement. I know from previous posts that they are also very well attuned to the fact that many of the people who make up the MAGA movement are themselves dependent on various forms of federal and state aid.
Yes, all voters will suffer. I guarantee you there will be a fair number of MAGA voters who will say "I didn't think you meant ME!!!"
My family MAGAts are not living hand to mouth, but they depend on government functioning just as I do. They are dear to me but I despise the weaponized imbecility. And that includes my well-off friends who think republicans are still the GOP. And who is more at the trough than muskrat.
I noticed that Brian Tyler Cohen has dumped his suits and wears t-shirts and sweatshirts on his youtube channel now. I have wondered if it was to be viewed as a "regular guy."
Now it seems like Elon is pushing his own elite-ness. I wonder what they make of that.
I am determined to remind them that their cult got what they asked for. It’s hard when the “enemy” is a loved one and not a “gook, or whatever “other.”
Rereading "The Fifth Risk" by Michael Lewis to pick up on the actual consequences of the 2016/17 transition team efforts, at least started competently by Chris Christie, to me, was scary enough and withstands the test of being attentive to the actual risks. Though Christie had shortcomings in honesty and ethics (like many politicians), he was at least competent and honest enough (compared to the 2024/25 would be appointees and supposed transition team) to want competent people kept or appointed.
With Christie fired, it seems the honest and competent government workers really helped limit the damage back then, at least compared to what the new appointees and projected firings and rules changes portend.
To me Lewis is all about risk management, what I would also call insure-ability. The money to prepare for reducing the risks of the Y2K problem was well spent (as I imagine the costs of not preparing as well).
Two incidents remind me of inadequate risk management, the first being the January 28, 1986 launch of the Challenger in cold conditions that the engineers would not sign off as safe, and the upper echelons overrode under pressure to launch before President Reagan's upcoming Feb 4th State of the Union Speech.
That was an obvious failure that was a known risk as early as 1977 and could have been avoided by simply waiting for better weather.
The 2nd incident was a far less recognized risk in 2007, perhaps because the Y2K problem seemed to have been not that big a deal (enough of the right people fixing it at at greater cost than many would know).
I knew a bit about the incident that could have caused the loss of six F-22 Raptors (designed during the Cold War to counter the projected future fighters they would have to face in the foreseeable future), a need that didn't materialize so we had time to design a more affordable, good enough, more appropriate fighter.
"... DID’s F-22A Raptor FOCUS Article mentioned recent flight software problems that delayed the aircraft’s first foreign deployment from Hickam AFB in Hawaii to Kadena AFB, Japan. What we didn’t mention at the time is how serious the problem was, and how dependent on computers modern aircraft – including military aircraft – have become. What follows are relevant excerpts from a CNN transcript on February 24, 2007 that covered a number of unrelated issues. We’ve cut that out, and left only the F-22 related section of the transcript… KC-10: Life saver…(click to view full) Maj. Gen. Don Sheppard (ret.): “…At the international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were — they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. It turned out OK. It was fixed […]
Thank you for this AMAZING link! Everyone please read this journalist who has lived through three autocracies and offers her advice to America! Be sure to read Reich’s preface to her words.
Ann, I have posted here a number of times (hard to know who might see it) a recommendation for Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk—the book is about the Obama-to-Trump transition, but IMHO is so much more….a dive into what is called the “deep state” by those who are clueless. His other books have similar vibes, thinking The Premonition…about the pandemic and how rank ‘n file public servants were overlooked/discounted in their efforts. Chilling. Spot on, too.
I read Anthony Fauci’s memoir “On Call” and realized that without him millions would be dead. Under Trump’s Project 2025 we are not likely see his like again. The people with expertise and passion cannot be easily or quickly replaced. I’m not Catholic but I would encourage the Pope to canonize him asap.
Barbara, I don't make it all the way through all the comments. (Trolls sometimes cause me to abandon, so thanks to all who instructed me how to block him!) I had not seen your recommendation and I have added it to my list. I love the "LFAA Bookclub" as I've gotten great, informative books from the people here!
You’re absolutely right. And don’t forget: actual government is boring, and it will never make the news, so people never hear about it and so will believe the standard GOP/billionaire bullshit that you can do away with it. It just costs money and doesn’t do anything, right?
Dutch, government is boring unless is a republican government. In that case it's a big circus to distract the transfer of wealth from we the people to the top.
For far too long we have allowed the Reagan-narrative of government to reign supreme. It relies on magical thinking that governmental workers are not needed. That they really are doing nothing. This is patently untrue and a slap in the face to government workers. My hope for government workers is that we can give them respect and the support they need to make our government actually function admirably. These people know the flaws. They suffer under them each work day. I don’t care what size government we have if it is well running. All of us, in all areas of our lives, should want good functionality. But to get that we must think and care. Power-mongers don’t want us anywhere near thinking and caring.
We might start a two-pronged campaign. 1) Put Civics back in the classroom, minimum 4 semesters. The intro to every beginning class: “This system is not perfect because it’s run by people, and people aren’t perfect. But it’s a very good system as long as we work together on it, and give it our best, and always look to make it better. *You* are part of what will make it better.”
Now that as of 2025 we have handed to our billionaire overlords complete control it is time to state the obvious.
We are no better than a flock of pigeons being shoed away and scattered by some old man on a park bench, are we? Or a swarm of herring being scattered by a large swooping pelican. We wonder why the anchovies or pigeons don’t organize and mount a collective attack against their tormentor.
But we are no better. Millions were sent to their deaths in two world wars and the armies turned against each other, but never on the old men in London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, Moscow, or Tokyo who organized their deaths for profits or worse, to prove an abstract idea whose ultimate end is always the same: death, cruelty, and profits, privilege, and luxury for a very few. Use whatever pretense you like: flag and country; folk and fatherland; workers of the world, unite; the person of the king, czar, emperor, is the voice of God. We are no better than frightened fish or scared birds.
Leaders steal openly from or kill us, and we revere them for it.
And when we are finally brought to our senses – when in a frisson of justice, we guillotine the king or shoot the Czar for stealing everything from those who have little or nothing, we are the ones forced to apologize for it, to pour dust on our heads and wear sack cloth. Then we want to hear stories about the Czar or King Louis, but not the mother of the starved infant, not the struggle of the widow made by the old men in respectable positions, not the agonies of young men and women ground down and starved by King, Czar, President, or Emperor.
Steal a loaf and there will be a reckoning. Kill an entire people, raze a country, and there will be rich rewards: television gigs, speaking engagements, book deals, sitting on the board of directors with rich remuneration, pockets filled by lobbyists.
This is an absurd state of affairs. It is no way to run a species. It wasn’t in 1789, it wasn’t in 1917, in 1939, and it certainly is not in 2025.
There's a lot of truth in your post, but it is not the whole truth. History is not just bad guys and mindless lemmings. There are plenty of heroes as well. Some of them are well known, but almost all of them are nameless. Over 360,000 Union soldiers died in the Civil War, fighting first to preserve the Union and then to end slavery. In the Second World War, one side was fighting to put Jews in gas chambers and the other side was fighting to stop them.
Some Brits in World War II made up a mock-Latin phrase that I tell myself every day: "Illegitimi non carborundum", or "Don't let the bastards grind you down." It should be the motto of every Democrat until the current Mump Regime is toppled.
I have a family member, a maga, an evangelical, and a former Marine, who can’t resist bringing up his fervent belief (every single time we’re together) that the Civil War was never about slavery but was singularly about state’s rights and that everyone in the country is all the worse for changing a state’s right to keep slavery legal. I have no words for that misanthropic viewpoint, but who am I but a progressive agnostic former veteran of the Navy who basically wants to run away from my freak family. Glad the “getting together as a family” for the sake of the grandkids is over for a while.
I can't help but laugh when I hear someone defending the South's justification for the Civil War as "state's rights." I grew up in upstate New York and Connecticut and moved to Texas at age 21. I had never once heard "state's rights" as a reason for the Civil War in the northeast. Then, I move to Texas and hear southerners spout that nonsense all day long. The Civil War was about SLAVERY and the moral wrong embedded in the so-called "right" to own another human being. Still, to this day I can't wrap my head around the idea of slavery being a "right."
“States rights” my eye. They are going to have to find a better lie now with what has been happening with states that have been protecting safe and accessible abortion and reasonable laws to protect their citizens from gun violence. “State’s Rights “ as long as the state is on the far right.
Reader, that must be tough, having family members with such wrong-headed views. I am betting he spouts them with a loud voice as though loud makes right (OK, Trump thinks loud makes right and he has been or is about to be made president again). I think one of the biggest problems we as a nation are now facing comes from the Civil War. We did not insure the rights of Black Americans as a reality for all the people. It was in the Constitution, a document the South was not fond of reading or sharing and it is easily ignored has it has been the past few years even by our Supreme Court cons. Then, we permitted southerners back into the union with no change of heart, no acknowledgement of the rights of former enslaved persons. States' Rights is just an excuse for super conservatives to get their way when what they are proposing will do harm to those who are not well-off white men. Unfortunately, those Southern beliefs and bad behavior has spread to formerly union states like Kentucky and Missouri (which wanted to leave the union), Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and was the basis for the governments of the Rocky Mountain states, except maybe for Colorado. I am glad you have a reprieve for a while from the family challenges.
I grew up around that stuff (it was rampant in the schools down here!) and my follow up question for them is always “the right to do what, exactly?” The answer is to own other human beings. South Carolina made that crystal clear when they seceded.
Joel, I like that phrase. Maybe we need some signs with those words. It might make people get onto the internet for research, something other than trashing people on behalf of their leader, Trump.
Philoctetes, wow! That is about the most cynical piece I have read in a long time. Alas, I believe you are right to a great extent. However, putting every war/battle in the same pot is hardly fair. I do believe some causes are worth fighting for. However the one thing that is true in all of the cases you cited, it was men who were making the decisions. I keep hearing of women who were in leadership and sent people to wars like Victoria and Elizabeth II, but in both cases, the men in Parliament made the war decisions. Maybe we should look at what is going on in the male psyche or body that wants them to do harm to others whether for a righteous cause or not. Trump and his buddies, mostly white males have no real cause beyond money and power, but want to do harm to a whole lot of people who have been here for decades, just because he thinks he can. He is OK with calling for others to be hurt as long as he does not have to do the actual fighting, which he could never do which is why he had bone spurs during Vietnam. Maybe there needs to be a world effort to find drugs that can be administered to men who become too violent and can't channel it into sports of some kind. A spray or fog that could be released in war rooms and presidential palaces or committee rooms might help. It could help in police stations and maybe in their vehicles if certain chemicals exude from the officers. You get the idea. We need to find ways to stop the intense, destructive male bullying. Then we can work on the few women who are violent too. It's time we do something about this insanity!
One person's cynicism is another's realism. What consequences did Nixon face for his secret bombing of Cambodia and unleashing of genocide? Instead of treated as the criminal he was, he was revered as an elder statesman. Kissinger too. Much as I detest Trump, W. still takes the prize for sheer awfulness - destroying a country of 25 million based on lies, and now he too, is revised into a "friend of Michele Obama" as he paints away in Texas living off of residual profits from high office, name, and privilege. It's a grotesque absurdity. One could go on.
I for one am a champion against sentiment and for accountability. The Athenian democracy had the institution of judicial review after one left office and no one escaped. The hero of Marathon, Miltiades, was brought into court on a stretcher when ill after accused of embezzlement from the state . . . and condemned.
Power inevitably compromises ethics and moral norms; accountability is the only check we have, and in the US, because of a misguided belief in our supreme goodness, we of course have none. That is why no president has ever or will ever go before the ICC.
Trump us lawless. We are unhappy about it - I certainly am - but that lawlessness is merely a reflection of the US's all too frequent global lawlessness particularly since the end of WWII, after which we helped put in place the Nuremberg Principles and Geneva Convention of 1949, principles we ignore, currently and most vividly in arming Israel for its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as has been recognized by numerous countries.
Philoctetes, I do agree about accountability. It seems we have decided that wealth and power make people immune to accountability unless their behavior is just too out of control, and I can't remember a white man for whom that happened. We just keep putting people into office whose loyalty is to money and power rather than to our nation and its Constitution and to participation in a United Nations that claims to want peace and a willingness to charge people in power with war crimes. I do think W. and his buddies should have been tried for war crimes, actually pretending there were WMDs and getting a whole lot of people on all sides killed and unleashing an Islamic movement whose aim has been to cause chaos and kill anyone they don't like. I don't know where we go from here except that anyone opposing Trump and Kump needs to be willing to take a stand and do whatever they can to bring about positive change and to help keep Trump and Kump from doing damage to our nation. I am not sure what that should look like, though.
A fatal flaw in the transitioning traditions in American power shifts. Outgoing crooks are still treated with deference. They are never held accountable. It’s way past time for exes to be held accountable, W and chump certainly should have been. Now in our upside down world, chump will likely accuse Joe of God-knows what and try to execute him.
What an absolutely depressing point of view. There is much of that these days. I have lost a lot of belief in the goodness of humanity. I can’t believe that there is so much hate and bigotry alive and well in this country. Most of the folks that the felon-elect has nominated and surrounds himself with are evil and power hungry in their outlooks and the felon is just making patronage nominations. Even if there are kernels of sense making change, the motivation is not from a good place. I don’t trust the GOP to actually do the right thing in the vetting process.
We would have slavery again and women would not be allowed to vote if the red state legislatures had their way. I firmly believe that.
Nice job. Thank you. It bothers me to no end how this is placed solely on men especially white men. We all would do well to look into a mirror to find that log we ignore. Women especially would do well to consider a quote attributed to Marilyn Monroe “ I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can do it as a woman “.
Until the rage against men is fully and completely expressed, we can’t move past it and it will continue to distort the space we have to conduct a meaningful dialogue.
From this perspective, the spector of chemical castrations can be seen as an initial needed act of expression in the process of addressing the issue of men’s inhuman treatment of women and other men.
Rage aside (to whatever degree possible), the thing to note is that the violence suggested doesn’t even register (or it wouldn’t be spoken) which I do not think is particular to any one individual but rather a product of the environment we’ve all been acculturated by since birth and which has been present for centuries.
The core issue is the being of human beings. Philoctetes begins to get the issue up on the table by clearly pointing to the bad behavior and uneven treatment of people in positions of leadership, however, bad behavior isn’t an exclusive men’s club either nor is the core issue to address.
It gets really scary real fast when owning one’s own smallness, meanness, and stinginess.
Thank you for your comment, it resonated. Made me think of this Buffy Saint Marie song “Universal Soldier” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGWsGyNsw00 Maybe, just maybe, some day we will learn….I am not holding my breath.
Oh gee Barbara - another Buffy St. Marie fan! Let me just add on my way up to Cripple Creek that "my dog might only be a hound, but you've got to stop kicking him around." I was also reminded of the e. e. cummings poem "plato told."
Approaching big changes are a very hard sell to the public at large. Accepting the magnitude of the climate change cycle we are in is a good example. We are in a total melt cycle, and that may not be the worst of it. A lot of coastal communities claim to be working on sea level rise plans, but I have yet to hear of one that is thinking in terms of even 10% of the 250' that is all but locked in. This question is not whether it's all melting, but rather what the water release rate is going to be, which is highly unlikely to be a straight-line function.
Now all of that said, despite the fact that we evolved to our current form as the result of a long series of highly specialized adaptations, one of the curious results is that we are a highly adaptable species, which is one of the more curious things about us.
Yeah, Craig, have long wondered in the coming millennia how our species will either evolve or devolve…. IMHO, too many are paying attention to the “shiny object du jour” of technology and not so much, for example (among many), of the age-old regenerative farming & water harvesting (not dam building, but water table infiltration)…slow, sustainable, non-raping coexistence with our biosphere. I won’t be here to see it…but have some slim hope that our species will do the right thing for all. That said, in another 5 billion years, give or take a day or so, our sun will go all “red giant” on us and, well, earth will be toast….to be, yet again, recycled (as we all be) into whatever comes next. The Long Game.
I have no hope. The scale required is beyond the wishes of the rich, who imagine there will be another planet, or their bunkers or enclaves will protect them.
We won't see the massive die off, but we are of course already seeing the climate disruption causing massive population shifts.
I played that one for my son in law, the special forces reservist.
There really is no argument against the sentiment. Except thst humans are evil and do evil to each other. Usually in the name of religion, or racism, or misogyny.
Love it Barbara, spot on! I first heard Donovan's cover of that song as a boy listening to my dad's wonderful collection of folk records. Love you dad! We need our most popular artists to bring back protest songs.
Your analysis is spot-on. The masses are often manipulated into self-destruction while the architects of their suffering profit unscathed.
The solution? Widespread education that fosters critical thinking paired with grassroots movements that empower collective action against exploitation. Awareness and unity are the best shields against manipulation.
I like people. I believe in the ultimate goodness that wins in the end in one form or another. I also believe that given the opportunity people rise to the occasion.
Hyperbolic philosophic stuff aside I sincerely hope you like the world more than you pretend.
That second to last paragraph immediately brought to mind Matt Gaetz. It is astounding that the truly religious Evangelicals can support such men--but then, they have such a history of following the smarmy televangelists.
And in spite of it all, Gaetz has a promising future. No punishment for statutory rape because of the statute of limitations, a gig at Newsmax, serious consideration of a Senate run, etc. Being honorable is for suckers and losers today.
It is worth noting that your observation that "Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with," emphatically applies most importantly to the important quiet work of public health. In real time, over the past year, bird flu has been slowly moving toward a possible pandemic crisis, but because there is no crisis yet and contemporary culture and policy has denigrated public health, appropriate and simple preventive measures were never taken and the possibility of serious human infections looms large.
I see this often in those back to the “it was just a flu” and “you’re a fool for taking the jab”. I had to remind a neighbor how happy we were when his girlfriend was able to get us into her vaccine drive through clinic in Miami. It shut him up.
Thank you for mentioning this. I feed the bird in my yard and have been wondering about the safety of coming in contact with their droppings. Especially my cat, getting it on her paws and then cleaning herself.
You cause me to recall the earliest days of covid when there was word in the news of an epidemic in China that seemed to be spreading faster and faster. I remember hoping that the physician-scientists would get it figured out and controlled until it became inevitable that it would not be. And now so many complain of the inconveniences they experienced, apparently unaware and uncaring of the tragedies that others experience, and unappreciative of the amazing efforts that resulted in an ability to better manage the virus.
Heather, what a powerful post. I had no idea that so many people were working for years to make 2000 a non event. I appreciate you and people with insight, who keep our lives mostly stressful free.
Indeed they were; I was one of those programmers. So many computer systems using six digit dates!
It nearly became rote, changing the date formats to 8 characters and testing everything that used them. It was weird in that it was both tedious and very important. =)
Noble work, indeed. One of my favorite guilty secrets is the movie Office Space, about people doing that very work.
As anyone who worked in a hospital on December 31, 1999 can tell you, there was genuine fear about the clock turning to 0000,01/01/2000. All of the department heads at my hospital set up camp in the cafeteria in case the worst happened. All that was lost that day was sleep.
As were the federal courts also. We were all there in our judges’ chambers that night testing, testing, and more testing until the moment of truth. Very intense time.
We were watching the fireworks on Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia with my daughter and her husband. I remember at midnight turning around to look at the city and realizing that all the lights were still on! It sounds silly to anyone who didn’t live through it, but that’s because we take so much for granted in this country. Thanks, Heather, for reminding us of all who worked for years behind the scenes to make sure those lights stayed on.
Thank you, Karen, your work is appreciated by some of us! And, I'm really sorry what's happened to the use of your beautiful name. I have several friends that cringe when they hear the "Karen" trope. It makes me sad for them.
Thanks for doing that work, Karen. Our department went through some difficult times with that, and thankfully we had (at the time, and about the ONLY good thing I can say about him) a fellow high up in the command structure who recognized what the problem was and got us through our resistive transition.
But with just 8 digits now we have the same problem in the year 9999 and have to spend another trillion dollars (in today's dollars)? Maybe by then all of these codes will be long retired by then, but surely we should have gone with a larger number of digits.
I never thought it was overblown because in federal court we got weekly messages from the AOC (Administrative Office of the US Courts) with updates to systems and backup tasks, and we all had to sign documents attesting to doing the work that was mandated. Apparently it worked because there was not a single glitch that I ever heard from any court in the country.
We were in a hospital in Evanston, awaiting the birth of our first-born, and praying that Y2K didn’t interfere. Thank goodness, it didn’t; she just celebrated her 25th birthday!
What a great memory! It must have been quite a mix of emotions welcoming your first-born into the world while the whole globe held its breath over Y2K. How wonderful that everything turned out perfectly, and now you're celebrating her 25th milestone!
I worked for several years on Y2K at a giant NYC bank. Our superiors also insisted that we prove there would be no disruption on February 29th, 2000. It seemed to me to be unlikely, since anyone who actually knew that 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, and therefore did not have a February 29th, would know that 2000 WOULD be a leap year. Of course, February 29th caused no disruptions either.
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis highlights the unappreciated but critical importance of government workers, " there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system―those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running." Eye-opening.
GMB, thanks for posting this…I did also, once again, upthread. Read this when it first came out and IMHO should be required reading for high school/college courses…and, well, for others too. To me it is far “deeper” than just a take on the Obama-to-Trump admin transition.
The last chapter of The Fifth Risk, that deals with how much the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA weather) does for Americans to keep us safe, was so enlightening for me. And now Project 2025 wants to do away with NOAA & privatize it, so that some Republican crony can monetize it! Even the Weather Channel uses NOAA Weather for its forecasts.
Thanks for this reminder of what it was like for a lot of people back in 1999. I was one of the lucky ones because I have a family member who works with computers and informed all of us that the fixes were being worked on as early as the 1980s and that unless someone messed with the systems, there would be no big Y2K disaster. He was right. I told my students not to worry about it and that they should be excited to watch the numbers on their clocks change, if they had a date setting. Reminding us of how often disasters are averted by hard work and thoughtful understanding of what has to be done is important because we have come to think that things just happen, almost magically. Our media often pay more attention to the crackpots who predict gloom and doom rather than the words and explanations of those who actually know what they are doing. If someone had watched Apollo 13 take off, then a few days later splash down, they might not have realized the potential disaster that was averted by a bunch of skilled problem-solvers at NASA. There are also disasters that could have been averted had those in charge actually listened to those skilled, thoughtful people doing the work. Here's to all those people behind the scenes who work quietly but diligently to keep people safe.
And, Ukraine does not have many options when it comes to standing against Russia, but the pipeline is a good one and the people of Europe worked hard to prepare for the pipeline shutdown. Now, Putin, get the heck out of Ukraine and take care of your own people who are suffering from neglect as you pump up your ego by invading other nations.
I was so encapsulated in my father’s cancer that I barely noticed any of the Y2K scare. At the hospital, they gave him a cowbell. I was like what the heck is this for?! My mom said for when the computers shut down. Ha! So the vast hospital computer system is going to be replaced by a cowbell?! It was the very least of our worries. Glad everything was taken care of so it didn’t interfere with our situation. 25 years later, computers still running the world. Hope this year runs better than I imagine it will. Our worries today are far greater!
Having worked in systems on the Y2K issue, the planning and hard work simply meant that an issue never occurred.
The best way to manage a crisis is to identify the risk, plan and act accordingly to ensure their is no crisis in the first place. This work however isn't sexy and as you indicate, people with no understanding bleat that there was no crisis in the first place...
The "fire-fighters" are (rightfully) seen as heroes. Those that ensure there was no fire in the first place are never "seen" let alone seen as hero's.. A significant human blindspot.
I hope the all DC government workers join the Jan3-4 Demo. They will be the first to be affected; at least those who don't sign the coming "Loyalty Oaths".
They probably won't, as they are mostly apolitical (it's almost a job requirement). And most of them will be back from whatever holiday leave they took, back to the daily grind.
I remember Y2K and the theme of panic---but as you show, advance planning, meticulous planning, made things work. Democrats plan, MAGA screeches. The gas crisis now has also been averted by advance planning. You CANNOT do these things on X or while bellowing on some pod cast. The incoming administration has already shown it can't plan, can't cooperate, and it looks like it can't govern if past practice continues with the new silly people added to the old ones. Not a good prospect.
Leslie, agreed with the dangerous part bur I think they have a plan already, it's called Proyect 2025. Implementation it's their Achilles tendon. Let hit them there, put pressure on our leaders and legislators 24/7. It's our only option for the next 2 years.
Yes, implementation is the weak spot. Will the senate approve the cabinet picks? Will proposed changes be challenged in court? Are there ways the Trump loyalists can work around standard operating procedures? At this moment it looks like the Republicans are splintering into groups. Can the house even get itself together to elect a speaker? So many questions with some very bad possibilites ahead.
I remember this well! A tragedy averted.
If only we could avert the 2025 inauguration as easily!
Happy New Year and thank you for all you do to keep Americans informed and updated!
Averting the Y2k disaster wasn't that easy, it took a lot of work and preparation. And it will take work and preparation to strengthen our democracy and avert another disaster in 2026.
Thank you for ‘splainin’ Y2K, Lucy!!! Kidding aside, thank you over and over for the “deep state” (you know, the public “servant” employees) for keeping us safe in all manner of areas (food, safety, medicine, transportation…and on and on). I do hope with the upcoming admin, that public service workers stand their ground, do their job in what maybe fraught times….THEY are my heroes.
These are the folks that keep our country running! Day in and day out. They are a totally nonpartisan workforce and this country could not run without them!!! Thank you for recognizing them.
Mine too Barbara ,but they need to know we are supporting them. They are our first responders because they are to be affected first.
A bit late, I found Bob Lewis's Polytricks: Slight of Mind,Part 2 of The Norwegian Resistance Movement at https://ki6mnk.substack.com/
It covers the 80% of teachers that refused to conform to the Vikund Quisling power structure that Hitler thought would peacefully keep Norway from being a major weak point on his Atlantic Wall.
I do hope many true American public servants can be as strong against the similar abuse from the new malicious administration
Thanks for posting the link. My great-grandparents emigrated from Norway so it made fascinating and relevant reading for me.
The issue with this is that American education isn't education at all, it is indoctrination. The profession is already full of quislings.
You must be a professional educator who knows the ins and outs of curriculum, brain development of the various levels of our youth and the most effective teaching methods. You must be an omnipotent scholar of what constitutes American education because if you aren’t you are blowing major disinformation out of your ass.
As a retired Special Educator, thank you Maureen. Once again, I will repeat, I had no time to indoctrinate anyone. I was too busy teaching the state approved curriculum, developed and approved by a very red state.
Are you sure you are replying to the right person/comment?
In 1990, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, partially out of fear of Y2K issues with computers. The H-1B program was started at this time to address the shortage of computer programmers and engineers due to the demands of Y2K. Heather's overview is correct about Y2K. A friend of mine and I started a consulting firm in 1990 focusing on the life insurance industry. The 1970's and 1980's had seen an explosion of new products which were created mostly to address the high interest rates caused by stagflation in the US. New interest-sensitive products like universal life, interest sensitive whole life, instant cash value, indexed annuities and many other variations came on the market.
Congress felt the need to tax the capital gains on many of these products and so they came up with several new tax laws to insure people were paying the Federal income taxes they owed.
The modifications to the various life insurance systems was a major effort taking several man-years to analyze and implement. Companies combined their efforts to insure they got their new products to the market ASAP.
And then came Y2K.
In 1962, IBM wrote the first life insurance administration system mostly to help sell "big iron" to the largest life insurance companies like New York Life, Mass Mutual, etc. It was written in a long dead language called autocoder. It wasn't especially robust but the architecture was sound and most systems since that time are built on the basic architecture IBM developed.
One of the smartest things the did was to store dates in a 3 byte field in a packed format. But they didn't store the date as MMYY. They stored it as the number of months since January 1900. So January, 1990 was stored as 90 x 12 + 1 or 1081 which = '01080F' Although it only saved one byte of storage, calculations were faster because you didn't have to convert MMYY to a different format.
The bottom line was that because of IBMs foresight, the Y2K job of converting dates was much easier than in many other industries.
Back to the H-1B status. Tens of thousands of programmers were brought into the US on H-1B visas, mostly Indian and Russian. Most were just out of school with limited experience. But, it didn't take much skill to modify programs for Y2K. There was also the language barrier as many of the H-1Bs did not communicate well in English.
Fast forward to Elon Musk and his wanting to bring in engineers from other countries, mostly because they are less expensive as Congress set a hard minimum wage for H-1Bs at $60K and this has never changed.
If Congress were to raise the minimum wage to say $100k to be fair to American engineers and programmers, Elon would likely change his tune.
Regarding H-1B engineer “imports,” doesn’t Musk know that we have schools like MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc., that produce fine young engineers? Sure he does. He just wants to pay his workers as little as possible while he uses his brining billions to corrupt and render ineffective our government.
If you check out the students, many are foreigners, here on student visas. Same with researchers, many "post docs" are classified a students. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/study/student-visa.html
We also have we have other longstanding temporary visa programs. I heard about 20 kinds of appeals for 20 years. E.G. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2b
2025 allocation under Biden. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2b-non-agricultural-workers/temporary-increase-in-h-2b-nonimmigrant-visas-for-fy-2025
At one time I was on the BALCA board. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oalj/contacts/BALCA
The poster boy for employer sanctions for illegal hiring was Trump. The Employer Sanctions Act, also known as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, is a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that prohibits employers from hiring unauthorized workers.
Several of his golf clubs hire workers on the H-2B visa program. Hiring records show that Trump clubs don’t try too hard to find US workers in the high season, and the company’s recruiters usually say that no Americans even apply for them. If a prospective American is denied a job, there may be a cause of action.
In the computer field my husband, as a hiring manager, rarely saw an American candidate. When he did their resume didn’t fit the job requirements at all showing that H.R. was deliberately avoiding American workers. Putting stringent requirements that candidates be the top 10 from the top 10 schools while ignoring the great programmers turned out by schools like UCSD right in our area indicates this program needs some regulation.
They don’t pay them less, they give massive hiring bonuses and relocation packages. But they do get employees who can’t jump to other companies to move ahead and who are willing to work ungodly hours. They can treat them poorly and get away with it.
When Musk bought Twitter and began making inhumane demands these are the employees that didn’t desert him.
We had tens of thousands of cases. Microsoft files covered a staff attorney's office. All their jobs were listed in Bellingham, WA.
Some whistleblowers make a living turning in violators. Most companies use labor pools of computer engineers, that can be shipped around from company to company.
If a US citizen is screwed out of a job, they have a viable cause of action. E.G. https://insider.govtech.com/california/news/jury-finds-discrimination-in-h-1b-visa-tech-worker-case
Daniel, the poster boy being death star does not surprise me. I also think that the super wealthy will continue to have the undocumented work for them as house and grounds staff. Thank you also for your information on the visa programs.
Indeed! And include IIT where I started my college education. Many foreign students there, but much more Americans. Including women. One of my friends made local news when she became the nation's first female FPSE.
(Fire Protection and Safety Engineers)
But they want money, 100K at the very least if they are skilled.
Yes, ironically - a rare example of a wee bit of a functioning market in today's price-fixing, monopolistic and vertically integrated industries - which effectively extort the consumer via advertisements and other behavior mod disinfotainment.
People are no longer the consumers - they are the raw materials from which surveillance capitalism information products are made.
I worked in what everyone now knows as IT for many years, with insurance and finance industry, and later government, clients. So many systems were developed with what became archaic languages often because development timelines were decades long from RFP to full implementation The efforts made to 'fix' the Y2K bug may have been invisible to outsiders, but multitudes of people were involved.
H1B was a 'fix' at the time. Thanks to Heather for connecting it to today's news. Your insurance clients were oddly lucky due to that archaic system.
I spent the first 4 to 6 years after getting my computer science degree just working on Y2K. What a time it was.
Gary, thank you for posting this explanation. I confess to being a computer dolt, so I had no idea exactly why Y2K was going possibly to be a problem. Re the last part of your post: no surprise that Muskrat wants cheaper skilled labor. This is one of my problems with super wealthy people. Many of them get that way partly because they exploit the system when they could afford to pay the full and fair price. Selfish and greedy. I also note that they are no different than most of the world's elite who have always managed to waltz off with most of the wealth while the peons did the work and paid in various ways.
Thank you, Gary, for the additional history and insight.
Wow, thank you for this. The things I do NOT know could fill a small book.🫢
Large book for me, Carol! I learn something new here just about every day.
Ally, agree....maybe a multi-volume set. I really appreciate what I learn here every day.
I watched YouTube video of Ben Wittes interviewing a scholar on Roman labor and realized I knew not much of anything! A tome for me!
I always say I have forgotten more than I ever learned so it is good that I read people like Heather every day to recompute my brain (old age does that to you).
In the 1980s, the bank I worked for was considering writing a mainframe system to automate safe deposit box rental and access across 500+ branches. We ALWAYS required business case support. I remember well that disk storage (then called DASD) was so expensive that the business case became positive when we reduced storage requirements by 5 megabytes by falling back to a 2 digit year (the year was carried several times in each record, plus once for each access).
When I left that bank in Ga in 1987, it was the 11th largest bank in the US. It had the most powerful (at the time) IBM mainframes and the most data storage of any shop in the state.
You’ll laugh when I tell you it was 8 meg of program memory across two mainframes, an early form of sysplex, and 20 gigabytes of DASD.
Ah, you're young! I wrote my first chess program in ForTran-II on an ancient IBM 1130 with 12K of macroscopic ram (visible magnetic donuts on multiplexed wires).
Punch cards. A 15" deck of them. Played legal chess, slowly; printed out the position of the board on fanfold paper via a LOUD line printer. This was 1971 at Earlham College in an enclosed glass room with elevated floor for AC and cables. And a false ceiling for after hours access. (finally graduated with class of '77). ;)
A bit younger, yes. My first project (automated online teller machines) was on a DEC PDP-11, programming in Assembler. Total program memory was 96k, storage was a twin 8” floppy disk drive, one disk for program and one for data storage.
In retrospect I had a 'charmed' IT life.
Wrote my first program of any type in CoBOL, c 1970, in high school.
Beat the GM-Fisher plant computer in a game of 3-D tic-tac-toe, 1968.
Played King of Sumar (early Civ 3 type game) on Atlanta Area Tech computer summer of 1966, where my oldest brother worked.
Build a plastic and metal rod calculator from a kit ~ 1965.
Toured computer room with big reel to reel tape 'RAM' at Plasma Physics Laboratory about 1963, where my dad worked, on take your kid to work day.
When I finally finished school in '88, I developed systems for the CDC, first of which was WONDER (Wide-ranging Online Database for Epidemiological Research) running by early 1989, still in use (google it); EDITS (Exchangeable-edits, Data-dictionary, and Information Translation Standards) as part of implementing Bernie Sanders first bill (which I helped proof at CDC), for a national population-based breast cancer registry ~1992; I incorporated & was Chair of MATCH (Metro Team for Child Health, an immunization registry with The Atlanta Project 1995 (my eldest brother wrote this software, funded a wee bit by The Carter Foundation), was Louisiana OPH Dir Dept of Health Information (& State Vital Registrar) where my team implemented a nurse entered Medicaid billing system (PH9) to replace a $1M/yr OCR contract; helped write a bill requiring hospitals to provide line-listed patient discharge data to the OPH, then implemented a state-wide hospital discharge data registry; and began publishing state health reports, vital statistics and research online.
Then I spent the better part of my career, 14 years, in Zambia doing epidemiologic surveillance for HIV and implementing the first African electronic health record system (initially using 'sneaker-net' JIT communications via smart card EHRs, in the absence of telecom) as part of PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). US did good.
Ended my career assisting the implementation of the Hanoi EOC (Emergency Operations Center) for the detection and response to viruses emerging from China, for 6 months in 2015, and consulting with WHO and UNAIDS on health information standards in developing countries, thru 2016.
By the time I retired I found I was mostly talking AGAINST the national collection and warehousing of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) online, in the absence of sufficient (more) legal safe-guards, something I'd worked most of my career to enable. It seems our technical capacity and greed has outstripped our ethics and policy-making capacities.
Proud to have been a civil servant, and part of the deep state.
Thanks, fascinating-- both IBM's coding and the relationship between Y2K and H-1B.
Really interesting information here! Thanks for explaining something I had never considered.
That was a long way around the block (smiley)
"...One of the smartest things the did was to store dates in a 3 byte field in a packed format. But they didn't store the date as MMYY. They stored it as the number of months since January 1900. So January, 1990 was stored as 90 x 12 + 1 or 1081 which = '01080F' Although it only saved one byte of storage, calculations were faster because you didn't have to convert MMYY to a different format..."
Reminds me of the way the DoD Supply system used only the last digit of a decade and three digits of the day of the year to identify a date within a decade in 4 bytes instead of 5.
Though it was just an extra duty for one of the techs like me earlier in small detachments, one assignment in a Systems Command Project, let me contact anyone in the supply chain without having to go through the base supply officers. That came in handy in knowing how to track a lost shipment of a large antenna feedhorn to a base 70 miles south of us. When I called them they said it wasn't there and got rather rude about me insisting that was where the trail went cold (with no location listed for where the part should be). Instead of arguing with the Senior NCO on the phone, I got our base supply to provide an Airman to drive their truck (and me) down to the other base. When the Senior NCO saw the truck and realized I had come down to look for it myself, he got really angry insisting it wasn't there until I asked him what the object he was resting his foot on was. It was outside on the dock since it didn't fit in the space it was designated to be in.
That was a rare incident, though, most of the time we could get what ever we needed anywhere in the world we went within 3 days.
So if it's this intricate and specific, do the entrepreneurs learn the parts that benefit their bottom line and preserve their reputations, and politically hew to those details, and hire underlings to run the programming and to mind the details and "comply" with the law?
Not in any well-run IT shop. Though we’re 25 years removed from the days when new products or features were programmed (in COBOL) into huge posting systems, good management requires that changes due to regulation, new needed features, process change and maintenance are all coordinated. Otherwise you run into circumstances where further changes and quality testing are virtually impossible.
B, it's true that avoiding disaster 25 years ago wasn't easy and took a lot of work and preparation but it was done timely. We wasted our preparation time ,we didn't react forcefully to the two impeachment ,it took forever to start the trials against a dangerous demagogue and we,literally run out of time . All we can do now is to resist, forcefully and timely through our leaders and legislators and putting pressure on them to prevent as much damage as possible an be prepared for the midterm elections.
Ricardo, I think that both of those events you mention (impeachment and trials) were intentionally slowed down or circumvented. I don't think it was as much "time wasted" as it was "willful delay/denial".
Agree with your premise, Ally House, that the blame and shame should not be placed on those of us who were stunned by the ineffectiveness of the impeachments and trials and the success of the wilful delay/denial process by those whom we had elected as our representatives only to discover that they were really representing Russia and our own oligarchs. One of the failings also of the media seemingly working alongside those who would blind and disable American citizens.
One thing was a consequence of the other. Time wasted willfully would be a better definition. Thanks for your comment 👍
Steven (Stephen?) Beschloss quoted John Kennedy speaking about manned space flight to the moon: “We do these things not because they are easy. We do them because they are hard.” The Y2K preparation was hard, in a sense. The next few years will be hard…but we all are up to the task.
We can also say that a lot of people held their breath for a full minute, then complete relief. This one will take a lot more work from a lot more people; however, we must keep working on it.
Lee, the next few years will be hard and we "must" be up to the task. Thanks for your comment 👍
…and 2026 - the year we need to regain control of both the U.S. Senate and the House!
Fot that JL, we have to start working "yesterday ".
Yes , your right. The only way is for the voters to take the midterms seriously and show up to VOTE.
Wouldn't it be nice to know the identity of the person who first realized the Y2K potential problem and alerted the world. My wife and I, with our two teenage daughters, spent New Year's eve in Puerto Vallarta bringing in the new century, with nary a concern. I would love to know the name of the unsung hero.
I would bet everything I own it was a woman. Since humans crouched around fires and grunted their comments, women have done the work that made progress possible and men claimed all the credit.
https://katherinejohnson.net
Thank you, Dale, for this link to Katherine Johnson. I think that you are probably right - a woman recognized the 2000 issue. For millennia we failed to utilized the brains and talents of the females among us. I am a 1973 grad of Harvard Law - 10% of the class was female. My wife was a 1978 grad of Stanford Med School -10% of the class was female. Our daughter was a 2012 grad of Santa Clara Law School. More than 50% of the class was female as now with Harvard Law and Stanford Med School, female grads are 50% or higher. I was lucky in that I didn't need to compete against all those more qualified and brighter females.
A good friend once explained it to me this way: Men think vertically and women think horizontally.
Imagine that everyone's lives are spreadsheets, with columns for Work, Immediate Family, Friends, Extended Family, Household, etc., etc. Each column contains rows designated for every component of that column. The Immediate Family column might contain rows for Husband, Eldest Child, Second Child, Pet, etc.
My friend suggested that when men are at work, their focus is entirely on work-related matters and it is difficult for them to think of anything outside that "column."
Women, however, may be concentrating on work, but their minds are also monitoring several other "columns" in their lives. In other words, they are better "multitaskers."
It stands to reason that that while that lone female computer programmer in a room full of men was working on the program at hand, the thought suddenly occurred to her that Y2K could be a problem.
Let me guess. You are neither a sociologist nor a psychologist. You grew up reading fairy tales, and are now a scriptwriter for The Hallmark Channel.
Dale, if you haven't seen the movie "Hidden Figures" you owe it to yourself to give it a watch.
Thanks, Ally. I am already a fan of the three stars. Don't know how I missed this, but it's now on my watchlist.
Ally, I see I can rent it on Amazon and I have some digital credits. I’ll try to watch it in the next week. Thanks for the heads up.
Powerful !
Half the programmers in the country had known about it, some for decades. It’s also one of those things that doesn’t lend itself to the moronic, overused but trendy idea that men are credit-grabbing dullards and women are society’s heroes. Life is not a 90s sappy sitcom.
I worked on fixing programs for Y2K back in the day. Me and many others. And it worked.
The only care of the new incoming administration is how to jerk off the nation and suck it dry for all they can personally enrich themselves with. This is their only goal. Unless there is an awakening of sorts, we will head fr a recession and a loss of wealth unheard of since the 1929 crash.
Hi, Bill -
You may well be correct. If that happens, then it is my fondest hope that the millions of non-MAGAts who voted for Trump will realize they bought a pig in a poke and actually pay more attention the next time they vote.
Not very likely. They will still blame “the libs” for their misery, even if Emperor Musk personally pisses them in the face. Just read the comments here by the likes of Rick Sender and you’ll realize they will never, ever blame their idols for anything.
Only thing we can hope is that the masses who didn’t vote will finally get off their asses.
Geez...did you have to mention that guy? His built-in misspelling, syntax melting megaphone is loud enough as it is. Why remind us of him? His theory of "substance of his words" over efficient and effective writing is embarrassing enough to have on the quality pages of HCR.
Sorry to have made you nauseous. But it just shows how deep the programming can go. Guys like these will gladly bend over, have their backside thoroughly plowed by the orange blob, and they will be cheering and waving their MAGA flags all the while. And afterwards, they will blame the libs for the pain in their bum.
It should be on a t-shirt: PLEASE DON'T FEED THE NARCISSIST.
Report him. He is more troll than hayseed
No worries, Dutch. I know he's paid his 50 USD just like the rest of us. If he continues to, as you say, "gladly bend over, have their backside thoroughly plowed by the orange blob, and they will be cheering and waving their MAGA flags all the while", I just wish he wouldn't communicate in gobbledygook and make a little more sense. Best wishes.
Report him. Every time.
Rick is obnoxious, but a lot of his misspellings are the result of the "voice to text" feature that he has to use. I gave him a pass on that aspect of his posts once he explained it to me. However, I no longer acknowledge him because he refuses to cite evidence for his opinions.
I hear what you're saying, Joel; however, I can't give him a pass. If one wishes to debate an issue, it is on that individual's dime that he/she has to find a way to make sense. Voice to text is an important feature for many, and there are many from which to choose. Physicians many times have to use them, and they know how important it is to get spelling correct and the syntax absolute. If *they* screw up on a voice to text scenario, the shit will almost definitely hit the fan. His excuse is flimsy. Simply, he needs to upgrade. If he can't do so, then he needs to get the hell off the pot.
Mike I blocked him from my home substack page by searching for him. No more troll. It’s been weeks.
I didn't understand MaryPat's posts above, now I get it! I had asked about how to get rid of the troll and the blocking worked!! YAHOO!!
Yay!
That's a great tip, Gail! Thanks a million! :)
😘
Are you referring to Musk on your substack page?
Yes, Musk, too :)
No, Rick Sender the troll.
until the libs decide to fight like the conservatives, we will continue to be in retreat. for conservatives, every problem is liberal policies and every solution is a hammer. liberals need to do the same and start hammering the conservatives.
Precisely. We tried "Joy". I liked it.
But I am not trying to raise a family, both of us working full time and can't afford child care. I'm not one healthcare emergency away from losing my home. I'm not bitter because I know my generation will NEVER have a better life than our parents. I'm not carrying onerous amounts of student debt which prevents me from buying a fixer upper starter house. And saving for retirement? What are you smokin'?
There is a systematic rigging of our national economic system that holds hard working families down. It is crushing and it is depressing. It's why many of the 90 million eligible voters stayed home.
"Libs" and Democrats and Independents - people of all stripes need to join together in a battle to achieve Economic Justice.
Mark Zuckerberg has a mega yacht. He has a second mega "support" yacht. Both yachts have helicopter hangars. And we are still debating whether everyone should have minimally basic life saving health care.
We need to get pissed off and make some "good trouble".
Yes we should!
If everyone reported him...
45 is not a pig in a poke. He did not hide who is. He just flat out lied about anything and everything. The #45 voters chose a stupid, evil criminal who was sane washed by corrupt corporate media and corrupt politicians—all for a buck.
I think the sane-washing by public media wasn't too much of a factor. As for the "pig in a poke" characterization, I meant that he was elected not just by his core base, but by habitually uninvolved and uninformed people who weren't paying enough attention. But if we are to adhere to the letter of the phrase, you are correct.
This might upset a few people, but it's my observation that the evangelicals are by far the most gullible, conspiracy theory believing folks around. Pat Robertson's headlines are only one of hundreds their media constantly publishes. Remember the "Satanic Panic," the rumors they spread about Proctor & Gambles' 13 star logo, etc.? There's a direct line between that (lack of) thinking and MAGA.
Hi, Gregg -
I not only agree with you, I'll go further. Christian zealots, because they believe they are acting for God, are very, very dangerous. i recall when Charles Colson became "born again" in prison. One of his Watergate co-conspirators said this: "Colson said he would run over his own grandmother for Richard Nixon. Just imagine what he'd be willing to do for Jesus."
I hope we are able to vote a next time.
If the current media shit-storm on the right persists, Faux!, they will here nothing but excuses…like the idea that the New Orleans ‘terrorist’ arrived from Mexico. Rather than the truth.
Sometimes people, especially those on the right, simply won't believe the truth, no matter the evidence. I read a number of stories about right-wingers dying of Covid who asked their doctors what was killing them. When the doctor told them it was Covid, they swore, literally on their death beds, that Covid didn't exist.
Some people can't be helped.
That is a huge fear of mine. Have discussed finances quite a bit with my spouse since the election.. we are braced and worried. At this point I just hope I’m hurt less than his voters on the financial end, petty as that sounds.
What I said is more likely hyperbole. But we are overdue for a recession and the stock markets have gone way up. I don’t dispense financial advice but the analysts are predicting choppy waters and there is a feeling that within around a month if markets rise that it will take a quick downturn. Who knows.
Sooner or later, everything "regresses to the mean". Two years in a row of over 20% gains for the S&P 500 is a message. Unsustainable. Regardless of politics.
And...there are two economies. The "markets" and everyone else. They don't always work in tandem.
Example: right now. Families all over the country are struggling in the best "economy" this nation has seen in decades. Great unemployment "numbers". Solid GDP. Lower inflation.
But who cares about those numbers? Not the people who still haven't recovered from the housing debacle of 2008 or the Pandemic.
I'm less worried about the future of the markets and more aware of the pain being felt by our working class citizens right now.
But you are right. The markets will drop.
It's not petty SR B, the more those voters fee the pain of voting against their interest the more chances of regarding Congress and being able to prevent, obstruct and build coalitions more effectively to defeat them in 4 years.
We are prepared to sell all of our stock and let it sit in cash if the markets take a turn. Our other retirement money is in protected annuities. I am grateful we know how to do this without financial advisors.
The question is timing. Do you do it now or when? When the markets start dropping and "everyone" bails out? This caused many people to lose money back in 2008 which they never recouped.
I am not at all criticizing you, Sharon! I've been talking this over with my financial advisor for months now. I'm nervous, but we are very well diversified with our investments.
I have a good friend I've spoken about on this forum, who voted for Trump but is not 100% MAGA. Her entire portfolio--which is seven figures--is invested in ONE stock. This was never a good idea but this stock did well for her. She is supporting several family members (all MAGA) so this could get dicey.
I have a determined sell point and watch the market daily. Just being prepared and having a plan gives us peace of mind.
We had friends that lost everything in the dot com bust in early 2000. I can even set up a number that if the stock hits it, it will automatically sell.
I sold all of it before when Trump was messing with the numbers with all his rhetoric and bought it back after Biden took office. Sold Tesla the day Musk bought Twitter. Maybe I’d have more if I stayed in it but it wasn’t worth the risk or the ethical dilemma.
You do sound well prepared, and good luck to you. I have no doubt that a correction is coming as well, and it's going the hurt the billionaires, too. Or maybe it will hurt them? They always have a way of coming out on top. :(
Bill ,they been preparing for that for years and they planned to stay long time not just 4 years and then see what happens. We have no time to waste. Obstruct, oppose, don't let them consolidate.
We people of faith know that there are times when we must fall on our knees and call out to God to give us relief. How far have we drifted?
God will not save us. God gave us the power and responsibility.
Yes, and it all started with Genesis: Build relationship with God and one another and exercise dominion/stewardship over God's creation. Not hard to comprehend until greed, lust, and all manner of sin take hold. Leaving matters to others gets us here.
The idea that we humans have "dominion" or the more palatable word "stewardship" over everything on earth is what has brought us to the environmental extinction crisis we now face on the entire planet. We are not the apex of creation. Humans are part of a wondrous interdependency of all life. If humans had collectively accepted "stewardship" over the planet we would not have allowed companies to continue saying that making money is more important than protecting the environment. But it has become so and because of profits, the planet is warming and the continuation of life on this planet is threatened. Dominion over the planet has been used to defend slavery. It is used to justify agribusiness using chemicals that increase profit but which also poison the earth. It is used to justify keeping animals we use for food in inhumane conditions that cause fear and suffering. It is used to justify destroying the Brazilian rain forest to create grazing land for the meat industry, to destroy water sources with mining and manufacturing.
Humans do not have permission from any deity to destroy the planet. Religion has been used by people who only care about making money. It is also used to justify making money by saying that being rich is a sign that God loves you.
If there were a caring god, that god would not allow humans to destroy the life that the god created. To believe that god gave humans dominion over the earth is to agree that money is more important than life. No caring deity would allow humans to destroy life on an entire planet.
I’m reading Dan Brown’s book, The Templars. It’s astounding how religion has been used to manipulate the masses and line the pockets of those who lead movements, regardless of the “god” chosen.
Amen, Rickey!
You know all those Evangelicals pray, too, right? Their prayers and ours are for different outcomes. They prayed for Trump to win; ours were for Kamala. We need to do the hard work.
I experience and "believe' in a greater power/dimension that we humans do not have a reliable, refined or well tuned sensory organ to grasp. So "religions" step in to define and interpret whatever magic this force may be. Physicist Lisa Randall has studied and discussed this phenomenon. In the meantime, it's for sale and open to manipulation by the well intentioned ministers as well as the gifted charlatans.
God helps those who help themselves.
What kind of relief do you expect from lying prostrate and hoping some other being would fix things for you?
Or ... people of faith could call out to Allah, Jupiter, Odin, Zeus or the thousands of lesser-known gods men have created over millennia. They always demand that their worshipers become beggars. And the effect is the same: a 50/50 chance that they get what they asked for, which happens to be the same odds as if one didn't pray at all.
I really do not want to be an antagonistic non-theist, but when I read comments like this, I am troubled by recommendations that people should waste their time and energy on unproductive activities rather than actually doing something that will affect outcomes.
Dale, I respect your opinion. As a lapsed Catholic, I still pray and this is where I disagree with you--sometimes in thoughtful prayer, answers pop into my mind. Perhaps for other people, meditation produces the same results. Anyhow, it isn't unproductive for all. I'm sure that you have an internal method of problem solving as well.
And btw, I appreciate you saying you don't wish to be antagonistic! That is what I appreciate about this forum--that people here (with the exception of the occasional nasty trolls!) can discuss and debate each other respectfully.
Miselle, I appreciate your comment. I want to elaborate on my intent to be non-antagonistic. I acknowledge and appreciate that following religions – not just Christianity – has helped millions of people be their best selves. (I also note that religion has brought out the worst in people, and this column is likely more weighty, unfortunately.)
I would never want to prevent people who benefit by practicing their religion of choice from having that privilege. I only wish that they would afford "non-believers" and "different-believers" the same respect and courtesy.
Moreover, scientific research has indicated that prayer has a beneficial effect. However, the benefits are not derived from a deity granting favors, but rather the calming effect of personal quietness, contemplation and so forth. Time spent in this state is assuredly productive and beneficial.
My disagreement comes with people who act on the belief that their deity is better than others because he is like a rich uncle who doles out gifts or an ATM that dispenses cash on demand. An unfortunate majority of religious folk apparently think that's how it works, and once they have prayed, they've done all that is required.
Dale, good answer. Thank you. I appreciate the dialog on this forum where most people do provide their well thought out reasoning, as you just did. And I totally agree with that last paragraph.
Agree but don’t “like”.
See Jessica Denson at https://www.youtube.com/live/fkRnnglQm4Usi=xn_mouALUKqc3DCN regarding nowmarch.org (Jan.3-5 protest in D.C). Legislators can vote on Jan. 6 to not certify electors for tRump based on section 3 of the 14th amendment.
Writing to my congressional rep every day with the sec 3 14th amendment.
We need millions like you Carole. Just put pressure on our legislators to do the right thing. And start being loud and repetitive about denying their claim of a landslide and a mandate!!!!
It’s not a viable option. I would like to think it was but it isn’t. Trump was not convicted.
And not only that; as much as I hate to say it, he was elected. His legitimacy of election may be in doubt to some; however, no evidence to that point has yet been provided.
Not the kind of electoral game Dems want to indulge in, the GOP has already done too much, and I'm not sure if there's an end in sight. MAGA plans to rubber stamp the Stolen Election into cement once they're in.
My understanding is that conviction doesn't matter. When the Colorado Supreme Court ruled ineligibility for the ballot due to insurrection, the U.S. Supremes didn't address that, only that states didn't have the power to remove someone from the ballot.
He was impeached by the house
He wasn’t convicted
By the Senate along political lines. I will still give voice to the visual & facts by the House Jan 6th committee & someday , hopefully in the future hx will set the record straight.
We went through this before. DIDN"T HAVE TO BE. not a criminal standard.
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5055171-constitution-insurrection-trump-disqualification/
...or given aid or comfort to the enemy.
No conviction necessary.
Reading THE REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT, kind of like the 100th monkey. Can enough of us persist & resist the coming administration ? When no one wore car seat belts to now 91.9% of front seat passengers do; when everyone smoked & now most public places are smoke free.
Instead the current divisions within the GOP who can't agree by tomorrow who the Speaker of the House can be, whose responsibility it is to swear in all members of the House before the January 6th day to officially count and certify the votes for President and Vice president is more pressing. That it has taken votes and influence of Democrats to accomplish much of anything in legislation these last few sessions of the House is revealing. These dates are important to the functioning of government and until these dates confirm the ongoing legislature Mr Biden is president.
Such an event would have to be organized very quickly and effectively, as the deadline is six days away!
I agree, challenging. See nowmarch.org .
Don, no Jessica on that link you posted tonight…
Hmm, "Lights On with Jessica Denson" on YouTube. It worked for me just now.
- Pulled Quote -
"Popular televangelist Pat Robertson ran headlines like “The Year 2000—A Date with Disaster.”
And so began, in earnest, the re-emergence of the snake oil that the GOP has been selling since (that got us Donald Trump 2.0) At the time I remember posting on the Delphi forum this scripture for supporters of Robertson:
2 Thessalonians 2:11: "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie."
This verse is in the context of Paul discussing the end times and the coming of the lawless one (the Antichrist). It suggests that those who refuse to love the truth and be saved will be allowed to fall into deception as part of their judgment.
Oh, the irony.
I had just started a career in science education- which has felt like using a broom to keep back a sea of misinformation and ignorance for the last 27 years, honestly- and those years were my first exposure to the extremist religious lunacy that grips so many in this nation to this day. I was raised in a secular household by a nurse and computer programmer. It was a real shock.
Best not to wade into Apocalyptic thinking in the first place. I remember dear senior Baptist ladies solemnly predicting Final Judgement when i was still a teenager in the 60s, 1960s of course ! Many human beings have been credulous and delusional on this one for a couple millenia now. Beliefs like this have viral power, sad to say.
Growing up Jewish insulated me from such ideas, but adulting as an atheist I am never surprised by the “sky is falling” narrative on infinite repeat from the Bible thumpers. Heather’s tale of Y2K is entirely different. A definable threat, a resolute response, and objective success in averting disaster.
Jews were the "original" apocalypists , ask Jesus. lol
You are referring to the Prophets, like Jonah, Jeremiah and Isaiah? The difference is in Biblical narrative, the sky does fall, and prophesy is vindicated. In the modern world, catastrophic events occur, but the moral of the story is lost…and repentance never prevents the next one.
I'm afraid i take the OT prophets stories with a huge grain of salt, though the idea that catastrophes are the moral fault of the victims eg the Assyrian conquest of the Hebrews is a familiar and much used one "ever since". They probably didn't originate that idea. A similar one was if your deity was overthrown it just showed your local deity was weak and also overthrown. Exampled in the OT as well.
And when I was in catholic grade school, and being the only kid with a Jewish last name, I was sent to Mr Macken’s studio who was the janitor and he made a set of cardboard donkey horns to wear for talking in class. Boy did those nuns Sisters of Mercy love to punish converters.
Iberian conversos didn't fare so well i hear!
I'm a product too. C'mon Bill...surely it wasn't your name that go you there...odd thing to do, tho. Perhaps you were a bit too "independent and active?" We had one, out of all my teachers, who had a rather odd solution to unruly behavior. Aimed mostly at boys and employing a paddle. Not surprisingly, its aim was to shame the disruptive behavior out of them. So many decades later, I remember it well. And what a shame it was and still is..but on that one disabled woman. A few of those women were extraordinary people, and inspirational. I sure hope that "technique" was not employed by all your teachers!!
I didn't attend Catholic grammar school but did attend "CCD" back then. I still remember one extremely disruptive boy who got solid whacks on the knuckles with a ruler by one of the nuns. I could see him blanch and wince in pain but he never cried. In retrospect, I think he was the first example of ADD or perhaps being on the spectrum that I can recall. He was the child of Irish immigrants, and I can't recall how many siblings he had, but there were a lot of them. I won't use the real name, but my childhood friends and I still refer to him as
"---- ----- with the green teeth." Yup, no lie, the kid had a line of green against his gums. I doubt he ever brushed his teeth and I doubt the parents had the time or money to install dental hygiene. I think about it now and feel badly for him. No idea what ever happened to him, but I think the family may have returned to Ireland.
I think we are wading into Apocalyptic thinking because, rightly so, a T&M administration will be apocalyptic. It's easy to get confused about the realities we face with all the sane washing that is/has occurred.
Yes!!! I have had the same thoughts! Thanks for the scripture references….
Love this!
This misses a major point of HCR's post: The transition into Y2K was virtually seamless because experts realized the potential problem years in advance and serious resources were devoted to solving it. What's the connection? Too many USians didn't realize the country was in trouble till Trump was elected the first time. Certain Republicans, white Southern Democrats (who ASAP started turning into Republicans), and eventually white Evangelical Christians realized the country wasn't going their way with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, followed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. They got Reagan elected in 1980, whereupon the country started sliding backward -- a slide that was interrupted in a few bright spots but that basically continued for four decades.
And despite the heroic and essential work of the Biden-Harris administration, the damage done in those four decades continues to have serious (one might say "catastrophic") effects. Consider the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton administration, the packing of the Supreme Court with right-wingers, and the Citizens United decision of 2010. In short, "we the people" didn't do the work that could have averted the first Trump presidency, and now we're facing a second.
Excellent points, Susanna. I recall a comment thread a few months ago (anywhere from 3-8 months, my brain is all wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey) where Y2K was discussed at length. I suspect that has given Professor Richardson her ideas for this topic.
My personal Y2K experience was being the watch commander for my department as the clock rolled over. Admittedly, in the Pacific time zone, most of the impact was minimal, since we'd had the 8 hours since GMT had rolled over to realize that Armageddon wasn't going to happen then. I ended up in that role because the other sergeant on my shift (8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m.) was on the SWAT team, and was deployed with them, and Command Staff was "on call" from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. While I am sure each of them was awake, I was the only supervisor on the street at that time, and I was "acting in capacity" (working one rank above my actual rank) because we had a lieutenant at the FBI Academy in Quantico, and my regular supervisor was AIC as a lieutenant. Quietest NYE I worked in 28 years.
I sure wish I understood more as about WHY there was not a huge political pushback to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the conservative judicial push and Citizans United at the very time they were introduced. That is to say, I do not remember a strong negative political reaction.
I don't get it either, nor do I recall a strong political reaction. OTOH, I didn't understand at the time what a big deal it was, in part because I was so disgusted with Bill Clinton and electoral politics in general that my expectations were low and I wasn't paying much attention.
However, I recently read an account of the Clinton administration that criticized the role of his business-oriented economic advisers like Robert Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan (who was all in with the despicable "free market" advocate Milton Friedman). It's beginning to make sense, but I want to learn more.
OMG, Mary Kay, you are so spot on!
Start by not watching it, maybe? I urge that you read the piece published last night by Robert Reich (Substack) , in which a recent survivor of three authoritarian regimes offers very good, and timely suggestions we would do well to consider. These suggestions gave me a large dose of relief after reading the piece. Time well invested with this one. Promise! Good New Year everyone !
Oh! How I wish!!!
We can.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/119017397?utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=android_share
No one (or at least very few) pays much attention to the hard work of governing. The day in and day out work of hundreds of thousands of government workers who actually keep this country running. These workers are the ones that Project 2025 is set to replace not with equally skilled and experienced replacements. No, the replacements will have only one qualification: loyalty to Trump. The chaos that will ensue will be devastating.
Our only hope is that bureaucracies don’t move or change quickly. Implementing new or changed policies could take years; hopefully more than four.
As a former government worker, this is my nightmare. I know from experience that it is the expertise of government specialists that prevents chaos. Elected officials (those with any sense) know that government workers know community issues, can project the outcomes of both good — and bad — policy. The elected officials rarely have any interest or ability in identifying the unintended consequences of the laws they pass. They frequently rely on employees to figure out how to make sense of the conflicting, incomprehensible or just plain awful statutes they pass. Without those government experts, all hell would break out. And if the Trump Administration actually fires thousands of employees who don’t pass the loyalty test, all hell will break out.
You say: "The elected officials rarely have any interest or ability in identifying the unintended consequences of the laws they pass."
I say: Truer words have never been spoken! One need look no further than the pro-birth asshats whose votes interfere with medical professionals trained to assess pregnancy and child birth and end up killing women in the name of saving "babies."
I’m wondering if that might possibly be (for some of those misogynists) a not-unintended consequence?
That's a dark view that we cannot ignore.
Or, to present a related view, the necessary if maybe unintended consequence of the implementation of their ideology.
Considering that this group is made up of mostly evangelicals, whose ethos is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures (aka The Old Testament), only obedient, child-bearing women have any value, though far less than any man. So yes, the implication is that disobedient women do not deserve to live.
Since I’m an old lady who has no children, I’m doodoo to these guys. (Since I don’t have a cat, maybe they’ll miss me in the roundup?) And of course no grandchildren to make me useful enough to continue to live. As the Wicked Witch said: “what a world, what a world.”
Marge, I have bad news. According to Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of that great humanitarian state of Texas, even if you had grandchildren, you should still die so the kids can go to work and make money during a pandemic.
Speaking of kids working ... there's Sarah Huckleberry Sanders advocating for child labor from behind her $19,000 lectern.
No one could have predicted that the 1900's would end and, out of nowhere, the 2000s would begin. Not elected policy makers anyway.
👏🏻🤪💕🤪👏🏻🤪
??? What did elected officials have to do with programming for computers that tried to cut corners by using six digits for the date instead of eight?
My impression in the run-up to 2000 is that many IT workers were keenly aware of these looming problems, but their concerns failed to impress management until things got to an emergency state. The corner-cutting that made sense when computing power was constrained and very expensive had gradually becoming neither necessary nor wise, and could have profoundly impacted society if not sufficiently addressed.
I never believed a lot of the scare stuff in the media that practically all digital devices would shut down; because why would they if the critical programming did not need to know the correct date? Yet enough did to require urgent updating. I don't know to what degree government officials were seeing this coming. They should have been, as well as on top of any threat to society. I don't trust the "invisible hand" alone to have sufficient foresight and oversight when it comes to protecting the common weal.
I refer you back to today's Letter from Heather in which she details all the work that went on for a very long time; not on an emergency basis but an urgent one as there was so much work to do.
We started Y2K fixes at my company in 1993. All testing showed clearly those systems would fail if the date was not corrected. The calendar is a critical element in every computer program.
Republican elected officials you mean.
And they know well what their actions will do, or don't care of women die.
As a former employee in federal court, I know exactly what you mean. Taking an oath of loyalty and protection to a person rather than the Constitution means that person is above and over all every.single.other.person in the country and the planet, and governing means nothing, it’s just a criminal protection racket. I would NEVER have taken an oath like that.
Me, either. My oaths I swore were to the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Oregon. Not to the guy who was Sheriff or Governor.
Reading Michael Lewis's book "The Fifth Risk" made me really appreciate the work federal employees do every day to keep us safe, & in some cases, keep us alive!
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
Absolutely recommend that book. Michael Lewis is a top notch writer, love his books. This one is outstanding..
And the ones that pass the loyalty test are the WORST choice to run things.
George, they are the worst for we the people and the best for them because they are going to complie with their orders with any second thought.
Do people here remember Sgt. Schultz’s (from Hogan’s Heroes) famous saying? “Nozink. I know nozink.”
😆
Great point Marge. We have been living with many "unintended consequences" of the 1990 Immigration bill. Congress has never been able to fix many of the problems with the H-1B program and the H-2B program.
Like In 2024 when Trump blocked passage of the immigration bill when a bi-partisan committee had spent months hammering out the details.
Trump's little Johnson killed it when Trump told him to. Anything to get elected.
Gary, maybe we should also do "anything" too.
Just wait til the government checks evaporate, operating a huge bureaucracy is tough enough already, chump toadies are all mouth, no brains..
It is comments like these that gets the Democrats labeled "elites" and cause us to lose elections. It is a safe bet that those millions who elected him were not all living hand to mouth. Take a look at who is bending the knee to him these days. The oligarchs could not line up fast enough.
All voters will suffer one way or another beginning January 20 at 12:01 pm.
I understand J D’s sentiment, because I have these feelings as well. A casual friend of mine (from church, ironically) commented when I said I was apprehensive about 2025, that she “knew” it was going to be a great year. Why? Well her next statement says it all: “then again, I’m a Republican.” The ignorance and actual underlying malice in that statement really got to me. It encapsulates this myopic worldview that as long as there’s a Republican in charge, Republicans will be okay. What about Democrats? Apparently the answer is: who cares? Also, no understanding of how government works (or doesn’t) depending on the competence of the Administration. This is Heather’s critical point today. I didn’t feel like getting into a fight, so I decided not to tell this “friend” that Republicans, especially those, like her, who are on Social Security, with a disabled grandson, will suffer every bit as much as the hated Democrats when we have an unfit, incompetent lunatic “running”everything. It sounds mean to say it, but people like this apparently have to experience personal pain to have their eyes opened to reality.
Our individual and collective challenge as people who voted for Harris is to resist gloating. We can take this as an opportunity to build bridges as hard as this may be. We can keep factual track of the things he is doing and make sure the Democrats don't get blamed.
Dems have to resist gloating, Lordy. Repubs have blamed Dems for what they do, it is de rigueur. At least in my adulthood…. Great last sentence
Joyce Vance is doing that.
Given that JD, like myself, is dependent on SS/Medicare, it is not an elitist statement. I know from previous posts that they are also very well attuned to the fact that many of the people who make up the MAGA movement are themselves dependent on various forms of federal and state aid.
Yes, all voters will suffer. I guarantee you there will be a fair number of MAGA voters who will say "I didn't think you meant ME!!!"
"chump toadies are all mouth, no brains.."
Really? This doesn't sound elitist to you? My point is indeed that we are all going to suffer together.
No. It sounds like someone who has them, in their immediate family, who knows them well.
My family MAGAts are not living hand to mouth, but they depend on government functioning just as I do. They are dear to me but I despise the weaponized imbecility. And that includes my well-off friends who think republicans are still the GOP. And who is more at the trough than muskrat.
I noticed that Brian Tyler Cohen has dumped his suits and wears t-shirts and sweatshirts on his youtube channel now. I have wondered if it was to be viewed as a "regular guy."
Now it seems like Elon is pushing his own elite-ness. I wonder what they make of that.
Cohen stopped wearing suits on November 6. Maybe it is a statement. May just more comfortable.
Yup.
I am determined to remind them that their cult got what they asked for. It’s hard when the “enemy” is a loved one and not a “gook, or whatever “other.”
Or someone you served with and faced incredible risk with...
Hard to imagine, trust is the linchpin
Rereading "The Fifth Risk" by Michael Lewis to pick up on the actual consequences of the 2016/17 transition team efforts, at least started competently by Chris Christie, to me, was scary enough and withstands the test of being attentive to the actual risks. Though Christie had shortcomings in honesty and ethics (like many politicians), he was at least competent and honest enough (compared to the 2024/25 would be appointees and supposed transition team) to want competent people kept or appointed.
With Christie fired, it seems the honest and competent government workers really helped limit the damage back then, at least compared to what the new appointees and projected firings and rules changes portend.
To me Lewis is all about risk management, what I would also call insure-ability. The money to prepare for reducing the risks of the Y2K problem was well spent (as I imagine the costs of not preparing as well).
Two incidents remind me of inadequate risk management, the first being the January 28, 1986 launch of the Challenger in cold conditions that the engineers would not sign off as safe, and the upper echelons overrode under pressure to launch before President Reagan's upcoming Feb 4th State of the Union Speech.
That was an obvious failure that was a known risk as early as 1977 and could have been avoided by simply waiting for better weather.
The 2nd incident was a far less recognized risk in 2007, perhaps because the Y2K problem seemed to have been not that big a deal (enough of the right people fixing it at at greater cost than many would know).
I knew a bit about the incident that could have caused the loss of six F-22 Raptors (designed during the Cold War to counter the projected future fighters they would have to face in the foreseeable future), a need that didn't materialize so we had time to design a more affordable, good enough, more appropriate fighter.
The YF-22 test version first flew in 1990, the production version in 1997, and they were operational in 2005, so the problem wasn't expected in Feb 2007. Unlike Y2K there was an unresolved problem, best described at https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-by-the-international-date-line-03087/
"... DID’s F-22A Raptor FOCUS Article mentioned recent flight software problems that delayed the aircraft’s first foreign deployment from Hickam AFB in Hawaii to Kadena AFB, Japan. What we didn’t mention at the time is how serious the problem was, and how dependent on computers modern aircraft – including military aircraft – have become. What follows are relevant excerpts from a CNN transcript on February 24, 2007 that covered a number of unrelated issues. We’ve cut that out, and left only the F-22 related section of the transcript… KC-10: Life saver…(click to view full) Maj. Gen. Don Sheppard (ret.): “…At the international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were — they could have been in real trouble. They were with their tankers. The tankers – they tried to reset their systems, couldn’t get them reset. The tankers brought them back to Hawaii. This could have been real serious. It certainly could have been real serious if the weather had been bad. It turned out OK. It was fixed […]
Thanks for this info, Jim. I knew about the Challenger situation, but had forgotten about the 6 YF-22's.
Wow, thanks for this information.
And this hard work isn't just government, it's across the board, including superstore checkouts.
"Our only hope is that bureaucracies don’t move or change quickly"
Here is a very good article encouraging that hope:
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/trump-will-overplay-his-hand-be-ready?r=36qkci&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
thanks B Evans…
“Nothing is more meaningful than being part of a struggle for democracy.”
Nothing is more meaningful than keeping democracy alive and well.
Excellent article. Thank you. "Opposition over the next four years must be strategic and broad-based."
Thank you for this AMAZING link! Everyone please read this journalist who has lived through three autocracies and offers her advice to America! Be sure to read Reich’s preface to her words.
Ann, I have posted here a number of times (hard to know who might see it) a recommendation for Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk—the book is about the Obama-to-Trump transition, but IMHO is so much more….a dive into what is called the “deep state” by those who are clueless. His other books have similar vibes, thinking The Premonition…about the pandemic and how rank ‘n file public servants were overlooked/discounted in their efforts. Chilling. Spot on, too.
I read Anthony Fauci’s memoir “On Call” and realized that without him millions would be dead. Under Trump’s Project 2025 we are not likely see his like again. The people with expertise and passion cannot be easily or quickly replaced. I’m not Catholic but I would encourage the Pope to canonize him asap.
Great idea, Marge, I agree….St. Fauci it is!!!!
lol, he could change his first name to Francis, the almost most famous of all Catholic saints. St Francis Fauci !
I just hope they don’t make his retirement a misery.
SR B, you are hoping against all hope 😉
Marge ,ASAP is not soon enough!!!
Just requested it from the library.
Barbara, I don't make it all the way through all the comments. (Trolls sometimes cause me to abandon, so thanks to all who instructed me how to block him!) I had not seen your recommendation and I have added it to my list. I love the "LFAA Bookclub" as I've gotten great, informative books from the people here!
Thanks for the recommendation.
You’re absolutely right. And don’t forget: actual government is boring, and it will never make the news, so people never hear about it and so will believe the standard GOP/billionaire bullshit that you can do away with it. It just costs money and doesn’t do anything, right?
Dutch, government is boring unless is a republican government. In that case it's a big circus to distract the transfer of wealth from we the people to the top.
You're dead right on that one, Ricardo...
Thanks for your input 👍
Amen! alas…
For far too long we have allowed the Reagan-narrative of government to reign supreme. It relies on magical thinking that governmental workers are not needed. That they really are doing nothing. This is patently untrue and a slap in the face to government workers. My hope for government workers is that we can give them respect and the support they need to make our government actually function admirably. These people know the flaws. They suffer under them each work day. I don’t care what size government we have if it is well running. All of us, in all areas of our lives, should want good functionality. But to get that we must think and care. Power-mongers don’t want us anywhere near thinking and caring.
High school students of government and politics do but apparently there's too little staying power. How shall we address that:
We might start a two-pronged campaign. 1) Put Civics back in the classroom, minimum 4 semesters. The intro to every beginning class: “This system is not perfect because it’s run by people, and people aren’t perfect. But it’s a very good system as long as we work together on it, and give it our best, and always look to make it better. *You* are part of what will make it better.”
Someone else would improve on the above.
So what comes next?
Now that as of 2025 we have handed to our billionaire overlords complete control it is time to state the obvious.
We are no better than a flock of pigeons being shoed away and scattered by some old man on a park bench, are we? Or a swarm of herring being scattered by a large swooping pelican. We wonder why the anchovies or pigeons don’t organize and mount a collective attack against their tormentor.
But we are no better. Millions were sent to their deaths in two world wars and the armies turned against each other, but never on the old men in London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, Moscow, or Tokyo who organized their deaths for profits or worse, to prove an abstract idea whose ultimate end is always the same: death, cruelty, and profits, privilege, and luxury for a very few. Use whatever pretense you like: flag and country; folk and fatherland; workers of the world, unite; the person of the king, czar, emperor, is the voice of God. We are no better than frightened fish or scared birds.
Leaders steal openly from or kill us, and we revere them for it.
And when we are finally brought to our senses – when in a frisson of justice, we guillotine the king or shoot the Czar for stealing everything from those who have little or nothing, we are the ones forced to apologize for it, to pour dust on our heads and wear sack cloth. Then we want to hear stories about the Czar or King Louis, but not the mother of the starved infant, not the struggle of the widow made by the old men in respectable positions, not the agonies of young men and women ground down and starved by King, Czar, President, or Emperor.
Steal a loaf and there will be a reckoning. Kill an entire people, raze a country, and there will be rich rewards: television gigs, speaking engagements, book deals, sitting on the board of directors with rich remuneration, pockets filled by lobbyists.
This is an absurd state of affairs. It is no way to run a species. It wasn’t in 1789, it wasn’t in 1917, in 1939, and it certainly is not in 2025.
Hi, Philoctetes
There's a lot of truth in your post, but it is not the whole truth. History is not just bad guys and mindless lemmings. There are plenty of heroes as well. Some of them are well known, but almost all of them are nameless. Over 360,000 Union soldiers died in the Civil War, fighting first to preserve the Union and then to end slavery. In the Second World War, one side was fighting to put Jews in gas chambers and the other side was fighting to stop them.
Some Brits in World War II made up a mock-Latin phrase that I tell myself every day: "Illegitimi non carborundum", or "Don't let the bastards grind you down." It should be the motto of every Democrat until the current Mump Regime is toppled.
I rather like the lyrics of the Moody Blues:
Face piles
And piles
Of trials
With smiles.
It riles them to believe
That you perceive
The web they weave
And keep on thinking free.
Songwriters: David Hamelin / Liam Oneil / Olivier Corbeil / Timothy David Fletcher
In the Beginning lyrics © Peermusic Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, Inc
The Moody Blues - Now that was a band! Thanks for the quote.
Joel, yes, The Moody Blues was a great band, one of my very favorites!
OMG my husband and I quote those lyrics often!👏
Gee, I thought it was "miles and miles".
You know, I'm going to have to dig out the vinyl and listen... the lyrics above were on-line...
I have a family member, a maga, an evangelical, and a former Marine, who can’t resist bringing up his fervent belief (every single time we’re together) that the Civil War was never about slavery but was singularly about state’s rights and that everyone in the country is all the worse for changing a state’s right to keep slavery legal. I have no words for that misanthropic viewpoint, but who am I but a progressive agnostic former veteran of the Navy who basically wants to run away from my freak family. Glad the “getting together as a family” for the sake of the grandkids is over for a while.
I can't help but laugh when I hear someone defending the South's justification for the Civil War as "state's rights." I grew up in upstate New York and Connecticut and moved to Texas at age 21. I had never once heard "state's rights" as a reason for the Civil War in the northeast. Then, I move to Texas and hear southerners spout that nonsense all day long. The Civil War was about SLAVERY and the moral wrong embedded in the so-called "right" to own another human being. Still, to this day I can't wrap my head around the idea of slavery being a "right."
“States rights” my eye. They are going to have to find a better lie now with what has been happening with states that have been protecting safe and accessible abortion and reasonable laws to protect their citizens from gun violence. “State’s Rights “ as long as the state is on the far right.
Reader, that must be tough, having family members with such wrong-headed views. I am betting he spouts them with a loud voice as though loud makes right (OK, Trump thinks loud makes right and he has been or is about to be made president again). I think one of the biggest problems we as a nation are now facing comes from the Civil War. We did not insure the rights of Black Americans as a reality for all the people. It was in the Constitution, a document the South was not fond of reading or sharing and it is easily ignored has it has been the past few years even by our Supreme Court cons. Then, we permitted southerners back into the union with no change of heart, no acknowledgement of the rights of former enslaved persons. States' Rights is just an excuse for super conservatives to get their way when what they are proposing will do harm to those who are not well-off white men. Unfortunately, those Southern beliefs and bad behavior has spread to formerly union states like Kentucky and Missouri (which wanted to leave the union), Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and was the basis for the governments of the Rocky Mountain states, except maybe for Colorado. I am glad you have a reprieve for a while from the family challenges.
If only Lincoln had not been assassinated....
I grew up around that stuff (it was rampant in the schools down here!) and my follow up question for them is always “the right to do what, exactly?” The answer is to own other human beings. South Carolina made that crystal clear when they seceded.
And yet, just about every secession document listed keeping slavery as a primary motivator.
Oh there are words for your relative. Believe me.
I’ve heard that theory before. Geez.
Joel, I like that phrase. Maybe we need some signs with those words. It might make people get onto the internet for research, something other than trashing people on behalf of their leader, Trump.
Philoctetes, wow! That is about the most cynical piece I have read in a long time. Alas, I believe you are right to a great extent. However, putting every war/battle in the same pot is hardly fair. I do believe some causes are worth fighting for. However the one thing that is true in all of the cases you cited, it was men who were making the decisions. I keep hearing of women who were in leadership and sent people to wars like Victoria and Elizabeth II, but in both cases, the men in Parliament made the war decisions. Maybe we should look at what is going on in the male psyche or body that wants them to do harm to others whether for a righteous cause or not. Trump and his buddies, mostly white males have no real cause beyond money and power, but want to do harm to a whole lot of people who have been here for decades, just because he thinks he can. He is OK with calling for others to be hurt as long as he does not have to do the actual fighting, which he could never do which is why he had bone spurs during Vietnam. Maybe there needs to be a world effort to find drugs that can be administered to men who become too violent and can't channel it into sports of some kind. A spray or fog that could be released in war rooms and presidential palaces or committee rooms might help. It could help in police stations and maybe in their vehicles if certain chemicals exude from the officers. You get the idea. We need to find ways to stop the intense, destructive male bullying. Then we can work on the few women who are violent too. It's time we do something about this insanity!
One person's cynicism is another's realism. What consequences did Nixon face for his secret bombing of Cambodia and unleashing of genocide? Instead of treated as the criminal he was, he was revered as an elder statesman. Kissinger too. Much as I detest Trump, W. still takes the prize for sheer awfulness - destroying a country of 25 million based on lies, and now he too, is revised into a "friend of Michele Obama" as he paints away in Texas living off of residual profits from high office, name, and privilege. It's a grotesque absurdity. One could go on.
I for one am a champion against sentiment and for accountability. The Athenian democracy had the institution of judicial review after one left office and no one escaped. The hero of Marathon, Miltiades, was brought into court on a stretcher when ill after accused of embezzlement from the state . . . and condemned.
Power inevitably compromises ethics and moral norms; accountability is the only check we have, and in the US, because of a misguided belief in our supreme goodness, we of course have none. That is why no president has ever or will ever go before the ICC.
Trump us lawless. We are unhappy about it - I certainly am - but that lawlessness is merely a reflection of the US's all too frequent global lawlessness particularly since the end of WWII, after which we helped put in place the Nuremberg Principles and Geneva Convention of 1949, principles we ignore, currently and most vividly in arming Israel for its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as has been recognized by numerous countries.
Philoctetes, I do agree about accountability. It seems we have decided that wealth and power make people immune to accountability unless their behavior is just too out of control, and I can't remember a white man for whom that happened. We just keep putting people into office whose loyalty is to money and power rather than to our nation and its Constitution and to participation in a United Nations that claims to want peace and a willingness to charge people in power with war crimes. I do think W. and his buddies should have been tried for war crimes, actually pretending there were WMDs and getting a whole lot of people on all sides killed and unleashing an Islamic movement whose aim has been to cause chaos and kill anyone they don't like. I don't know where we go from here except that anyone opposing Trump and Kump needs to be willing to take a stand and do whatever they can to bring about positive change and to help keep Trump and Kump from doing damage to our nation. I am not sure what that should look like, though.
A fatal flaw in the transitioning traditions in American power shifts. Outgoing crooks are still treated with deference. They are never held accountable. It’s way past time for exes to be held accountable, W and chump certainly should have been. Now in our upside down world, chump will likely accuse Joe of God-knows what and try to execute him.
What an absolutely depressing point of view. There is much of that these days. I have lost a lot of belief in the goodness of humanity. I can’t believe that there is so much hate and bigotry alive and well in this country. Most of the folks that the felon-elect has nominated and surrounds himself with are evil and power hungry in their outlooks and the felon is just making patronage nominations. Even if there are kernels of sense making change, the motivation is not from a good place. I don’t trust the GOP to actually do the right thing in the vetting process.
We would have slavery again and women would not be allowed to vote if the red state legislatures had their way. I firmly believe that.
Nice job. Thank you. It bothers me to no end how this is placed solely on men especially white men. We all would do well to look into a mirror to find that log we ignore. Women especially would do well to consider a quote attributed to Marilyn Monroe “ I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can do it as a woman “.
OUCH!
Until the rage against men is fully and completely expressed, we can’t move past it and it will continue to distort the space we have to conduct a meaningful dialogue.
From this perspective, the spector of chemical castrations can be seen as an initial needed act of expression in the process of addressing the issue of men’s inhuman treatment of women and other men.
Rage aside (to whatever degree possible), the thing to note is that the violence suggested doesn’t even register (or it wouldn’t be spoken) which I do not think is particular to any one individual but rather a product of the environment we’ve all been acculturated by since birth and which has been present for centuries.
The core issue is the being of human beings. Philoctetes begins to get the issue up on the table by clearly pointing to the bad behavior and uneven treatment of people in positions of leadership, however, bad behavior isn’t an exclusive men’s club either nor is the core issue to address.
It gets really scary real fast when owning one’s own smallness, meanness, and stinginess.
Queen Victoria had little power. Elizabeth II had none. Strictly figureheads.
Thanks, Ruth. Guys, get your shit together.
Thank you for your comment, it resonated. Made me think of this Buffy Saint Marie song “Universal Soldier” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGWsGyNsw00 Maybe, just maybe, some day we will learn….I am not holding my breath.
Oh gee Barbara - another Buffy St. Marie fan! Let me just add on my way up to Cripple Creek that "my dog might only be a hound, but you've got to stop kicking him around." I was also reminded of the e. e. cummings poem "plato told."
Approaching big changes are a very hard sell to the public at large. Accepting the magnitude of the climate change cycle we are in is a good example. We are in a total melt cycle, and that may not be the worst of it. A lot of coastal communities claim to be working on sea level rise plans, but I have yet to hear of one that is thinking in terms of even 10% of the 250' that is all but locked in. This question is not whether it's all melting, but rather what the water release rate is going to be, which is highly unlikely to be a straight-line function.
Now all of that said, despite the fact that we evolved to our current form as the result of a long series of highly specialized adaptations, one of the curious results is that we are a highly adaptable species, which is one of the more curious things about us.
Yeah, Craig, have long wondered in the coming millennia how our species will either evolve or devolve…. IMHO, too many are paying attention to the “shiny object du jour” of technology and not so much, for example (among many), of the age-old regenerative farming & water harvesting (not dam building, but water table infiltration)…slow, sustainable, non-raping coexistence with our biosphere. I won’t be here to see it…but have some slim hope that our species will do the right thing for all. That said, in another 5 billion years, give or take a day or so, our sun will go all “red giant” on us and, well, earth will be toast….to be, yet again, recycled (as we all be) into whatever comes next. The Long Game.
I have no hope. The scale required is beyond the wishes of the rich, who imagine there will be another planet, or their bunkers or enclaves will protect them.
We won't see the massive die off, but we are of course already seeing the climate disruption causing massive population shifts.
I played that one for my son in law, the special forces reservist.
There really is no argument against the sentiment. Except thst humans are evil and do evil to each other. Usually in the name of religion, or racism, or misogyny.
Or greed.
And use religion to justify all of it.
Thanks for the link to Buffy Saint Marie. As always one link leads to another … and another…
Love it Barbara, spot on! I first heard Donovan's cover of that song as a boy listening to my dad's wonderful collection of folk records. Love you dad! We need our most popular artists to bring back protest songs.
https://youtu.be/UC9pc4U40sI?si=vxmDcjCGmb_T9nAG
Never heard it 'til now -- sobering truth stares into my soul. Learning in this moment and hoping such moments add up in useful ways. Thanks Barbara.
Wasn’t it Stalin who said, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic
Your analysis is spot-on. The masses are often manipulated into self-destruction while the architects of their suffering profit unscathed.
The solution? Widespread education that fosters critical thinking paired with grassroots movements that empower collective action against exploitation. Awareness and unity are the best shields against manipulation.
I like people. I believe in the ultimate goodness that wins in the end in one form or another. I also believe that given the opportunity people rise to the occasion.
Hyperbolic philosophic stuff aside I sincerely hope you like the world more than you pretend.
To quote Harry Truman, I like people generally. Specifically, not so much.
But I don't respect them. They are generally stupid.
That second to last paragraph immediately brought to mind Matt Gaetz. It is astounding that the truly religious Evangelicals can support such men--but then, they have such a history of following the smarmy televangelists.
And in spite of it all, Gaetz has a promising future. No punishment for statutory rape because of the statute of limitations, a gig at Newsmax, serious consideration of a Senate run, etc. Being honorable is for suckers and losers today.
Oh hush.
Beautifully said.
You forgot the priests. They are the worst.
Philoctetes, noticed that none of those leaders were women?
It is worth noting that your observation that "Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with," emphatically applies most importantly to the important quiet work of public health. In real time, over the past year, bird flu has been slowly moving toward a possible pandemic crisis, but because there is no crisis yet and contemporary culture and policy has denigrated public health, appropriate and simple preventive measures were never taken and the possibility of serious human infections looms large.
Yes, this terrifies me, given that those who so damaged faith in public health during COVID will be in power once again.
I see this often in those back to the “it was just a flu” and “you’re a fool for taking the jab”. I had to remind a neighbor how happy we were when his girlfriend was able to get us into her vaccine drive through clinic in Miami. It shut him up.
Thank you for mentioning this. I feed the bird in my yard and have been wondering about the safety of coming in contact with their droppings. Especially my cat, getting it on her paws and then cleaning herself.
My cats are indoor only. It’s not to hard to teach them to stay inside.
KITTY!! KITTY!
I've been watching this evolve, Doc. Scary stuff.
You cause me to recall the earliest days of covid when there was word in the news of an epidemic in China that seemed to be spreading faster and faster. I remember hoping that the physician-scientists would get it figured out and controlled until it became inevitable that it would not be. And now so many complain of the inconveniences they experienced, apparently unaware and uncaring of the tragedies that others experience, and unappreciative of the amazing efforts that resulted in an ability to better manage the virus.
Heather, what a powerful post. I had no idea that so many people were working for years to make 2000 a non event. I appreciate you and people with insight, who keep our lives mostly stressful free.
Indeed they were; I was one of those programmers. So many computer systems using six digit dates!
It nearly became rote, changing the date formats to 8 characters and testing everything that used them. It was weird in that it was both tedious and very important. =)
Karen, thank you so much for that work.
Nobody went home. Until midnight. And then we did.
I was standing what I call either a "what if" or "just in case" watch with my local law enforcement agency. 2000-0800 12/31/1999 to 01/01/2000.
Noble work, indeed. One of my favorite guilty secrets is the movie Office Space, about people doing that very work.
As anyone who worked in a hospital on December 31, 1999 can tell you, there was genuine fear about the clock turning to 0000,01/01/2000. All of the department heads at my hospital set up camp in the cafeteria in case the worst happened. All that was lost that day was sleep.
As were the federal courts also. We were all there in our judges’ chambers that night testing, testing, and more testing until the moment of truth. Very intense time.
We were watching the fireworks on Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia with my daughter and her husband. I remember at midnight turning around to look at the city and realizing that all the lights were still on! It sounds silly to anyone who didn’t live through it, but that’s because we take so much for granted in this country. Thanks, Heather, for reminding us of all who worked for years behind the scenes to make sure those lights stayed on.
Thank you, Karen, your work is appreciated by some of us! And, I'm really sorry what's happened to the use of your beautiful name. I have several friends that cringe when they hear the "Karen" trope. It makes me sad for them.
I appreciate the thought, but I just like to think that now I know how guys named “Dick” have felt all these years! :D
😆good way to think about it!😆
Exactly so! My wife is a Karen (spelled with a "y" instead of an "e") but still... I'll tell her this. She will guffaw.
Me too, on FEMA systems.
Often the most important work is the most tedious. Thankfully, there are people who can/will commit to the tedium.
Thanks for doing that work, Karen. Our department went through some difficult times with that, and thankfully we had (at the time, and about the ONLY good thing I can say about him) a fellow high up in the command structure who recognized what the problem was and got us through our resistive transition.
But with just 8 digits now we have the same problem in the year 9999 and have to spend another trillion dollars (in today's dollars)? Maybe by then all of these codes will be long retired by then, but surely we should have gone with a larger number of digits.
If they're still using the systems I worked on at THAT point, they deserve whatever happens! =D
I’m with you. I’d never realized it and had always laughed it off as overblown.
I never thought it was overblown because in federal court we got weekly messages from the AOC (Administrative Office of the US Courts) with updates to systems and backup tasks, and we all had to sign documents attesting to doing the work that was mandated. Apparently it worked because there was not a single glitch that I ever heard from any court in the country.
We were in a hospital in Evanston, awaiting the birth of our first-born, and praying that Y2K didn’t interfere. Thank goodness, it didn’t; she just celebrated her 25th birthday!
Who was awaiting the birth and who was in the process of labor and delivery giving birth?
Wilburp?
I'm laughing! Thanks Bill Katz! I feel better now!
lol!
What a great memory! It must have been quite a mix of emotions welcoming your first-born into the world while the whole globe held its breath over Y2K. How wonderful that everything turned out perfectly, and now you're celebrating her 25th milestone!
Dr Cox Richardson, thank you for providing the perspective that history can give us. Happy new year!
I worked for several years on Y2K at a giant NYC bank. Our superiors also insisted that we prove there would be no disruption on February 29th, 2000. It seemed to me to be unlikely, since anyone who actually knew that 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, and therefore did not have a February 29th, would know that 2000 WOULD be a leap year. Of course, February 29th caused no disruptions either.
New Year 2023
Almost a quarter of a century
Reflect on past security
We started with the Y2K scare
Not knowing 9/11 was coming there
Starting a war based on lies
Has led us to our current cries
When border fears are used to demonize
The helpless, poor and persecuted dies
Instead of welcoming beacon to our shores
Hate and bigotry blossom as a cause
And evil dictators divide without a pause
Whipping up passions and flouting laws.
When love of others accepting all in
No matter race, or sex, or origin
That is the only place to begin
To cleanse us of our original sin. 1/1/23 revised 3/20/23
Elise Rosen-Levin, MD. - Don’t see much changed since I wrote this. 1/1/2025
Happy New Year in Interesting Times
So good, Ellen. Here's hoping it eventually loses its validity. So, happy New Year!
Happy New Year! Let’s fix the bugs before 2028!
"I chased the bug
around the room.
I'll have his blood
He knows I will!"
Repeat, fast, without a break.
🤣
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis highlights the unappreciated but critical importance of government workers, " there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system―those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running." Eye-opening.
GMB, thanks for posting this…I did also, once again, upthread. Read this when it first came out and IMHO should be required reading for high school/college courses…and, well, for others too. To me it is far “deeper” than just a take on the Obama-to-Trump admin transition.
The last chapter of The Fifth Risk, that deals with how much the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA weather) does for Americans to keep us safe, was so enlightening for me. And now Project 2025 wants to do away with NOAA & privatize it, so that some Republican crony can monetize it! Even the Weather Channel uses NOAA Weather for its forecasts.
I was unaware of that book. Thanks!
Thanks for this reminder of what it was like for a lot of people back in 1999. I was one of the lucky ones because I have a family member who works with computers and informed all of us that the fixes were being worked on as early as the 1980s and that unless someone messed with the systems, there would be no big Y2K disaster. He was right. I told my students not to worry about it and that they should be excited to watch the numbers on their clocks change, if they had a date setting. Reminding us of how often disasters are averted by hard work and thoughtful understanding of what has to be done is important because we have come to think that things just happen, almost magically. Our media often pay more attention to the crackpots who predict gloom and doom rather than the words and explanations of those who actually know what they are doing. If someone had watched Apollo 13 take off, then a few days later splash down, they might not have realized the potential disaster that was averted by a bunch of skilled problem-solvers at NASA. There are also disasters that could have been averted had those in charge actually listened to those skilled, thoughtful people doing the work. Here's to all those people behind the scenes who work quietly but diligently to keep people safe.
And, Ukraine does not have many options when it comes to standing against Russia, but the pipeline is a good one and the people of Europe worked hard to prepare for the pipeline shutdown. Now, Putin, get the heck out of Ukraine and take care of your own people who are suffering from neglect as you pump up your ego by invading other nations.
I was so encapsulated in my father’s cancer that I barely noticed any of the Y2K scare. At the hospital, they gave him a cowbell. I was like what the heck is this for?! My mom said for when the computers shut down. Ha! So the vast hospital computer system is going to be replaced by a cowbell?! It was the very least of our worries. Glad everything was taken care of so it didn’t interfere with our situation. 25 years later, computers still running the world. Hope this year runs better than I imagine it will. Our worries today are far greater!
My Dad died in hospital on 12-28-87, far before the Y2K scare. I know where you were then...
Having worked in systems on the Y2K issue, the planning and hard work simply meant that an issue never occurred.
The best way to manage a crisis is to identify the risk, plan and act accordingly to ensure their is no crisis in the first place. This work however isn't sexy and as you indicate, people with no understanding bleat that there was no crisis in the first place...
The "fire-fighters" are (rightfully) seen as heroes. Those that ensure there was no fire in the first place are never "seen" let alone seen as hero's.. A significant human blindspot.
I hope the all DC government workers join the Jan3-4 Demo. They will be the first to be affected; at least those who don't sign the coming "Loyalty Oaths".
They probably won't, as they are mostly apolitical (it's almost a job requirement). And most of them will be back from whatever holiday leave they took, back to the daily grind.
Yes, with a larger picture in mind, we as humans are not very far along in our evolution, are we?
I agree that we are not very evolved as a species yet. It's disappointing and frustrating. Will we pass this test? I have my doubts.
I remember Y2K and the theme of panic---but as you show, advance planning, meticulous planning, made things work. Democrats plan, MAGA screeches. The gas crisis now has also been averted by advance planning. You CANNOT do these things on X or while bellowing on some pod cast. The incoming administration has already shown it can't plan, can't cooperate, and it looks like it can't govern if past practice continues with the new silly people added to the old ones. Not a good prospect.
Silly? Dangerous is more like it.
Leslie, agreed with the dangerous part bur I think they have a plan already, it's called Proyect 2025. Implementation it's their Achilles tendon. Let hit them there, put pressure on our leaders and legislators 24/7. It's our only option for the next 2 years.
Yes, implementation is the weak spot. Will the senate approve the cabinet picks? Will proposed changes be challenged in court? Are there ways the Trump loyalists can work around standard operating procedures? At this moment it looks like the Republicans are splintering into groups. Can the house even get itself together to elect a speaker? So many questions with some very bad possibilites ahead.
MAGA may screech. But the folks behind Project 2025 plan meticulously.
Happy New Year Heather! Thanks for the sanity check, today and always.