Living In A Glass House

     There's limited room on the airwaves.  Digital TV made it easier to get more signals into the same channels -- and the FCC promptly stacked stations closer together to make more room for police radio and commercial users.*  Mostly-analog FM and AM† is even more pressed for space, with an array of technological fixes helping to find and fill in available slots anywhere there's enough of an audience to turn a profit.

     Radio and TV spectrum is a limited resource.  You can run out of it.  It's not like newspapers (just print more!) or cable TV (filled up one wire?  Run another -- or use fiber-optic for more bandwidth) or the Internet (make more webpages, run fatter data pipes!).  So the government regulates it via the FCC and one of the things they have required since early on is transparency: stations have to ID themselves with every transmission and you've always been able to go look up which owners go with what call letters. 

     Broadcasting is a big megaphone, and broadcast stations have to prove they're of some use to their community.  The way that happens is by a thing called a "Public File."  It used to be an actual file at the studios that anyone could show up during business hours and leaf through; now it's an electronic file, accessible through the stations website and the FCC's as well.  In it you'll find the current license (including ownership information) and any applications pending with the FCC, agreements the station has made with citizens (usually advocacy groups), contracts, complaints, details of political broadcasts, a copy of the FCC's guidebook The Public and Broadcasting, a list of issues and of programs that address them (including children's programming), and so on.  "And so on" has for years included EEO requirements: equal opportunity in employment.  There aren't any hiring quotas, but the FCC wants stations to make sure they're reaching out to all qualified applicants when they have job openings.  And they used to require stations keep track of staff demographics, and post that information in their public file.  Twenty years ago, that requirement was dropped (at least for radio stations) due to a court case, but time marches on and they were able to reinstate it recently.

     Of course a station owner objected.  Remember, there aren't any quotas; the FCC just wants that data out there so the general public can see it, along with all the other information about how the station has addressed matters of public interest and who's running the place.  But that's too much for the folks who run "theDove" and they've filed suit to block it.  The NAB loathes the notion, too, and have filed their own lawsuit. 

     I don't know.  Over-the-air radio and TV stations are using a scarce resource, and nobody's keeping them from making money; but since they're getting to use the public's airwaves (and at a pretty cheap price, too), the public deserves to get some direct benefit, and the public ought to be able to check how the sausage is made, too.   It doesn't seem out of line to include demographic data not linked to names.  NAB suggests it may enable doxxing individuals, and I will leave it to readers to decide if that's a genuine concern or a legal stratagem.

     Radio and TV stations are allowed a disproportionately-loud voice, and subjecting them to a greater degree of scrutiny in return is about as close to fair as we're going to get.
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* Yes, it's true.  UHF TV, which used to end at channel 83, now stops at channel 36, just shy of the channel 37 spot that was never used: radio astronomy finds 608 - 614 MHz useful and above that, it's all cops, military, Feds, fire departments, ambulances, phones and so on.
 
† There is, kind of, available room on the AM band these days, but it's more like vacant buildings than wide open spaces -- and decrepit buildings, at that.  An AM radio station is a big pile of sunk costs, especially the antenna tower(s) and ground system, costly to build, expensive to maintain and vulnerable to theft.  But AM listenership has been declining for years and advertising revenue has followed.  If you ever wanted to own an AM radio station, now's the time; but the way to make a small fortune with an AM station is to start out with a large fortune and be very, very frugal.

Puzzling

     I really don't get the two-hour speeches.  Donald Trump is the leading example, but the primary campaign had a lot of it, candidate John or Jane Doe showing up and yammering away for an hour or more, on and on and on, punctuated by cheers suited to a high school basketball championship.

     American politicians used to have a stump speech as smoothly polished and quick as a standup comedian's best act.  They'd stand up, promise every chicken would get an indoor potty and no car would sit weeping at the curb for want of a garage or some damn thing, talk about their wonderful record as an office-holder, spouse/parent and/or in military service, thank you in advance for your vote, and be back on the train out of town in under fifteen minutes.  The Ladies Civic League and their long-suffering partners would be taking down the red, white and blue bunting before the candidate had cleared the city limits.

     These days, major campaign appearances are like a Grateful Dead concert, though minus the mellowness and (usually) the more experimental substances.  I keep looking at news coverage and wondering if these people aren't maybe a little old to be painting their faces and wearing handmade jewelry of questionable taste -- and that's just the "stodgy conservative" party.  It's as if the boosters all saw the "Mad Max" films and thought they were travel ads: "Yes, let's move there!"  (This kind of irrational exuberance used to be reserved for party conventions, and carefully controlled even there.  Now, not so much.)

     It's probably not a good idea to hold your breath while waiting for louder segments of the gen. pop. to finish growing up.

"Weird," Or The Hit Dog Yelps

     In the latest round of playground-level political struggle, politicians from one party are calling politicians from another party "Weird," and the politicians being so labelled don't like it.

     Their party's been calling the other party's office-holders and candidates "Weird" for years now, so....

     So 'scuse me if I can't muster much sympathy either way.  Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder; an oddball notion in Duluth is plain horse sense in Manhattan, and vice versa.  What wise heads nod in agreement over in Chicago may be risible nonsense at a hog farm two hundred miles down the road.

     Single-issue and ideology-motivated people are often hard workers, who show up for their party, whichever one it is, and put in the long, low-paid or unpaid hours to get things done.  They're quite often weirdos.  So count on it: your party is weird, at least at at various times, in various places, and over various issues.

     If a politician gets slapped with "Weird" and it sticks, especially with the vast, barely involved middle of American politics?  Ooops.  They probably are, are least a little.

     The old observation was that candidates catered to their base in the primaries, and edged to the middle in the general election.  That model's broken these days, but to many people, not moving towards the center looks, well, weird.  With polls showing near-parity in the high forties-percent range for the Presidential race, engaging the moderate middle's going to tip the balance.  Not being perceived as weird is going to matter.

     Look for a slap-fight in soundbites over this, silly as it seems.

Busy!

     Had the writing group thing today, which I am co-ordinating this year.  This is very much not one of my skills, so it's stressful and takes most of my attention, after which I am very sleepy.

Expectations Vary

     Growing up, my family took to the board game Trivial Pursuit shortly after it came out, and played it seriously.  Not grimly; we had a lot of fun.  But it was a game with definite answers to clear questions and that's how we approached it.

     I dated a guy for several years, and his family played board games too -- Yahtzee among them, which I'd never played, but they approached with brisk precision.  So imagine my surprise the evening they got out Trivial Pursuit game and proceeded to play it very lightly, a game so hard no one could be expected to know most of the answers, an occasion for bluffing and swapping hints where the points didn't really matter.  And they had a nice time with it, too.

     Even when we're playing the same games, we don't all play them the same way.  And it doesn't mean the people playing it differently are necessarily doing it wrong, either.

Social Media: Basicially Turbocharged Junior High School

     An utterly scurrilous rumor made the rounds on social media recently before being thoroughly and easily debunked.  Rest assured that no current candidate for President or Vice-President has ever described their personal experience of having sex (of sorts) with a couch in a memoir.

     Never happened, should have been immediately obvious as a falsehood intended to tarnish an individual's reputation and was dispelled via the kind of text search that modern technology makes quick and simple.  But the lie was all the way around the world before the truth had even put its glasses on, and there we have politics in 2024, a game that any amateur with a knack for it can play.

Quaint?

     Today is the anniversary of the "Kitchen Debate" between Richard M. Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev in 1959.

     Say what you will about the two men -- or their attitudes toward women and housework -- it's a better time when the struggle between capitalism and communism comes down to addressing the immediate and long-term personal and societal merits of dishwashers and lemon squeezers.  I'd rather see countries and political philosophies compete in terms of home appliances and the average person's standard of living than who can build the biggest bomb or wage the most effective proxy war.

     Of course the politicians didn't see it that way.  But just once, for a little while, they did.

In Search Of Excellence

     Digging into history, I sometimes take odd turns.  Recently, it was "When did we stop calling the President of the United States 'Excellency,' and why did we ever start?"

     The last part is the easiest to answer: "Excellency" was (and is) the honorific or style for a representative of a government as a whole, especially if they had no other title.  Ambassadors were (and are) "Excellency."  This was extended by analogy to the head of government of a republic and was already in use when the United States was formed.  As an honorific, it was often "sticky:" if you'd held a post that carried it, by courtesy you were allowed to keep it when you moved on.

     Another use of "Excellency" is to refer to the Commander in Chief of armed forces.  So when George Washington was first elected President, he'd already been an Excellency and arguably still was.

     Washington is sometimes decried as an "Imperial President," pompous and high-handed.  He did enjoy a degree of formality that can look excessive to us, but was it far less so than British practices of his time, shockingly abbreviated and brusque.  He is known to have complained about the necessity of issuing Executive Orders to fill in where Congress had, in his opinion, skimped on their work and gone out of session.  Over two terms of office, he backed away from "Excellency" in favor of "Mr. President."  Nevertheless, John Adams continued to be addressed that way; Thomas Jefferson was as well but doesn't appear to have liked it much.  He tried to use other titles, but in formal correspondence, he was still "Excellency."

     While the term has faded away in everyday speech, and even internally in the Federal government, it still shows up in letters and documents from foreign governments.  In many countries, the head of state is still called "Excellency" if they don't hold some inherited title and it spills over onto our Chief Executive.  Unofficially at least, the U. S. President is still "Excellency."

     But to give the 18th-Century revolutionaries their due, it sure does sit oddly in the ear, doesn't it?  In our heart of hearts, we all know the President of the U. S. is Just Another Citizen, stuck with the worst job on the planet: under constant hostile scrutiny, on call 24/7 with no real vacations and they have to live over the store.  No matter what happens on their watch, no matter how much or how little they had to do with it, they'll get all the blame and small credit if any. 

Switcheroo

     Oh, no!  A Presidential candidate from one of the major political parties, who had already won that party's primary, has stepped down!  It's a crisis!

     At least that's what leading lights of the other party are saying, along with a few of his own.  But is it true?

     You can't look to the U. S. Constitution for answers.  The men who drafted that document weren't thinking much about political parties and it doesn't address primaries.  When they did get around to mentioning factionalism in the Federalist Papers, they didn't like the idea. (Some history here, a little here.)

     By the time the new government was in place and George Washington was stuck with the top job, the first Senators and Representatives were well on the way to inventing a party system, centralizing Federalists against the free-trade yeoman farmers of the Democratic-Republican party.  Washington warned against it, but in that effort, he was more Cassandra than Cincinnatus.  But there weren't any primaries; Congressmen from each of the parties caucused to pick who'd they'd chivvy into trying for the hot seat.  That system held up for not quite a lifetime before state-level parties agitated to have more of a voice against Washington, D.C.'s insider's club; a third party who didn't have any Congressmen held the first nominating convention in 1831 and the idea caught on.  For the next eighty years, a mix of conventions and colluding elected officials picked candidates with conventions gradually dominating: the "smoke-filled rooms" of each party got bigger.

     That system had some merits, but transparency wasn't one of them.  Just ahead of the First World War, primary elections began to emerge as a way to advise and even direct the choices of delegates to political conventions.  It took sixty years for that movement to grow, but by 1972, the "binding primary" had taken root in all fifty states, fueled in part by the dramatic mess of the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.

     Notice anything?  I haven't mentioned the Constitution.  It still doesn't have anything to say about political parties or how those parties ought to go about choosing candidates for Federal office.  Even a binding primary only holds convention delegates to obey the results per their party's convention rules --  usually for a round or two of voting, after which, it's a free-for-all.

     We still have, as Benjamin Franklin observed, a republic, and both of the major political parties are determined to keep it that way at their conventions: the delegates represent voters and are expected to use their best judgment, not simply carry the results.  Parties set their own rules at their own conventions.

     So there's your "crisis:" a tempest in a teacup, intended to stir public opinion and get eyes on screens while keeping emotions riled up.  The Democats will sort their candidates out at their upcoming convention and presumably the Republicans will gird up to campaign against them, same as has happened every four years since the first party system emerged.  We're not on the same two parties, not even close; we're on the sixth or seventh party system and it's still running ad hoc, improvised outside the terms and definitions of the United States Constitution.  So don't be buffaloed; it's all as legal as church, and (finances aside) slightly less Federally regulated than religion.

FYI

     For those of you hankering for the lost Roman Empire -- or even the Republic -- it's 2777, ab urbe condita.  Do you know where your lares and penates are?  The literal ones or the figurative ones?  Have you checked your impluvium lately?

Of Course It Wasn't Worth Getting Out The Crayons

     I didn't expect it would do much good.  If you're deep into the Trumpian Cinematic Universe, you've left objective reality behind.

     In response to pointing out that attempting a crime counts as committing the crime, even if the attempt does not succeed, I got a tortured hypothetical situation with only the slightest connection to the counting of votes in the 2020 election and disputes about the count.  Yeah, no, and not even the point; and easily dispelled by using a parallel:* the downballot Dems didn't do all that well in 2020, with narrow majorities in the Senate and House (the latter flipped the other way, barely, in 2022, and how'd that happen if the fix is in?): if they'd had a fat enough thumb on the scales to change the Presidential vote, they could have handed themselves comfortable majorities in both bodies and legislated to their heart's content.  They didn't.  Congress has been remarkably unproductive.  One commenter claimed the Democrats want a "tyranny of the majority," but given the number of times in the last forty years they've held the House, Senate and Presidency, if they were after it they'd have got it by now, with bells and ribbons and parades on May Day.  Hasn't happened and it wasn't for lack of opportunity.

     Commenters have accused me of being "ignorant," while supplying no facts or history to counter mine.  If you won't do the homework, you don't get to call other people ignorant and expect any response aside from derisive laughter.  I was able to watch January 6 in real time and there's no retconning actual events, no matter how much you may wish to or how many glittering lies your Great Leaders may spin.  (Of note, live/near-live TV coverage that day was often forced to rely on wide shots, showing the literal "big picture," the true extent of the crowd and the broad sweeps of movement, the lulls and pauses as they happened, the cries of "Hang Mike Pence" after his decision was announced.)

     They have also accused me of being a Democrat.  Nope.  I'm a Democrat voter these days, but I'm still not a registered member of any political party; Indiana doesn't require it to vote in general elections and in party primaries, they only ask which ballot you want.  I'm a small-d democrat and small-r republican, and a small-l libertarian, too.  I think it's too bad Republicans decided Christian Nationalism (with a wide streak of White Nationalism) and a cult of personality was their way forward.  All my life, I have counted on having two big mostly-sane parties running in elections that are mostly "Coke vs. Pepsi" and "Crest vs. Colgate," and keeping one another between the rails, despite the occasional John Bircher or would-be socialist in their ranks, and that they maintain internal Party discipline by pitching out the genuine nuts, crooks and extremists that sneaked in.  I can't count on the Republicans to clean up their own party any more, and they're immune to any shame when their worst ideas and politicians are revealed.  At best, the GOP are the Whigs and Know-Nothings of our time, riding a ticking clock to irrelevance; at worst--  Well, extreme parties have ruined nations and instigated wars plenty of times in the past, and the price is always paid in blood and ignominy.
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* One of the better examples of this way of reality-testing is physicist Richard Feynman's work investigating the Challenger disaster: he looked into the history, engineering and production management of the Space Shuttle's liquid-fueled engines, and found the same pattern of each successive level minimizing the risk analysis of the preceding level that had doomed the solid-fuel boosters: if the engineers determined there was a one-on-ten risk of failure, their bosses, not wanting to look bad and knowing how cautious the engineers were, reported it as one in a hundred, and this happened over and over, all the way up: there were design problems, but there was a problem with management culture that kept them from being recognized and fixed until we lost a Shuttle.  And even then, we lost another one....

Is It Worth Getting Out The Crayons?

     I was going to refute in extensive detail a commenter who loftily informed me that "January 6 was not an insurrection" because there weren't stacks of dead bodies and no buildings got burned to ground.  But it's simpler than that:

     Sorry, old boy, there is no ineptitude exception for insurrectionists.  The mob that stormed the capitol was seriously lacking in command, control and communications -- not to mention intelligence -- but they did have a clear aim: to interfere with the certification of Electoral Collage votes and to apprehend or hang one or more elected official (the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House),  They didn't succeed.  They were poorly organized, despite the presence of members of a few militia-type organizations.  Too much would-be brass, too many undrilled troops, zero sergeants -- and you won't go too far without noncoms.

     You know what we call unsuccessful bank robbers?  Bank robbers.  You know what we call the perpetrators of unsuccessful robberies, like the guys who broke into a local gun store and found all the guns in the store's vault or armored display cases?  Burglars.  If a man runs up to you on the sidewalk, sticks a gun in your face and demands your pocketbook, he's an attempted robber even if a car comes around the corner and he panics and runs away.  (That happened to me, and while I was sure glad to not be shot and to keep the $2.75 in cash money that I had at the time, the perp had nevertheless committed a crime.)

     You don't get a pass for being lousy at it.  People were injured and killed.  Historical properties were damaged.  I watched real-time video, handheld stuff, security cameras, some professional coverage, whatever the networks could lay hands on.  It was a mob assault with the intent of overthrowing the normal functioning of the Federal government and installing a different President than the one who had been duly elected.  And not just duly elected, but repeatedly challenged in court and every challenge found meritless.  Every recount -- even the ones most suspicious of the results and set up to be well outside normal channels -- found the same winners and losers as the original counts.

     The candidate the mob tried to put in office had lost the election.  That makes their actions an attempted coup -- an insurrection.

     How sad for your bloodlust that it wasn't as productive of carnage and otherwise terrible as it could have been, I guess, though at the time, I thought the country had a very narrow escape from a truly dire outcome, and I still do.

     I am stunned that the instigator of that insurrection has been given another chance at the office.  Win or lose, his party will come to regret it.  History shows that autocratic usurpation never comes to a good end; the only question is how long it will take and how many people will be maimed and killed before the sickness has run its course.

     I'm telling you now, you don't escape a wood-chipper by jumping into the maw and hoping to ride it out, and you sure don't avoid the guilt by volunteering to gas the thing up and push the starter button.

They've Told Me Who They're Voting For

     It doesn't change how I plan to vote.  A few of my commenters are true-red Trumpists, and have told me how the former President "really loves this country." to which I can only point out that he loves it so much that this man who swore an oath to protect and defend our Constitution attempted by multiple mean to overturn an election which he lost, including inciting an insurrection that interrupted Congressional certification of the results and resulted in multiple deaths, and when out of office, hewing to his unsupportable Big Lie of a stolen election,* he called for the Constitution to to be suspended.  The man swore an oath to protect and defend it, and that oath -- and the U. S. Constitution! -- means no more to him than an empty pop bottle, to be tossed out if it gets in his way.

     His running mate is hardly better; Senator Vance first swore an oath to our Constitution in 2003 and again when sworn in as a Senator a few years back, but he has called for Jacksonian defiance of the separation of powers and muses that the United States is "...in a late republican period," referring to Rome right before Caesar ended their Republic.

      I don't have any x-ray vision into their hearts, nor do I into President Biden's, but he's been swearing the same oath to the Constitution (without picking away at it afterward) and taking Uncle Sam's paycheck for half a century now, and if he didn't love this country, he surely would have gone into a different line of work.

     It is unlikely any of these people -- or Vice-President Harris, who has been swearing the same or similar oaths since at least 2011 -- do not love our country.  My concern is that they will play by the rules.  Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he will not.  Sen. Vance has implied he will will not.  By my lights, that's disqualifying, right there.

     That leaves whoever the Democrats end up running.  It could be Joe Biden in a coma -- I can at least count on them to get us to the next election with a functioning American republic.  The GOP's picks are far too willing to pull it down.
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* He has a long history of claiming any contest he does not win has been "rigged."  The Emmy awards, for example.  So his veracity in making that claim is questionable, at best -- as is his sincerity.

An Ancient Mystery

     The Lapis Niger -- "Black Rock" -- in Rome was kind of a mystery to the Romans and it's even more so today.  It was widely considered to be an unlucky spot.  Supposedly the place in the Forum where Romulus was supposed to be buried, but wasn't; or possibly the tomb of his adopted father, or of a pre-Republic king or the king's grandfather, the location had a stubby column, a horseshoe-shaped altar with some guardian lion statues (think library lions) and a stelae with an inscription in a very old form of Latin.  It's almost impossible to read now and for most of their history, it wouldn't have been much easier for literate Romans to puzzle out.  Later on, the area was given black marble paving to mark it.

     There were ritual artifacts (possibly associated with kingly rule) buried in a layer of gravel under all this, and a sarcophagus that modern non-invasive methods have determined is empty.

     So, what's that stelae say?  It's a puzzle, and scholars have been picking away at it for decades.  The best read we've got is incomplete, but updated to modern language, it comes out to:

NO DUMPING OR LITTERING IN THIS GROVE. VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED [one?] COW, PAYABLE TO THE KING.

     You can go read it on Wikipedia (scroll down to the end of the section), but it looks like Ancient Rome was walking wide and careful of an unreadable "No Littering" sign that people knew was bad luck, even though nobody remembered why.

I Don't Get It

     Caesar did nothing good for the Romans and left chaos in his wake.  Oh, they sorted it out, painfully, bloodily -- but the Republic was gone, never to return.

     We've kind of got King Log -- if you can call President Biden that, considering that he's managed to get a lot done despite a nearly deadlocked Congress.  Replacing him with King Stork is not an improvement.  Sure, the stork makes more noise and flaps around a lot, but perhaps the eager should review the fable.  You and I are, like the rest of the 99%, small and tasty.

Unexpected

     Sure, he was on the short list, but most pundits put him near the bottom of it.  J. D. Vance will be running for Vice President on the Republican ticket, beard, suspected eyeliner, literary ambitions and all.

     His book received mixed reviews -- no one said it wasn't well-written, but critics were divided on his self-appointment as the interpreter for a whole region of the country and one he had not, in fact, grown up in.  If you want a take on transplanted Appalachian culture, his is as good as any; but there are a lot of transplants who headed to the manpower-hungry industries of what would become the Rust Belt, and a lot of takes on how that worked out.

     Senator Vance has issued mixed reviews of his new boss over time, and you can take them as a record of how his thinking has changed; he has moved in an ever more authoritarian direction, following his party's lead, and is very much the darling of the Federalist Society, and of the Heritage Foundation, the latter responsible for the "Project 2025" blueprint for, well, you can go read the thing yourself.  It changes the nature of government meddling and nudging, but not the amount of it.  And it throws open the door for the types of prejudicial treatment of people that would gladden the heart of the odious Woodrow Wilson.  It's not a good look.  Polls give Sen. Vance's party a 50/50 chance at implementing it, which is certain to provoke a strong reaction.  Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has promised a "bloodbath" if he fails to take the Presidency.

     Interesting times, either way.

     I hate interesting times.

"Hot Enough For You?"

     I may have to get the HVAC techs out again.  The air-conditioning isn't keeping up.  At least it's controlling humidity okay so far.  And it's not freezing up, which is a big improvement.  If I leave it at, say, 75 , what happens is it runs all of the time while the indoor temperature slowly creeps up, reaching as high as 78 when it's 95 outside.

     With a new coil, a clean filter and the vents and return unobstructed, the only handle left is velocity.  That's got an upper limit; the air's got to be in contact with the coil long enough to cool down, and, even worse, if it's going too fast, it will blow condensed water off the coil and right back into the air.  Some systems have range for adjustment but many don't; I know my system has at least a two-speed blower because the heat has a high-speed, higher-heat function that occasionally kicks in during the coldest weather. But does the cooling mode have access to it?  I don't know.

     It's been a long time since I cleaned the blower fan, so I'll try that first.  Even a little loss in airflow can make a big difference.  This is really a First World Problem; it's not as if I was particularly uncomfortable, even when the heat and humidity outdoors is wretched.  I'm just not as comfortable as I'd like to be.

Repair, Recycle -- Reuse

     Both of my parents were Depression babies.  I grew up conserving, re-using, repairing, and when "recycling" came along, it fit right in: don't trash what can become raw material all over again!  Use that stuff  'til it wears out, and then see what it can become next.

     In practice, it can be a little tricky, and while I sort and save fastening hardware at home, my work can't afford to be paying me to sift through old nuts and bolts (and so on) when there's actual stuff that needs to get done.  (I do maintain a semi-sorted "junk pile" at the transmitter, in as good order as can be managed in a hurry.  Old habits die hard, and it's been useful many times.)

     One of the more difficult items to dispose of properly are well-used TV microwave trucks.  By the time we're done with them, they're full of holes (mostly specialized access hatches), with generators too big for an RV and a distinct lack of beds and kitchens.  They're also high-mileage; okay for knocking around town, maybe not so great for traveling across the continent.

     But thanks to a blog-reader, I've found one group that can use them: volunteer ham radio emergency communications organizations.  In addition to the generator, the trucks have a pneumatic mast, and old ones become a maintenance issue that most TV stations no longer have the staff or spare time to mess with.  But hams do -- and many of them like to tinker.  One such organization in Colorado is making good use of old TV vans. 

It's Christmas For Conspiracy Theorists

     If you don't know someone took a shot a former President Donald Trump yesterday, doing only minor damage to him, killing an innocent bystander and injuring at least two others, then you have been living under a rock well past the last trolleycar stop.

     The TV and online talking heads were on it nonstop after it happened, mostly reporting the basic facts listed above and admitting they didn't know anything more.  The shots came from an apparently unsecured rooftop overlooking the venue, and that -- as so far reported -- is a significant failure.

     I have worked engineering support for TV reporting from a Presidential candidate appearance, though with smaller crowds.  I'm not going to get into any detail, but the U. S. Secret Service doesn't kid around.  They identify the sources of risk and they get them under control.  There are locations where they've asked utilities to weld down manhole covers along the route of a motorcade.  Their normal, known way to deal with vantage points is to put their own person with a gun up there, or get a cooperating agency to do so.  Did they miss this one?  Did the individual(s) assigned to it get sneaked past, taken out, distracted?  I don't know.  We may not ever know.

     What we do know is the dizzy-minded of every stripe are fabulating; online, I have heard everything from accusations of a "Reichstag fire moment" to "a Leftist plot foiled."  It's nonsense.  Not that knowing so will stop the firehose of BS, but it's all wind.

     The first claim is easy to disprove: nobody's that good a shot, not with a bobbing, weaving, gesticulating target.  At the reported distance, under the known circumstances, no one could pull off a near-miss of that nature on purpose, period.  And without a Number Two already in place, ready to step up and wave the bloody shirt, no even semi-sane conspiracy would take that risk.

     The other extreme is harder to debunk, but the historical examples (with one or two possible exceptions*) show that it takes a lunatic to get by the security around Presidents and Presidential candidates.  From Richard Lawrence's attempt on President Andrew Jackson in 1835 through the assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, the attempts on former President Theodore Roosevelt, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and president Truman,* the assassination of President John Kennedy and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy to attempts on Presidents Ford (two) and Reagan, only people adrift from reality have been unpredictable enough to bring the means of doing harm within range of Presidents and Presidential candidates, at least within U. S. boundaries.  Nearly all of them have acted as "lone gunmen."  Plotters plot and all plots leak, without exception.  It only takes one Smedley Butler, only one cinematographer with a longer lens and better microphone† than plotters realize, one disaffected member of the group, one misdirected message, one nosy reporter.  And both FBI and the Secret Service are listening; researching for this post, I was impressed by the number of attempts they have foiled.  There's zero likelihood of a plot.

     It is, I am almost sorry to tell you, "the usual noise in here." Having sown political violence -- and our history shows it is always lurking -- the harvest followed.  Keeping the civility in civil society requires constant effort from each of us, and we haven't been doing a very good job of it in recent years.  My sympathies are with the victims, as are the sympathies of any decent person.
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* John Wilkes Booth was (arguably) sane and part of a wider plot; the Puerto Rico nationalists who murdered their way to within shooting distance of President Truman may have been fanatical but had no history of insanity.
 
† Perhaps I shouldn't point this out, but the power switches on many wireless microphone transmitters are lousy and, worse, talent has a habit of turning them off and then forgetting to turn them back on, so the switches are very often bypassed. 

Dipping A Toe In

     The headline was interesting, combining two facts: more than forty percent of the U. S. population lives in coastal counties, and sea level rise is accelerating.

     People have differing opinions about climate change.  That's normal for our species -- in an age of space travel, people have differing opinions about the Earth being a sphere or flat, after all.  But while only twenty-four people have ever been far enough into space to get a really clear look at the big blue marble we live on, well more than a third of Americans can ride a bicycle to the sea shore and have a look for themselves, year after year.  Far fewer will find themselves under water in the near term -- in many places, the land rises quite steeply from the shore, after all.  Storm surges will be more of a problem, from the southernmost tip of Texas all the way around to New York City once in a great while, depending on the whims of hurricanes, themselves getting stronger and more frequent.

     Call it climate; call it weather.  Either way, the graph of water level over time says it's coming.  Does the name matter when your beaches become scuba sites or you're sloshing around the ground floor of your house in gumboots, salvaging what you can from the storm?

     It's certainly going to have an effect on the discussion.

     Of course, we said that when men went to the Moon, and we're not out of flat-Earthers yet.  Still, it's a lot harder to breathe water than to pretend geosynchronous communications satellites or the GPS and Starlink constellations are fake.

I'm Going Back To Bed

     Wake me up right before civilization ends, please?  I want to see the big fireworks show at the grand finale.

I Know The Face, But The Character...?

     Last night, Tam and I watched the Pete Gunn episode, "A Slight Touch of Homicide," with the remarkable Howard McNear as the bad guy.

     You probably know him as Floyd the barber from Andy Griffith, a vague, odd, garrulous character, and you may have wondered why Floyd can seem almost menacing at times.  Without giving too much away, his role in the noir PI series shows that darker side to wonderful effect.  It's well worth watching, thirty minutes of tightly-scripted drama.  And you'll never feel quite the same way about Floyd again.

Back To Conditioning Air

      The techs stopped by this morning and swapped out the coil and expansion valve, a not-inexpensive process (though it could have been much worse).  After a week of managing the system while it was supercooling, "set and forget" will make a nice change.

Oh, Of Course

     Every once in a while, I'm reminded of the extent to which we are still all wandering around in the broken remains of Roman civilization.  I was looking at some interesting engineering that included a few very old dams in Spain -- really old: the Romans built them.  Several are in what is now the Zaragoza region -- which (according to a machine translation) the builders knew as the settlement of Ceasaraugusta.

     Put that way, it's pretty obvious where the modern name came from -- as obvious as the remains of an ancient dam.

The Big Science Fiction Convention

     Inconjunction was this weekend.  I didn't go.  I'm still getting used to being around people again.  I nerved myself up and went to a nearby antique shop Saturday, and then to dinner at Half Liter with Tam and one of her friends.  A lot of walking and a little bit of bike-riding: I slept like a log.

     Between the pandemic, the crazy reactions to the pandemic, and the chaos leading up to and following the 2020 election, I have become deeply leery of anything but the simplest. arms-length, surface-level interactions with other people.  Don't know 'em, don't wanna know 'em; smile, nod, "How about this weather?" and be on my way.  I'm sure many of them are fine people but I've been disappointed too many times and fooled more than once.  So how about I just don't get to know them well enough to find out?  Seems like a fine basis for coexistence.  Maybe they're a saint.  Maybe they're an asshole.  Why should I know?

     Today, I did another load of laundry, cleaned out the gutter on the south side of the house, repaired a broken wire in the feedline of my ham radio antenna that I found while cleaning the gutter and made a nice chuck roast with mixed vegetables (apple, turnip, potato, carrot, celery, onion and a couple of little cherry tomatoes, seasoned with coarse salt, mixed fresh-ground peppercorns, curry powder, garam masala and some datil pepper sauce -- no, it wasn't especially spicy, since I used that stuff in moderation) and mushrooms in parsley butter on the side.  You can hardly beat apples and turnips in something like this, though people don't believe that until they try it.  After all that, I'm worn out.  I may not even do dishes tonight.

Both-Sideserism (Thumb On The Scales Edition)

     New York Times: "Joseph Biden may be too old to serve second term, should drop out of election now."

     Also New York Times: "Donald Trump may be too great a threat to the republic to serve second term, voters must decide."

     But, hey, apparently neither one of them has eaten barbecued dog like RFK Jr., who absolutely swears that he would never, ever eat human flesh and never has, and that's the honest truth as far as he remembers.

UK Elections

     I suppose this is where I'm supposed to say something insightful about the 4 July elections in the UK,* but I don't have anything specific.  I will point out that an American 10-32 bolt and a UK 2BA bolt are so close in dimensions that that you can usually use one in place of the other with no special effort, one of the great coincidental convergences of engineering. 

     How that might apply to elections is up to the observer.
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* While the United Kingdom held 2024 elections on our Independence Day, we're going to be pulling the lever on 5 November, their Guy Fawkes Day.  "Remember, remember the fifth of November," and maybe check the more important basements for anything unexpected.

Happy Birthday, America!

     Today's the day we told the British Crown we were leaving.  The King wasn't happy about that, resulting in eight years of spirited disagreement, death, injury, disease and various treaties.  But we persisted, and won, something George Washington, who was in a position to know, described as "little short of a standing miracle."

     We kept a few things from the mother country, like notions of jurisprudence that included the presumption of innocence.  In the 1760s, the English jurist William Blackstone wrote, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

     While this can mean that a man who can afford very good lawyers is especially likely to escape being found guilty, the broad principle is aimed at preventing harm to the innocent -- and any malefactors who squeak by are likely to either mend their ways or commit further crimes, for which they will be arrested and face the possibility of punishment in due course.

     There's a guy running for President right now -- he'd love for me to mention his name -- who's been preloading public expectations if he wins and begins the mass deportations he has promised.  He's saying the media will single out the one lovely, otherwise-innocent mother who gets deported while ignoring the ten or a hundred presumed horrible, awful criminals swept up in the same dragnet and removed from the U.S., literally inverting Blackstone's ratio.  Meanwhile, he is benefiting from the presumption of innocence in criminal trials while availing himself of some of the best attorneys money and power can afford.

     You can listen to Founder and Framer Benjamin Franklin, or you can listen to that other guy.  One of them was there at the beginning, and knew the score.  The other?  He's mostly riffing, with no real thought of tomorrow.

By Kazvorpal - Photoshop CS5. This file was derived from: Benjamin Franklin 1767.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23104980

Not Too Cool

     In the first few days of the Spring heat wave, the air-conditioner coil in the furnace here at Roseholme Cottage froze up.  (I've been calling it an A-coil, but it's got one more section, so it's really an N-coil.)

     That wasn't too great. I managed to catch it early: air was still flowing but the cold side of the coolant line was frosted up nice and white where it's exposed as it goes into the box where the N-coil lives.  I turned the thermostat up several degrees, left the fan running and added a floor fan over the register in the dining room -- that one's only six feet away from the return dust grill, and the system works better if I can loft the cold air up and displace warm air into the floor-level return.

     Tam had out-of-town stuff to do over the next week and a half after I found it and I had several projects at work, so service had to wait.  I figured the system was just low on coolant, which (for abstruse reasons I have neither the time nor the crayons to share my limited understanding of) can make the N-coil tend to get much colder than it it should and freeze up.  In the meantime, I could probably manage it by not cooling the house any more than the bare minimum needed to control humidity.  You have to pay attention to the outside temperature and if the ducts in the basement are sweating, but if the system's not too messed up, it works.  I fired up booster fans in the bedrooms and it worked through a couple of weeks of bad heat.

     Then we had the flea explosion.  I had scheduled service by then, but Tam had to go out of town again and the house was a mess with bags of to-be-de-flea-ed stuff all over, so I cancelled it -- I thought.

     A few days later, the tech knocked while I was in the shower and we had a short, unhappy conversation.  That was early last week.

     After rescheduling and apologies all around, he showed up yesterday morning and worked his magic.  Yes, the system was low on coolant -- but after topping it up, it was still acting funny.  I'd drawn the newest tech; he spent some time on the phone with his more-experienced peers and came back to tell me that either the high-tech self-regulating expansion valve was shot -- or the coil was.  The latter was going to be costly and even the valve would be painful because it's labor-intensive (or time-intensive, at least: they have to empty the system, but refrigerant's too expensive to waste, so it gets pumped down and saved, and that's not a quick process.)

     He left and I called his office for an official quote.  They reminded me that the bill would be less if the system happened to be under warranty.  I asked them to hold that thought, I'd call right back after checking.  Turns out I had registered it back in 2017, and yes, it was a ten-year warranty if you bothered to register.  I called back, and now the service outfit wanted to send another tech out to make sure the problem was as diagnosed.  (I can't blame them for that.  The parts markup on a coil is a nice chunk of change and some or all of that is now off the table.) 

     Early this morning, the previous tech returned, skeptical senior in tow, and they did another round of measurements.  The original guy was vindicated (and happy about it.  It sucks to be the new kid -- BT, DT), and I'm waiting to hear back on scheduling the replacement.

     Meanwhile, we're in another hot streak and I'm managing the thermostat.

Marooned In Space?

     Oh, no!  Sunita Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore are stranded (according to headlines) or not stranded (according to NASA) aboard ISS!  What'll they do?

     Ride the Boeing Starliner back down, once the engineers are happy; or hitch a spare pair of seats on a SpaceX Dragon capsule, if the engineers get a lot less happy than they are now.  They're not stranded.  If the price was right, the Russians would probably taxi them home, and gloat about it all the way.  

     The worst problem for the pair right now is ensuring a sufficient supply of underwear (etc.).  There's no laundromat on ISS; they can't even take dirty clothes outside and let the vacuum sterilize them: the resultant particulate matter would stay in orbit and after a few years, ISS and all the scientific instruments it carries would be orbiting in a thin cloud of schmutz. Astronauts, cosmonauts, tourists and whoever else on ISS bring up a suitcase of employer-issued attire, stuff their dirty laundry into the trash, and it gets packed into a disposable cargo vehicle (From Russia, ESA or JAXA, though the latter two may not be flying at present) and burns up on reentry, raining schmutz-laden ashes down on the oceans and great cities of the world.

     The biggest risk they're facing is a shortage of skivvies.  NASA has done detailed studies on just how long you can wear the same set of clothes (ickily long), and resupply flights arrive at regular intervals, so not to worry.

     But what about those thrusters?  The delay seems to stem from some wonky thrusters in the Starliner's Service Module, and the issue there is, that part is not coming home.  It gets discarded along the way and burns up, just like a bag of space laundry.  If there's any chance to figure out what went wrong, it's got to be before the spacecraft heads home.

     And why is there a problem?  Can't NASA just pull out their engineering samples here on Earth and start fooling with them?  Um, about that....  Even when NASA was building their own spacecraft, they weren't building their own spacecraft.  Mostly they were managing the design process, subcontracting construction to a whole flock of companies (Chrysler made big chunks of Saturn V that took us to the Moon!) and managing (and occasionally performing) system integration.  It was all done on cost-plus contracts: do the job, whatever it takes, and send Uncle Sam the bill.  For the commercial crew system that has produced SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's Starliner,* NASA has stepped back from micromanaging and final assembly; they described the mission and put it up for bid -- at a fixed price.

     SpaceX got in early, using the prototype Dragon capsule and Falcon boosters for the unscrewed resupply contracts and learning as they went.  Boeing -- who had absorbed a lot of other aerospace companies and had immense institutional experience building spacecraft -- went straight into building manned vehicles.  And, as they had always done, they subcontracted a lot of it.  Including the thrusters; those were made by Aerojet Rocketdyne (Owned by L3Harris, itself a child of defense contractor Litton Industries and Harris Intertype, who once made printing presses, broadcast equipment and military communications gear).  This was bigtime commercial spaceship stuff, and Boeing asked for -- and got -- a fixed-price contract from their subcontractors.

     Space is hard.  Rockets break, and they break in many new and unusual ways.  Make a change to an existing system, and it may surprise you; design a new system from the ground up and it will surprise you.  If the engineers are very talented and very experienced, they can anticipate many of the ways things will fail, but not all of the ways.  No one can.  SpaceX uses a "move fast and break things" approach, and it works -- but they suffer occasional dramatic failures and have, so far, been very good at knowing how much risk is acceptable for any given flight.  NASA, in the wake of the Apollo "plugs-out" ground test tragedy, was obsessed with hand-tightening every bolt, having all the contractors follow every step of every part of the work and materials in extreme detail, and it resulted in successful Lunar missions -- at very great cost.  Boeing threw their efforts into engineering and ground-testing -- and in writing careful specifications for the subcontracted subsystems.  When things break, it's a matter for figuring out where, why and how -- and if the failure was due to improper assembly, improper design, or flawed specifications.  Money is riding on the answer -- money and whose pocket it comes out of.  This is not just rocket-geekery; it's attorneys and accountants and managers; it's people's best educated guess on how much it's going to cost to make each widget and how much the prime contractor will pay for it.  Get those numbers wrong and you can eat up a year's profit; get them too wrong, and people die.

     Starliner's woes do not appear to be at the "people die" point.  They have, however, been teetering on the brink of "goodby, profits" for both already-ailing Boeing and some of their subcontractors, and that spaceship its going to to stay up there, docked with ISS, until they have sorted out every valve, bolt, screw, engineering specification, contractual clause and the wounded feelings of the second vice-president in change of making rocketships for money.  It's not very pretty or especially pure; it's not as spectacular as a fully-fueled Falcon blowing up on the launchpad because somebody screwed up the temperature limits of a carbon-fiber-reinforced propellant tank. But it's how big old companies like Boeing do things, and I'm confident they will eventually get it all sorted out.

     Meanwhile, Suni and Butch are rationing their clean socks very carefully.  Because, you see, it only counts as a successful test flight if they come back in the Starliner that carried them up -- and the second V. P. in charge of flying rockets for money will be in a heap of trouble if this doesn't work as planned.
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* And, kind of indirectly, Sierra Space's Dream Chaser. But it's not competing to carry people at present. 

SCOTUS Says So

     I held off posting this morning, waiting to see if the U.S. Supreme Court would release their decision about Presidential immunity, figuring they would thread that needle with great care.

     Based on recent past decisions, it seemed likely the decision was going to work in Mr. Trump's favor, but narrowly.  The Justices are all clever lawyers, I thought, and mindful of theire responsibilities, they'd take care to not leave a mess.

     Was I ever wrong.  Their decision is problematic on many level. Ignore for now the legal troubles of former President Donald J. Trump, and consider the wider angles:

     If you believe President Biden committed crimes, as President or during his terms as Vice-President, well, that's tough; he's almost certainly immune from prosecution for them.

     There's a moral problem with the underlying notion that a President might have to commit crimes in the course of his or her duties: if it's immoral for you or me to do something, it's immoral for a President to do the same thing.  We expect our country's military to fight wars without committing atrocities, war crimes, grave injustices -- and we prosecute them when they fail to abide by these civilized norms, even in battle.  We must ask no less of our Presidents.

     No man should be above the law. Not Donald Trump or Joe Biden or any of their predecessors.  I don't know what the conservative majority on the Court was thinking, but it wasn't very clear thought, and it certainly wasn't with any kind of an eye to Framers or their original intent.

     The United States of America is in trouble now.  I don't know if the damage can be repaired.