Saturday, January 9, 2021

Quarantine, Week 43: Insurrections and Late Grades

 2021 still feels like 2020, and that will probably last beyond the Biden Administration.  Slow rollouts of the vaccine, spiking rates of infection, and Trump will continue to amp up the anxiety and stress even after January 20th.  It will get better, but it will take a while to feel it.  However, we can at least celebrate the end of Trump on twitter and the many social media outlets banning the inciters of violence.  But damn, that was an awful day.

Still not a coup attempt, as I have relentlessly argued with friends, family, and strangers.  Awful, but could have been far worse.  Impeachment will not happen until after Biden is President and probably not even then.  It takes consensus to have the Senate return before Jan 19, so that isn't happening.  Can the Dems on Jan 21st get 18 or so GOP to vote for impeachment?  It would have the benefit to them of preventing Trump from being eligible in 2024 to be President ... or serve any other federal office, I believe.  But it would require courage, which is in short supply among the Republicans.  Any insurrectionists should be prosecuted and punished, which might just include Hawley and Cruz.  I had forgotten that the 14th amendment bans insurrectionists from serving in the House or Senate.  Hmmmm.  Give the polls today of how the American people feel about the violence on Wednesday, Hawley and Cruz have made quite a dent in their presidential aspirations.  But I'd like to see greater consequences.  I doubt that such consequences will be forthcoming.

So, yeah, I might have been in a pissy mood when the students who handed in papers quite late and thus were graded on their incomplete work were pretty annoyed and whiny about getting their grades changed this week.  Plus Trump's shenanigans interrupted my course prep for the new term that starts next week. 

I have broken one resolution and kept another.  I promised I would bake a bit less, but then I made emergency brownies on Wednesday.  On the other hand, I also vowed to connect more, and I did a bunch of that this week, zooming with friends.  

On the CDSN front, we are making progress.  I have been working on two things.  First, we have a grant proposal due in less than two weeks.  I wrestled with the budget, which was a diversion from the DC madness.  Now that the budget is beaten into submission, and the comments I got from the Carleton grant people were super helpful, I just have to nag partners to send letters.  If funded, the grant would add three new focal points of research to the network, addressing the pandemic.  It would also bring in some folks from other disciplines and improve the diversity of the network.  Speaking of which, I have also been working on a Diversity Council, which would be a group of people who could provide us with ideas and feedback on how the CDSN could do better on one of our key objectives--fostering a more diverse and inclusive defence and security community.  I hope to have the full council ready to announce at the start of February.  Then, we will work on a Diversity Plan, which will take existing initiatives and potential new ones and see how they fit together to help us reach our goals.  

I am pretty fried from arguing about coups/autogolpes/insurrections, so I will keep it short.  I will be making my second attempt at cross country skiing later today.  I hope you and yours are finding ways to distract yourselves from the DC madness.  Be well.

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