I'm Just Watching

     I'd like to have something trenchant and pithy to say about current events; we're oversupplied with holiday tragedy, and then there's whatever the hell is going on between the Trump administration and Venezuela....

     Historically, there's nothing governments feeling their power slipping turn to more readily than a short, victorious war -- and there's nothing more likely to turn on them.  Ginning up an external (and/or internal) enemy is a common element in many authoritarian efforts; George Orwell was drawing on experience when he wrote (managed) threats of both sorts into 1984.

     We're not there yet, and there's a whole of of "old man yells at clouds" going on, at home and abroad.  The problem is that when yelling leads countries, bombs and missiles often follow.

     It's not at all suited to the season -- but when is it ever really okay?  Pugnaciousness and preparedness aren't the same thing; neither are confidence and combativeness.

Oh--

     Thought I had posted something this morning.  I'm still fighting this cold, though it seems to be fading.  It's no fun to have a cold on vacation, but it's much better than trying to work while I have one; I used to do that, before COVID and before I had a co-worker who would "bravely" come in with colds or the flu, and give them to all of us.  If I didn't like him doing that, I sure had no excuse for doing the same myself!

     Any more, sick days and vacation days at work come from the same pool; and I am not much given to vacation travel.  So it's no great loss. 

The Cure For Kid Cocoa

     I enjoy hot chocolate in the winter.  I don't enjoy trying to keep milk in stock,* or washing out a pan used for heating it for just one cup of cocoa, so that means the instant stuff.

     One good trick for solving weak instant is to add a teaspoon of coffee creamer.  But the other problem with many brands is they're loaded with sugar.  And the fix for that?  A little more coffee creamer, a little more hot water -- and a level teaspoon or less of plain, unsweetened cocoa powder.  That kicks it up to something better suited to an adult palate, in my opinion, and I'm still not having to mess around heating up milk.
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* For some reason, UHT shelf-storable milk has become mildly scarce at my corner store.  It's still the best choice if you like to have milk handy but don't use it often.

Okay, Then...Dammit

     I have now reached the "obnoxiously crabby" stage of my cold.  It's probably a good sign; it means I've got enough mental processing cycles left over to be annoyed about being sick.

     That does not, however, mean it is any fun.  And I have to keep it reined in, despite an unceasing string of petty frustrations this morning: when I act annoyed, the cats get crabby with one another:
     "Mom's upset and it's your fault!"
     "No it ain't, it's your fault, you fluffy monstrosity!"
     "Yeah, well you're yellow!"
     "That's it!"  And they're off, wrestling, trying to chew one another's ears off, rolling over and over down the hall.
     Earlier, one of them was biting the other as he was headed into the litterbox, an offense against proper behavior so dire that we moved the biter to the front of the house and shut the door -- until his adopted brother, business taken care of, began wailing at the closed door about being so lonely, where was his pal, what had we done?

     There's no managing cats; you just have to figure out where they're headed and try to get there first.

But First...

     I went off to the kitchen for a coffee refill and asked the robot to play "Saber Dance."  She picked a version by the Boston Brass, and it was a good one, the kind of performance that has me idly wondering if they aren't having to rotate valved brass players out to the alley to fan them down while the rhythm keeps plonking along.

     Then it segued into something seasonal, doubly familiar and yet not familiar at all.  It turns out you can borrow riffs from Take Five and hurl them under the wheels of We Three Kings Of Orient Are, and it works out very well.  If you start picturing the wise men from the mystic East arriving in porkpie hats and sunglasses after this, well, I guess you can blame me.  Cool, baby, and dig them angelic trumpeters!

Well, Drat

     Tam had a very mild cold last week; she updated her cough-drop supply and spent a day at home.  It's still fading.

     Friday evening, I was kind of worn out and put it down to driving home in the beginnings of a snowstorm.

     Saturday morning, Tam shoveled the walks.  It kept snowing.  I shoveled the walks again that afternoon (and they needed it badly; the snow was still falling), rested a bit and made a quick run to the grocery for food.  The walks were covered again by the time I returned -- and our grocer's is only a few blocks away.

     I made chili for dinner.  About half-way through my bowl, it seemed to turn spicy-hot on me.  I crumbled in some crackers and finished it.

     I woke in the night with a funny, one-sided sore throat and very full sinuses.  I had picked up a cold from someone, somewhere and my exertion doing the walks -- look, we try to do all of 'em, at least  along the street, to our front door and from the back door to the garage -- probably hadn't helped.

     There was a pork roast in the fridge.  I marinated it in some pickling brine from a mostly-empty jar of home-made giardiniera with a little extra apple cider vinegar, soy sauce and oregano.  It sat in the fridge until later afternoon while I sat around the house, drinking a little eggnog and a lot of tea and beef bouillon.  Three and a half hours before dinner time, I browned the pork roast on all sides, set it on the meat rack in the same stewpot after deglazing with a little water,  poured a cup of chicken-mushroom broth over it and added three bay leaves along with sections of apple and turnip and put the lid on.  I rested a while, then put in parsnips and carrots, potatoes and celery, onion and shitaake mushrooms over the course of about ninety minutes -- and the effort wore me out.

     Luckily, most of cooking a big pork roast consists of ignoring it once the pot is simmering.  Along with the potatoes, I dropped in a cube of Knorr vegetable broth on a hunch,* and that worked out.

     Come dinnertime, the meat nearly fell apart.  It was moist and had good flavor, as did the veggies and mushrooms.  I took my time cleaning up the dishes and freezing the leftovers-- my nose was filling up quickly after every honk by then.  I fell into bed after finishing most of the dishes and only woke up to sneeze.

     Twelve hours later, here I am.  The sore throat has faded, my sinuses have at least slowed -- and I have less energy than a sleepy kitten.  It's still too cold (single digits) to order delivery in good conscience; I've had coffee, almond biscotti and a few saltines, which feels like plenty already.

     But I'm going back to bed.
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* The chicken-mushroom broth is low sodium, and while the pickling brine marinade most definitely is not, nearly all of it is discarded.  So a cup's worth of salty broth was liable to be fine, and it was.  That may be my favorite brand for vegetable and beef broth concentrate.

Looking Up At Freezing From Below

     It's presently two degrees Fahrenheit in Indianapolis, up from zero when I woke up.  Tam and I shoveled the walks a couple of times yesterday but they've got a thin coating of snow.  There's over five inches of the stuff on the ground where it wasn't shoveled.

     We'll be in single digits all day today and might reach the teens tomorrow.  I'm off this week and I'm not going anywhere until it warms up. 

Is He Dumb, Or Does He Think We Are?

     I admit it: my views on health insurance/health care have changed.  Coming up with a system that ensures all citizens get adequate health care is apparently so incredibly difficult that every industrialized democracy (and larger autocracies) except the U.S. has figured it out, in several different ways.

     Rand Paul, talking about the expiring Obamacare subsidies on Meet The Press this morning, first complained, "It's the artificial demand  that has driven prices up," by which he apparently means the weakly-enforced requirement (not to mention general individual desire) that everyone buys insurance.  How is that an artificial demand?  Was the point to have more health care for more people, or to encourage the weak and poor to die off?  Because the second is what we had before ACA, and what we have a little less of now.

     But that logical glitch was nothing compared to what followed: asked what he would do, the Senator from Kentucky explained that his plan would "...let Americans buy their healthcare at CVS, at [list of large retailers], at Amazon, and when you have a million or more individuals, that's bigger than any corporation," quite sensibly implying that per-person costs would fall; a sufficiently large pool of people is statistically predictable, allowing the insurer to manage risk, and the more of them you've got in the pool, the better that's going to work.  It's a great idea -- and works even better as it is scaled up.  It'd be a real hum-dinger if the insured consisted of, oh, the entire population.

     Don't hold your breath.  Not for an insure-everyone plan, or even for bopping over to Walmart to pick up their nationally-sold health-insurance package during the post-Thanksgiving sale.  If you take a look at Open Secrets, the majority of the top five political contributors are insurance companies, hospital corporations, and pharmaceutical companies; healthcare and HMO's are in the top twelve.  They know who to schmooze in Washington, and exactly how.  Every part of healthcare has an ownership/administrative layer taking a cut, and they'd all like a bigger slice of the pie.  It forms a kind of financial ratchet, and an increase at any point results in every part of the network turning the dial up.  It's a mess because it is a mess; the ACA legislation tried to make it less messy without asking any part of it to accept a smaller slice and, unsurprisingly, all that did was bake the messiness in. 

     Maybe Rand Paul is right; maybe it'll take a "Category Killer" to do to the insurance/medical complex what they did to the office-supply store, the corner grocer, the independent drugstore and the five and dime.  But while those little enterprises got squashed like bugs, Here Be Dragons, and it may have to all fall apart before it can be remedied.

     I'm not holding my breath for that, either.

     Pie in the sky is lovely to look at, but it's not nutritious. 

Count All You Like But They Ain't Hatched Yet

     I'll repeat that headline to Democrats and Republicans alike: the chickens of 2025 have barely come home to roost, and while there's plenty of frantic shuffling around of the prospective eggs of U. S. House seats, those eggs have barely been laid, yet alone hatched.

     Long-time Indiana Democrat political figure Ann Delaney, speaking about the failed GOP redistricting push this morning on Indiana Week In Review, suggested the Republicans are looking at a 50-seat loss in the House; elsewhere, the Republican national party chairman is warning his state parties that victory in 2026 is crucial.

     Well, okay, but we haven't even seen primaries yet -- and meanwhile, it looks very much as if time has run out for the Federal subsidies that kept ACA health insurance affordable for many Americans.  What I'm hearing is that House and Senate Republicans are of the opinion that most of the people who benefited were Democrats, if they bothered to vote at all, so why worry?  It's a gamble; a lot self-employed people and workers at small businesses rely on buying their own lower-cost insurance, and I'd be surprised if they were a solid block for the Dems.

     Nor can we be sure where the economy is headed.  I'm not going to rehash all the competing claims, or try to sort out which are fantasy and which have some basis in fact.  "Indications Are Unclear" is what my Magic 8-Ball keeps turning up; what's going to matter is how things are going right before the primaries and in the run-up to the general election.

     Anyone chortling "We've got him now" or that MAGA is a lock-in should be gently discouraged from putting any money down.  It's too soon to even make a good guess, and much too soon for helmet fires.  The trend among pollsters and pundits at present leaves the House and Senate balanced on a knife edge after the 2026 elections -- and those bodies haven't shown any great talent for the Sabre Dance so far.  It is a difficult piece, but they keep sawing the basses in half before the thing is even over....

A New System

     When I form my own country, we're going to vote in the legislature via some conventional way, but they'll have to live in military barracks, wear plain fatigue-type uniforms and eat regular military food in a chow hall.  They won't be allowed (?) to drill or march together, nor touch weapons.

     But we'll pick the Chief Executive by means of The Sandwich: At a location randomly selected by lot, a low table will be placed, with a ham sandwich wrapped in waxed paper on it, under a large wooden crate propped up at an angle by a stick.  Heavy twine will be tied around the stick, leading off to a concealed blind.  The two highest vote-getters from the legislature will wait in the blind, but they will not have known in advance where the crate will be, nor will they be allowed to communicate until some poor fool has picked up the sandwich and been trapped by the crate.  He or she will be the new Chief Executive.

     If it takes days and the legislators doze off, missing a sandwich-grabber?  Tough.  Somebody got a free sandwich!  Otherwise, sandwiches are swapped out every four hours, and the concealed Executive-trappers can split the old one.

     Is it a terrible system?  Sure.  But I've been looking at how the various countries of the world pick their person for the worry seat, and I've got to tell you, none of them filter for wisdom or for success at the job.  Might as well pick someone who knows free food when they see it, and who we can all recognize as the sap who fell for it.  Here's your uniform, Chiefie!  You get the bunk in the corner.  Workday starts at six a.m., and if you're not out of the sack promptly, the Sergeant-at-Arms dumps you on the floor and frog-marches you to the showers.

     They can quit the job any time.  Hell, we've got lots of sandwiches, and there's a sucker born every minute.

Indiana Says No

     Indiana's where I live, and it's a pretty conservative place.  It's full of stubborn people, and if you want them to change how they do things -- anything -- you'd better be filling a genuine need.  Hamilton County's road system has more roundabouts than anywhere in the U.S., but it only happened after decades of explosive population growth and four-way-stop gridlock that made getting anywhere at rush hour a crawlingly slow and frustrating experience.

    Indiana, like many other GOP-dominated states, has been under pressure from the Trump administration to redraw U. S. House districts and help retain the GOP trifecta in Washington, DC in the 2026 general election.  We've got nine districts; all but two of them are easy wins for Republicans.  Those two -- Marion County/Indianapolis/Seventh District, and the Chicago-adjacent  First District -- are about as strongly Democratic.  The proposed map split the Democrat strongholds; Marion county got it worse than Caesar's Gaul, hacked between four districts that extended deep into rural areas, most running all the way to the state boundaries.

     This wasn't a secret effort; the intention was well known and the maps were published.  Indiana doesn't have any rules against partisan gerrymandering.  But it didn't sit well with voters.

     I think there were two main issues.  One was that the changes were sweeping.  Your old, familiar House district would be gone, possibly taking your old, familiar U. S. Congresscritter with it.  In central Indiana, there was concern that "four millionaires from Indianapolis" would be speaking for primarily agricultural, rural areas, whose concerns would be underrepresented.  And the move was petty: with the GOP holding seven of the nine districts, they've already got a commanding lead; two more wouldn't make a big difference.

     For all those reasons, and plenty more, our state Senate rejected the effort, 31 to 19.  There are fifty seats; Republicans hold forty of them, so it doesn't take a math whiz to work out that 21 of the No votes came from Republicans.  When you can't sell a majority of your own party's state Senators on it, maybe redrawing the Congressional map isn't such a great idea.

     The legislature doesn't get another bite at the apple until Spring, too late to redistrict ahead of the mid-term elections.

Discontinuity

     Ever bend a hard plastic rod?  Many plastics will go quite a ways, and then, all of a sudden--  They break. 

     Mr. Trump's Republican party is courting chaos like a lovestruck teenager.

     In Missouri, both sides were playing chess -- until one side pulled out a baseball bat.  The legislature passed a bill to rearrange Federal House districts, with a map that will flip one of the two usually-Democratic districts in favor of Republicans.  Opponents fought back, with a ballot-initiative petition drive to put the new map up for a statewide vote.  You can do that in Missouri, but it takes a pile of signatures, and they've got to come from at least six of the state's eight House districts. 

     In fact, it takes a tick over 100,000 signatures.  The petitioners have collected well over 300,000, from all eight districts.  So it'll almost certainly go on the ballot, and per established precedent, the law is frozen once enough signatures have been turned in, while Missourians wait until it is determined if the signature requirements have officially been met, and until they've had a chance to vote on it if the number beat the minimum.

     The Republican Secretary of State says no; even if there are enough signatures, he can just declare the referendum unconstitutional all by himself.  And if so, the whole thing goes off the courts to work out.  It's not how the Show Me state has dealt with similar referenda in the past.  The power to shout, "Allee, allee, oxen-free," and dump the process has never been asserted by the Missouri Secretary of State before.  It seems, well, not the way a proper Republic goes about such things.  It's high-handed.  Authoritarian.

     In a state whose citizens are nationally famous for mulishness, it might not be the course of action that a sober, cautious politician should choose.

     I guess we'll find out.  Bending, bending--  Whattaya think?  Snap, or will it stay bent?  And what gets that treatment next?

     It feels like the lights are about to start going out, like the walls are closing in.  There's a lot of ruin in a big, well-established country, but there's no damn requirement to test that proposition to destruction.