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On Thursday July 27 our Supreme Court issued a set of rulings that severely weakened the ability of Federal agencies to protect
U.S. citizens.

On that day I thought up the slogan “Don’t Let SCOTUS OutVote Us.”

This was actually one day before another Supreme Court ruling essentially set up Donald Trump to become a dictator in January 2025. I know that sounds crazy, but if you study the January 28 decision, you will see that it is quite literally true.

That ruling will place Trump above the law and answerable to nobody for any act, no matter how venal or corrupt or harmful, as long as he can claim “I’m doing this in my official capacity as president.”

So now it is even more urgent. U.S. citizens are likely to lose fundamental rights that they have never even questioned before, as we careen toward becoming a authoritarian state. Imagine that — six people just summarily took away the rights of 300 million people.

To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, it can happen here.

Today would have been the 86th birthday of the great actress Shirley Knight. Alas, she passed away in 2020, at the age of 83.

She was one of those brilliant actors who always make the films they are in much better by making the other people in the cast look good. Tom Wilkinson was like that as well.

I had the great good fortune to meet her some years back, and we got to talking about movies. At one point I mentioned her role as Beverly in the 1997 film As Good as It Gets.

There is one scene in particular in that film where it looks as though Helen Hunt is giving a bravura performance, but if you watch carefully you realize that Shirley Knight is quietly doing all the heavy lifting. “You’re the person,” I told her “who won Helen Hunt an Academy Award.”

She seemed happy that I realized that.

I was talking with someone today who pointed out that today might be our very last Independence Day. At least, in the way that we’ve thought of it till now.

Depending on how things go on November 25, by this time next year it might be illegal to question our government’s policies. As of a few days ago, it is now perfectly legal for the U.S. President to issue an executive order declaring that any criticism of the U.S. government is an act of sedition, punishable by imprisonment.

I very much doubt that the current administration would issue any such order. But I cannot say the same thing about next year, when we might have a very different administration.

Such a policy might seem odd to those of us who grew up in the U.S., but it is perfectly normal elsewhere. There are many countries in the world where criticism of the government is an offense punishable by imprisonment, or even, in the case of Iran or Sudan, by execution.

So enjoy this holiday while you can. And don’t forget to vote in November. It might be the very last time you get to do that.

I learned this morning of the death of Robert Towne at 89. I had never seen his face before. From the picture in the New York Times, looking at his eyes, I could tell at once that he was Jewish.

How odd, I thought to myself. “Towne” is not a Jewish name. Then I read the obituary, and learned that he was born Robert Schwartz.

It all made more sense to me then, the undercurrent of incredible sadness that runs through his best screenwriting. The line “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” is a metaphor for infinitely larger tragedies.

We need our poets. We need them to speak to what is unspeakable, yet must be spoken.

To my astonishment, the U.S. Supreme Court just declared Joe Biden to be King. Well, not exactly King, because there is no right of succession. Hunter Biden doesn’t get to inherit the monarchy.

But in effect, the majority opinion of the court yesterday was that anything a sitting president does in his official capacity is legal. Which means Joe Biden can do whatever he wants between now and January 20.

Should he decide to round up all of the Republican senators and put them into holding camps for the next six months, that would be legal. Should he order a military hit on the Republican candidate for president, or on any particular members of the Supreme Court, that would also be legal.

In each case, he could simply say he is acting in the interest of national security. The Court made it very clear that we are not allowed to even question the motives of a sitting president.

According to SCOTUS, you cannot question POTUS. As long as King Joe is operating in his official capacity as president, whatever he does is by definition legal.

I wonder why the Supreme Court decided to give Joe Biden such absolute power.

When I teach computer graphics, some concepts seem to confuse students more than others. One of those is has to do with matrix multiplication.

When you multiply two numbers together, the order of the numbers doesn’t matter. For example, 5×7 is the same as 7×5. We say that multiplication of numbers is commutative.

But multiplication of matrices is not commutative. If A and B are matrices, then AxB is generally not the same as BxA.

Just last week a student was asking me about this. So yesterday I created a little Web app to help make it easier to understand.

This was only my first attempt. I’m sure I will keep tweaking this until I get it just right.

But meanwhile, you can check it out HERE.

For some reason, the last day of the month always makes me sad.

Oh well, only one more day until we get a whole new month of possibilities!

Suppose I were the government of a very large country on the other side of the world, and I wanted to influence the outcome of the next US presidential election. One particular tactic might be very effective, and as that government I would certainly have the wherewithal to pull it off.

I could simply arrange for someone to slip one of the candidates a mickey just before the debate. The candidate would experience brain fog for the duration of the debate, and then would, seemingly miraculously, go back to being his usual sharp, energetic, perceptive self by the time he gave a speech the next morning.

Remember: Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are aren’t out to get you.

Have you ever been cooking eggs, and one egg somehow manages to roll off the edge of the kitchen counter? At that moment, everything seems to go into slow motion.

You see the egg slip off the edge, and you watch as it seems to descend slowly to the floor. The entire time that it is falling, you observe that the egg is perfectly whole and intact.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you hold out hope that it will stay that way. Perhaps, you tell yourself, it will land on the floor and somehow continue to remain intact, retaining its beautifully perfect and pristine form.

But then, the inevitable happens. The egg breaks, and you are left with a big mess on your floor.

Try to hold in your mind the feeling right after such a moment. That was my exact feeling last night, watching the presidential debate.

When I use Google Docs, I often find myself wondering “What did this line of text say before it was changed?” But there is no easy way to answer that question.

Ideally I would like to point to any given word, phrase, sentence or paragraph, and quickly get a history of just that portion of the text. What was the sequence of changes that produced this particular sentence? When was it last changed? Who changed it?

It would very useful to have a “local change search” feature, which would give me that kind of local history of changes to a document. All the information needed to implement such a thing may very well already be contained in Google Doc’s Version history.

Alas, as an end user, you only have access to Version history for the entire document. There are no tools available to you to forensically examine selected portions of successive versions of that history.

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement local change search. I’m sure a lot of people would find it useful.