Build on the momentum of this weekend’s massive protests by calling your members of congress with a blunt message: Trump’s behavior in the first several days of his presidency — from his belligerent inauguration speech to his petty and dishonest squabbling about crowd sizes — indicate that he is dangerously unfit and temperamentally unsuited to be president.
His plunging popularity and the massive size of the Women’s Marches against him represent a clear vote of no confidence in him from the general public.
We need to treat Trump like the failed president he will inevitably be. And we need to convince our elected representatives to do the same.
Tailor your message depending on which party each of your elected representatives belong to.
If they are Democrats (or independents who caucus with Democrats):
Find out if they boycotted the inauguration. (Here’s what I think is a fairly complete list of congresspeople who boycotted; no Senators joined in, AFAIK.) Thank them if they did; express your disappointment if they didn’t.
Urge them to stop treating Trump like a legitimate president, and to block every single thing he puts forward from this point onward. Urge them to vote no on every single one of Trump’s cabinet picks.
If they are Republicans:
Tell them that you think Trump is too dangerous and erratic a person to run the country — and have their hands on the nuclear codes. Note that Trump’s popularity is crumbling and his inauguration weekend was a disaster. The sooner they break with Trump, the less Trump-stink will cling to them once his presidency inevitably implodes.
Tell them to start by voting against Trump’s cabinet picks. (You might mention one or two picks you find especially unfit and/or reprehensible. See my #ResistTrump posts about his various picks for more info.)
Obviously, tailor your message however you want; these are just suggestions that I think will help carry the message of the Women’s March into the world of practical politics.
You can find the name and contact info for your representative here, and for your senators here.
See my posts here and here for information and advice on how to make your calls and emails effective. If making these sorts of calls is tough for you, here’s some advice on calling politicians if you have social anxiety.
We’ve got the momentum on our side. Let’s not lose it!
Alan:
Dinorwig. Fascinating place. As a student, I had a summer job at what was then the CEGB (actually CERL, their R&D section), programming some of the kit which went to control Dinorwig. They were inordinately proud of the project.
Also Trump and his testerical tweeting and his gross obvious toddler-lies may be used as a shock-horror-“entertainment” shield to deflect scrutiny and focus from Pence and the talibangelicals/goppers. So he’s also worth getting rid of on those grounds: so Pence et al can’t shift the blame for their evil onto a Trumpscapegoatonfire.
@ moggie
I’ve just had a little Google session. That really is a fascinating place; thanks for the reference. I love the fact that Dinorwig* is the ‘starter motor’ for turning the national grid back on if it ever crashes. I’d never considered that, but yeah, how would you start the country again if there was suddenly no electricity? Thank goodness for gravity eh?
(*although I would have stuck with ‘Electric Mountain’)
Thank you for that, numerobis. You sound like you know much more than I do about it.
Alan:
I prefer “starting handle”. A starter motor isn’t much help when your battery is flat. Of course, kids today probably don’t know why my car has a hole in the middle of the front bumper.
(Sorry, I’m in “old fart” mode, because I’m remembering loading the aforementioned computer’s OS from paper tape)
@ moggie
I genuinely don’t understand why modern cars don’t have starting handles. It’s not like flat batteries are a rare occurrence. My earliest Landies had them and it was so nice not having to arse around trying to find someone with jump leads, or gathering enough people to bump you off (and notice how you always go flat at the bottom of a hill?)
@Moggie
Dinorwig can go flat too, once all the water drains out. Starter handles wouldn’t have that issue.
@Alan Robertshaw
Only, they are rare occurrences these days, and having to muck about with extra mechanical things in the design of the car just isn’t worth the effort anymore.
Re Discworld discussion: the bad guy of Making Money was Cosmo Lavish, not Reacher Gilt. Gilt was in Going Postal.
I loved the concept of Mr. Lavish (his being a Vetinari fanboy made him pretty original as a Discworld villain, and the business with his ring was pretty scary), but he never really lived up to my expectations. He was just too mentally unbalanced to pose a threat to the protagonists.
Still a more interesting person than Trump.
Flat batteries are about as common as flat tires. Common enough that most people know all the terms for the parts; uncommon enough that most people don’t know how to use them.
Cars still have a spare tire though — but not a starting handle.
A starting handle would have come in handy when I was up north. Damn car we were borrowing was hard to start.
I’ve only once used my starting handle to start the car, but I’ve frequently used it during basic maintenance. It’s useful to be able to turn over the engine in a gentle and controlled way. Handy for setting the points gap, for example. But if I had a modern car, I wouldn’t understand a damn thing about it, and I would leave all the maintenance to professionals.
I used the starting handle quite a bit with my old Series 2A, but that had a notoriously rubbish starter motor (no alternator). You only need to learn that lesson about keeping your thumbs on the outside once.
Alan:
Heh; I hadn’t thought of that method of curtailment.
Energy is maintained. So the only way to shed the excess electricity you push onto the grid is to make it do work… for instance, set people’s appliances on fire. Which is normally seen as a bad thing. Or use it to spin a machine that does nothing, which is wasteful but at least not destructive.
Big thermal plants like coal and nuclear can go up and down a bit but not as much or as fast as we need. So you curtail other things: gas-fired plants use a different setup that can be turned on and off fast. Wind you can tilt the blades so the wind doesn’t catch them anymore. Solar you can disconnect and just let the panel heat up a bit. Hydro you can shunt the water through a spillway rather than through the turbine — and you can reduce the flow of water, but within bounds set by environmental issues.
Pumped storage is a pretty niche thing, but it’s got a nice dose of an engineer’s “fuck everything that makes sense, we can do this” kind of feel to it that is appealing. You need a lake (or a reservoir) at the bottom of a steep valley to make it make sense. I visited one such plant in the alps on a school trip when I was a kid. I’ve seen proposals to build that on flat ground using water towers. I believe the math works that out to be even more expensive than batteries.
@EJ: I’ve spent way too much of my life reading about the electricity infrastructure, for someone not even remotely in the business.
@booburry
https://mobile.twitter.com/thebestsophist/status/824268076338253826
Bottom line, HUD is likely seen as a relatively unimportant position. Warren is a made gal, so she can take the hit back in Massachusetts and still probably win next time. She also ain’t running for President, so it don’t matter. She gives cover for someone who is in a competitive state, or who might run in 2020, to hold the line. The resistance hasn’t proved strong enough yet to make these calculations unnecessary 🙁
@numerobis
Or to spin a flywheel, and retrieve the energy later when you need it. (I mean, obviously there’s losses, but still).