Yes, it is I.

My internet went out right before midnight on the 14th, which means my office and home phones also haven’t worked since then until just a little while ago. Neither did my streaming services. Verizon, which I switched back to in November because Comcast was unreliable and cost too much, put me through the usual customer service Hell before I reached what I thought was a competent human being. It took me almost a half an hour of arguing with Verizon’s “automated assistant” to get to said CHB, who immediately contradicted hiscyber-colleague by confirming that yes, there had been an “incident” in my area (the bot had denied it) and a crew was working on the outage. That was the supposedly the good news; the bad news was that I might be trapped in the Stone Age (okay, I’m exaggerating: that statement would go into the Washington Post’s Trump Lie Database if the President said it) until as late as 4:45 pm on the 15^th.

But you didn’t read this post on the 15th, did you? That would be because 4:45 pm. came and went, and still I couldn’t communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, clients were screaming, Ethics Alarms was languishing, “fish is jumpin’” and I was reduced to singing “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess” for some reason. In a 52 minute phone call with Verizon in which I listened to a very polite, pleasant, customer service representative who spoke relatively clear pidgin English in a high-pitched voice (I couldn’t place the accent), I discovered that the company couldn’t send a technician to my house until Friday afternoon. Next, my phone stopped receiving signals too, so I couldn’t even keep up with comments.

A very nice technician showed up at 1:30 pm and was fooling around with things for an hour. He replaced “the box” and then told me that he had been informed that the problem couldn’t be resolved by him, and that his supervisor told him to tell me that the outage wouldn’t be corrected until 6:45 am yesterday, Saturday the 17th. It wasn’t. Verizon promised to have another technician come by between 11am and 3pm on Sunday. That actually came to pass, and it turned out the previous technician had inserted the wrong thingy in the wrong plug, or something.

Ol’ Crazy Ted, the Harvard grad terrorist, has again been proven right: it’s ridiculous what I (you, we) can’t do without key technology, and one of them is maintaining an ethics blog.

Well, I still could prepare a post on Word and have it ready to go up when civilization reappears, so that’s what I started to do Friday morning and am revising now, as I try to forget that I have God only knows (I switched to singing the Beach Boys because I can’t remember all the words to “Summertime” right now) how many emails to answer that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have email on my cell phone, you see, because I tell my ethics classes that the less confidential, client-related stuff you have on your phone, the better.

Meanwhile,

1. I am told that illegal immigrants were protesting in front of SCOTUS Thursday as the Justices heard oral arguments regarding birthright citizenship. That sounds like a good Supreme Court case right there. Can ICE swoop in and arrest these freeloaders, or would that be a First Amendment violation according to the theory that even people who have no right to be in the country have all of the rights citizens do?
2. Oh good, the New York Times has something to spread panic about that isn’t climate change or Orange Hitler. An “expert” tells Ross Douthat in a column that we are doomed because AI is ready to take over and is just biding its time until it kills us all. (I’ll include the link as soon as I am back online, assuming I remember.) Given the level of human intelligence that I’ve encountered from Verizon  in the last few days, artificial intelligence seems like a definite upgrade.
3. Gee, could we indict THIS Mom after her kid shoots up a school? Ashley Pardo was arrested in San Antonio after allegedly buying tactical gear and ammunition for her son so he could kill fellow students and others at his Middle School. It was, she says, how she repaid her darling boy for babysitting his younger siblings. The fact that Ashley has purple hair and tattoos all over her face and neck doesn’t mean she’s a bad mother, now (that’s a bias I have yet to banish, however), but that she apparently wasn’t troubled by her son’s drawings and writings pointing to eventual violence does tend to impugn her parental competence. Am I being too judgmental? Her own mother is clearly better at the grown-up thingy: she’s the one who reported Ashley.
4. On the “No one is above the law” front: a) The three members of Congress who started a ruckus at a New jersey ICE facility may be stripped of committee assignments. Good. Why wouldn’t they be? Oh, right, if a Democrat were Speaker! Silly me. b) Suspended judge Hannah Dugan, who helped an illegal immigrant from being lawfully detained by ICE, is claiming “judicial immunity” as part of her defense. This strikes me a “Michael Clayton” Hail Mary. (“See, now, that’s just not the way to go here, Karen.”) Her argument is that guiding a criminal out the courthouse back door was done in her official capacity as a judge, so she can’t be prosecuted for it. I guess if she mugged and robbed an attorney while he was giving an opening statement, the same principle would apply. Good theory!
5. Experts! For decades, paleontologists and evolution scholars have been confidently telling us that sea creatures began testing out the land about 400 million years ago, and that it took another hundred million years for them to fully adapt. Oopsie! Newly discovered reptile tracks found in Australia show that there were land creatures crawling around 350 million years ago at least, and probably sooner. There may be no field of science where less certain conclusions are more consistently misrepresented as facts than evolution.
6. This is called “an unethical escalation.” In Texas, Arturo Villareal, 56, got in a traffic dispute with another man, and a heated argument ensued. When Arturo started to drive away, the other driver threw a burrito at his car. A drive-by burritoing! Villareal responded by ramming the burrito-tosser’s vehicle with his own, causing major damage. Yes, he was arrested. The incident reminds me: I think the Russell Crowe film “Unhinged” should be shown in driver’s ed. classes. A woman who had just been fired has an angry exchange with a driver who was slow to respond to a green light. It turns out that the driver had just murdered his ex-wife and her new man, and is in an even worse mood than she is. When the mother (her son is in the car) refuses to apologize, saying that she is having a “bad day,” the enraged stranger announces that she doesn’t know what a bad day is,  but he will make sure she finds out. What results is a version of Spielberg’s “Duel” or the similar “Joy Ride” that should make anyone think twice before laying on the horn or giving another driver the middle finger salute.
7. The President and Republicans are irresponsible and insane if they really think a “big beautiful bill” that adds significantly to the debt is anything but a breach of trust with the American people. And look! The U.S.’s credit rating was lowered. But…but…Paul Krugman assured us that the exploding debt was no problem! And he won a Novel Prize in economics. He’s an expert.
8. Now that I can get back on my own blog,my first job will be to see how many banned commenters took advantage of my paralysis to post unauthorized comments. That’s just the kind of people they are (and why they were banned in the first place). Okay, wait, that will be the second thing I do: the first will be to release the legitimate comments WordPress has stuck in the “pending” and “spam” files. [UPDATE: No banned commenters on the Springsteen posy at least, and only Michael West was in spam Hell.]

It’s good to be back.