Yesterday I rematked that no tech had showed on Thursday. Shortly after that happened, my internet also died, so I had no phone, no internet. I had just managed to pre-post and schedule Friday’s Open Thread, and that was it. I could neither research or post. I had had my inbox open, so it did refresh a few stray times, and I was able to see an email confirming my new appointment, but couldn’t get into it. So after spending a long day Thursday, I had to spend another one Friday with no communication. I spent some of it checking the modem and the cables to no avail, and more trying to set up WiFi on either of them, also with no luck. By the time the end of their appoitment window rolled around, I was exhausetd. I went to bed early and slept 12 hours. When I got up and went to my desktop to try to find a phone number, and turned on the computer – the internet light on the modem lighted up – and I tried for internet – and behold, it’s back. So is the phone!
I wasn’t able to research any more than I could posr while it was down, so I have nothing, and I get my second shot today, and have things to do before that happens. So I’ll be posting late if at all today. But I’m back, and even sort of rested (the quality of sleep when one is under stress isn’t the best, but at least I got it.) Expect me when you see me.
signed JD
9 Responses to “JD Housekeeping Note”
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Good News! Thankful that you’re back on!
I know that can be frustrating having no phone, nor internet access….one misses it.
Hope that your Covid shot is uneventful, and that you get a chance to R&R today.
Thank you for the ‘Heads Up’, rest easy, and enjoy your day.
I was so worried not seeing anything from you this morning. So happy to see that you got your Internet back.
Will be praying that you don’t have any major side effects from your second Covid-19 vaccine today. I had no issues with mine, which was the Pfizer.
Hope you have a nice day. Take care. Thanks Joanne
That’s exactly how I would have felt. And that was a big part of the frustration. Thanks.
Well, this is all good news, now. Best of luck with the 2nd shot. I had virtually no side-effects, but my wife had a crumby next day; said it was worth it, would doit again.
So, given the situation Joanne describes:
July 9, 2021Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com> On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.
In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after an actor had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own plan. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857, this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so and Congress could not stop them. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so, the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, and the Loving v Virginia decision permitting interracial marriage, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. These opponents began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
It’s a funny thing to write about the Fourteenth Amendment in the twenty-first century. I am a scholar of Reconstruction, and for me the Fourteenth Amendment conjures up images of late-1860s Washington, D.C., a place still plagued by malaria carried on mosquitoes from the Washington City Canal, where generals and congressmen worried about how to protect the Black men who had died in extraordinary numbers to defend the government while an accidental president pardoned Confederate generals and plotted to destroy the national system Abraham Lincoln had created.
It should feel very distant. And yet, while a bipartisan group of senators rejected Bork’s nomination in 1987, in 2021 the Supreme Court is dominated by originalists, and the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment seem terribly current.
It’s absolutely amazing the things a long night’s sleep can repair. But I didn’t think that included phones, computers and the Internet!
(But never argue w/ success.)
We had a huge storm roll through last evening and it cause a power outage involving a large swath of the KCMO Metro that lasted almost 12 hours. So I, too, am a bit behind.
I made scrambled eggs and cheese w/ a toasted tortilla and peanut butter for lunch. But I was surprised I had to use a match to get the burner started.
We had a gas stove when I grew up and it had a pilot light. I knew the new stoves don’t have pilot lights any more – but I didn’t know they required electricity to light the flame. (About an hour after making lunch the power came on.)
I had a bit of a sore injection site after the 1st Pfizer shot – but nothing at all after the 2nd one.
Yes, I didn’t think sleep coule restore phones or internet either. I suspect it was something else (like an idiot neighbor digging without checking – except all our lines seem to be overhead. Maybe an idiot bird. Or an idiot neighbor playing with a drone.) And they responded to that outage and didn’t realize it was also causing mine. I may never find out.
Just got back from the second shot and I feel drained. That’s not a reaction – I’ve been feeing somewhat drained all day. If I do react, I don’t expect to know until tomorroqw. I’ll see what I can do but there likely won’t be aything till morning..
Please don’t get stressed when you’re not able to fill TomCat’s AND your OWN shoes every single day, Joanne. You’re doing an exceptional job as it is and I think you’re doing all that hard work for a handful of hard-core signers-on without much help from others, or any from me.
Perhaps you should let go of some extras, such as putting up Bill Maher and Sam Bee. As you already mentioned, you’re only putting them up for a happy few and I’m sure they won’t mind trying to find their videos for themselves.
So again, please don’t stress, especially not about things beyond your control such as an internet connection. Stress is bad for your health and there is nothing more important than staying as healthy as possible.
I’s already been considering dropping the Maher and Bee posts … and if I do, I’ll do a final one with the link provided to each show’s direct YouTube page so no one will have to search (as long as they save those in theor bookmarks). Thank you for your support (which we used to call “moral support.”)
I don’t plan to be shy about asking others to fill in on those weekends when I can visit Virgil again (which is probably coming up – Colorado has hit/exceeded the 70% vaccinated mark). But I can’t ask for help if i suddenly lose the ability to communicate … with no warning.
I wouldn’t say you are not helping … just because your help is behind the scenes doesn’t mean it isn’t help, and I am most grateful for it