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9Eleven for the first amendment
Thursday, September 18 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I woke up in the night, freaked out about last night's suspension of the Jimmy Kimmel show after Kimmel made an innocuous comment about how Trump's reaction to the death of Charlie Kirk was like that of a little boy whose goldfish had died. (Trump had said almost nothing about Kirk when asked and had immediately pivoted to the subject of the work he is doing to turn the White House into a despotic imperial palace.) The far-right and their enablers have decided that in the aftermath of his assassination, Charlie Kirk is a now a founding-father-level hero of the republic, and anyone saying otherwise (for example, by pointing out the many horrendous things Kirk has said) is committing a hate crime that the First Amendment does not protect. They apparently agitated aggressively against Kimmel for his "goldfish" comment, causing. This caused local affiliate networks to drop the Jimmy Kimmel show and led to Trump's sycophantic head of the FCC to say some things that should not be said in a free country. (He acted like such speech should affect whether ABC can have a license to broadcast and even said "we can do this the easy way or the hard way.) Subsequently, ABC suspended Kimmel's show. (As with other television networks that have capitulated to Trump, they have a merger they need approved, and Trump demands tribute before he will do anything that benefits anyone.)
This series of events is terrifying for anyone who wants to live in a free country, since the press and other media needs to be free for people to know enough about a government to know whether or not they should support it. Suppressing dissenting voices in the media is a hallmark of repressive regimes, and the silencing of Kimmel is unlike anything that has happened to date in this country. (The cancellation of Late Night with Stephen Colbert, which happened earlier this summer, was similarly horrifying, though in that case Colbert still had ten months of shows he can still deliver.) With Kimmel, you see, the despotic machinations were all out in the open: the head of the FCC making it out to be something that he should be able to do something about and ABC quickly capitulating to repressive pressure. This incident is to the First Amendment what 9Eleven was to America's complacency about Middle Eastern terrorism.
At work today, the pseudoephedrine I took actually helped me buckle down and make progress trying to make sense of some Crystal Reports reports and the SQL queries that underlie them. I've already complained a fair amount about Crystal Reports, but today I was finding it to be like training wheels put on a bike to be ridden in the Tour de France. The program is designed to make creating reports easy for people with modest skills. But if you know SQL, the Crystal Reports GUI is just in your way. And, because reports end up saved in an incomprehensible binary format, there's no way to interrogate how Crystal Reports does anything it does. You have to use the GUI to find or do anything, and sometimes the thing you're looking for (which would be trivially easy to find in the reporting systems I write) just cannot be found.
For lunch I ate leftover sformato (aka "purple pie") while the topic of discussion dwelled for some time on the subject of swimming pools. (The project manager guy has a side gig being a pool man for several clients, and the other developer in the Lunchroom Court wanted to know how expensive having a pool is.) Other topics of discussion included hot tubs (which I brought up) and people who don't identify as their birth gender. That last subject came up when the discussion of hot tubs turned to nudity, which then segued into how we had to be naked in front of our classmates back when we took showers after gym back in high school. The guys in the Lunchroom Court are very conventional white guys, and I expected them to have reactionary views of the trans community. The project manager might well have had such views, but he prefaced what he said about them by saying they were free to do whatever they wanted and he didn't judge. But he couldn't get his mind around the strange ways some of their sexual preferences work, citing as an example Caitlyn Jenner's spouse, who is another trans woman. Was Caitlyn a lesbian? It's all so confusing! I responded that there is no accounting for how someone's sexual preferences turn out, that's based on numerous factors and can end up many different ways. As for the ability to understand a sexual preference, I noted that I can't really understand why any woman would be attracted to a man.
When I got home from work today, I quickly packed up the Bolt before driving to the Adirondack cabin for the weekend. This weekend Gretchen would not be coming, but the dogs would be. I'd already loaded up the car with several hundred pounds of bluestone (which had gone to work and back with me today), but also wanted to bring some fun electronics, including four Meshtastic LoRa devices. (I still have a dream of building a LoRa-based tracker for Charlotte, since cellular-network-based trackers aren't particularly useful at the cabin.)
As I often do when driving without Gretchen to the cabin, I stopped at the Cairo Hannaford to get some items: lettuce, tofu, nuts, corn chips, Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, a jug of apple cider, and a 12 pack of strong Voodoo Ranger Hazy IPA. I also got a half gallon of cheap gin at the nearby liquor store.
Before I set out on the road from Cairo, I tried several times to add my phone to the Bolt's bluetooth-connected audio system. Gretchen's phone is already paired and it works great, but for some reason my phone cannot be paired to it. Interestingly, my phone is paired to the Forester's audio system and works great, but we've never been able to get Gretchen's phone to pair to it.
The sun was setting when I got to the cabin at around 7:00pm. I immediately did some work on the Mossy Rock Trail that I'd been thinking about whenever I needed to get my mind off the Jimmy Kimmel thing. There was a low spot a couple hundred feet down the trail from the cabin that I wanted to fill with sand from beneath the screened-in porch (where there is still too much fill) and then pave over with several nice pieces of weathered bluestone.
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