Repairs
09:08 Tuesday, 20 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 8.01°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 65% Wind: 12.88mph
Words: 345
There's only so much doom-scrolling I can tolerate, so I have to distract myself. I'm working on fixing the broken pieces of the marmot.
Just how something could alter "system" attributes (uneditable by the user) remains a mystery. I believe Tinderbox uses Unix time, counting "ticks" since 1 January 1970. Whatever happened to the marmot happened to both the system attribute $Created, and the user attribute $PublicationDate, which should be identical in nearly all cases. (There may have been instances when I altered $PublicationDate for some reason, but that would be rare.)
Anyway, there are two discrepancies. One changes the date and time backward 12 days and 20 hours. The other advances the time 12 hours, so it's relatively simple, if tedious, making the manual corrections to $PublicationDate. It's fairly inconsistent which notes are affected and when, so no clues there.
I'm cleaning up some other bits and pieces here and there. I've made copies of the marmot at various stages, so I can get back to a version before I started "fixing" it if I have to. I also bought a 4TB SSD to use as a Time Machine backup, which is online this morning.
There are pieces that are broken at the moment, but I should get them fixed fairly soon. Hopefully.
Once I'm fairly confident I have everything squared away, I'm going to make a backup of all the archives on the server, store those somewhere, then export the whole thing again. Stuff like On This Day... should work correctly thereafter.
While I was at Mom's I talked with Mitzi about just abandoning the whole project. I'm fed up with the internet and the kinds of interactions it facilitates, and the emotions it engenders in me. I get tired of "fixing" things that work one day and don't work the next, yesterday's mystery script failure being the most recent example.
Anyway, here I am, trying to fix the marmot rather than abandon it. I'm not confident it's the right thing to do. It's probably more of habit now than anything else.
✍️ Reply by emailMonsters on Maple Street
08:38 Tuesday, 20 January 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 5.79°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 12.03mph
Words: 637
(Note that it's 6°F outside!)
I'm past the executions of the Nazi war criminals in The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII, by Jack El-Hai, which was the basis for the recent movie, Nuremberg.
Toward the end of the movie, there's a scene where Dr. Kelley is drunk on a radio or TV program, explaining that there was nothing "unique" about the Nazis. I suspected the quote came from the book, and I finally got to last night. It's not, apparently, from a radio or TV program, but that's no surprise. Anywhere, here's the quote:
They are people who exist in every country of the world. Their personality patterns are not obscure. But they are people who have peculiar drives, people who want to be in power, and you say that they don’t exist here, and I would say that I am quite certain that there are people even in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the American public if they could gain control of the other half, and these are the people who today are just talking—who are utilizing the rights of democracy in anti-democratic fashion.
He had some other interesting observations. Apparently, Hitler was worried that he might have stomach cancer, yet refused diagnostic tests to rule it out. As a result, he was rushing to complete his agenda, lest he die before it was achieved.
Many important decisions were made hurriedly and put into effect equally as hurriedly.” Kelley had learned, for example, that Hitler told Göring in 1941 that a planned attack on the Soviet Union had to take place immediately because his stomach was getting worse; the Führer feared he had stomach cancer and that he might soon die.
Sound familiar? Trump's public speculation on whether or not he'd get into heaven? Reports he'd had a stroke may have prompted his reflections on his mortality.
Also, the despicable nature of the people who associate themselves with Trump?
The leaders “were not special types,” he wrote. “Their personality patterns indicate that, while they are not socially desirable individuals, their like could very easily be found in America” or elsewhere.
"Not socially desirable individuals." Truth.
“They all worked for incredibly long hours, slept very little, and devoted their whole lives to the problem of Nazifying the world,” he observed. “They worked slavishly and fanatically. It’s too bad,” Kelley added almost ruefully, “we don’t have that much energy to spare in making democracy work.” In addition, Kelley discovered, the Nazis focused on the ends of their labors and did not much care about the means that made them happen. Those ends varied from Nazi to Nazi and ranged from furthering the spread of Nazism to achieving personal power and glory.
The whole thing sounds like the Trump White House.
And there's this:
At Mondorf and Nuremberg, Kelley had interviewed Hitler’s associates, physicians, secretaries, and anyone else with intimate knowledge of the Nazi leader’s life. He determined that “Hitler had a profound conviction of his own ability, amounting to megalomania. He firmly believed that he was the only individual who could lead the Third Reich to success, and at times he seemed to feel that he had been chosen by Heaven for this task.” Anyone who crossed Hitler faced the leader’s fearsome rage. To Kelley, it was not inconsistent with such megalomania that Hitler in private was often kind and soft-spoken with his staff; polite to women, children, and the elderly; and a lover of good food and other simple pleasures of life.
Lest you think this book was written to promote parallels with Trump, it was written in 2013.
It's chilling, really.
History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
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