So, recently, I asked myself the question: what would be the outcome if I failed to complete Blogging A to Z in April of 2026, but I successfully paid my taxes and filed for an extension in a timely fashion?
The answer: I'd have to pay less of a penalty for NOT getting my taxes done on time.
Having worked in a startup, at a large company, as a contractor, and between me and my wife owning five small businesses, our taxes are ... complicated. Add to that many of the people we interact with not getting us forms until I've already left to attend the Game Developers Conference, I get them done late every year.
Every year, even though I have a formalized system for collecting receipts, and a structured spreadsheet for collating information, there's SOME damn thing that requires me to spend hours extracting information from one program or website and reformatting it into tax-friendly data in an another.
I thought I'd be done three weeks ago. Then last week. Then this weekend, where I set aside all of Sunday to "finish up". At 3AM or something, I gave up, deciding to scan the last forms in the morning.
BUT, this time I was right. There were only three or four things left to scan, the scanner worked, and the data was successfully uploaded to our accountant. We'd expanded our spreadsheet last year to enable me to compute what we owe - paying your tax is a prerequisite for filing an extension.
We paid the tax. Our accountants filed the exception. And then I went out to an impromptu dinner with friends, where we talked about writing.
It was a pretty good day.
-Anthony
Pictured: A custom cocktail at Select restaurant - a mezcal Old Fashioned, I believe.
Postscript: I forgot to say, Blogging A to Z will resume TOMORROW, after I'm caught up on other stuff.
Egalitarianism: all people are people, and deserve equal treatment under the law:. Egalitarianism is the foundation of civilized society; without it, there are no standards to which appeal can be made, and what you have instead is not civilization, but institutionalized barbarism.
That's why, to me, egalitarianism is one of the most important principles after reason and benevolence. (You'll note I didn't say "rationality" there, because in my conceptual lexicon, logic, rationality, and reason each refer to three increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking, and for most problems, rationality just doesn't cut it. But to see why, we'll have to wait until we get to the Ls or Rs). Even if we are making good choices, with good intent, if the system does not apply those to all people equally, we are still failing them.
Most of the problems we have in society ultimately come down to failures to implement egalitarianism. Royalty? Bigotry? Misogyny? Corruption? Oligarchy? Communism? Ultimately, all of these tools of oppression come down to the basic principle that there's one special group of people - a family, a race, a gender, an in-group, power-brokers, a party - who is ideally suited to making the rules for everyone else, and once that is established, money and power quickly start getting sucked into those old vampires.
This is why another concept that I'm fond of, "authorial endorsement," is relevant to a famous science fiction story, "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. In the story, everyone in the United States is "finally equal" in the far future because the United States Constitution dictates no-one can be better than anyone else: pretty people have to wear ugly masks, strong people have to wear weights, smart people have to wear concentration-destroying devices, and so on, and so forth, ad absurdum.
People who should know better claim this story is something called "satire," and Vonnegut himself liked to pretend that his story didn't mean exactly what it seemed to mean, but for the rest of us, the story endorses the conclusion that equality under the law means equality of outcomes. Typically, that either appeals to the bigot in you who's offended by the idea that the law should treat everyone equally - and the people who I knew growing up who liked that interpretation of the story did indeed grow up to be bigots - or else you quickly realize that the story is aggressively missing the point of egalitarianism.
Equality under the law can't mean equality of outcomes. It can't. Not everyone starts in the same place; it isn't even possible to define a uniform frame of reference from which everything could be viewed in the same way. The rules of relativity are inescapable. The only way to ensure equality of outcomes under the law is to treat people differently if they start in different places. And that's not egalitarianism.
We need one law for all people. We need to treat all people as people. That means both trying not to enshrine differences and not to erase them; it means both trying not to privilege one group of people nor trying to erase others. It's fricking hard. But it's what makes our civilization a civilized place for everyone.
Some people don't like it. I know quite a few. Many of those seem offended if the world simply contains people different than they want to see, and some of them even seem outraged if the world makes reasonable accommodations for people whose needs are different. Trying to pretend different people all have the same needs, or that we can ignore people who are minorities, also is not egalitarianism: it's putting your thumb on the scale so that some "default" group gets most of the resources.
Under governments powered by tax dollars, egalitarianism involves not taking too much from anyone so that they can't live, taking more from those who can give more without constraining their freedom of action, and giving to people based on their needs, not on their membership in a privileged group. Sometimes that means giving from the wealthy to help the needy; sometimes a particular needy person can't get a break or a wealthy person gets a break that they don't need, because that's the way the law works out, and unless it's a matter within our personal discretion, we can't put our thumbs on the scale. Again, it isn't easy: we just have to keep trying and trying again until we get the system right ... or find that new exception.
But trying to treat all people like people is what makes our civilization worth living in.
One of the worst things in the world - not the things that feel bad to me, but things that are bad for others - is the pernicious phenomenon of bullshit - and I don't mean crap from a bull, but the kind of crap that comes out of people's mouths when they're trying to sell people a load of crap.
This kind of bullshit is a particularly pernicious kind of lying - a kind of lying so bad that philosophers aren't even sure that it's lying at all. A liar, after all, envisions a model of a world better for them than the one we live in, and deliberately tries to falsely impress that model into in the mind of their hearers.
But a bullshitter doesn't care about true or false at all: they just care about creating an impression. I recall running into a bullshitter at a friend's party once who claimed "there are no Native American vegetables" and when I later came back with a list (it's a long list) he blew this off as irrelevant.
Because he wasn't concerned with the truth. He was concerned with holding court. He was a loud, showy, know-nothing know-it-all, who was constantly trying to find ways to dominate the conversation at this particular social grouping. He didn't care about the facts - he just cared about being the center of attention.
I didn't care to go to too many of those parties. :-)
It should be obvious that bullshit has corrupted American politics. While both ends of the political spectrum can fall victim to it, our current leadership is bullshitting dangerously about everything from the legal justification for their illegal actions to the strategy behind their irresponsible wars.
And the bullshitters I know personally have given away the game on this. They have repeatedly said things like, "the only reason you're raising that objection is that you oppose what I'm trying to do". No, no, my friend, you have it backward: we're opposing what you want to do because of those objections.
We do not live in a world defined by different movies running in different people's heads.
We live in exactly one shared world, where there are facts to matters to which appeal can be made - exactly one shared reality which we cannot fake in any way whatever, and if you try, sooner or later, it will bite you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A path in our yard choked by invasive succulent plants. They grew from cuttings which we got from local plants that thrived in our dry climate; we didn't know they were invasive when we planted them. I guess they showed us. Invoke what symbolism you can from this about bullshit in public discourse.
I am unlikely to become a vegan, but I do enjoy vegan food, and one special time for vegans is the winter, in which many wonderful squash are available for vegan dishes. My wife has developed a wonderful "formula" for vegan dinners which involves a squash (today, spaghetti squash), a filling (today I think mujudara, a rice and lentil Lebanese dish she picked up from me and ran with), a topping (mushroom jerky and mushroom marinara sauce) and some kind of bread or pasta (today, vegan sourdough from Whole Foods).
An assist on today's meal are some Lebanese pickled hot peppers that I made which are ... okay. The recipe I used said they'd be ready in about a month, but these are one and a half months old and they're not too pickled so far. Flavor is fine, not too exciting, but the ones my mom and dad made were always a bit more pickled and soft, whereas these are still crunchy. I'd probably research whatever it is that makes them more soft and do more of that, and probably up the amount of spices (turmeric and garlic and more) in the mix.
But! A perfectly good meal.
Today's challenges included blogging (yasss, this post), drawing (1 drawing), writing (~1900 words on Tales of the Spookymurk), working on a scientific paper (on prosocial robotics), and some reading.
Also in today's news, America seems to be grasping at starting a Western Hemisphere empire, and to justify it, Stephen Miller demonstrated his lack of grasp of basic history:
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Real cute, Steveo, but ignorant. Since you're interested in the beginning of history - I know you said time, but I'm just going to interpolate what you really meant there, since it isn't coherent enough to be parsed on its own merits - you might look up the chaps Hitler, Napoleon and Alexander. The iron law of the world is that setting the whole world against you never goes well, and even if things seem to be looking up for you for a bit, an empire put together by pure force will fall apart as soon as it slips from a tyrant's dead fingers.
Realpolitik is neither real nor politic - it's a childish emotional response to situations which is directly contradicted by readily available facts. I'm prepared to justify that in depth, but then, the proponents of realpolitik generally don't know what it actually meant and are simply grasping at a word to justify their emotional desire to do something harmful and stupid that feels good to them, rather than, say, looking at what the actual consequences of pulling that bullshit on counter-acting actors generally turns out to be.
-the Centaur
Pictured: dinner with Sandi, and the pickled peppers when I bottled them.
... and we had a nice afternoon visiting family and nice evening relaxing afterward. But despite the fact that it worked out well for us, it's important to take some time out to share that news with your friends and family, because political action, as important as it is, can sometimes backfire on you.
More in a bit. But everyone is safe.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A New Fashioned at the 07, a restaurant with a great vegan menu that my wife and I enjoy quite a bit - and is becoming a new favorite of her mother, who recently moved to town.
So today I'm going to a #nokings protest in downtown Greenville to stand up for our democracy in the face of the authoritarianism creeping over our whole society since the re-election of Donald Trump. I'm never going to be someone who criticizes my opponents for everything that they do, but ever since Trump chose to lie about his affinity for the ideas in Project 2025 - after praising the project at the Heritage Foundation in 2022 and before embracing it in his administration in 2025 proper - we've been sliding more and more to a "unitary executive" idea in which the President has plenary power to do whatever the hell he wants.
Not in my country!
So we're going to a #nokings protest in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. No Kings may be a movement, but it's also an idea - and an ideal. For example, the No Kings Act was designed to counter the Supreme Court's blatantly unconstitutional grant of immunity to the President - when the constitution implies exactly the opposite: "the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law."
Now, Heaven knows I'm no fan of Donald Trump's policies, but there's a difference between disagreeing with what he wants to accomplish and opposing the methods by which he's doing it. Sure, I don't like many of the things that he's doing, but that's a normal part of the political process: you don't always get what you want. But the actions of ICE, the roadmap of Project 2025, and Trump's embrace of strongmen is a direct threat to the civic foundations of American democracy, and must be stopped - for everyone's sake.
So, even if you're a conservative supporter of Donald Trump, you should join these protests. The unitary executive theory is the path to authoritarianism, and while the powers and privileges of strongmen may be appealing to Trump and some of his followers, we're driving dangerously close to the edge in this country, and if we slip down that cliff into dictatorship, it can take decades to get back. As Rush Limbaugh said, if you loan power to someone, you've got to watch them. And even if you agree with Trump, you should not give him any more power than he needs - or the next president may use that power against you.
It's going to take a long time to get our civic ship righted; it's time to get started.
"I'ma gonna get that bird in the mirror, I swear, this is my territory, I'll show him---BONK!" "Okay, this time for sure---BONK!" "Tenth time's the charm---BONK!"
Not even putting up a screen in front of the mirror has helped; our little friend just hopped down onto the stairs of the cat condo (that "table" is a cat condo with a re-purposed glass tabletop, to give one of our now-passed older cats a place to sit and see the stars while shielding him from the rain) and started bonking the lower section of the mirror.
There's no reasoning with some people.
-the Centaur
P.S. Yes, I am making a direct comparison of people whose political beliefs are built around their persecution by imaginary enemies to a bird not smart enough to recognize his own reflection, why?
2024 is shaping up to be one of the most consequential American elections in recent history, in which our first twice-impeached ex-president is running AGAIN for the highest office in the land. When he ran for office the first time, it wasn't clear precisely what he would do if elected, and Clinton had her own problems.
But now, what Trump stands for - and would do - is clear. Even if you forget the two impeachments (no convictions) and the many indictments (not conclusive yet), Trump was more than just a poor loser hawking false claims of a stolen election: he actively tried to overturn it, and stoked the fires of insurrection on January 6th. He's a proven threat to American democracy.
American democracy is the light of the world. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, you should register to vote, and vote for almost anyone else than Trump. And if you're a Republican, you should contact your congrescritter and state your opposition to Project 2025.
Democracy is a wonderful thing - if we can keep it.
Regardless of the merits of the case, we shouldn't be doing things like that. All too often we let things go that we should drop, or press things that we shouldn't, because of political appearances.
Has the statute of limitations passed on Donald Trump's indictment? As an AI language model, I cannot provide legal advice or make a definitive statement about a specific legal case. However, to provide some general information, the statute of limitations varies depending on the type of offense and the jurisdiction. In the United States, federal offenses typically have a five-year statute of limitations, but this can vary depending on the offense. State laws also have their own statutes of limitations for criminal offenses.
Regarding any potential indictment of Donald Trump, it would depend on the specific charges and the applicable statute of limitations. It is also important to note that the decision to indict someone is made by prosecutors based on the evidence and legal standards, and is not determined by whether the statute of limitations has expired or not.
the Centaur in dialog with ChatGPT.; emphasis mine.
Gee, thanks, AI overlord! Seems like the prosecutor's job here may have been to bring the indictment if they believed a crime was committed, even if the statute of limitations had passed. Let's get more specific:
What is the statute of limitations in New York? In New York State, the statute of limitations for criminal offenses varies depending on the severity of the crime. Here are some examples:
- For most felony offenses, the statute of limitations is five years. However, for certain serious offenses such as homicide or terrorism, there is no statute of limitations. - For misdemeanor offenses, the statute of limitations is typically two years. - For certain sexual offenses committed against minors, the statute of limitations has been extended in recent years. For example, the statute of limitations for second-degree rape of a minor is now 20 years from the victim's 18th birthday, or within 10 years of the offense, whichever is later.
It's worth noting that the statute of limitations can be tolled, or paused, under certain circumstances, such as when the defendant is out of state or in hiding. In some cases, the statute of limitations may also be extended if new evidence is discovered.
the Centaur in dialog with ChatGPT; emphasis mine.
According to Wikipedia, what Trump is accused of - falsifying business records - is normally a misdemeanor, but can become a felony if used to further another crime. From what I've read, the prosecution has withheld a lot of facts from the indictment to improve the surprise of their case at trial, so they may have more evidence forthcoming; but "The indictment raises novel and complex legal issues." Sheesh.
This isn't the way to do this.
I understand the desire to speak truth to power, and the importance of holding the powerful to account; but the way to uphold the rule of law is NOT to ignore the rule of law so we can bring a case. There's a word for that: a kangaroo court, "a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice," leading to show trials.
Donald Trump certainly isn't my favorite politician, and perhaps he needs to be brought to justice; but we should also presume innocence until proven guilty. Here's hoping that either the District Attorney coughs up some very good evidence that justifies his actions, or that the case gets swiftly thrown out if his actions weren't justified. I just can't see any good coming from anything between those two extremes.
