Hunting Lions

      Dandelions, that is.  I spent a couple of hours today removing them from the wildflower-thick front yard.  The bees can have the wild violets, the tiny purple blooms on Creepin' Charlie, the yellow flowers of the wild strawberries and the tiny, pink-streaked white flowers that carpet the yard every Spring, but I get the dandelions.  And I take them away.  I like them. But the neighbors don't, and the dandelions would crowd out the other flowering volunteers if I let them.

Yeah, Friday

      Migraine, dizziness and lousy eyesight.  Most of it allergy-triggered, though there are ongoing issues with my left eye since cataract surgery that lasering didn't help.

      I have hopes for this weekend but the weather is going to interfere with some of them if it goes as predicted.

Puffing Up

      Vladimir Putin has been working himself up to do...something.  V-E day fell on the ninth of May in Moscow, just a minute after midnight, and it's still a big deal in Russia. 

      I expect that by the end of that day this year, Russia will have taken some kind of dramatic action.  It could be very bad; Moscow's TV pundits are pretty much everything bad anyone in this county has imagined about the yapping heads on MSNBC or Fox News, turned up to eleven while fat and happy on government paychecks.  Discussing WW III, one of them recently pointed out that if worse came to worst, Russians could count on going to heaven while people in the West "would just croak."  --I'm starting to miss the atheistic Soviet Union; there are few things worse than a foe convinced of getting a good seat in the next life and the Soviets were (at least officially) sure that this life was all they were going to get.

      This is the world we've got and the clock's ticking.  Maybe it'll just be a ramp-up in the conventional war in Ukraine, and that will be horrific enough.  It could be far worse.  We're not going to know until May tenth.

      But I wouldn't start any really big jigsaw puzzles right now, just in case.

Oh, The Comments....

      As expected, several commenters have taken me to task -- they tell me those officers in the Capitol being menaced by rioters were heavily armed!  They (may have) had a path to retreat!  So it was perfectly okay for a mob to be bashing in doors with a helmet to get at them!  I guess the Capitol Police were supposed to leave the entire House and Senate, along with the Vice-President and all the staff, to fend for themselves?

      You're idiots, carrying water for thugs.  There are clear aggressors in the actual event, just as there are in the scenarios I sketched.  Somebody's initiating force.  It isn't the defenders.  And as for any "duty to retreat," that has never applied to police; Castle Doctrine laws explicitly extended to all citizens something police have always had de facto if not universally de jure: the right to self-defense. 

      If you are making excuses for howling, violent mobs -- and I don't care if it is BLM-associated rioters, an historical lynch mob, black-masked Antifa, the Capitol rioters of 6 January 2021, or any other bunch of self-appointed nitwits out to break heads, rules and property -- then you're arguing in favor of force over law, in favor of mobs over an elected, representative government.  Is that really the world you want to live in?

      If it is, you're an idiot.  Again.  Stop making excuses for the worst impulses of humanity.  Stop making excuses for the initiation of force.  Stopping violence against yourself or innocent others is a good thing.  Starting violence against others is not. 

So...

      Okay, let's run it.

     Here's the situation: you and your extended family have gathered in one room of your large house for some all-hands-on-deck thing you do regularly but not frequently -- working out income tax returns, watching The Wizard Of Oz, whatever.  Your family isn't especially popular, and even internally, it has split into two groups that rarely see eye-to-eye.  But you're all there, doing the thing.

     Other people gather in a big group outside on the lawn and start yelling.  Some of them break into the house.  Some adult family members gather the kids and old folks, and get them to a place of safety.  The mob reaches the (now barricaded) French doors that lead to the room you'd all been in.  Some have signs.  Some are shouting.  Others just mill around.  You shout, "Stop!"  You draw your sidearm and point it at the threat.  One of the members of the mob batters out the glass in the door.  Another of them starts to climb through the breach.  You shoot.

     Are you a murderer? 

     What if a similar thing happened at your workplace and a security guard shot a member of the mob that had broken in while they were coming through a just-breach internal barrier -- is he or she a murderer?

     If you are one of the people who has watched coverage of a BLM protest or riot, or saw antifa types running amok through a downtown, and asked why the police "don't just shoot them," then don't claim Capitol Police "murdered" Ashli Babbitt.  She was killed in the commission of a crime, while presenting a direct threat to other people as part of a dangerous mob. 

     I'm all for solutions that lead to fewer dead people.  I'm all for people making choices that lead to less deaths.  But ideal solutions are not always possible.  Don't want to get shot by Capitol Police?  Then don't break into the U. S. Capitol as part of a mob, don't bash through doors while police stand on the other side with guns drawn telling you to stop, and don't go through the broken door.

     Means count as much as ends, and must not be judged through a partisan filter.

     The lesson to take from this is the same lesson to be taken from any political riot: mob rule is not democracy.  Mobs do not lead to solutions.  We knew it in 1776.  We knew it in 1787 - 89.  Most of us still know it.

Not Now

      I had a long-ish post planned, but I'm all burned out on explaining reality slowly and carefully, and then getting inflamed comments from people who'd rather live in a bloody fantasy.  Maybe tomorrow, kid.  Maybe tomorrow.

      Maybe not at all.

Had To Work Today

     A routine failure at work, for which we have backup, managed to turn into a full-fledged disaster of the kind that you just have to ride out, at the mercy of outside forces.

     Power went out and the backup generator came online.  And then after awhile, it died without warning.

     It wasn't fun, especially since we were all counting on the normal, routine, automatic solution.  It did work -- for a couple of hours.  It's supposed to hold up for three days.

     I showed up, shortly after Power & Light fixed the problem and left -- the same problem they had showed up to fix hours earlier and given up after leaving voicemail for our Accounting people, despite our installing their special locks on the gate and having the account marked as "critical, cannot be left off, must speak to a living person," and giving them home and emergency numbers for our techs and managers.

     That frustration was compounded by a genset that mysteriously stopped pumping fuel.  Not my department, and I left the specialists to their problem-solving after one effort sprayed everyone around with diesel fuel, including and especially me.  Yeah, thanks, and if I can ever do the same for them?  I won't.

     What a day to have misplaced my clown nose and floppy shoes.  Fucik!  Send in the gladiators!

Nota Bene

      Just for the blood-and-soil racist nitwits, you can make oblique and supposedly disparaging references to my Cherokee-and/or-African-American ancestor all you like, but the fact is, I am proud of her. 

      We don't know a whole lot about her, but she made hard choices and lived with them.  She was upwardly mobile.  She had smart kids, smart grandchildren, and I like to think subsequent generations weren't especially stupid, either.  Heck, I even have IQ tests to support my opinion.

      My ancestors look like America.  They're from all over -- 19th-Century German farmers and schoolteachers (many of them Mennonites or Old Order Dunkards), 18th-Century Britons and Scots, and who knows what else.  They were farmers and millers, teachers, college professors, heavy-equipment operators starting back when that meant enormous horses and an array of arcane equipment, sailors, carpenters, mechanics, fathers, mothers, homemakers and homebuilders.  Just about all of them could cook.*  There were a few drunks and even one lawyer; but that's not atypical, either.

      I'm proud of them.  They survived, even thrived.  I'm not going to be cowed by any sneering weasel submitting a blog comment; I can outrun and outshoot most people, and I have backup.
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* Both of my parents were younger children of large families with a pronounced gender imbalance: Mom had four sisters and one brother, Dad had six brothers and three sisters (of whom he knew only one, twin girls having died in early childhood of probable TB).  That meant they both had to learn a wide array of skills, and took for granted that any competent adult or diligent child could cook a meal, hammer a nail, sew on a button, hang a picture, sweep floors, wash dishes, paint walls, plant/weed/harvest a garden and so on.  My sister and I weren't allowed to drive until we could check and change oil and coolant, change spark plugs after checking and setting the gaps, and demonstrate a basic understanding of how the car worked.  These were simply "background skills."

Insultingly Ignorant Nonsense

      That describes all of the comments I have received so far to yesterday's post.

      I stayed at home most of 6 January 2021, with the TV on while I worked.  I watched the events live, usually with the sound down but not always.  I know what I saw: chaos, mobs, doors being forced, windows being broken, chanted threats.  The rhetoric at the rally earlier had come just short of inciting violence.

      Since I had watched extensive coverage of the BLM demonstrations and subsequent rioting in Indianapolis earlier in the year, it was pretty familiar, and the gradual sorting-out of the crowd as the most violently-inclined moved themselves out from the people who were only there to wave signs and make noise was familiar, some of the sign-wavers being swept up in the moment.

      I work in television.  I am aware of the context-limiting nature of TV cameras, and channel-hopped, looking for wide views.  I know what I saw that day.  I wrote about it that day.  I wrote about it the next day.  I wrote about it the day after that.  I stand by what I wrote.

      I saw it happen while it happened.  Not an edit.  The cameras available for live coverage that day didn't catch everything but they didn't add anything.  So what should I believe, my own eyes or the retconned fictions of the Right-wing punditry?  (Or for that matter, of the Left; despite a lot of speculation, to date no clear evidentiary line has been drawn from the Trump Administration or the rally speakers to the subsequent riot and insurrection, and given the chaos of that day, the lack of cooperation from witnesses and some missing call logs, there may never be.  On that, I have my opinion -- they were egging the rioters on and hoped to put a scare into Congress -- but no, I can't prove it.)

      I'm going with what I saw.

      I'm going with my observations about who was serving up distorted versions of the events afterward and what those distortions were.  Fox pundits and the news providers to their Right were peddling bullshit and politicians on that side, after a short period of shock and a few condemnations, joined in and pushed the fantasy even farther.  Pundits on the Left exhibited a kind of rueful glee, but the fantasy content was much lower.  Actual mainstream media, in their actual news segments, generally stuck to the facts.

      You are welcome to your own opinion.  You don't get your own set of facts.  What happened, happened.*

      For the record: no Trumpist Republican will ever get my vote.  Insurrectionists and fellow-travelers don't get votes from me, not now and not ever.  If you vote for this vileness, you are voting to put an end to America's great experiment in popular rule.  Don't the Founders and Framers deserve better than a descent into Caesarism?  Don't we owe it to to them and to our posterity to not let it come crashing down in exactly the way 18th-Century critics predicted it would?  The French had the Terror followed by Napoleon; let us learn from history, and not follow that path.

     The economist Adam Smith comforted a friend, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."  Things can go on almost as before even while the underpinnings fall to pieces.  Rome outlasted her Republic by some five hundred years.  Nevertheless, there's nothing good to be gained by trying to hurry it along.
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* In a telephone conversation about an entirely different topic with my oldest niece last night -- she's a retired Nurse-Practitioner, who specialized in difficult intensive-care work -- she pointed out that human beings are not wired up to process really terrible news all in one go; people have to hear it over and over, and the worse the news it, the more times it may take.  In some cases, it may take nearly twenty encounters with the same facts before the hearer can accept them.  An attempted coup in the service of people willing to tell outrageous lies in order to hold on to power is very bad news indeed.  Denial is a normal part of the grieving process -- but it does eventually run out. 

Opinions Are Not Facts

      Nearly a year and a half on, I still get comments telling me that the 6 January 2021 assault on the U. S. Capitol and interfering with the normal functioning of the Federal government was a "demonstration" or a "visit."

      Sure it was -- in much the same sense that trying to burn a Federal courthouse or a mob destroying a city police station is a "demonstration:" they all demonstrate criminal activity.

      You want a normal "demonstration?"  People did that at the official rally earlier that day: speakers, flag-waving, sign-carrying, shouts and for all I know, happy songs.  The organizers got permits and everything.  You want a spontaneous demonstration?  That same day, people, many of them from the rally, walked down to the grounds of the U. S. Capitol, waving flags, carrying signs, shouting, etc.  They had no permit, which makes the police unhappy, but this is something that does happen from time to time in that spot.  It's as American as apple pie. Some members of the crowd trashed an outdoor news camera position and put the journalists to flight, which is what we call a crime, just as it would have been if they'd done the same to a tourist from New Jersey.  Still, this is the kind of thing that does from time to time happen at a "demonstration."

      Overrunning barricades around a building, breaking in, smashing doors and windows and putting the Vice-President, House, Senate and staff to flight while they are in the process of counting electoral votes for the next President and Vice-President?  That's not a demonstration.  That's an insurrection.  (Nor does it matter if, as is still being claimed by some on the Right, "the police let them in."  It's not true, but even if it was, that's not a decision the police are empowered to make: the building was closed, period.)

      Stop trying to sell me a crock of authoritarian shit and claiming it's Constitutional cheese.  It's not, and no amount of fast talk and handwaving will change that.

      And stop claiming nonsense about the 2020 election, either.  I get that a sufficiently ignorant or stupid person might have doubts, but everything from the actual way voting machines work to the multiple recounts in multiple states to Joe Biden's profound lack of coattails to the narrow GOP Presidential losses in states with Republican administrators firmly in control of running the elections make it very clear to me that no skullduggery was afoot -- which puts a mob trying to change the outcome on the day of the final count of electors very much in the category of insurrection or attempted coup.

      Mr. Trump's Republican party lost a lot of respect from me on 6 January 2021 and the party in general has only lost more by their behavior ever since, with a very few exceptions, men and women excoriated by their party.

      With the Democrats, I have substantial disagreements about policies and politics, about specific laws and administrative actions, but we seem to be in general agreement about things like freedom of the press, freedom of religion and the normal operations of a functioning republic including free elections.  With Republicans, many of their leading lights have put in a lot of work trying to undermine elections, questioning our form of government and trying to force Caesarism on our country.  The party of Judge Roy Moore and Matt Gaetz has become preoccupied with a definition of "grooming" quite at odds with the actual meaning of the term while they wink at the actual sexual exploitation of underage people.

      So, look, if you're still banging that tired old Trumpist drum, do so somewhere other than my Comments section.  Freedom of speech protects you from government interference; it doesn't mean I have to publish any crazy thing you write.

      This is the United States.  You're welcome to your own opinions.  You don't get your own set of facts.

From The Irony Desk

      As near as I can sort out, Congresscritter Marjorie Taylor Greene is irked that some folks are "gaming the system" by using existing laws and Constitutional provisions to mount a challenge to her reelection effort.  Read about it here or here,* it's the same story.  This approach has already been tried elsewhere and didn't succeed; the burden of proof is high.

      I guess it's only engaging in legitimate political discourse when you do it to other people, not when they do it to you?  Curious, that.
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* I would have linked to it at Fox News, but they seem to have buried the story so deep search engines can't find it.  Here's a link to a site using Fox video, if you'd like.  Apparently both participants never heard of the Reconstruction Amendments, and don't think they were a good idea.

-No-

      This morning, I woke up, looked out the window and saw about a half-inch of snow on the ground, with more falling.

      I disapprove of this.

Cheating At Chicken Soup

      The past week was a vacation for me, mostly spent trying to catch up on sleep.  The weather was just chilly enough to make working outside impractical for more than a few minutes at a time.

      It was chilly enough to make a bowl of soup for dinner look like a good idea; but I'd been lazy and had run out most of my fresh vegetables and I hadn't thawed any meat.  The canned stuff is okay, but....  Surely I could do better.

      I had a packet of condensed chicken noodle soup that claimed to make three cups.  Of course, it's mostly broth and noodles.  I keep canned meat in the pantry; I always have, but the pandemic prompted me to maintain a pretty good assortment* and there was a big (9.5 oz.) can of white meat chicken.  That's a start!  I had half an onion and a few carrots in the fridge, too, and a small can of mushrooms.  Dicing and sauteing the carrots and onion, and adding the well-drained canned chicken before three cups of water (and a dab of this and that, sage and thyme mostly) was a good start.  When the water boiled, I added the soup mix and mushrooms, and let it simmer for a few minutes.

      No, it's not as good as home-made.  It was a lot better than any canned chicken noodle soup, though, and just the thing before a night that was going to reach freezing and stay there until the sun was well up.
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* It's a bet with myself, a few cans each of salmon, corned beef, chicken and Spam.  With them and my supplies of rice, pasta, canned tomatoes and beans, I could do all right for a month or more while supply chains sorted themselves out.  Longer-term?  I live in the city; if things go longer than that, there's probably no outwaiting them.

"G'wan -- Try'n Knock It Off"

      The thing about bullies is, they keep on pushing until someone stops them.  Russia recently warned the U.S. and other NATO countries who have sent weapons to Ukraine that such shipments could result in "unpredictable consequences."*

      I guess the West is just supposed to stand by and let Russia beat up their smaller neighbor.

      This kind of doubling down on a bad situation (Ukraine is standing up pretty well so far) is not atypical of autocracies when their aggression is called out -- the early stages of WW II were full of examples.  Sometimes it even works for a while.  Long-term, it's not a winning strategy.

*  *  *
      Some Americans are still cheering on the "manly" Russian government, most notably Tucker C------n of Fox News,  His latest long-form effort celebrates manly manliness in a manner not seen since the films of Leni Riefenstahl, or perhaps Steve Reeves.  Not that there's anything specifically illegal with that...outside Florida public schools, at least.  But he doth protest rather a lot.  I guess every authoritarian movement builds its own Röhm, or tries to.  Or is that Rome?  Naw, sticking with the first spelling.
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* From what I have seen of Russian military QC under battle conditions in Ukraine, I'll certainly grant them the "unpredictable" part.

Nice, Nice, Nice

      Got up at a nice hour this morning, had a nice English muffin with butter and sweet orange marmalade, had a nice bath, dressed nicely, brushed my hair out nicely and went off to see the nice doctor.

     We had a nice visit -- with a nice amount of poking and prodding and stethoscope listening -- and I was nicely told that I needed to lose more weight.  They finally completed my shingles vaccination (nice!) and I went home, to walk over to Half Liter and have a nice brunch -- they do a very fine waffle -- with Tam.

     Nice as can be -- because I'm scared of going to the doctor and if I'm not in a nice, relaxed frame of mind, my blood pressure goes through the roof and they refuse to believe that it measures much lower at home.

     After brunch and a short walk, I was all niced out.  I came home and had a nap before driving over to feed my friend's cats, who were happy to see me.  That really was nice, no effort needed.   They're in need of affection and interaction.

I'm Still Not Convinced

      Current events -- recent events, since, say, 2015 or so -- continue to leave me wondering if it's not all some long, detailed and horrible hallucination I'm having to live through.  Or perhaps I'm dead and the next life is particularly cruel.  It's too awful to be real.

      Of course, this is an inevitable consequence of living in an age of powerful social media and cult-of-personality leaders.  The run-up to WW II gave us plenty of hard times and Mussolini, FDR, Stalin, Hitler and Churchill, each one larger-than-life, each one living in his own legend.  Modern mass and social media are to the media and following those men had as an H-bomb is to a stick of dynamite -- and a giant personality that defines "truth" as "whatever best suits him at the moment" is even more corrosive now than it has ever been.

      Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump in particular are a "Shiri's Scissor" to Western Civilization.  I don't know what's going to be left when the snipping slows and stops.  I suspect nobody's going to like it much, even the people who are eagerly anticipating sweeping change.

Cat-Sitting, Continuing

      Still looking after my friend's cats.  Until a few days ago, there were three I was sure of -- black cats, well-behaved, one of which was a long-legged, youngish tomcat who liked me, an older female cat who was okay with me if I had already been smoothed on by the first one, and a third -- an elderly, one-eyed tomcat -- who would only watch from a distance.   Plus a likely fourth cat, grayish with white paws, that I have only seen as a blur.

      The female had some tangles, which I have been slowly working on brushing out.  She's not a big fan of the brush.  Then one day I found her in one of her favorite spots, fur all smooth, collar missing.  The friendly tom had managed to shed his collar earlier, so I wasn't surprised -- until I went to the basement, and the female cat with tangled fur and a nice pink collar was asleep on the washing machine.

      Yes, there's a fifth cat.  After sending a photograph, my friend confirmed the cat's name, and concluded that her other friends at the cat refuge had overlooked that cat.  She's the smallest of them all, a bit shy but friendly.

      I have no idea how many cats she had in the house before the refuge rounded up some of them.  They were all well looked after.  Her house was always neat and clean and in no wise odoriferous.  I had only ever noticed a few cats.

      Three of the cats like me pretty well now.  The gray cat is a mystery.  The one-eyed cat remains wary, though he watches me from less of a distance every day, especially when the others are getting attention.

TV Of Tomorrow

      In 1953, Tex Avery took a satirical look at where television might go.  Nearly 70 years on, we've got quite a lot of it, right in the palm of our hand. (It's incomplete, sorry.  Haven't found a better one.)

Hi, Still Here

      Just kind of busy and distracted.  Sorry.   I still can't process where we are in history.

Nothing

      The world has gone crazy and I don't want to deal with it.

      An example: Indiana is at an historic low in COVID-19 cases right now, like all of the U.S. and at least one in-state blogger is complaining that the Indiana State Board of Health website has switched to reporting cases, hospitalizations and so on per 10,000 instead of per 100,000.  It's right there on every chart; they're not hiding it.  Cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen so low that the only way to have whole-number divisions on the charts is to count them per ten thousand instead of per hundred thousand and this nitwit's complaining, on the basis that "it inflates the numbers."

      It does nothing of the sort.  It makes them clear, and if it confuses the innumerate, well, they've been confused for years now; this isn't going to leave them any worse off.

      And that's one of the least crazy and sad things I have seen recently.  We got a new Supreme Court Justice and did not alter the balance of the Court in the slightest -- and Republican Senators are peeved about it, peeved enough for a couple of them to pull silly stunts in the confirmation vote which did nothing to change the outcome.  Go hold a press conference and articulate your fears of the scarrrrrry black woman* if you need to, but perform the duties of your office with a little damn gravitas, willya?  It's the same standard to which I hold every Senator and Representative, and which so many of them in both parties fail to achieve.
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* There's a remarkable amount of overlap between the people objecting to the latest Supreme Court Justice and the people who were irked at the well-deserved retirement of the "Aunt Jemima" pancake mix mascot, which tells me a lot more about them than I enjoy knowing.

Speaking Of The 1930s....

      ...Who's up for another Dust Bowl?  The last time farming in Ukraine was disrupted by Russian activity, farmers in the U.S. stepped up grain production to meet the increased demand.  Aided by a remarkable intersection of advances in mechanized farm machinery, expanded land grants for homesteaders and a stretch of unusually wet weather, farmers put much of the Great Plains under the plow for the first time.

      When drought hit in 1930 and stayed, the land dried up and blew away.  Eventually, a lot of the people left, too, short on money, paying work and food.  Meanwhile, Ukraine stayed hungry and got hungrier, thanks to Russian politics. 

      Bad things happening a long way away echo around the world.  You can bet none of the political leaders missed a meal or had to face a dust storm without adequate shelter back then, and they don't now, either.

1930s All Over Again

      It gets to be too much.  It feels like I'm living in the 1930s, a Doc Savage story or something, only without the Man of Bronze, without the radio dramas or pulp magazines, no soda fountains or amazing technical advances in radio, none of the good stuff.  Just the quack medicine and worrying disease outbreaks, just the economic uncertainty, cynical political demagogues, bloody-handed dictators and a horrifying civic hunger for authoritarianism.

      Some days, it's all I can do to cope with it.  It feels as if the world is going crazy.

      (In the original posting, I left out the thing we've got now they didn't have in the 1930s: the threat of thermonuclear war!  Yes, we don't have dirigibles any more, but we've got the nukes.  Ain't progress wonderful?)

Still Busy

      There was weirdness at work overnight.  The details are arcane and dull, but I was summoned from bed not long after laying down and spent a couple of hours on the phone and online. 

      This after trying to get to bed early and managing only the scheduled time.  That was an improvement over recent days, though.

      Now I have to go drown ants.  Not on purpose, but there are dishes to get done and it's ant season.*  They're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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* The kitchen spider, who has moved her net to slightly less visible spot, agrees.  I'm happy to have her help with the pests.

A Busy Day

      Had to catch up on housework from yesterday, finish critically reading (and commenting on) three pieces of fiction, and attend a virtual meeting of the writer's group.  One member was on vacation in a warmer climate, and the occasional sight of the ocean over her shoulder was more uplifting than envy-inspiring.

      I did skip vacuuming, so that's still to be done.  The cats do not approve of it.

So Much For Saturday

      Made breakfast, did a little laundry (very little), had an issue at work that my boss was already looking into and solving when I remoted in.   Drove to my friend's house, fed her cats and cleaned their litter, and...  Text message from work.  Different problem.

      It was a problem that required my presence at the North Campus.  So I drove up there and did the thing, and when I got home, it was time to make dinner. 

      This is not what I had planned.

Weather Fools!

      It snowed this morning.  For real.  Just a dusting of snow on rooftops and in the cooler corners.

      Just a mean little trick to remind us that despite the change of seasons, Winter is not quite entirely gone yet.