An Hour And A Half Of Fun?

     I watched a few minutes of last night's big Presidential speech and picked up the box scores and highlights this morning: it mostly covered what he's already done. Republicans cheered wildly and offered standing ovations; Democrats sat, jeered a little and held up small, polite signs with simple messages like "FALSE," "MUSK STEALS" and "SAVE MEDICAID."*

     In short, nothing unexpected, right down to cantankerous Representative Al Green getting ejected for heckling the President, saying, "You don't have a mandate to cut Medicare."  (A power Presidents, as a matter of law, do not have -- which may or may not carry much weight at present.)

     Either you welcome chaos or you don't, and if you do, consider your fellow citizens -- veterans relying on benefits, the elderly and disabled relying on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  What did they ever do to you?

     But I guess we're finding out now what you will do to them -- and possibly to your own tax return, et Federal cetera.

     Tam and I watched an episode of Resident Alien instead, a refreshing, cheerful comedy about an alien sent to destroy the world who crash-lands in Colorado.  Gotta tell ya, in context he seems benign.
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* As an opposition party, their current motto is something along the lines of, "You wouldn't hit somebody who wears glasses, would you?"  Guess what?  That never did work and it's not working now.  This is no way for adults of any political stripe to behave, on either side of the equation.

The Bulwark Says It

     In 1933, Jews constituted one percent or slightly less of the German population, a tiny minority.  Tiny, visible and increasingly despised.

     In 2025, there's a tiny, visible, and increasingly despised minority in America -- and they are canaries in the coal mine.  I have no idea how to write about it effectively, but over at The Bulwark, someone does.

Grim Statistics

     Spent part of the weekend and this morning looking up some very grim statistics, but I'll spare you for now and just share the gist:

     The United States is a big, sprawling polyglot country, filled with people who came here from all over, for all sorts of reasons -- misfits and high achievers, people with a checkered past hoping to start over, people with a fancy pedigree in search of the next big thing, religious (and antireligious) nuts of every kind, people with big dreams and people with low ambitions.

     Politicians want to slice us and dice us and hammer us into molds -- "woke," "conservative," "liberal," "moderate," sort us by skin color, natal language, religion and so on and on and on, but we're all here.  Red state or blue state, red city or blue city -- it's really all shades of purple and we're side by side, like it or not, fixing one another's cars, cutting each other's hair, punching a timeclock at the factory or cattle on the open range, writing poems, building houses, spraying graffiti on walls or painting it over.

     A few of us -- a tiny minority -- have billions of dollars.  A sizeable minority of us are barely getting by.  Most people living in the U.S. are somewhere in the middle, a little worried over bills but on average, not missing any meals.  We're all a tiny bit special and we're all pretty ordinary.

     And they're all the same as you: they have dreams and hopes, sore spots and gripes.  Try to give 'em the benefit of the doubt.  Even the oddballs and weirdos.  You look pretty strange to someone yourself, right now, just as you are.

On Sunday

     It was cold outside.  I went outside anyway.  I touched some grass -- well, mostly in the process of cleaning the soles of a pair of tennis shoes, or whatever we're calling them now.  I have four pairs, one of which is about due for retirement, but they're all washable and they all got washed today.

     They still wear out at the balls of my feet and down the outside to the heel, same as always -- I leave question mark-shaped footprints, thanks to having very high arches.  It's rough on the soles.

     But I got outside.  In Nature.  With the birds and the squirrels and the plants that are, even in the cold, longing to be green again.  (That last part is just the plants.  As far as I know, the birds and squirrels are okay with being reddish or gray or whatever they got handed.)

Okay, I'll Bite

     Half everybody -- or maybe it's three-quarters by now -- has their own take on the meeting yesterday between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Donald Trump, Vice-President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and various assistants, flacks, hangers-on and the Press.

     It's not news that things did not go as expected.  Word was that Ukraine had agreed to a deal swapping access to their rare earth deposits in exchange for past and future U. S. help.

     Everybody went off-script.

     Here's the thing: while such agreements are usually worked out well in advance by underlings, who can have all manner of deep and vociferous disagreements in private, and then put forth by their principals in carefully-planned press events, that particular assortment of national leaders is remarkably lacking in political experience.  Sure, Mr. Trump was President for one term already, but before that?  Real estate promoter.  Reality TV star.  Mr. Zelenskyy was a professional comedian.  Mr. Vance spent part of one term as a U. S. Senator, after dabbling as a memoirist, venture capitalist and attorney.  The only long-term expertise in the front row at that meeting was Secretary Rubio, and it didn't appear to me that anyone was looking to him for guidance.

     Everybody's got some opinion about who was out of line and who was merely standing up for their side, but what I have to add is just this: these are not old hands at diplomatic give and take.  I did not get the impression any of them were playing a carefully calculated game.  They surprised themselves and each other.

     I'm not much inclined to give President Trump or any member of his Administration the benefit of the doubt, and I do my best to take that into account.  Conversely, I'm overly aware that Zelenskyy has had his back against the wall since the Russians first invaded.  But no matter how I feel about the participants, that meeting was a cock-up, in full view of the Press.

     And you'd have to be entirely ignorant of at least the last three or four hundred years of history to know that when major powers fail to oppose aggressive territorial expansion in Europe, it always grows to become a huge problem.

Sometimes....

     Some days, it's not worth turning the TV or radio on.  The news gets stranger and stranger.  The Feds lay off a few thousand more people every day, most of them doing jobs that need doing, and we'll find out which ones were essential the hard way, when airplanes fall out of the sky, severe weather forecasts are screwed up, TB cases soar worldwide and famine spreads.

     All those things come home to roost, even when it's people starving and falling ill in far-off, distant lands: hunger leads inevitably to unrest, unrest to radicalism; disease can circle the globe in months, as we only recently experienced.  Other effects are more immediate -- I hope you've already filed your taxes and received a refund, because the IRS is laying off many of their tax-season hires, the people who were helping to process returns and talk to puzzled taxpayers among them.

     I've got my own Uncle Sam worries, the least of which is renewing my ham radio license.  There are a few weeks before that window opens -- you've got ninety days before the expiration date and, if memory serves, two years after -- and I'll be using one of the commercial services for it, just as soon as I can.  If you've got fed.gov stuff to get done, from Social Security and Medicare to pilot and maritime certification, better get it done now, because the public-facing jobs at most of these agencies and departments are often entry-level, and those jobs are shrinking fast.

     Maybe it'll all be just fine.  But when the inspiration-if-not-official-head of the Federal job-cutters makes a joke out of "little mistakes" like cutting funds for ebola suppression and treatment, hah ha hah, don't think your corner of fed.whatever is going to be immune.  It's not.

     Things are not going to get better soon.

Can't Even? Not Even!

     It's exhausting, but the unceasing churn of the news cycle bears watching, mostly to see who they're after now.  It's basically a Junior High School slumber party, with AP presently on the outs and the mean girl who's playing hostess talking smack about 'em, but there are whole cliques of insiders, outsiders, wannabees and news orgs trying to get their hair and outfit to match the prevailing style, and it's all--

     Bullshit.  It's all bullshit.  I want the President -- any President -- and Congress -- all of 'em -- to be covered by the widest possible variety of news outfits, from toadies to skeptics, from liberals to conservatives, from budget hawks and war hawks to pacifists and save-everybody socialists.  I want 'em singing praises and digging through trash to find evidence of malfeasance, I want 'em doing deep-dive backgrounders, chirpy puff pieces and viewing with alarm.  I want all of it -- because I am paying for that damn fed.gov, I am subject to its benefits and laws, and when they get hinky, I am sure to be screwed over.

     I don't think the White House ought to be picking and choosing exactly who gets to sit in on their news conferences and events, and who gets left out.  Limited number of seats available, okay, got it -- but the Press has done an okay job of sorting that out among themselves, and the pols and their flacks could then seek out special pals and sneer at best enemies among those ranks, just as they have always done.

     No matter who is in power or what party they belong to, they should be under a microscope, warts and all.  Especially the warts.  --And we need all of the Press there, not just to watch the gummint but to be watching one another.

     Evil fears the light.  So does incompetence.

So, How's It Going?

     The U. S. joined with Russia, North Korea and a rogue's gallery of nations in voting against a UN amendment that condemned Russia for invading Ukraine and told 'em to withdraw their troops.  Our NATO allies voted the other way.  Are we still the good guys?

     Uncle Sam is spamming Federal workers with "justify your existence" emails that they could be either required to respond to, prohibited from responding to, or in receipt of evidence of Federally-prohibited unfair labor practices.

     Farmers who use water from the Colorado River had been getting Federal grant money to scale back crops, so the reservoirs could retain enough to spin the generators at places like Hoover Dam.  Those grants are now "under review" and nobody knows when the review will be complete -- but lacking the funds, they'll need to start planting or go broke, so....

     Yeah, how's it going?  Meanwhile, the price of eggs is high and rising.

Judicial Review

     Yesterday was an important anniversary.  I'd never heard of it.

     Hylton v. United States was argued before the U. S. Supreme Court on February 23, 1796.  The Court decided it on March 8 of that year.

     The particulars of the case are unremarkable.  Congress passed a law that levied a yearly tax on carriages.  The law was challenged on the basis of being a direct tax and therefore Constitutionally prohibited.  The Court disagreed, in a ruling that stood until 1895.

     But it set up the notion that the Supreme Court could review the Constitutionality of laws passed by Congress and by implication, the Constitutionality of official acts of the Federal government, paving the way for Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the first time the Court threw out a law on such a basis.

Nope

     A commenter recently suggested one of the online, black-market (masquerading as gray) digital archives as a source of the out-of-print Andre Norton books I had mentioned.  I'm not going to publish his comment, nor the name of the archive.

     While it's perfectly okay to share works in the public domain -- the Library of Congress has plenty -- and there's a (weak) argument to be made for doing the same with out of print books that are unlikely to be republished, those archives also host copyrighted works and it is, simply, theft to share them without payment to the copyright holder.  Just as bad, in my opinion, is that these lawless collections are used to train "AI," stealing from the writers now and using the input to create soulless crap afterward.

     I won't support them.  I encourage you to not support them, too.  The only thing that ought to be fed into "AI" engines is a wooden shoe.

     Writing pays starvation wages to most writers.  Don't make it worse.

Saturday

     Saturday, I once again chaired the writer's critique group, an activity I enjoy but which leaves me exhausted.  Unless you're an introvert, it's difficult to explain how draining social activity can be, especially if you're running the show.  Fortunately, it's a well-disciplined group of talented writers.  I count myself lucky to be able to spend time with them.

     The same Saturdays always (or nearly always) include a general meeting of a local writer's group.  Their guest speaker yesterday was Charlotte Halsema Ottinger, who has written the definitive biography of Madge Oberholtzer, a young Hoosier woman who kneecapped the 1920s Ku Klux Klan.  I'd like to tell you she was a crusading reformer, but she wasn't.  She was a victim of the brutal D. C. Stephenson, political power-broker, Klan leader, murderer and rapist.  Abducted and abused by Stephenson, Ms. Oberholtzer attempted suicide and died a slow and agonizing death -- but not before supplying testimony that led to her attacker's arrest, conviction and imprisonment.

     Indiana's Governor at the time, the Klan-endorsed Edward L. Jackson, refused to grant clemency and in retaliation, Stephenson spilled all he knew, releasing previously-secret lists of paid-off officials and prompting extensive investigations by the Indianapolis Times that resulted in charges against the then-Mayor of Indianapolis, the Chairman of the Marion County Republican Party and others.  It was the beginning of the end of the second incarnation of the KKK in the United States.

     Authoritarians are often brutes, hiding behind a facade of old-fashioned respectability.  Stephenson, who liked to boast "I am the law in Indiana," had promoted the Klan as stalwart defenders of sobriety and the purity of American womanhood while drinking and womanizing with abandon in private.  It is a pattern that has repeated itself throughout history, and appears to be repeating yet again.

     You can find the book Madge at the link above or via Amazon, who are also selling a digital version for substantially less.

Reading Is...Too Much?

     It's looking like Dolly Parton's Imagination Library won't get matching funds in Indiana's next state budget, putting the effort at risk of having to shut down in Indiana.

     The charity sends kids one free book a month from birth until age five.  All parents have to do is sign up.  The hope is that, in a world of screens and clicks, if you get kids around books even a little, they'll start to find out just how interesting they are.  The Indiana Legislature has been able to find spare change for it in the past, but times, apparently, are tight.  Or perhaps they're not as concerned about illiteracy these days.  I don't know.

     You can pitch in; it appears some of their funding is through United Way, and you can earmark your donation.  I'm not finding a "Donate" button on the Imagination Library website, but you can email and ask; they're a 501(c)(3) non-profit and I doubt they'll turn down gifts.