The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Ah, people: The difficulty lies not in our stars; it lies in us!

For reasons rooted in the 1968 so-called democratization of the presidential nominating process [primaries] and the subsequent polarization, not of overall opinion, but of electoral means and results predicated on those few believers voting in primaries, the Supreme Court had become confirmed as the go-to-guy to get the stuff you wanted, avoiding the messy process of convincing one's fellows in States and in the nation. The Supreme Court was never intended to do this or be this.

Scalia put all this most directly, and said words to the effect of

Hell, if we all wanna' go that way, let's have direct elections of justices!

Otherwise, not Scalia, but I, would say, forever hold your peace. :-)

I'm mortified by people who work all day on laptop screens and without an external keyboard & mouse. Can't possibly be good for their eyes or hands.

Now that people are working from home in their jammies, they can also work from bed, propping the laptop on their tummy. An external keyboard and monitor really don't make that better for the eye or hands.

WRT Zoom, I confess I am less than impressed with this foundation I am doing the volunteer senior citizens courses for.   My two courses are set to start Thursday, and I do not yet know if this is going to work.  I get that the foundation board was essentially winging it last minute in late July when they decided to go online this fall, and the director asked if I could do that.  I asked the tech person who gave me the machine if it could do Zoom, and learning that it could, I agreed to do the classes.   But the foundation director promised to provide Zoom training, which I told her then that I wanted and would need.  She dilly-dallied for several links and then sent, as 'training', links to a couple of youtube videos.   I was able to sign up for Zoom account with this info (but of course I could have located the info myself), but I have gotten no assistance beyond this, certainly no access to a local tech person to see if this is going to work.   And when I  registered for Zoom last week, the Zoom screen offered me a chance to do a demo meeting.... I have asked the foundation director to set something up for me to do so, but gotten no response.   Unless I very much miss my guess, a 'demo meeting' actually requires at least one other person somewhere else working with me to do it, it cannot be done by myself?   If I cannot do a demo mtg by Thursday, the first class is going to end up as the demo, and we will see what happens.

Ideally you'd have some people to demo on, but you can test out a lot of stuff for yourself-- just start a meeting with just you, practice screen sharing your slides (if you are using them), check your camera and mic are working, practice muting and unmuting yourself, etc. There is a pretty extensive user's guide on the zoom website, and it's really not that bad-- a lot more user friendly than some other platforms I've had to use.

Ok, here’s the difference. The Republicans have been playing power politics and acting in bad faith to politicize an institution that is not supposed to be politicized. The answer to that is not to throw away the framework and make it a permanently nakedly politicized institution and permanently do away with one of the checks and balances in the constitution.  If you do that, you will have already lost, even though you have “won.”  Do you see the difference?

It's hardly throwing away the framework. And while I agree that Republicans are unlikely not to pack themselves when they have the chance, the idea is not to just pack because Democrats can, but to use packing to shore up the institution Republicans are actively undermining. When they stop undermining, the packing would stop. That's the idea.

The alternative is to sit there and accept what they're doing, which is to "permanently nakedly [politicize the] institution and permanently do away with one of the checks and balances in the constitution." If they do that, it's all lost. Do you see the difference?

The alternative to the court-packing bandaid solution is going to be a major upheaval. And that seems like a bad thing to me, in amongst all the other things.

What is fall-like in your area?

Highs below the 80s, with bracing cool breezes.

Actually it dropped right through the 70s and down into the upper 60s.  It's too bad--I like highs in the 70s.  In recent years we've seen that a lot--temperatures dropping or spiking so dramatically the 70s are about the least frequently-seen temperatures.  Except during the winter months, where until about five years or so ago they were absolutely unheard-of.