"Run The Govenment Like A Business"

     I have worked for small to medium-sized companies all my life, with a short stint at a big multinational decades ago.

     The medium and smaller outfits are often bought and sold, at which point you get a new set of managers, new procedures, new policies and new goals.  Sometimes it goes smoothly, especially if the place was making money before the sale.  More often, it was a mess; either there was a long, slow march though the departments, the heads being inexorably replaced one by one, no matter how hard they tried to adapt -- or the new owners would sweep everyone away as quickly as possible.  The new acquisition would often be used as a kind of "lab," where new ideas would be tried, and quite often a new boss brought along all his old friends and family members.  (One of the most duplicitous bosses I worked for was famous company-wide not for skill, but for marrying the daughter of a majority stockholder.)

     You didn't always end up with the best and the brightest.  What you got was the best-connected.

     Governments are not companies.  They've generally got hedges against cronyism and sudden changes, which help to protect citizens (and markets!) against uncertainty and the whims of new elected officials -- and their pals and relations.  They have Constitutions, laws, court decisions and customs, a framework that members of the government abide by, a kind of contract with the people.  They have competitive examinations for civil service jobs.

     The United States appear to have elected a government that wants to break the contract.  It has handed over the keys to the President's buddies,  people who were not elected, not officially appointed and not confirmed by Congress and they are moving fast and breaking things with little regard for the human cost.

     They say they want to slash the Federal workforce.  But they're trying to chase away the people who process tax refunds and Social Security payments, veterans benefits and disaster relief.  Is that what you voted for?  Is this an experiment you want to be subjected to?

Played Part 2

     There's no sugar-coating it.  Judith Butler is a lot of people's idea of a boogeyman.  College professor, pioneering feminist, scholar of non-violence and censorship, Butler has written a couple of dozen books and is a highly regarded political theorist.

     Butler is a non-binary Berkeley professor -- ooga-booga! -- and so has an axe to grind in this particular political moment.  It's an axe with a keen edge.  Asked about "issue[s...] which affect very few people" in the context of GOP's attacks on "trans" and DEI, she replied:

     "You could say that about the Jews, Black people or Haitians, or any very vulnerable minority. Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?"

     Martin Niemöller has the answer to what happens next: "Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

     You can argue that some transpeople aren't very nice-looking.  Or that they're whiny, or pushy, or, ew--  These are not reasons to mistreat people.  You don't have to like canaries to understand how they are beneficial to coal miners.

     Butler's right.  We're being played.  A tiny, easy-to-despise minority is being used to establish the notion that it's perfectly okay to give up on one group of people so very unlike ourselves.  Who'll miss them?  --But after them, who next?  There is always a next.  Niemöller knew.  Butler knows.

     Eventually, they'll work they way to me.  As one of the very few women in a highly technical field, I spent over a dozen years working for a man who referred to me as an "EEO hire."  The next level up of management didn't believe me, and told me I needed to work harder at getting along with him.  Over and over.

     So I pay attention when people start getting singled out not for what they do, but for who they are.  "But they're sooooo icky."  Yeah, well, there's plenty ickier in this world.

     Don't get played.

Played, Part 1

     The makers of China's Deep Seek AI announced Monday they got the AI up and running for six million dollars -- pocket change in the AI world.  U.S. AI firms spend that much just furnishing their boardrooms, espresso machines and all.

     Stock markets plunged, especially AI-related stocks.  Chip-maker Nvidia, whose top-of-the-line chips were unavailable to Deep Seek, was hit especially hard: if you can run top-end AI on much cheaper second-tier processors, why would you ever pay top dollar?

     Two facts emerged:
     First, Deep Seek was a subsidiary not of some high-tech development company but a hedge fund.
     Second, and much later, they might have been a teensy bit wrong about the price tag.  It wasn't $6,000,000.00  It was at least $1,300.000,000.00 -- over 200 times as much.  It's like ordering a fancy $5.00 cup of coffee and finding out the real cost is $1,000.00: they lied

     Hedge funds are very, very smart about investing and financial markets.  From Wikipedia: "A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that holds liquid assets and that makes use of complex trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and insulate returns from market risk. Among these portfolio techniques are short selling [...].

     Short selling?  Ahem, Wikipedia again: "In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the market value of the asset falls."

     It doesn't require a genius-level investor to know that a drastically cheaper AI using drastically cheaper hardware would yank the rug out from under the big names in AI, some of whom are publicly traded.  With a big pool of funds to take advantage of that knowledge, hey, presto, Chinese hedge fund makes a nice tidy sum, Chinese government gets a week of financial instability in U.S. (and other Western-aligned) markets.

     We got played.

     And meanwhile, the giant, energy-sucking plagiarism machines still don't have a sustainable use case other than listening in on your Zoom conference and writing a more-or-less accurate summary of it.  You could hire a professional administrative assistant to do that without needing to boil Niagara Falls to power her, and she'd probably even make coffee, too, if you asked nicely.

     But you do you.  Just try to not do in everything and everyone else in the process, maybe?

It's Black History Month

      Apparently the Feds aren't going to recognize it much this year, but you can, because it's everybody's history: we're all in here together.  History, culture, invention and everyday life are wrought by everyone -- but some of 'em keep getting swept under the rug.  Let's take a month to roll back the carpet and see.

"TDS"

     Of course I've been accused of "hating Donald Trump," with the implication that I have taken some unthinking personal dislike to the man, sneering at how he combs his hair or ties his necktie.*

     Yeah, no.  I think he's a lousy boss; he's certainly got all the hallmarks of every bad boss I have ever had, and none of the behaviors of good ones.  But Presidents don't necessarily need to be super-duper bosses.  We've had some real assholes in the job who did it well enough.

     My problem with him is he's not a very good President.  He doesn't delegate well and he dodges responsibility.  He makes decisions I think are poor, from contradicting his own subject-matter experts to ignoring issues of Constitutionality and legality when undertaking Presidential actions.  (Sorry, President Nixon, but things are not presumptively legal just because a President does them, and you can tell your pal, the odious Woodrow Wilson, that the U. S. Supreme Court, James Madison and I said so.)

     As for the man, I think he is more to be pitied than loathed.  He appears to me to be deeply insecure.

    As President, he's going to break something you value; he has let Elon Musk and Mr. Musk's minions rummage around in the system that issues individual income tax refunds and Social Security payments and nobody appears to know what they're up to.  I don't know if that's where the fed.gov writes checks for Army bullets, Air Force jet fighters and Navy submarines, but I sure hope not.  That's not TDS.  It's not even PDS.  It's me, with my usual lack of trust in anybody in some sort of authority, looking with alarm at alarming behavior.  All U. S. Presidents are Just Some Guy, and all of them are capable of screwing up the job very badly.  It's not deranged to keep an eye on 'em, and to point out when they're messing up even worse than is usual for the office.
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* Let us distinguish between the questionable sartorial choices and oddball behavior of Presidents on the one hand and how they actually do the job on the other.  Tan suits, weird ties, goofy jogging outfits, press conferences while on the john, bitey pets or ugly kids do not actually matter.  Running the Executive branch and avoiding civil disruption and unnecessary war matters.  Mr. Trump doesn't have a real good record on civil disorder both Left and Right, especially compared to his last several predecessors from both parties, and he seems to be working on the second.

"...Don't Know Much About Government..."

     The current President -- who held the job before -- does not appear to know what "Continuity of Government" is.  Here's a bit from yesterday's press conference:

Speaker 17 (47:08): [...] if you could clarify perhaps something that the defense secretary said when he said that this helicopter went on a continuity of government mission?

Trump (47:23): I don't know what that refers to, but they were practicing. They do that. They call it practicing and that's something that should be done. It's only continuity in the sense that we want to have very good people and that has to be in continuity and that's what they refer to, but it was basically practice and it was a practice that worked out very, very badly.

      You can read the entire transcript here. I burst out laughing when I heard it live.  CoG is serious, base-level keep-it-going stuff.  When then Vice President Dick Cheney was evacuated to an "undisclosed location" on 9/11, that was a Continuity of Government move.  (He was probably taken to Raven Rock, a secure bunker.)  On one level, the various people who would be covered by CoG -- and who have CoG "shadows" in place -- don't need to know much about it, or the various scenarios the people involved train for.  They just have to get in the helicopter and trust the crew.  But they do have to know CoG exists, and why, and what it would do.  I got the impression our current President might not have been taking notes when they covered the topic.

     It was easy to miss among the bizarre, DEI-blaming comments, but it happened.  I don't think he's done his homework.

Create Chaos, Get Chaos

     There was a terrible air crash in Washington D.C. last night between a small commercial passenger airplane and a military helicopter.

     Night flying is difficult.  Washington's airspace is busy and flight paths are restricted -- nobody flies over or near any of the important buildings except a few government flights, just as you might expect.  In air traffic generally, there are rules about who gives way to whom, based on type of vehicle and activity, but an airplane on final approach and a helicopter complicate sorting it out, and around a busy airport, air traffic control has the final say.

     Ultimately, all airplane crashes come down to pilot error, mechanical failure or external action, and the worst ones most often have more than one cause -- things like an inadequate de-icing system and a decision to fly through bad weather rather than avoid it and so on.

     But around a busy airport, pilots (who do not have 360-degree vision from the cockpit) rely on air traffic to keep them safely clear of one another.  FAA's got radar, with transponder data to ID each blip, and a lot of eyes on screens.

     FAA is, of course, a part of the Executive Branch.  Their Administrator resigned a few days ago, under pressure from Presidential advisor Elon Musk.  FAA employees, like all Federal employees, have lately been whipsawed by a series of memos and e-mails warning them to end all "DEIA" efforts (with threats of dire consequences for holdouts and tiplines for informants), a clampdown on external communication, "buyout" efforts of questionable legality (and warnings not to accept them), and so on, creating a lot of buzz and uncertainty.  It's not impossible that some of those eyes on screens were distracted.

     It's one thing to make airy campaign promises about lowering the price of eggs, only to take office and waffle that lowering prices is difficult to do; that's the usual politician bait and switch.  It's quite another to bring so much chaos and worry to vital agencies that planes collide, leaving scores of citizens dead.  This tragedy is Donald Trump's doing, an albatross he will wear as surely as Joe Biden took the blame for an economic recovery that left the middle class worse off while billionaires rolled in booming profits.

     Sixty-seven people are dead, thanks in part to President Trump's addlepated "war on woke."

     Update: Already had a couple of "Wait until all the facts are in, you just hate Trump" comments.  Tell me, did you say that before you slapped a Biden "I did that!" sticker on a gas pump when prices were high?  Sorry, charlie: Mr. Trump is in the worry seat now and he gets the blame.

     Update II: I've received several comments from people claiming to know what happened and why -- but without any cited sources or even claims of holding a pilot's certificate, I will not publish them.  There will be a preliminary NTSB report in a month or so, and a full report in a year.  We'll know what details can be known then.  Nevertheless, President Truman's desk sign summed it up: the buck stops at the President's desk, no matter how much he might want to blame disabled people, sexual minorities, people of color or women.  You don't have to pitch in when that small, weak man tries to throw people under the bus for not being straight white men.

Ah, The Question

     Is it "monkeywrenching" if it has nothing to do with environmental activism, and isn't strictly illegal but just a little sand in the juggernaut's gears?

     Probably more polite to leave Edward Abbey's term for his destructive friends to use, and find some other name, like "malicious compliance."

One Week In

     A week in, the country is still under an unrelenting Presidential firehose of nastiness, slanted rhetoric, questionable firings, punitive reassignments, sweeping halts to Federal spending that may not actually be within the Executive Branch's power* and so on.

     Steve Bannon usually gets the credit for the Republican "flood the zone" strategy, and it's certainly effective; several high-profile stories have adopted the official framing without much fuss.  When Colombia refused military flights of handcuffed and shackled deportees, insisting their returned nationals be treated with dignity,† the U. S. President threatened tariffs and travel restrictions.  Colombia fired back, with hot words of their own and their own set of planned tariffs.  Diplomatic hijinks ensued and in the end, flights resumed, sans restraint on the deported passengers.  Our President got tough with Colombia until Colombia got what they wanted -- and then he told the Press they'd backed down.  And that's how it it got reported by many outlets.  If your child came home from school with a story like that, a bully who pushed them around until your kid got what he or she wanted, you'd be more than suspicious.

     One of the intentions of such a massive onslaught is to overwhelm, confuse and upset any people or institutions who might oppose it.  And it is a lot of stuff, sometimes couched in loaded language that can get under your skin.  But it's just stuff.  It's nothing that wasn't described in Project 2025 or Agenda 47.  There's nothing in the wording that isn't a quote from or a paraphrase of the new President's campaign speeches.  The Blitzkrieg may be full of Kreig‡ but for anyone paying attention, it is notably lacking in Blitz.  It's the same kind of ranting that was once found only on obscure YouTube channels or late at night on staticky AM stations, it's not any less mean or dull when it gets shouted from the bully pulpit of the Presidency and it is not at all unexpected.
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* Although with a cooperative Congress and a compliant Supreme Court, who's to say?  I'm sure this is just what James Madison had in mind.
 
† He's got a point.  While it's a crime to sneak into the U. S. without permission, and many of the returnees are said to have committed other crimes in the U.S., most of them aren't criminals under Colombian law.  If the aim is to get them out of the U. S., why should we care if they're handcuffed or not?
 
‡ Kultur-Krieg anyway, mostly sad-sack foaming at the mouth that some people might have dared to dye their hair unusual colors, marry members of their own gender, or had the temerity to practice a non-Christian religion, or even none at all.  Some of them even refused to vote for him!

Saturday Dinner

     Saturday dinner was pure guesswork, driven in part by our grocery store having only one pork roast, and it small and tattered.

     I bought three thick pork chops instead, along with an apple, potatoes, onion, carrots, celery, parsnips and mushrooms.

     Ahead of cooking, I marinated the chops for a few minutes in a mixture of balsamic vinegar and soy sauce, with ginger, garlic, smoked paprika, fresh-ground mixed pepper, some left over chimichurri herbs and dashed of celery salt and curry powder.  I browned the chops on both sides in a little extra-virgin olive oil and poured the remaining marinade over them, hoping for the best.  Once it was simmering, I peeled and cut up the apple, added it and put the lid on.

     Potatoes, carrots, celery and onion followed slowly, and I let it for about an hour, having forgotten the parsnips.

     I remembered when I went to prepare the mushrooms, so I hurried to peel three big parsnips, slice them thinly, and add them with a little hot water.  Then the mushrooms with a little more hot water, and I left it for over an hour.  It was smelling pretty good.

     When I went fish out the pork chops, the bones came out.  They were just about spoon-tender and juicy.  The sauce was dark and rich, the potato had soaked some of it up, and the whole thing was just right, carrots and parsnips about equally soft.

     The marinade had me worried.  It could have been too strong -- but it wasn't.  It was balanced between the apple, the balsamic vinegar and the soy, none of them predominant.

Don't Know Why I Bother

     There was a point during the pandemic when I stopped doing confrontational debunking.  People had their minds pretty well made up, right or wrong, and they were not going to change -- and some of them were starting get threatening.

     I try to not have strong attachments to anyone or anything (it's that Jr. High flirtation with Buddhism), and to not share too much about the stuff I really love if it's where other people can get at it.  I was always dislikeable: nearsighted, clumsy, stroobly-haired, a tomboy who never knew when to shut up.*  It's never nice to discover someone's poured milk in your school locker, glued your Lord of the Rings paperbacks into a series of solid lumps or keyed your car.  I learned to keep things shut away.  At my present age, I would prefer to retain all the teeth I have left and not suffer any more broken bones -- little things, I suppose, but such comforts.

     Nevertheless--  It irks me when molehills are inflated into mountains.  The Federal Emergency Management has been a prime focus for political extremists from the day it was proposed. If they stock up on house trailers, they're said to be planning concentration camps.  If they ask for bids to supply body bags, they're accused of plotting mass death.  FEMA workers are often greeted with hostility when they show up after calamity has struck, accused of being too slow (States usually have to ask for 'em) or too snoopy (it's a government agency; they have forms that have to be filled out) or of doing things they have never done.  (And I get it, it's nervous-making when The Gummint shows up; my Mom was a township property tax assessor, which occasionally meant having to measure the outside dimensions of somebody's house.  Not everyone was okay with that.)

     So I had a blog comment about how FEMA had left Trump supporters in the lurch, and that comment needs to be addressed.

     In the aftermath of disaster, people are on edge.  Armed with a clipboard and a cellphone or radio, FEMA workers have been known to encounter residents who have rather more armament.  I gather the advice they are given is to avoid confrontation.

     In early October of 2024, Hurricane Milton roared from the Gulf and across Florida, killing at least 35 people and doing over 30 billion dollars in damage.  Afterward (some sources say October 27), a FEMA supervisor of 11 canvassers working in Lake Placid, FL told them not "avoid confrontation" but to skip houses with Trump campaign signs.  She got caught; someone leaked the email and by November, she was fired and FEMA sent a new crew to cover the area.  Short write-up here, news stories here and here.  Any search engine will find more.  FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell was hauled up before the House Oversight committee, where she condemned the supervisor's action.  Jamie Raskin of Maryland called the instruction "a bad mistake, legally and constitutionally, which violated the core mission of FEMA and every federal agency to work on behalf of all Americans. [...] It’s plainly wrong and divisive to use a presidential campaign lawn sign as a proxy for someone’s dangerousness," and that's the ranking Democrat on the committee calling it out.  The Republicans said much the same thing.

     That is the sole documented example I can find of FEMA being partisan.  Some crazy rumors came out of North Carolina after their terrible floods, but it appears to be social-media fantasy.

     Here's what FEMA says: "FEMA provides assistance to survivors regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, English proficiency, political affiliation or economic status." They've got a whole fact sheet you can look over -- and if you've got evidence they're not playing by their own rules, there's a "contact us" link right there at the bottom of the page.  Cc the House Oversight Committee while you're at it, I'm sure they'll be interested.

     Or you can huff the fumes of overheated bullshit, if that's what gets you high, but don't confuse the resulting hallucinations with reality, and don't ask the rest of us to take a whiff.  The stink is unmistakable.
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* One of the first signs of trouble with my ex was when we were building a little platform at my previous home to get the house for the feral cats up out of the mud, and it became obvious he wasn't much good with a handsaw and had trouble sinking a nail straight.  It took me by surprise; I think of those as basic life skills, stuff my big sister, little brother and our parents knew before adulthood.  He was...not real happy that it surprised me.  I'll take half the blame for that, but, um, it was a warning of basic incompatibility we both should have heeded.

No FEMA?

     The Executive Branch is talking about doing away with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security.  This would probably require Congressional action, given that the current version of FEMA was set up under the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

     While most people know FEMA from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, or the short-term support they give to disaster victims, often in the form of funds for food and housing, they do a lot of the "grunt work" behind the scenes.  After Katrina, they took a long, hard look at themselves and the co-ordination process, and adopted, expanded and trained for the National Incident Management System, a flexible, modular command framework for disaster response -- and one in which FEMA officials rarely get the top job.  They also got handed the ugliest part of the EAS system: working out who initiates alerts, how the system passes messages, what the data codes are, and running periodic national-level tests.  FCC does the enforcement; FEMA has to make the thing work when needed.  That was a job that didn't get done at all before it was handed to FEMA; there was hardware in place, but it had never been tested and there was a lot of resistance to testing it.  When it finally did get tested, surprise: the national-level system mostly didn't work.  It does now: they ran the tests, found the weak spots, and fixed 'em.

     They're the agency state Governors call up when major disasters strike, and they're the ones who get the blame if response lags.  Congress sets their budget and they've got to go back to Congress if a string of floods, bad weather and wildfires run it dry.

     So set among DHS's super-spies, decorated soldiers and counterterrorists, FEMA is the agency in work clothes, rumpled and sweaty.  Could other parts of the government do their job?  Sure -- but history tells us that didn't work very well in the past and I see no reason to believe it would be any different next time.

     I was always told conservatives were all about keeping the stuff that worked, conserving it, and eliminating wasteful flash.  I'm not sure the present crop of 'em believes that.

The Next Four Years

     I'm going to do blog posts on things that catch my eye, and not follow all the various helmet-fire freakouts or unseemly celebrations.  These are going to be contentious times, as anyone who remembers the years between November 2016 and the Spring of 2020 could predict.  People will get burnt out on politics, and I don't intend to be one of 'em.

     Individuals will be physically hurt as politics play out in the real world and the only advice I have to offer is to try to zig when the bad stuff zags.  Protests and rallies carry a small risk if you're going with the flow, but the various kinds and intensities of riot absolutely do not care what your politics are or if you and all your friends think you are a good person: get in the way and you will come to harm.  Understand both the odds and the stakes.  Don't go doing stupid things in stupid places with stupid people.

     Mind the trolling and poking.  As the Cynic philosopher warned, "Boys throw stones at frogs in jest, but the frogs die in earnest."  And remember that while gentle persuasion sometimes works, screaming at people will never change their minds.  It just encourages them to yell back.  After a while, everyone is yelling and nothing gets done.

Contrasts Along A Timeline

     When I was growing up, if you went to a Protestant church on a Sunday, you knew you were going to get a sermon along one of two lines: Hellfire and damnation, warning of dire Divine retribution against sinners and the necessity of being saved or the Sermon on the Mount, emphasizing compassion and forgiveness and reminding everyone that the Almighty's love was raining down salvation like soup and the church was giving away bowls.  There might be the occasional digression on some point of theology or a Bible verse the preacher had found especially apt, but you knew you were going to be yelled at or gently chided, and either way, they wanted you to eschew sin and follow the Lord.

     With that out of the way, I'll move to the secular.  In his second Inaugural address on January 20, President Trump said: "After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America."  What decent American would fail to applaud such a firm commitment to free speech?  It is one of our proudest traditions and most valued rights.

     On January 21, the new President, Vice President and their families were at the National Cathedral for an interfaith prayer service, an event organized long in advance, with all of the speakers carefully vetted.  The sermon was delivered by an Episcopal bishop serving the Washington, D.C. area, who concluded, "Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors, they are faithful members of [religious congregations]. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land."

     This is pretty standard stuff, of the Sermon on the Mount variety.  It may not be your cup of tea; it may not be a particular politician's cup of tea.  But it's not an attack; it's not hateful.  And it is most certainly free speech; it is most certainly representative of our nation's cherished freedom of religion.

     Mr. Trump didn't like it -- and he, along with every other person covered by the Bill of Rights, is not obliged to.  A little after midnight on the 22nd, he posted to his social media site, "The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. [...]."

     He is entitled to his opinion; I don't think he's a very perceptive critic when it comes to tone or graciousness, but that's merely my opinion.  It is a matter of plain fact that the speaker is a Bishop of her faith -- and no President gets a say in that.

     Another member of the President's party had something to say.  Republican U.S. Representative Mike Collins from Georgia posted a video clip of the sermon to social media with the comment, "The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list."

     And that, too, is an opinion -- but it is also a call to action from a member of the national legislature, and as such it is, in the legal sense, chilling.  On the other hand, if he gets his wish, the Bishop will be sent packing, back to where she came from: New Jersey.

     Last time I checked, it was still a state of the Union.

     Last time I checked, speech was still free of government censorship and threats of punishment.  Congressperson Collins might want to do some checking, too.

Darwin Doesn't Need Your Help

     Channel-surfing this morning, on three separate occasions I happened on an NBC reporter, live from the latest big wildfire in southern California.

     She was about as close to the fire as she could get, with smoke drifting through and hints of flame in the background.  The report had "B-roll" shots from even closer, nightmarish images.

     But what kept giving me the shivers was the immediate background for the live report: A downed high-tension power line, the pole slanting away from the viewer's lower left to center screen, with a couple of crossarms making a steeper angle from lower right to upper left, big insulators gleaming, fat cables in slack catenaries crossing behind her making a dramatic scene--

     Dramatic and potentially fatal.  A downed live power line does not always arc, smoke or hum.  Electricity itself has no color, no smell, no sound.  Not every inert-looking wire is dead.  Power companies do not protect the high-voltage lines with the kinds of fuses and circuit breakers that trip once and stay off until reset.  They use "reclosers:" gadgets that open on a fault, wait some set amount of time, re-energize and try again, over and over.  It takes less human intervention and most faults -- a swinging branch, an incautious squirrel, a Mylar balloon -- will clear themselves.  Your lights at home flicker a little, maybe go out and come right back on.

     You not only can't tell if a downed power line is live or not, you can't even count on it to stay off!  California electric utilities routinely shut off power in lines feeding fire zones, especially if there's an evacuation.  They (somewhat reluctantly) shut them off in high-risk areas during fire season; power grids allow a certain amount of re-routing, though it takes extra effort.  Re-routing can light up a previously-off downed line, too; there's nothing magical about monitoring a power grid and the central control at even the most up-to-date utilities have only a limited picture of what's going on.

     The voltage gradient from a downed power line tapers off gradually with distance, in a logarithmic or inverse-square way.  The current is limited by the resistance of the soil, and current  across a resistor gives us a voltage differential.  The reality of this rough math means if you're too close, even standing with your feet too far apart can be fatal.  Holding onto a microphone connected to a wire plugged into a camera that is itself connected to a van some distance away will be fatal if the juice comes back on.  Oh, maybe she's got a wireless mic; maybe the camera is plugged into a video-over-cellular backpack.  Maybe -- and even then, maybe a long step to get back to the news van and make ready for her next live report will be her last.

     In most TV markets, the news photographers (don't call 'em "cameramen," they're photojournalists), any tech who runs a remote truck and as many live-news reporters as can be rounded up and made to hold still for an hour are subjected to regular training sessions on the dangers of overhead* and downed power lines.  The industry didn't used to do 'em, but a string of fatal and near-fatal accidents over thirty years ago caused our insurance carriers to insist.  The NBC crew ought to know better.  I hope they don't learn better the hard way.
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* Overhead?  Way up there?  Yes indeed.  For a terrestrial microwave link, those trucks carry tall pneumatic masts that will easily reach power lines -- if the operator was fool enough to park under them.  Filling in on an ENG shift, I was once waved into a spot at the State Fairgrounds, started the mast up, grabbed a reel of audio/video cable and stepped out of the truck to run it into the venue -- only to look up and see they'd put me right under a ridiculously low power drop.  I darned near broke a wrist, flailing for the air compressor shutoff, and had a short, heated discussion with the well-meaning Fairgrounds worker.

Not Gonna Do It

     Just downstream of the Inauguration, the news media has locked themselves into a familiar cycle of "OMG, look what the President has done!"  Thrilled or horrified per their political bent, the coverage is long on generalities but short on specifics, and I find myself having to dig for details on the actions that strike me as significant.*

     I suppose I could turn around and share them with readers, but at that point it only throws a teaspoon of signal into a boiling pot of noise, and there's enough steam and fog already.

     Let it settle.  One of the few in-depth stories I could find sorted the flurry of Executive Orders and related actions into three categories: things unquestionably within Presidential powers; things that are going to take considerable adjustment, changes in rules and possibly Congressional action, and which may be challenged; and things that are most likely unConstitutional and either will be challenged or have already been challenged.  The last two sets aren't going to have much effect for some time, if they ever do.

     Presidents do not operate in a vacuum.  The Executive Branch is just one leg of the Federal tripod.  It happens to be the only one with a single individual at the top of it, and the full focus of the Press is on him in a manner impossible with Congress or the U. S. Supreme Court, but that's not the entire show; it's not even close.
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* An example: over 1,500 people were given pardons by the new President; fourteen had their sentences commuted instead, leaving felony convictions on their records.  Can you name the fourteen?  I couldn't find their names in any news story and had to go back to the White House press release instead.  It's an interesting group.

Margaret Atwood Says She's Not A Prophet

     Indeed, Ms. Atwood says The Handmaid's Tale drew on historical and (then) contemporary events -- which is one of the reasons she, somewhat sniffily, eschews being lumped in with "Science Fiction."  It's also one of the reasons I, somewhat sniffily, have shelved that book with my other science fiction books: all SF is, in one way or another, linked to current and past events, and to the writer's perception of them.

     You can read The Handmaid's Tale as a warning -- just as you can Le Guin's The Dispossessed; and they both warn about the harm caused by trying to hammer everyone into the same mold and the endless cruelties we inflict on one another when we don't stop to think and to care.

     The lesson is the same: Live however you choose -- but don't force the weird people across the road or the dull people next door to live the way you do.  Treat other people politely; you're not obliged to respect their choices but you don't get to be a jerk about it, nor do they about your choices.

     Otherwise, you're locked into an endless cycle of mutual retribution that will harm innocents every time the wheel turns.  "Oh," you may complain, "But look how it enrages those who disagree with me."  And with that, you have put yourself next to the Carthaginians as Roman historians described them, shoveling babies into the fire to ensure prosperity and victory.

     It's not worth so horrific a price.  It never is.

Fact-Checking

     I keep seeing mention of "Wilhoit's Law," sometimes attributed to Professor Francis M. Wilhoit, Ph.D., U. S. Army cryptographer, CIA agent, pal of Zbigniew Brzezinski​ and Henry Kissinger, political scientist and anti-racist.  He retired in 1990 and passed away in 2010 at the age of 90.

     Wilhoit's Law is younger than Godwin's Law, younger than Rule 34 (find your own links, weirdo), and states:

     "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

     Sad if true, and historically, it may be easier for an American to see it in application to European conservatism (and vice-versa); but the guy who coined it did so in 2018 as part of a lengthy reply in a discussion thread: 60ish highbrow composer Frank Wilhoit of Ohio.  He's got some pithy opinions about politics, but he is not a former spy and confidante of high-level diplomats, nor a professor of political science, and you should not come sailing into debate flying the banner of Francis M. Wilhoit aboard the good ship Frank Wilhoit, orchestra thundering at full blast.

Well, It's Done

     The new President has been installed, with slightly more fuss than screwing a new plug fuse into a 1920s electrical box.  Apparently, we're going to war against Panama, possibly Mexico, and Boy George.  The latter is a Crown subject and presumably protected; Mexico's reaction to organized U. S. efforts against drug cartels is an open question.  But I'd sure hate to be Panama right now.  No, strike that: I'd sure hate to be the Panama Canal.

     The thing about a vulnerable asset, of which the canal is a prime example, is that it is entirely too easy to destroy its value, especially while fighting over it.

     The incoming President's speech was -- and I don't want to be unfair, this is hardly atypical of Inauguration speeches -- long on rah-rah rhetoric and short on specific plans.  So was his express desire to "retake the Panama Canal" chest-beating boosterism or a definite plan?  Are his aims to turn the fed.gov on a dime going to run headlong into the reality that even a cooperative Federal bureaucracy has far worse cornering ability than a 1930s battleship?  I dunno about the first, but the second is likely, and the pile-up will be ugly no matter what.

Get Out Your Auguries

     I don't know, maybe augers will make holes to peer through into the future as well as they make holes in lumber.  But I think it's auguries you want, whatever tomorrow's inauguration may augur for the future.

     It's going to happen.  I'm not going to pretend he didn't win the election, or whine wordlessly over it either.  This is our reality and we're all going to see how it works out together.

     Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe it'll be wonderful, and his cabinet with almost no experience will live up to their jobs, each and every one.

     But I doubt it.  Anyway, tomorrow we get the scaled-down, indoor version of the same pomp and circumstance that first greeted George Washington and has greeted every President who has come into office on the Constitutionally-mandated day since then.

     A spate of Executive Orders are promised to follow, ensuring full employment for civil rights and Constitutional-law attorneys for at least the next six months and probably far longer.

     The Circus is back in town.  I wouldn't be holding my breath for any bread along with it, if I were you, and I kind of am.

Our State Is Beclowned

     Beclowned by disappointing Todd Rokita, who was once a pretty reliable, mildly-conservative, mildly-libertarian politician.

     That guy is long gone, burned on the altar of his own ambition.  He was leaning farther and farther Right before Trumpism sped him up, before the Covid pandemic spun him harder, and these days, well, follow the link to see the flexible office-holder flexing that our state is a place, "...where we can raise our children as God intended, without interference by woke schools, doctors or courts...where we are no longer vaxxed or masked."

     Yesirree, Todd considers the unchecked spread of disease as a gift from his personal conception of the Supreme Being, a being to whose tender mercies he, as a holder of public office, would subject each and every Hoosier -- Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, agnostic, Unitarian, atheist or whatever.

     I, personally, happen to be vaccinated against everything I can get a shot for.  At 66, I still remember rheumatic fever* at age five, chicken pox at eight, mumps at ten: you don't want any of these.  If Todd wants to be open to the possibilities of shingles, Covid or HPV (etc.), I'd like to encourage him to pursue it, but he can bugger right off if he wants to extend his crazy ideas to the rest of his fellow Hoosiers.

     This is what happens when a political party embraces a feelings-based, anti-science, anti-expertise approach: performative crazy, from cynical politicians who know better.  Medical privacy being what it is, we'll never hear from Mr. Rokita's physician, but I'm betting he's not skipping any shots; he's just pandering to where he thinks the votes are, to a base he expects will keep on falling for it.
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* There's no vaccine for this one.  It's an autoimmune disease, often in response to a strep infection, and it can come back for more later.  And colds can often leave you vulnerable to strep.  So leave me out of your "Let's all share viruses," lovefest.  I'm profoundly disinterested.

N.B.

     Comments like "Hahahahah. Your a idiot." are not, in fact, actual debate, and will not be published.  Give facts, cite verifiable sources, make an effort to be coherent -- or remain unpublished and much-mocked.

     I get that the junior stormtrooper thing is big fun for you, and you think it's very much the style these days; I get that it must be deeply satisfying for you, after all those years of trying to keep up with the smart kids (while deriding them as grinds and/or weirdos), but you're still a loser, even when you think "your side" is winning.

      PS: The gazillionaires you think are on your side?  The ones raking in daily more money than you'll make in your life?  They are not on your side.  They're laughing at you behind your back while they're picking your pocket.

The Retcon Brigade

     I'm still getting a few comments from people who claim the events at the U. S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021 could not possibly have been an attempted coup or insurrection because "they had no weapons."

     This assertion is risible.  January 6 rioters using clubs (both actual club-type clubs and stout posts from protest signs) and pepper spray can be seen in video of the day, along with improvised weapons that include police helmets and shields and sections of barricade fencing.  A number of rioters were credibly charged with bringing firearms onto Capitol grounds, and reported non-gun weapons included bats, crutches, flagpoles, skateboards and fire extinguishers.

     Aside from all that, a force of roughly 10,000 people is a weapon in and of itself.  At least 2000 made it inside the building, significantly outnumbering law enforcement.  Around 150 of the defenders were injured; I guess you could go argue the semantics of riot vs. insurrection vs. attempted coup with them, but your prospects will not be improved by claiming it was a "day of love" or a "peaceful protest."

     We came very close to losing elected officials to mob violence that day; pretending otherwise is like a cat trying to cover up a mess on a bare tile floor.

     I do not and will not whitewash political violence by any individual or group.  I try to sort out plain old regular protest, as American as apple pie, from "direct action" violence or riots, and from looting.  They're different things.  An enraged, shouting crowd -- like the people listening to then-President Trump and others earlier on January 6 who did not proceed to storm the Capitol, or a pissed-off BLM gathering marching up Meridian Street here in Indianapolis -- is not the same as rioters trashing government offices; nor is either of those two the same as opportunistic looters emptying a store amidst political unrest.  Conflating them is sloppy thinking; pretending the ones whose notions you more-or-less agree with are ever-pure blameless angels and those whose opinion you dislike are entirely malign destroyers is disingenuous doublethink.  Actions matter more than intentions or what banner the perpetrators wave.

     I am sick and tired of smarmy partisan bullshit.  I'm not going to publish it in comments and I'm not going to pretend it has any intellectual standing.  Straining at gnats and swallowing camels whole isn't a good habit to take up, even when a lot of the other kids are doing it.

On High-Level Federal Appointments

     I so should've applied for the top job at the Securities and Exchange Commission.  C'mon -- I played Monopoly a lot as a kid; I ran a cash register the summer I worked at a paint store -- and I read the financial news on the radio once a day, right off the wire, for almost two years!

     Like 'em or loathe 'em, for all of my life, nearly every one of Presidential appointees to the top jobs in the Executive Branch have been highly qualified, at least on paper.  In the past, when Presidents have tried to promote people who were not heavy hitters with prior experience -- remember Harriet Miers? -- the nominees tended to get shouted or laughed down. 

     Man, those were the days.

Skipped A Day

     I skipped posting yesterday.  The attempt to get across the scale of the mess in Los Angeles is depressing.  And people who think the dueling boasts and threats of politicians somehow outweigh FEMA's guidelines and limits for aid annoy me beyond measure.

     Nothing stops fires pushed down dry mountains and hills by winds in excess of sixty miles an hour.  Nothing much prevents them starting; southern California is a tinderbox in the dry season and LA county is vast, a megacity bigger than Delaware or Rhode Island, containing more people than the individual populations of all but ten U. S. States.*  Sparks are inevitable.

     The people who lose their homes will get the same help as the people who lost their homes to natural disaster in the Southeast: FEMA covers their hotel bill or rental and a few other things.  The Federal agency doesn't play favors because it cannot; it's not a rich man's whim or a politician's pork handout but a fairly hidebound Federal agency, one in which (for example) it took a determined band of worried bureaucrats over a decade to make minor reforms in the way the national-level EAS system functions.  Congress can (and may) come up with extra funding; the Executive Branch can tinker a little with what goes where, but the stuff that makes an actual difference to J. Average Citizen is cut and dried, and involves filling out forms.

     Anyone claiming the LA Fire Chief is a "DEI hire" can go look up her record, including written and physical tests.  She's been fighting fires for a long, long time, mostly in jobs where the inability to fight fires or to lead groups doing the work would result in termination for cause.  If you're still worried about some chick running a 3000-plus person fire department, step up and shake hands with Anthony C. Marrone, Fire Chief of the 3000-plus member LA County Fire Department, working side-by-side with the city (and every helper they can get from within the U.S., Mexico and Canada).  There is no shortage of competent bosses, and the only limitation on front-line firefighters is logistics.

     It's a fire (well, several fires).  Just like storms, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, it hasn't got any politics, and no decent person checks the party membership of the victims before deciding if they'll help.
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* How does Greater LA compare to Indianapolis/Marion County?  The population density is about the same, between 2400 and 2500 people per square mile -- but the 400 square miles of Indianapolis is a tenth of LA County's 4000 square miles.  We lose some land area to lakes and rivers; LA loses a lot more to slopes too steep to build on.

Steak Night

     Tam and I went to Half Price Books this afternoon and on the way home, stopped off at the other foodie grocery store in Broad Ripple -- where they had grass-feed New York strip steaks at a price that fit my holiday-bonus budget!

     Cooking them in this weather -- it was 37°F this afternoon, but dropped rapidly as the sun set -- meant getting out my cast-iron grill pan, scrubbing it with chainmail (no, really, fine chainmail is the best way to clean cast iron) and olive oil for good luck and to refresh the seasoning, and an even tougher scrubbing job after.

     Paired with trumpet mushrooms sliced and fried in the grill pan next to the steaks, plus seasoned tiny potatoes nuked in the microwave and a bagged salad, it was a good way to wrap up the weekend.

Snow

     Indianapolis had another 2.7 inches of snow yesterday.  I'm measuring at least ten inches accumulation on the back yard picnic table here.

     It's not fun.  I'm long past snowball fight age.  Driving home Friday night was a little scary.  But the city copes; they keep the major streets pretty well plowed and so far, my Lexus all-wheel drive kinda-SUV has done well with the alleys and side streets.  January in Indianapolis -- we do get snow.

Footnote

     If you're one of the people chortling how the "lib'ruls" of LA voted wrong and now face fires, two bits of information:

     -Post hoc ergo propter hoc is still a logical fallacy.

     -In the 2024 Presidental election, more people voted for Donald Trump in Los Angeles than voted for him in Arkansas or Oklahoma.  This nonsense about "red America" vs. "blue America" ignores the reality that we all live in purple America, a bit redder in some places and bluer in others, and when bad luck falls on Texas or New York, Oregon or Florida, it falls on millions of people who voted the same way you did and hold similar values, no matter how you voted or what policies you favor.  We're all in the same box. 

     But neither voting patterns, election results or efforts to attracts a more diverse pool of firefighters caused the recent and current fires in and around LA.  They had a fairly wet year or two recently, then things got dry (as is normal in that part of our country) and then--  Then the dice came up snake eyes (or double sixes) for the Santa Ana winds, roaring with an intensity rarely seen.  People being people, anyone with a yard has stuff growing in it, and it was all pretty much tinder.  Add strong winds and all you need is a spark.

     Strong winds kept firefighting aircraft on the ground (and still are, at their worst), leaving the greater Los Angeles area with exactly the same resources as any other big city: a hydrant system and trucks and personnel adequate to battle normal fires, a building or three at a time.

     Information about LAFD funding is muddled; they were in the process of negotiating fire department pay (and apparently other terms) during the overall budget process.  LAFD's portion was left for another bill, later, and their funding went up, not down (as has been claimed elsewhere), but reports on how much and what it was for vary.  All I can tell for sure is that it went up some tens of millions -- not much less than 20, nor more than 50 million over what it had been.  Call it a couple week's income for Elon Musk, or more than you or I would see in ten lifetimes.  They've got the money.  They're not worse off for staff than fire departments generally -- and, faced with a wall of flame pushed by katabatic winds exceeding 60 miles an hour, blowing embers ahead of it into paper-dry shrubs, grass, trees and wooden houses, all they can do is fight for time, no matter who they are.  Against a calamity this enormous, all people are the same size, and it's too damn small.  Additional help is pouring in, from as far away as Canada.

     It's probably ironic that the best tool against this kind of disaster is slow and about as nannying as it gets: building codes and zoning.  Requiring more fire-resistant construction and materials for homes and commercial buildings, mandating largely vegetation-free "clear zones" around them, incorporating firebreaks into neighborhood design -- all of those things would help mitigate the kinds of harm we're seeing happen.  Towns and cities in Southern California have made efforts to create such rules -- and it has been decried as liberal interference in personal freedom to do as people wish on their own property.  Like most things in politics, like most things involved in living with neighbors nearby, it's a matter of compromise and sometimes it works out badly.  It's a part of life -- and only a ghoul revels in the bad outcomes.

DEI Didn't Do It

     Elon Musk and others on the Right have decided to blame "DEI" for the California wildfires getting so out of control, or possibly for happening at all.

     That part of California has fires every winter.  They've got native plants that produce seeds that won't even germinate unless they're been through a fire, so you can't claim it's not normal.  And every so often, there's a winter there in which the Santa Ana winds aren't the usual 25 to 35 mph, but much higher.

     If there's any kind of white guy special knowledge and skill, or secret science, or for that matter magic, voodoo, prayers, incantations or handwavium that can counter fires being pushed through dry vegetation by winds of 80 mph and up, in a region of scarce water, I'm pretty sure California firefighters would like to hear about it.  But there is, in fact, no level of training, staffing or demographic adjustment that amounts to a hill of beans against what firefighters there are facing.  What they need is water, far more of it than any fire-hydrant system can deliver, and the way they usually get it is from airplanes and helicopters.  You can't fly 'em in 80+ mph winds; you can't scoop up water in winds that high and you can't drop it with any accuracy in winds that high.  Wind speeds have fallen a little and they are now dumping as much water on the fires as they can, as quickly as they can, and nobody is downchecking pilots for being too pale, too dark, too butch or too femme.  It's tricky flying and they'll take anyone who can do it.

     So some fire departments in LA County spent their downtime looking at demographics and trying to recruit firefighters from groups presently under-represented in the firefighting staff?  So what.  If they ended up with a few more who spoke the various languages spoken in their districts, or more familiar with the neighborhoods, great.  Fighting fires is hard work, and it doesn't pay all that well for the amount of risk and effort it involves.  If you're worried some nice white Christian boy is missing out on those sweet, sweet fireman jobs 'cos a dark-skinned pagan lesbian from across the sea edged him out, you're nuts.

Oh, That Reasoned Debate!

     I can, in fact, be convinced by logical argument supported by verifiable facts.  It's kind of a thing with me.

     On the other hand, if your idea of refutation is this comment: "Damn you're stupid" then all you have done is show me you're a member of the might-makes-right team, nothing more than a brute authoritarian, and you have neither facts nor logic on your side.  Sorry, ol' jackboot, but being quoted to mock is as close to published as your comment will get.

     Another would-be commenter linked to an oily article arguing that tired old trope, that the January 6, 2021 riot (and behind-the-scenes Administration machinations) couldn't possibly have been an insurrection because it was a grabastic soup sandwich, and because the action at the Capitol was not one hundred percent violent chaos.  Nope, sorry, won't wash.  The plotters were pretty clearly counting on Vice-President Pence playing along, at which point the riot would have been mostly window-dressing.  Muddled lines of command, control and communication are an excellent route to plausible deniability.  But a few periods of relative calm in some areas of the Capitol do not negate the violence of the break-in, nor the internal hammering-down of doors and windows, assaults on persons and facilities, vandalism and theft committed in the course of that day.  Smug commentators in comfortable offices can smirk and retcon all they like, but it doesn't change the events recorded on video that day, many of which I watched in real time.

     Trump supporters and fellow travelers would not be trying to rewrite history so desperately hard if they were not embarrassed by their side's actions on that day.  It's hard to claim you Back the Blue when your side is beating up cops, isn't it?

     So go on, keep up the name-calling, keep up the handwaving bullshit.  It doesn't change what actually happened.  It doesn't change what Team Trump tried to do.  And it doesn't change what you are: thugs.  Thugs without respect for democracy, decency or the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights.  From the crowned heads of 18th-Century Europe to the Know-Nothings, from the Confederacy to the Klan to the fascist movements of Europe and their less-successful American counterparts, the Trumpian Right is part of a terrible tradition that believes power is its own justification and that some men are -- and should be -- more equal than others.  But that is a damnable lie; it is and has always been a self-evident truth that all men are created equal.  All of 'em.  Even women.  Even people who are darker than you are, who are poorer than you are, who don't follow the same religion, even the ones who don't share your political opinions.

     This country is headed down a bad path for the next four years.  I expect a reaction at the midterms.  I have no idea what to expect in the intervening two years, but when I look back at Mr. Trump's first term and hear his wild talk now, I can see it won't be anything good.  Oh, and if you were expecting eggs to get cheaper?  Don't bet on it.

It Was An Insurrection

     Quick reminder: January 6, 2021 was an insurrection.  It wasn't a successful one; it wasn't well-coordinated.  Vice-President Mike Pence's stiff neck impeded a critical step and he sacrificed a political career that he'd compromised a lot to advance, in order to preserve the orderly and lawful function of our system of government and prevent an autogolpe.

     I watched live and near-live coverage of the assault on the U. S. Capitol as it happened and it was not a "day of love."  It was a violent, poorly-organized attack on the building and on Congress.  We came within minutes and feet of serious harm to the Senators and Representatives, and multiple police and citizens were injured.  One rioter was killed while charging at law enforcement personnel through a just-broken window in a door with a raging mob behind her.

     There's a real push on the Right to retcon these events as some kind of overly-enthusiastic hijinks at worst; after all, there were lulls in the fighting (as there are in any such conflict.  Sorry, Hollywood tends to skip over the dull parts) and there's plenty of video of that, too.  But men (and a few women), many armed with clubs and more, scaled walls, burst through barricades, smashed windows, broke down doors and put Congress to flight.

     It was an ugly day.  There may be more ugly days ahead.

Snow Business

     There's over half a foot of snow on the ground per the official count.  Around Roseholme Cottage, it falls short of a foot deep, but not by much.

     I'd love to hang around and talk about it, but I've got to creep my way to work.

Unrepeatable

     I probably won't be able to repeat it, but I certainly will if the chance occurs.

     For Christmas dinner, I made a ham -- steamed it, in fact, which came out much better than it had any right to.  It was a big ham; Tam and I had a nice meal and I froze the leftovers in three batches.

     The corner grocery store always has "fresh" (rehydrated) blackeyed peas for New Year's, and I made a nice pot of Hoppin' John for New Year's Eve, using one of the bags of frozen ham, with onions, peppers, canned chilis and both fresh and canned tomatoes.  Good stuff, and there I was, with a couple of bags of leftovers.*

     New Year's Day, we had corned beef and cabbage (and potatoes, carrots, celery and onions), slow-roasted in a covered pan on the closed grill.  The corned beef was tender and flavorful, and there was enough left to freeze for later.

     Friday, I picked up a chorizo sausage, and Saturday, I squeezed it out of the casing, cooked it and drained it before pushing it to the sides of the big stewpot and sautéing a little red onion and mixed peppers.  I took several thickish slices of corned beef, diced them and mixed them in.  Then I added most of a can of some wild stuff: Heyday Canning Company's Enchilda Black Beans, plus a small can of tomato sauce.  I'd been thawing a freezer bag of the Hoppin' John, and I stirred it in, covered the pot and let it simmer with a bay leaf. (Heyday offers an interesting variety of canned soups and spiced beans.)

     That's three kinds of meat, two kinds of beans, red and white onion, chilis, multicolored peppers, tomatoes and seasonings.  Chorizo, honey ham and corned beef; without leftovers, this would take hours and you'd end up with enough for an army, or at least an Elks Lodge.  It was a thick stew, savory and complex, exactly right for a cold evening.

     It's so much different stuff that I can't really say "try this," but if you get the chance, you should, or whatever similar thing appeals to you.
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* Gallon-size freezer bags make this appealing: stand them up, fill them about one-third full or a little more, squeeze out the air and close them up before laying them flat and letting the contents spread out in a thin layer that will freeze quickly and reheat easily.  If you're feeding more people, use bigger bags; they make them up to at least two and a half gallons!

I Admit It: I'm Surprised

     Mike Johnson was re-elected as Speaker of the House with remarkably little fuss.  Indiana's Victoria Spartz, who'd been making holdout noises, blinked: while a couple of Republicans didn't toe the line at the very first, she was not among them.

     For now, the ringmaster's got the clowns under control.  Let's see if he can maintain it.

     Next up, counting the electoral votes on Monday.  Here's hoping for dull routine.  I won't mind if some Congressthings even manage to doze off during the proceedings.  It's not supposed to be exciting.

Mike Johnson's Tea Leaves

     House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to keep his job.  His party's bare majority in the House means he can't lose even one GOP vote* and word is that he already has.  Kentucky's Thomas Massie has already said he won't vote for the Johnson.  Right behind him, you'll find Indiana's Victoria Spartz in full maverick mode, and while I frequently find myself wondering just what she's up to at any given moment, her position of being a more seriously conservative conservative than all of her fellow conservatives, especially over fiscal restraint, certainly makes for interesting moves.

     With two holdouts and a certain loss, there's no reason for any other Republican looking to earn brownie points or extract concessions to hang back, so the whole thing becomes an exercise in party discipline for a party increasingly given to infighting.  Or possibly a kind of piñata, with everyone taking a whack and hoping goodies will fall out.

     The House needs to put a Speaker in place before the official tally of electoral college votes on January 6.†  They've got three days and the stopwatch is ticking.  They're not fast-moving even on their best days.  This will be interesting, and possibly a preview of the next two years.
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* Unless he's got a secret best buddy among the Democrats who will break ranks.  There are probably several who'd be happy to have him stop by their backyard cookout, but votes like this are a whole other thing.
 
† My goodness, why does that date seem so familiar?

The New Year

     It would be nice to have something profound to say, but I'm right out of "profound" and running low on "glib."  2025's liable to be an A-ticket ride, and not in a good way.  Better buckle in, and make sure the safety bar is down and locked.  It's already moving!

Tragic Start To 2025

     Like you, I'm monitoring the reports from the truck-ramming attack in New Orleans that has killed at least ten people and injured over thirty.  The bare facts are about all that has been released to the public.  It is known to have been a deliberate act, not a drunk or incapacitated driver.  The FBI is on the scene and is investigating it as a probable act of terrorism.

     There are, in fact, a lot of State and Federal agencies at work on this in the French Quarter, and during the first news conference this morning, MayorLaToya Cantrell used an interestingly specific term, referring to the "unified command."

     That tells me that it's not chaos; it's from the Incident Command System, originally developed to coordinate public safety agencies fighting wildfires in California, but adopted and greatly expanded by FEMA, which had already learned the hard way what doesn't work.  ICS does work, and pretty much anyone in a position of command at a public safety agency has at least had the short course on how to work it.  I've taken the online version -- it was required in order to be certified to access the various sites where my employer has equipment, during an emergency situation.

     "Unified Command" comes right out of ICS, and lets me know that the highest-ranking members on the scene from every responding agency are metaphorically -- and probably literally -- sitting around the same table, pooling information, setting shared objectives and timetables, and sorting out who does what, within a framework they're all already familiar with.  It's a tool that prevents conflict and avoids wasted or duplicated effort, designed (perhaps uniquely, as things fed.gov go) to be flexible.  Internal chains of command are not disrupted: your boss is still your boss, but he (or his boss) is in steady contact with the bosses of every other department or agency working the incident.

     ICS command staff numbers expand and contract as the situation requires, task-oriented rather than position-oriented.  One person might wear many hats, or only one.  They may have a subsidiary staff or work solo.  And there are rules of thumb for figuring that out.  At its best, it's staggeringly effective; even when it's just clunking along, it ensures that the people out at the leading edge have ways to resolve conflict that run through their own communications and land in the laps of someone who can work it out with his or her opposite number(s).

     The system's working in New Orleans right now.  It's not magical, but it ensures FBI, the NOPD and the Louisiana State Police (etc.) are all on the same page.  There probably won't be a whole lot of details released to the Press until this evening; the next press conference* will be at noon and I don't expect to learn more from it than an update on the killed and injured, and perhaps early details on the perpetrator.  But the Mayor's use of one uncommon term has told me that the response is coordinated and organized, with clear goals.  They'll figure this crime out.
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* "Public Information Officer" is one of the defined jobs of the ICS Command Staff, and you may see a spokesperson or just a quiet coordinator in the background of the next news conference, but count on someone having the official details, probably an FBI agent; the rest of whoever will be there are only present because it is expected of them -- Mayor, probably the police chief and so on.