Matt Ulman

In the last 16 years I probably spent more time in this room than anywhere else. It felt weird to walk out last week knowing that if I was ever back it would be as a visitor.

Two apartments, a 9 year-old, seemingly countless seasons and events and just everything happened while I was here. Good times and bad and some awful and some great.

We moved just three floors, and it was the right call because no one wants offices anymore so why were we paying for 30 of them, but it feels a lot farther.

Probably some day I’ll stop hitting the wrong button in the elevator, but not yet.

I made this, because the states on the left were just told by SCOTUS that they’re not doing guns correctly. And I’m fairly angry.

So I don’t know exactly when I started hosting stuff on ulman.net. I know I registered the domain in ’98, but it probably took me some time to get something hosted.

I also know that I can find some (unintelligible) stuff from late 2001/2002. Back then it was just a wiki-like thing that anyone could edit (with an actual edit button on the page). Then php-nuke, with some other phone upload stuff going on.

I noticed today that the old phone photos weren’t alive anymore, but that’s what we have backups for.

I had a good time going through the old phone uploads. This stuff seems like it’s from another era/planet. And often the photos quality makes it LOOK like it’s from another planet:

/category/phone/page/11

And this guy says hi from the distant past:

On this most excellent of days, I need to keep reminding myself of W.

Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, but W killed millions of innocents all over the world.

Both are bad. Fortunately both are gone, hopefully forever.

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.

Lindsey Graham – May 3, 2016

Lots of work to put things back together, but it’s finally the end of the beginning.

Last night sentators representing substantially less than half the country confirmed a Supreme Court justice appointed by a guy who lost the popular vote. Again.

So now 5 of 9 minority justices control the Court, which joins the Senate and Presidency as minority controlled.

I don’t think that’s out of spec for the Senate. We know that one of the founding ideals of the country was the protection of the minority from out-of-control majority rule (also the protection of the elite from the masses, but that’s a topic for another day). Both problems were solved by the Senate’s design.

But things have to change, our government hasn’t kept pace with the changing country.

Today the talk is about ‘court-packing’ and I’m sure that’s going to happen given the current climate and undemocratic methods used lately to appoint Justices.

Without a constitutional amendment we’ll end up with a court-sizing arms race. There’s no alternative anymore, but a change of that magnitude is going to bring some hard times for the republic.

As I see it the main problem, and one that doesn’t fit into 140 characters (and therefore our political discourse), is the House. So rather than respond to every person online that suggests short term solutions to the problem I’m just going to rant about it here.

We know the framers didn’t mean for a static House. Article the First would have been adopted and fixed this but for administrative snafus. We could have had a whole different set of problems with 6,000 representatives (or more likely an amendment to fix the size somewhere between where we are and where we would have been). Instead we’re left with a popular body that doesn’t represent the population. Madison would say (again) that’s by design, but he also said:

Whilst all authority in [the government] will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

Federalist 52

Our country is more than a collection of fifty states. It’s a partnership of 330 million people, not all of whom are represented equally.

Fix that, and you fix the even-more-out-of-whack elector system. We should fix our republic by making it more democratic.

On March 24th, two days after I turned 47, I loaded our apartment-sized freezer into the back of our Subaru. It was a tight squeeze, but everything fit.

It was a big step. It meant we were leaving Brooklyn for a long time. It meant we weren’t planning on coming back until things settled down.

Even now I have a hard time remembering what those days were like. We didn’t know what was happening and we didn’t know what would happen.

No one was wearing masks yet, we didn’t know.

We suspected that things would be better in New Jersey. That we could go outside and take a walk, build a swing set, a playhouse. Plant a garden. Even though it meant two weeks self-quarantine it was worth it, we said.

We were right. We missed a lot in Brooklyn, but we had a better time. The kid had a better time.

That freezer lives in NJ now, but the new one – identical in every way – was just delivered to us in Brooklyn this morning.

One day shy of six months – it feels like we’re back, but we still don’t know what will happen.

That’s all I got. It’s been a very exhausting few months…