As 2025 comes to an end, we can review the wreckage of freedom under Donald Trump. At this point it’s clear: Support for Trump is enmity toward America. This isn’t a case of a president being terrible as usual; it’s an existential threat to what the United States stands for.
Let’s make a list, in the style of the Declaration of Independence, of the outrages he has committed.
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Every December I reread Erich Kästner’s Das fliegende Klassenzimmer (The Flying Classroom). It’s a Christmas novel set in a boarding school (an Internat in German). It has some of the elements that later showed up in Harry Potter: feuding groups of students, strong friendships, wise faculty members and some who are less wise, and efforts by students to overcome their limitations. Boarding school stories have been popular for a long time.
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It’s that time of year, so I went looking for Christmas-themed silent movies. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was adapted multiple times. The earliest known version was directed by Walter R. Booth and released in 1901. It survives only in a five-minute fragment. A 1908 treatment is considered lost. That leaves Edison’s 1910 film as the earliest treatment that survives in a reasonably complete form. Marc McDermott is an enjoyable Scrooge, and Charles Ogle, better known as the first actor to portray Frankenstein’s monster on the screen, is Bob Cratchit. This is the film I’ve combined with my accompaniment on YouTube.
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Donald Trump claimed: “Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” In fact, he has no power to pardon Tina Peters, since she was convicted under state law. His claim is an illegal usurpation of power.
The news media have a long tradition of yielding to sitting presidents, and they’re doing it again.
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Another in my series of posts on SFF conventions’ codes of conduct. This time I’m writing about the one for Arisia 2026. Arisia is held in Boston or Cambridge in January each year. I haven’t attended Arisia in years, but I found the code of conduct surprisingly reasonable. However, there’s another requirement which potential attendees could find burdensome.
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