Month: May 2026

Life is Easy if You have the Updated Operating System

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Sometimes in life things change and we just don’t even notice. It is like when an old building that has been sitting tucked off the street for years gets pulled down; or that store on the corner that has been there forever goes out of business. And then one day you drive by and say to yourself “when did that happen.? When did they go out of business?” “Things” like that happen everyday. 

For instance, I have had a certain bank app on my iPhone for several years now. The reason I put the app on my phone was because I was moving to a state where that bank did not have any branches. So the app was a logical next step in the new electronically internet connected world we live in.

Now, I know I am aging myself because for the longest time in my life communication devices were connected to a landline to the home. The big upgrade was a cordless phone and answering machine. The mobile phone, soon to become a smart phone, changed all of that with voice mail. And I will admit, it is much easier now than back then. 

When it came to doing banking I would sit down on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and begin the task of writing out any bills that had arrived in the mail that week, put a stamp on an envelope and I was good to go. And with the advent of direct deposit I no longer had to stand in line, or wait in the drive through window at the bank on Friday to cash my check.  Things are starting to get easier.

Gone are the days when you would have to fill out a deposit slip indicating how much of your paycheck went into the checking account and how much cash you wanted back. The ATM soon became the go to place to get cash. You could go into just about any store and get  cash with a newly issued debit card. Today, the banking industry with its cash back bonuses has weened us away from carrying any cash at all—what’s in your wallet: no folding money. 

There were weeks when I would guard that last one or two dollars in my wallet as if it were the Dresden Green Diamond—waiting for Friday, Pay Day! Things seem to be getting easier.

But I have digressed from the banking app. I really did not use the app that much. Most of my banking is done remotely now. Now my bills either go directly to my bank to be paid or to an email account, no trip to the mailbox and no stamps needed. It was like when radio music went from AM to FM: “No static at all…”

Occasionally, however, there is the need to cash a check. That’s where the app comes in. It was awkward at first logging in, fumbling around with user names and passwords—which I never remember—and now getting an authentication code texted to me. Then there is taking a picture of the front and back of the check. I feel like an Olan Mills photographer cajoling a toddler to sit still. Here I am trying to get a check to smile at me while instructions pop on the screen demanding me to get closer, center the check or use a darker background. It was the modern version of fumbling in the bank with pen on a chain and trying to remember your account number for the deposit slip–if you did not have a slip that came with the checkbook. It keeps getting easier.

I never thought about the app beyond trying to log in until the other day when I went to cash a check. I went to the app and logged in, which I finally could do without having to fumble around for my user name and password. My phone remembered that for me. Life just keeps getting easier.

However, a slight glitched popped up. Before I could do my banking I needed to update the app. No problem I thought. I would just hit update, which then took me to another screen to get the new updated app. I hit “get” but I got nothing but a return to the previous screen that said update app. I thought I just did that. So I demonstrated one of two lesser desired qualities of human life, either stupidity, insanity or both, and I tried again to update. It sent me back to the app screen to get the app. I hit “get” again and was promptly sent back to update. I was putting myself into a human controlled flow loop, the proverbial dog chasing his tail. I thought things were supposed to be getting easier.

As in most cases it is me, as the user, who is lost in the tangle of internet webs that connect us to the cyber universe. It was now that I examined the screen closer. In the upper portion of the screen in small writing next to a triangle with an exclamation point was a small message.

I want to shuffle off a side street here for a moment because one, I have fat fingers and any typing I do on my iPhone ends up with numerous typos. Secondly, it takes more than my reading-glass cheaters set at 1.5 magnification to read something that small. Those little messages are treated like a Yield Sign in Dade County Florida, a strong suggestion to the other guy to look out for you because you are coming through. I just thought if they wanted me to stop or slow down the message would have been a bit bigger with a Stop Sign symbol: Please read before continuing.

The message said I needed IOS 17 on my Apple iPhone to download the new app. I went to Settings to see what my operating system was. I and fumbled around some more only to learn that my iPhone was operating on some version of IOS 16. Getting the app for my iPhone now  required an additional update—to my operating system. Further research on the internet reveled that my phone cannot be updated to IOS 17. I would need to buy a new phone to get the banking app to run.

I was dumbstruck. In my mind this would be like having to buy new shoes because you have a broken shoelace.  Why do I feel like I am being scammed? Maybe because I am; or we are. 

But, there is a happy ending to the story. I went to my iPad, which did have IOS 17. I uploaded the banking app and was able to cash the check–for $11.49.

However, I have to wonder is this like the old house tucked back on the street or the business that just closed. How many other of my seldom used apps are just sitting on the home screen waiting to be pulled down or sign placed in the front window that simply says “closing.”

Life is getting easier if you have the updated app.

A True Vulgarian: To Offend and Upset and the Art of the Upside Down Apology

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I have to laugh at the recent Trump settlement with the IRS for what most people are calling $1.776 slush fund. I refuse to get offended or upset with these financial and legal shenanigans Trump is, and has, pulled over our heads. He has really refined the art of the steel from land deals with city and county commissions to the fleecing at the federal level.

And further more, I think we should just chuck all the democracy talk of, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, as too esoteric. We need to push that sort of fear and the death of our Republic to one side and look at what is going on with this administration’s shenanigans. Or as Merriam-Webster describes as the “devious trick(s) used especially for an underhand purpose;” or the “activity or behavior that is not honest or proper: deceptive or questionable practices or conduct.” Trump and Associates have refined the tools of democracy to boldly walk through the front door and then walk out the front door in broad daylight in plain sight with loaded pockets.

The funny part in all of this is we opened the door and let him. Their methods appears to some as a smash and grab, which was the case with his January Sixers cohort. With that said these are not the activities of say a cat burglar who tries to avoid being seen using stealth and deception like Cary Grant in the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief. What we need to do is dumb the Trump administration down to something Hollywood could produce and everybody could see in relation to what the viewing public understands.

For instance, we could go back to the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda. I am not going to rehash the entire movie but to quote Wikipedia the movie is a “heist comedy film…(that) follows a gang of diamond thieves who double-cross one another to recover the stolen diamonds hidden by their jailed leader.” Although, in our current state of affairs the leader is not jailed.

But according to PBS News, “As part of the (Anti-Weaponization) IRS settlement agreement, the U.S. is ‘forever barred and precluded’ from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons and the Trump organization’s current tax issues, according to a one-page document posted to the Justice Department’s website on Tuesday’.”

I get it, there is a slight difference in the plot; but, get out of jail or stay out of jail, it seems to me to be the same side of the soon to be minted coin. A one-dollar commemorative coin featuring Trump’s image on both sides. Heads its Trump, tails its Trump. Unfortunately, it won’t be minted in time for the country’s 250th birthday. Too bad, we could honor our First President by going down to the Potomac River and see if we could throw them across the river.

Whatever the case may be, we are more familiar with heist movies than movies about democracy. If we consider what is going on in our government as a heist operation instead of governing or some sort of governmental effort to make America better, I think we can better understand the current workings of our government. I reference the movie A Fish Called Wanda but we could probably insert any of the Oceans movies going back to the 1960s with the Rat Pack, or the 2003 The Italian Job, or the Tower Heist (2011). It is all about the grift.

The reason I picked A Fish Called Wanda is for one particular scene where Otto, the vulgar American weapons expert hangs the sophisticated British barrister, Archie, out a window upside down demanding an apology. I just feel like Archie represents the American people. We are being hung upside down. Shaken down and now forced to apologize for crimes that somehow we were complicit in. (See Youtube link below for video)

Instead of ranting or raving about the current state of affairs we should do like what Roger Ebert said in his review of this Anglo/American comedy, laugh loudly when “eccentric people behave in obsessive and eccentric ways and other, equally eccentric, people do everything they can to offend and upset the first batch” Their motto could be: Find out how much there is, get it, and get.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwfuUyTMpVY

The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments.

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A good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.–James Madison

It is an oft told story about Benjamin Franklin that after signing the Constitution being met by Elizabeth Willing Powel who asked the good doctor “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin replied, “A Republic madam, if you can keep it.”

According to Historynet.com “By upbringing, experience, and nature, Eliza Powel was politically astute and acquainted with the leading lights of the American political scene.” Like many Americans in Philadelphia at the time, It is not hard to imagine her waiting at the steps of Independence Hall anticipating the results of the secret meetings that took place that long hot summer.

Eliza Powell is one of the many women who have been pushed aside as a footnote in the pages of history. According to Historynet.com she was a Philadelphia socialite, ” a fixture in her hometown’s most influential circles, and a proto-feminist who delighted in her intellect, broad range of interests, and social rank…” with “a first-class mind, and, unusual among women of her class and era, a serious interest in and engagement with the details and nuances of politics and statecraft.”

I would bet that when addressing Eliza after signing the Constitution, Franklin was not speaking specifically to her when he used the word “you.” The 81 year-old Franklin would only have two more years to live. So the “you” was sort of a collective second-person pronoun referring to a group of people, Americans from 1787 to the present, rather than one person at the time, and a disfranchised woman at that.

Franklin had his concerns about the Constitution. In final remarks before approving the Convention’s work. He said, “I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered.” The key words in his comments, like, “you” is “well administered.”

A big fear today among many is the fear of losing our democracy. Various polls in the last couple years show an increasing fear that our democracy is under pressure, mostly from the extreme ends of the political spectrum and their hardcore entrenched views. But it not really our democracy that is under threat. We will always be a country with a democratic foundation. What we are witnessing of late is democracy manipulating the republic’s foundation for political belief or factions as the framers of the Constitution called them.

In this famous Federalist Paper (51) essay, Madison explained how the Constitution’s structure checked the powers of the elected branches and protected against possible abuses by the national government. With the separation of powers, the Framers divided the powers of the national government into three separate branches: a legislative branch (called Congress), an executive branch (led by a single President), and a judicial branch (headed by a Supreme Court). By dividing political power between the branches, the Framers sought to prevent any single branch of government from becoming too powerful. At the same time, each branch of government was also given the power to check the other two branches. This is the principle of checks and balances. Madison and his fellow Framers assumed that human nature was imperfect and that all political elites would seek to secure greater political power. As a result, the Framers concluded that the best way to control the national government was to harness the political ambitions of each branch and use them to check the ambitions of the other branches.–National Constitutional Center.gov

For instance a lot of debate during the Constitutional Convention centered on the make up and function of the Legislative Branch of the proposed new government. Some delegates were in favor of a unicameral others a bicameral Congress. (The Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation was unicameral.) The real problem today with Congress is it is still bicameral but completely divided along factions, with political parties providing the checks and balances in a unicameral way. Yes it is representative democracy at work. But, it is a complete disfunction of legislative design. Congress cannot even do its most essential task: pass a budget.

The House of Representatives is the people’s House. Its elected officials, because of their two-year elected-terms and smaller districts, are closer to the wishes of the people than a Senator with a six-year term representing an entire state. Madison’s belief, explained in Federalist Paper 62, was that “No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence first of a majority of the people (the House), and then of a majority of the states (the Senate).” The entrenched two-party system has done away with that concept.

He further explains that the Senate “as a second branch of the legislative assembly, distinct from, and dividing the power with (the House), a first, must be in all cases a salutary check on the government. It doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies.” An impossible feat under today’s government.

Additionally, he writes that “The necessity of a senate is not less indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies, to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders, into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.” (my italics) Does January 6th come to mind. On January 6th the Republic held firm against the democracy, or mobocracy, taking place on the Capitol steps and then within the Capitol itself.

There is, in my mind, no chance of losing our democracy. Later this year we all go to the polls and vote. The real problem in my mind, is how those administering our Republic will try to rig the democratic process. We have witnessed states gerrymandering legislative districts to favor one party. We have seen the courts upturn the gerrymandering process in one state but not another. We have seen the courts roll back voting rights. We have seen an Executive branch try to impose voting changes through executive orders. All of this is democracy but as Franklin said, it is a republic–if we can keep it.