Month: March 2024

Birmingham-Southern College is shutting down.

I don’t know how to feel about this.

I stand by my previous remarks: BSC was the biggest mistake of my life. Fortunately, years of drugs and therapy have helped me understand how I made that mistake, and how much of it was not of my doing, and how much harm I did myself from years of trying to go back and keep fixing that mistake and the others that spiraled out from it. And I suppose thirty years after graduation, it’s far enough in the past that I’ve learned to walk around the broken step that leads to the black hole.

It’s hard not to feel weird about seeing a big chunk of your past detach itself, like a calving glacier, and disappear beneath the waves. The only people I can really talk about this with are one or two folks on Bluesky, people whose government names I don’t even know. When I left BSC, it was with essentially no friends but my psychotic girlfriend, and when she finally cost me my Vanderbilt career – or caused me to cost myself said career – I was left with a void that I spent literal decades trying to either fill with meaning or retcon into something else. At some level, I think I hoped that somehow BSC would do what Birmingham accomplished, and evolve into a place I would again be happy to claim and be associated with. I think they could have, and they were on the right track, but they had too far to come and started far too late to make it.

After hearing the news, I found myself out in the shed digging for some stuff I’d boxed up. A sweatshirt. A pennant. The ubiquitous opaque container. A few caps. The pewter engraved flask I bought myself because I didn’t have anyone else to buy it for me. The football jersey I had made for myself at a point when transitioning straight to Division III with football would have been a fun and interesting swerve and not a blindsiding comedown based on a fraudulent vision. And the class ring – not the bespoke design that was yet another dose of Vanderbilt envy, but the stadium-top 90s style with its degree that I never used adorning one shank. Except I suppose I did use it to get into Vanderbilt, do the resume laundering and collect an MA that would give me a leg up at NGS and Apple.

I mean, the things I was taught at BSC pale next to what I learned, and how I fell into a life lived on defense rather than offense, and how that manifested itself for a quarter century. And when I disavowed it in 2006, I felt none the worse for disclaiming it. And at some primal Celtic level, I am grimly satisfied that bad conduct has had consequences, even thought a lot of people are going to suffer as a result. I hope Miles can move in, or UAB can take the opportunity to establish a presence and a residential college, or something at least happens to preserve Yeilding Chapel and the planetarium.

The fight song didn’t have words, the alma mater was a direct word for word lift of Vanderbilt’s, and the only campuswide traditions were getting thrown in the fountain by your friends and having smoke blown up your ass by everyone in authority, but it was a thing that happened to me for four years and now it’s not there anymore, and will not have an opportunity for redemption.

So it goes.

If there were any doubt that Merrick Garland is a mediocre hack with banana pudding between his ears, I don’t know why, given the desultory reluctance to do anything about the events of the January 6 attack on Congress. But the announcement of an antitrust suit against Apple yesterday should have dispelled any questions.

There are plainly things that Apple could be dinged for. Mostly because they already have, by an EU determined to take a chunk out of the hide of American tech companies. And the things they have been dinged for are illuminating, as are the things they haven’t. The EU didn’t view Messages as an issue, because unlike the US with its fixation on “green bubbles”, literally everyone in Europe is on WhatsApp – which is in the App Store. They said nothing about “super apps”, because WhatsApp is a product of China’s authoritarian marketplace and nothing anyone in Europe uses any more than they do in the United States. They did say a lot about the App Store – and Apple is already deploying the framework for additional App Store options to be run by third parties. Whether that works has yet to be seen, but it’s in progress.

The problem with the DOJ suit is that it seems to have been whipped up three years ago by someone without any experience of tech, and not touched since. “Green bubbles,” about which some people are entirely too much in their feelings, are a product of carriers sticking with SMS and MMS to the point Apple felt the need to build their own superior solution (as did Facebook, twice, and as did Google, more times than anyone can remember, and as did Signal, which is the one you should be using). Things like the Amazon Fire Phone failed not because of anything Apple did, but because it was shit on toast.

In the macOS settings, you have three options for apps: install from the App Store only, install only from the App Store or from verified developers, or install anything from anyone. Option one is what the iPhone has now, option two is what Apple is moving to for iOS in Europe, and option three – which is not the default in Android at all, for what it’s worth – is asking for Ed Earl Brown to fling down his phone with the same disgust as his virus-riddled HP Pavilion running WinXP. I suspect that implementation of something similar in iOS – choose from these three levels of security and buy the ticket, take the ride – is probably inevitable and will disembowel a huge chunk of this case, as will the RCS implementation in iOS 18.

It seems like most of the DOJ’s case is based on vibes, like suing Apple because they should have built Messages for Android or because super apps should be a thing or because CarPlay shouldn’t be superior to the typical car infotainment system. It’s a piss poor case, honestly, but that means nothing with the right forum-shopping and a good jury draw. But the real dagger is that this case seems to revolve far more around the harm to Spotify or to Epic than any harm to the end-user, and the fact that this is rhetorical flagship case – rather than going after Google or Facebook – uncomfortably suggests that Puddin’head Garland is far more worried about the well being of companies than people. Which makes it just as well he didn’t wind up on the Supreme Court, really. Shame Doug Jones couldn’t also have wound up at the DOJ instead.

I skipped the State of the Union for what feels like the 26th consecutive year, and am no worse off for having done so. To all accounts, though, Uncle Joe delivered the goods in a setting where everyone was primed to expect Weekend At Biden’s. Followed by a former Machine SGA president from the University of Alabama delivering the breathy baby voice horror stories of any Sunday night Baptist service. Between the two, we have begun the 2024 campaign in earnest: the first collision between reality and Cable News Make Believe, with democracy itself at stake.

Because there’s no hiding it anymore. No pretending there’s some kind of miracle get out of rematch free card, no matter how much CNN and the New York Times want to wish it into existence. Donald Trump will be representing the GOP for the third straight election in a world where his record of venality and incompetence has been festooned with multiple criminal charges in three separate jurisdictions, half a billion dollars in civil liability, and four more years of delusion and conspiracy theory that looks far more like dementia and decompensation than anything Biden has ever exhibited. And in most polls, he’s running neck and neck with the President.

And to make matters worse, the rigged judiciary is breaking things his way – the case that should be the end of him is in limbo with a judge he himself appointed, somehow, and he is being transparently protected, and the system shrugs. But then, when it took Merrick Garland two years for his pudding brain to cough up “maybe we should be investigating a a coup attempt,” it’s hardly surprising.

For some reason, we decided that investigating and prosecuting someone who was running for office was inherently a political act, without considering that in doing so, we basically grant criminal immunity to anyone running for office. And the instant someone worries about the implications for potential political violence, the terrorists have won. The most successful practitioners of terrorism in America have always, always been the racist right, from the Klan to the Birmingham bombers to Tim McVeigh to the January 6 insurrectionists. Yet we cannot devote one percent of the energy of post-September 11 to pushing back against a coup attempt by an anti-democratic mob.

I don’t know. Every Democratic win seems to just make the Enemy more intractable and the political press more supine. Things that would have been career-ending twenty years ago are blithely ignored now. Consequences are for people who aren’t rich or white enough. And even if Biden clocked 40 states and 370 electoral votes and 55% of the popular vote, does anyone think for a second that Republicans would shake their heads and say “well we got beat” rather than start back in on denying reality and threatening lives if they don’t get what they want?

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, age 81…you have less than eight months to save the world. And even then, it still won’t be saved for good.