The Great Crash, 1929

      I finished John Kenneth Galbreath's book about the stock market crash and, almost in passing, its connection to the Great Depression that followed.

     He closes with some interesting observations, listing major contributing factors.  At the top of the list, extreme income inequality.  The problem as he sees it is that the whims of a few major players can make an impression that the chaotic urges of thousands of lesser lights cannot -- unless they're following the lead of the big guys.  There'd been booms and busts during the era of the "robber barons" a few decades earlier and the phenomenon of extreme wealth for a very few came back even harder in the 1920s.  Look around: we've got that again.

     He follows that with "bad corporate structure," the kind of trusts and holding companies that concatenated during the boom years before the Crash, companies that existed only to own the stock of companies that also existed only to own stock and so on: while they amplified gains, they also amplified losses, so that when things went bad, they kept getting worse.  While that kind of thing is a lot less likely today -- and you can thank New Deal reforms and regulations for the reduced risk -- any novel financial instrument carries similar risk, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis awhile back revealed.

     "Bad banking structure" comes in for censure, and that got a post-Crash restructure, too.  Some of it has been rolled back.  Good, bad?  I don't know; ask an economist.  Ask three of 'em, and you'll get four different opinions. 

     Next, "the dubious state of the foreign balance," and Galbreath credits high tariffs with helping to create the problem.  They were not nearly as high then as they have become in the last few months.  Ouch.

     The stock market has "circuit breakers" these days: if prices start plunging, trading is suspended.  While that may sound like a cheat, one of the main reasons for it (past putting brokers in time out to ponder their actions) is to let the record-keeping catch up.  On multiple occasions during the 1929 crash, the decline and subsequent trading, sell-outs, bankruptcies, etc. got so far ahead of the data coming out of the stock market that nobody knew what was going on until hours after the close of trading; some people "lost everything" not once but multiple times.  They ended up in holes too deep to claw their way out of.  These days, the market can still crush you -- but it's a lot less likely to keep trying to wring out more afterward.

     We're certain to see abrupt dips in the stock market -- if not today (seems to be mildly up so far), then eventually; we're unlikely to have another Great Crash.  Unlikely does not mean impossible, and no matter how carefully a thing has been made foolproof, new and more ingenious fools arrive every day.  Have they once again become too clever for their -- and our -- own good?  Time will tell.

It's Too Nuts

     So, I'm online this morning and President has climbed onto the (flat and railed) roof of the White House Briefing Room because...well, nobody's sure.

     You can't make this stuff up, and multiple press outlets are undoubtedly busy sanewashing it because they don't dare call it crazy.  Or as the WaPo likes to say these days, "Lights out!"

Parade Of Clowns

     The most disconcerting element of the Sunday morning political talk shows was the persistent sound of sirens and shouting in the background of NBC's Meet The Press; I kept expecting police or soldiers or rioters to burst into the room, push Kristen Welker aside, make a hurried, largely incoherent announcement and fall back under fire.  Didn't happen; moderator, guests and panelists alike all ignored it with the determination of the prospective heirs of a wealthy, elderly great-aunt pretending her dire flatulence isn't happening.  I still don't know what the noise was about, though if I had to bet, I'd split my money between starvation in Gaza and general Presidential protests.

     Kevin Hassett continues to toady and smirk; he behaves like a tween-age boy passing a set of silent-but-deadly farts and letting his rich great-aunt take the blame.  Today, he thought he'd put one over by pointing at the normal review process for employment data as "evidence" of some sort of skullduggery.  Nope, sorry, won't wash; it's routine, and the numbers come from scads of scribbling statisticians, not one (now-fired) appointee.  It'll be interesting to see if they can find someone who can both understand the math and sugarcoat it for Presidential consumption.  Hassett's glee is in part motivated by his sure and certain knowledge that he's playing to an audience of one, and he thinks he'll always be able to play that one like a cheap harmonica.  ...It'll work until he blows it wrong.

     Over on CBS, Doctor Oz showed up, trying to add a spoonful of sugar to the Medicaid cuts.  It didn't go over nearly as well as any segment of his old TV show, and we know about the snake oil it peddled.

     All of these people -- and many more, throughout the Trump administration -- got their jobs by coming across well on TV.  Look, being on TV and not looking like a fool is a lot harder than it appears, but the only skill it proves is the skill of giving good television.  A narcissist who can't find the off button for his TV -- and would not use it if he could -- in charge of Executive branch is filling it with people who have two main skills: A) Being on TV and B) Flattering the boss. And he's steadily dumping people who bring him inconvenient truths, especially if they're not telegenic.  In the process, he's ascending a pyramid of fantasies, building it as he goes, a process that never ends well.

It's Not Easy

     There's a three-ring circus going on in Washington, D.C., and it is echoed in many state capitols.  It's hard to ignore it, but I can't take every morning to point out the latest crazy thing thing the nitwits -- and especially the Nitwit-in-Chief -- did.  He loves the attention, after all, and like wresting a pig, all it does is splash mud around.

     It's a big wonderful world out there, and even the best efforts of the worst people probably won't break it forever -- but it's sure going to leave a mess. 

Rain!

     Summer in Indiana means rain.  It's normal.  The recent heat wave is unusual, but today we had a lot of rain in the morning (and there's more predicted for this afternoon) and it's cooler.

     We're also under an "areal flood warning," which I consistently hear as an "aerial flood warning," meaning the floodwaters will be higher than people's TV aerials.  Nope.  Nor is it "a real flood warning" but they forgot to hit the space bar.  The entire forecast area is at some risk of flooding.  Sure enough, my basement took on a little water, enough to make a puddle draining away to the floor drain.

     At least it's not so beastly hot.

Watching TV, Reading The News

     I could point out that the intersection between "I unfriended the notorious pedo for being a perv" and "I unfriended the notorious pedo for poaching two employees from my spa (one of whom is known to have later been one of his victims)" is not exactly exonerative.  I could, but you either already knew the guy was scum or you're still waving the Hooray For Him flag and will never drop it.  So what's the point?*

     Instead, I will report that Tam and I watched the entire first season of Ballard, and if you enjoyed Bosch and the follow-on, you'll probably like it.  Same city, different setting, same old grimy, imperfect LAPD.  This one's more of an ensemble effort, though the title character is certainly front and center.  She's no Harry Bosch; she's very much her own person.

     Michael Connelly is one of the all time great storytellers.  He is not a knock-your-socks-off prose stylist, but a skilled inventor of personalities, situations, and plots filled with unexpected twists and reverses.  His fiction translates exceptionally well to the screen and the film and TV writers and directors (and actors and set designers and so on) have done justice to the material.
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* I will admit that I'm curious as to what form the defensive comments will take -- will it be "Nobody's perfect," "It's totally not creepy that a rich guy employs extremely young female masseuses in his club's spa," or the non sequitur, "You just hate the Great Man?"  The latter is half true; I do loathe him, but he's not great.  Look, I'm sorry you chose to hitch your wagon to a pile of manure, but you can always get unhitched and it's high time you did.  The smell lingers. 

One More Time

     Exporters do not pay tariffs.
     Exporting countries do not pay tariffs.
     Importers pay tariffs, and pass the added cost along to wholesalers.
     Wholesalers pass the added cost on to retailers.
     Retailers pass the extra cost on to you and me.

     There are a lot of links in that chain, but that's how it works.  Oh, importers, wholesalers or retailers may eat part of the cost, but not for long; profit margins are slim.  It'll take time, but the prices of imported goods -- and things made here that use imported parts -- are going up.  If it came from Europe, the price will go up at least fifteen percent, by and by.

     Inflation is coming.  Yell at me all you like, but it will still happen and tariffs will be the cause.  Tariffs imposed by one man's whim.

Some Weekend

     Once again, I chaired the monthly writer's "critique group," where we analyze one another's work, everything from grammar and word use to plot development and character behavior: "Your protagonist is an underweight ten-year-old -- do you really think she could fight off a tiger bare-handed?"

     It's fun but exhausting; I'm markedly not an extrovert, and I find a pleasant morning talking shop with a half-dozen friends exhausting.  I napped in the afternoon (instead of doing laundry) and grilled moderately-priced steaks for dinner as a treat, with baked potatoes and salad.  That left Sunday for laundry and housework; blogging had to wait.

     On politics, the merchants of balloon-filling (get it while it's hot!) were busy all weekend, especially on the Sunday politics shows.  These days, it's like going to a silent movie, and if you cared to watch, you booed at the villains and cheered for the heroes, and Little Nell got tied to the train tracks same as always.  The locomotive is just out of sight around the bend, smoke trailing upward from the stack, bell ringing, whistle hooting, and yet everyone is acting like it will never arrive.  Going to be an interesting day when it does.

     On the topic of imminent doom, I've been reading John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929, an analysis of the factors that led up to the event that marks the start of the Great Depression.  There's plenty to debate in Galbraith's politics -- though he did correctly identify the Vietnam War as a quagmire best avoided, well before U. S. involvement -- but his lively, snarky approach to a subject that could be a dull slog (and has often been, in other hands) is well worth reading.  The book, written in 1955, accurately identifies one of the clever tricks that led to 2007's sub-prime mortgage crisis and remains a red flag to look out for; the dismal science is much better at looking backward than warning of danger ahead, so props to him for that.

Worst Soap Opera Ever

     Every day, I look at the news and think, "You can't make this stuff up.  If you put it in a novel, it would be rejected as implausible hack writing, too ludicrous for the worst pulp."

     And yet here we are.

Another Angle On "Artificial Intelligence"

     Investing is essentially a more-or-less honest confidence game: you convince investors your enterprise will succeed while not guaranteeing it and show 'em (a subset of) the books.  It either succeeds or fails and the investors either get their money back, ideally with some kind of profit or they don't.  But the investors have to convince themselves it's worth the risk and the firm they invest in has to do the work, not take the money and run.

     Tech firms are usually selling smoke, mirrors and a cunning plan.  That's what all forms of artificial intelligence boil to: a cunning plan and some impressive-looking hardware.  Good AI, bad AI -- either way, it's a massive server farm, building algorithms on algorithms to crunch through massive amounts of data in the hope of emergent patterns.  Chatbots are very, very sophisticated, context-dependent word-prediction machines; imagebots do the same thing with pictures.  The process between input data plus user prompts and output is opaque, and it was slow going for a long, long time.  (How long?  Marvin Minsky never did get a robot to build an analog Heathkit TV set, despite the very clear instructions that come with the kit.  Heathkit as a major kit company has been gone since 1992, analog TV since 2009, Dr. Minsky since 2016.  He bought that TV kit before I graduated high school, back when Gerald Ford was in the White House.)

     Then in 2022 (as recently as that!), a Google AI engineer convinced himself that a chatbot called LaMDA was self-aware.  He tried to hire a lawyer for it and went to the press.  Google fired him: that work was a trade secret.

     But mark what happened carefully: a person who interacted with AI in depth convinced himself it was alive, and that was the dawn of our current AI boom.  It didn't build a Heathkit,* or take over the world,† or help mastermind a political revolution.‡  It managed to seem real enough for someone to believe there was a ghost in the machine.  It got his confidence.

     "AI" is a con game, and it gets better at the con every day.  Does it get better at "intelligence?"  Probably not, but it certainly gets better at convincing people, especially those with money and a will to believe, that it is either intelligent, sentient, or on the verge of one or the other or both.  And it may not be an "honest con" in the way investing in general is: there may be zero chance of the actual payoff, or as close to zero as makes no difference: there will probably never be a ghost in the machine.  And that matters.

     The bottom is liable to fall out once it hits its peak, in something akin to the dotcom boom and crash, leaving fortunes for the promoters and ashes for the investors.
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* Minsky, op. cit.
 
† Colossus: The Forbin Project, both the book and the film.
 
‡ The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Heinlein, Robert A.

Shares In Futility Up Sharply In Early Trading...

     Listening to a steady drumbeat of news this morning, the local TV stuff that wakes me up, NBC, NPR, BBC, and it strikes me that "Alas" is a damn poor motto to live by.  People are starving and it's become an opportunity for online grifters and self-serving propaganda vids from the nations causing the starving, or at most throwing pennies at the problem while looking the other way and hoping it will end soon.

     "Alas."  Guess it'll make a nice epitaph.

U.S. Out Of UNESCO; RADAR Out Of Their Minds

     UNESCO is a UN agency that encourages peace through cultural exchange; they also list and track sites of exceptional interest and, yeah, they're pretty much longhaired idealists.

     They're apparently not racist enough for the Trump administration and, just like the last time Mr. Trump* had the gig, the U.S. has withdrawn from participation and funding; the Federal government was picking up about eight percent of UNESCO's tab.

     While it's not up to the level of abandoning international soft-power efforts that fed starving people and built good will towards the United States (cough, USAID, cough), it's another self-destructive move.  But it's also not the second but the third time the Feds have walked away from the table.  Like most UN organizations, UNESCO is kinda slapdash, prone to politicization, sketchy finances and a wavering focus; in 1984, the U.S. bailed for the first time.  Here's what U. S. Congressman Jim Leach (R - Iowa) had to say about it a few years later:

"The reasons for the withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO in 1984 are well-known; my view is that we overreacted to the calls of some who wanted to radicalize UNESCO, and the calls of others who wanted the United States to lead in emasculating the UN system. The fact is UNESCO is one of the least dangerous international institutions ever created. While some member countries within UNESCO attempted to push journalistic views antithetical to the values of the west, and engage in Israel bashing, UNESCO itself never adopted such radical postures. The United States opted for empty-chair diplomacy, after winning, not losing, the battles we engaged in... It was nuts to get out, and would be nuttier not to rejoin."

     You can't fix 'em if you don't have a seat at the table.

*  *  *

     Tam showed me a meme this morning that is circulating among the conspiracy-minded Right, claiming "NexRad," the next-generation weather radar system, actually means "Death Radiation"† in Latin.  At least one lunatic has already tried to blow up a radar tower recently.

     I have long railed against people who want us to live in mud huts, no matter if they were Green types who wanted to give up technology to save the planet (as opposed to, oh, building out wind, solar and efficient power storage) or RETVRN ideologues who figure they'll get to live in the big house while the rest of us till the fields (don't count on it, kiddo).  Threatening a highly-effective weather radar system as storms and similar events are getting worse (go argue causes over there in the corner where you won't annoy the grownups; it's happening no matter why) is another mud-hut move, right up there with eschewing vaccinations.  If you want you and yours to die early and often, go for it, but you don't get to inflict that stuff on the rest of us. 
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* Note that I do not make up or borrow amusing or dismissive nicknames for politicians, even the ones I heartily loathe.  Using silly monikers is foolish habit; you end up engaging with the caricature and not the person.  It's also symptomatic of a grade-school-level intellect, like chasing squeamish kids around with a booger stuck to the end of your finger.
 
† I have been through this before.  In fact, the peak power levels and operating frequencies of radar systems are scary -- but the reality is that they transmit in extremely short bursts, and the average power, roughly the heating power, is very low and falls off as the inverse square of distance.  Add in that the dish is moving and systems are interlocked such that when the dish stops, the transmitter is locked off, and.... Nope.  Radar is not now and has never been a death ray.  It won't even warm up your coffee unless you defeat the interlocks, stick the cup right in front of the dish and risk melting the transmitter.  The Brits would have liked to have a death ray, but when Watson-Watt went looking for one, all he found was a way to spot airplanes -- and clouds.  And all that did was help win the Battle of Britain for them.

Try Harder

     Commenting, it would be nice if some of you'd look up how paying tariffs actually works, and if you want to ring in Marxists in connection with them (for pity's sake, why?), you might want to look up what Marx et al had to say about tariffs (not much; he wasn't even sure if he was for 'em, against them, or neutral.)  Don't take anyone's word for this, and if you slept though the part of History class where they talked about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, don't try to BS your way through; you can look it up, too, and get the gist in about ten minutes.  (tl;dr: it didn't do what it was intended to do.  Surprise!  But go see.)

     Likewise, if you want to talk about public media, you might want to be sure you know the difference and relationship between CPB, PBS and NPR.  CPB doesn't produce programming or run a network; claiming "their stuff" is "biased" is nonsensical.

     I keep buying ducks and buying ducks, and some people insist on eating the feathers and then complaining about the taste.

Unrealistic

      - A few comments have come in that are obviously based on having read the headline and lede of my blog post and then changing channels to one of the far-Right opinion networks.  Hey, consume whatever media you like; an awful lot of it is junk food for your mind whatever the source.  But read my entire article: I'm a big fan of narrative twists, especially ones based on little-known or often-misunderstood facts.
     Do your homework.  Bring an understanding of what I wrote and actual facts to the table, or at least try for clever and amusing ridicule (I'll admit to a weakness for good writing), if you want to get your comment published.  Don't pretend it's fed.gov, western.civ as usual these days, because it's not. 

     - I am once again being accused of "TDS."  Nope, sorry, not the case; while I have openly acknowledged my distaste for the man since he first made a serious play for the Presidency, I was entirely willing to let him be just one more asshole President; we've had lots of those, several within my lifetime, and in the usual course of things, so what?  It's just one branch, it's just one term or at worst two.
     The insurrection of January 6, 2021 changed that; Donald Trump and his loose network of accomplices, patsies, fellow-travelers and enablers and the mob of thugs he raised revealed themselves as a genuine danger to the people and government of the United States of America on that day, and they have only become more of a danger since.
     I dislike Mr. Trump; he's the distilled essence of bad managers, comprised of ignorant self-importance, lies, probable grift and graft, bad faith and so on, but he's just one man.  The problem is Trumpism, which is an authoritarian, pseudo-populist movement with clear fascist tendencies; it is harmful to our system of ordered liberties and civil government, undermining the separation of powers between the three branches of the Federal government and abusing the rule of law.  The damage is severe, grave and ongoing.  One day, everyone will have always been against it, but coming back from Trumpism will be a long and painful process.

     - U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was on CBS's Face the Nation this morning, gleefully selling used cars with only slightly cracked engine blocks.  The worst clunker on the lot was a lie he repeated often, that when the U.S. levies a tariff, the exporting country pays it.  That's not how tariffs work and only a blink of thought reveals why: the U. S. government has no authority over exporters in other countries, or over the governments of those countries.
     Tariffs are collected from importers: U. S. companies, who will then raise prices, a process that rolls all the way downhill to you and me.  There is no magic source of tariff money; it comes out of our pockets.  The CBS News moderator did not push back on this; increasingly, news outlets accept the Administration's assertion that tariffs are somehow levied on other countries.  They are not.  They are a form of indirect sales tax, paid by consumers either at the checkout counter or in the form of lower wages from jobs at importing companies or firms downstream of them.

     I can't keep you from living in fantasyland, but I will point out when you are.  If that makes you itchy, write back -- but maybe lay off the lotus-eating for awhile when you do, because I'm not grading on the curve.

Bottom Line

     Events of the past week have made it clear: If you're still supporting Republican politicians at this point, you're in favor of authoritarianism and opposed to democracy.  There isn't any nuance left, and it's GOP politicians that have given it the old heave-ho.

     I'm not saying you've got to love Democrat politicians.  They're maintaining a very big tent, and depending on how you lean, you may find a few or many espousing policies you don't agree with.  But don't be running with the Republicans unless you think only one side should get a vote.

AI Seeps In

     My boss recently had occasion to use a packaged microcontroller; I leapfrogged from BASIC Stamps (nice little widgets, as long as what you're doing is amenable to BASIC and you don't mind being looked on as a tricycle rider in a world of road bikes) to Raspberry Pi pocket-sized computers and he started with them, but this project needed the step in between: an Arduino.*

     Natively, you write stuff for Arduinos using a C-like language and I never learned C.  There are serious syntax differences between that family and BASIC, something like code-switching between German and Japanese: lots of people are fluent in both but knowing one isn't much help in learning the other.  The boss didn't know the Arduino version but he's got a little C.

     So he used AI.  I don't know which one, probably Microsoft's, which is all over at work these days.  And what the hell: it wrote his code.  But it was A) full of cruft† and B) kept leaving stuff out, which he had to ask it to fix, an iterative process that would probably have had me flipping the table over.  When the code did what it needed to do, he went back and cleaned it up, finding the process remarkably instructive in the ways in which the language differed from the similar ones he knew.

     On one level, that's okay.  It got the job done, and he came away knowing more than he had.

     On another, he lost out: he didn't solve the main problems with his own skull sweat; he didn't have to mentally crunch through the code before sticking it in the machine and waiting for it to crash or get stuck in a loop.  He hasn't internalized that language the way you'd do actually writing in it.

     Good enough is, in fact, plenty good enough; you can be "jack of all trades and master of none," and as long as you keep it all working, it counts.  But a lack of mastery means the next job that uses those specific skills will be a little harder, and the temptation to let AI do the heavy lifting will still be there.  What's the harm?  --The harm is, the critical skills needed to clean up the result require a degree of mastery and it's an ephemeral skill: the less you use it, the worse you'll be at it.  It worries me.

     Engineers of the late 1960s and 70s in my business had a tendency to commit "combat engineering:" hack it together, tape it up, make it good enough to get through the next day or the next hour, and leave it until the next time it failed.  The previous generation had tended to "build for the ages," putting stuff in on the assumption that it would be in place for the next twenty years, and the solid-state revolution had blown that model up like a hand grenade in a watch factory.  Now technical plants kept getting smaller and simpler, and you were either buried in generations of older junk or putting in shiny new all-in-one devices, and they'd slop it together and keep moving, because next week, something else would be replacing that stuff anyway.

     We darned near lost the ability to do good work.  Who cared?  What did it matter?  --And then things slowed down.  Budgets shrank.  Equipment became software-based, and the same physical platform might persist through a decade of upgrades.  Staffs got small, the business lost its luster, and--  Suddenly, those mountains of messiness and poor documentation weren't how you kept forward momentum, they were in the way.  We had to start over; we had to rethink how we did things.  Documentation started to matter again; you were going to be stuck with the stuff for quite some time, and have less people to repair or replace it when it went wrong.

     We're still digging out from under the legacy of what worked in the past.  AI promises to be a source of equally clumsy messes, if we're not very, very careful how we use it -- and an equal atrophy of skills that will be needed again later.
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* I did the physical side of the project.  The Arduino and its various "shields," piggyback boards for specialized functions, are mounted and held together using 2 mm nuts and bolts, about the diameter of a pencil lead.  It's annoying stuff to work with and I ended up buying a couple of little "grabbers," after realizing my old fingers weren't up to the task and needle-nose pliers had a disconcerting tendency to send nuts, bolts and washers flying across the room. It seems unnecessarily small.
 
† A surprisingly subtle term, somewhat context-dependent, but it alludes to unnecessarily complex or convoluted programming; or to code that's been heavily edited and modified and tinkered with; or to the accumulation of unneeded, leftover junk in hardware or software; or to going about a software task in an awkward, old-fashioned way; or to some combination of this.  Think "baroque" or "rococo," but with endless lines of arcane commands.

Rabbit Hole

      This morning, Tam was looking at a Mars-lander parachute with a message encoded in the panels.  Over her shoulder, I thought it was a Russian Soyuz parachute, which have patterns used to check orientation and spin.

     That led me to look up Gray code, which is a binary code that only flips one bit per increment.  Unclear?  Look at it this way: real binary numbers, the way a guy with two fingers counts, run like this:
0000
0001
0010
0011
0100
0101
0110
0111
     The step from 0 to 1 and from 10 to 11 (or 2 to 3, as you and I count) only flip one bit; but going from 1 to 10 and from 11 to 100, two or more bits change state.

     Who cares, right? That's just how robots count anyway.  But if they count wrong, it makes trouble for us, and if the robot is counting how far we're turning a knob (or a steering wheel!), the encoder is a physical device, maybe a light source and a disc with digital numbers encoded as clear or opaque spots read by a phototransistor array -- and no matter how carefully the blame thing was made, the bits aren't going to change at the exact same time: the robot might miscount on the steps from 1 to 10, 11 to 100, and every one of them (a lot, as the count continues) that flips more than one bit at once. 

     We're smarter than robots; let's help 'em out -- and that's what Frank Gray did, putting the numbers in a different order:
0000
0001
0011
0010
0110
0111
0101
     Now only one bit changes for each step; the robot can't be confused when the count increments.  It's only got to track the single change.

     If you chart this Gray code order on a conventional-order number line, it turns into a funny set of hops of greater and smaller distances (see the Wikipedia page) -- and looking at it, I was struck by how closely it resembled one representation of output from the high-speed data encoding behind digital television.  Scrolling down, I discovered that's not a coincidence: because it results in more robust data transmission under noisy conditions, Gray coding works with forward error correction in digital modulation schemes, of which U.S. 8-VSB digital TV is one (albeit something of an ugly stepchild; the next-generation ATSC 3.0 uses a better method, called OFDM).

     And that's this morning's rabbit hole.  Frank Gray, who died in 1969, worked for Bell Labs, where he made many contributions to early television.  He's the father of the flying-spot scanner, which is the backwards of a TV camera: scan the thing you want to televise with a single bright dot of light, picking up up the reflected intensity with a single cheap photocell: the output is the same as the raw output of a TV camera tube. Slide scanners once used this, with a tiny TV picture tube as the moving light source, much cheaper than a video camera tube.  Gray was a graduate of Indiana's own Purdue University, with a degree in physics.

     (If you'd like to sink even deeper into the geekery, try Trellis encoded modulation, the trick that lets us push the Shannon limit for communications speeds over a noisy link -- and it turns out they're all noisy in the real world.  Digital TV uses Trellis encoding, too -- look, that's a whole lot of bits to pack into not very much space on the dial, static and all, and if they didn't mash it down very compactly, all the basketballs and footballs and hockey pucks would be jerkily-moving little squares, and the numbers on the players would barely be readable.  Oh, Claude Shannon?  That's a whole other bundle of brilliance, father of modern digital telecommunications and a first-rate juggler, too.  If you haven't seen The Bit Player, perhaps you should.)

A Mighty Own Goal

     As I write this, the U. S. Senate is poised to pull the rug out from under funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the next couple of years.  CPB gets less than 0.01% of the Federal budget.  Oh, it's big money for you, me or your local factories, but it's still a rounding error compared to military expenditures, highways or servicing the Federal debt.  The House has already approved this recission, and the Senate just had a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Vance (wearing his President of the Senate hat, and I do wish the Framers had come up with a different title for the job) to keep the legislation moving.

     CPB is a Federally-funded private non-profit corporation that in turn funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) -- largely indirectly.  By law, they're only allowed to spend five percent of their budget on themselves -- salaries, staplers, coffee machines.  65% of their budget goes directly to public radio and TV stations, everything from tiny, one-man stations deep in the Alaskan wilds to massive operations like the WGBH stations in Boston.  About 25% goes to production companies, which make programs for public radio and TV.

     The big public stations have multiple income streams -- those annoying pledge drives, strings of grants, endowments and "underwriting" sponsorships.  NPR has been a political football for decades, and set out some time ago to ease off the Federal spigot; around one percent (1%) their funding comes directly from CPB.  PBS has taken similar steps, but -- television's spendy -- are more reliant on CPB.  There's a catch, though; I'll get back to that.

     The Trump administration doesn't think NPR and PBS are being fair to them, and that's why they want to defund CPB.  I have not noticed this in actual NPR news segments, those five-minute blocks at the top and/or bottom of the hour; they're radio newscasts, strictly limited for time and focused on things that are, in fact, newsworthy.  While they're a little more relaxed than the ABC "Contemporary" news of my youth and more buttoned-down than NBC's hipper "The Source" a decade later, NPR matches any of the old classic top-of-the-hour radio news, CBS, NBC, Mutual or what ABC branded as "The American Information Network."*  The long-form stuff has a much greater proportion of opinion to information, and both NPR and PBS have had controversies.  While CPB's rules have some sober language about balance and perspective, the Fairness Doctrine is long gone, and nobody benefited more from the ending of it than the political Right.

     But NPR and PBS are not living off CPB dollars.  NPR outright sells ads on their streaming services (it's legal), albeit delivered in the same subdued manner as their over-the-air underwriting announcements.  Nope, the CPB cuts hit local stations.  This does loop back around, and there's the catch: in the indirect way networks operate in the U. S., member stations pay the networks, and between a quarter and a third of the funding for NPR and PBS comes from membership and programming fees those stations pay.  The big stations will tighten their belts, lay off janitors and newspeople, and keep on keeping on; they'll probably drop some programs, too.  But those tiny little stations, in Alaska or Montana or wherever, in backwater towns where the commercial AM station went dark and the FM got moved to the nearest sizable city?  Their local NPR station, over at the State School of Cow Mining (etc.), is the only source of local news and weather warnings, and it's got a staff of three, or two, or one: they don't have any janitors to lay off.  Those stations rely on CPB money to meet payroll, rent tower space and pay the power bill, and when it goes away--  Hey, maybe the Cow-Mining College or the Town Board will kick in a few more bucks, for old time's sake -- if they can afford it.  And if not?  Well, gee.  Better buy a NOAA weather radio, if you can pick up one of their low-power stations. (Kinda thin in some states.)

     Those small towns, those rural spaces, they're not generally hotbeds of big-city liberalism, and neither are their radio stations.  They're red spots on red maps -- and they'll be hardest hit. 

     The CPB cuts are an own goal.  NPR and PBS stations -- the survivors -- will have less reason to toe the Federal government's line, and more reason to be fractious.  
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* Speaking of money and news -- post WW II, U.S. radio networks were, by law, singular.  NBC had previously operated multiple networks, with NBC Red and NBC Blue at the forefront; they had to spin off Blue, which became ABC.  ABC started out in fourth place, behind NBC, CBS and Mutual -- Blue network had always been something of a "second string" network for NBC.  By the late 1960s, with radio losing badly to television, ABC came up with a way around the law, becoming not one but four radio news services over the same physical network: they offered different newscasts around the hour, each one suited to a different radio format; Information at the top of the hour, very conventional radio news suitable for middle-of-the road and all-news formats; FM and Entertainment at :15 (or :45, it's been awhile) and half-past the hour, both more relaxed and quiet, and Contemporary, available as a fast-paced two-minute newscast at ten til the hour and a five-minute newscast that ran from :55 to the top of the hour.  If it sounds a little crazy, it was -- but it meant ABC could have as many as four stations in a given town all carrying an ABC newscast, with lovely, paid ABC commercials in each one; and it meant ABC offered specialized news products the other three networks did not.  To my larger point, the actual content of these newscasts was almost identical: news is news, war, famine and natural disaster, and you got largely the same on-the-scene soundbites from all four versions.  The style of delivery differed; the focus varied slightly, especially when it came to celebrity items.

"...Just Ignore The Troubling Politics..."

     I've gotten that advice in comments quite a lot.  Oh, if only I could!  The problem is, politics won't ignore me.

     The United States was supposed to be a place where you didn't have to worry about the Federal government: it was supposed to be inherently stable, in ways that "Westminster" parliamentary democracies weren't.  It was intended to find the centerline in American politics, compromising between the interests of the states as polities and the people as a whole.  It was supposed to have limited, enumerated powers, with inherently fair courts based on law and not politics.  It was supposed to respect individual rights, and not play favorites to any group or creed.  We were a nation friendly to innovation in science, technology -- and ways of getting along with one another.  No majority held forever; the Presidency, House and Senate rotated regularly from one party to the other, often out of step with one another.  We were a nation with open arms.  A lot of that was more aspiration than reality, but the aspiration existed and was held up as a worthy goal.

     We've got an administration in place that doesn't buy any of that old-fashioned bunk.  They've got friends to reward and enemies to scourge.  They're hamstringing science and medicine in the service of politics -- and bending politics to serve religion.  The United States is going to come out of this poorer, sicker and less capable: that's what's happens when you defund universities, slash healthcare and medical research, set up hospitals to close, crash the economy with tariffs and uncertainty, shrink the Federal workforce in key service programs and let religion overrule scientific conclusions.

     It's a revolt of ignorant, opinionated, unqualified middle-managers, pushed to prominence by pressure from below and a moribund, senescent vacuum above.  I can't ignore it; they're hacking away at the foundations of my future and not just in the broad, society-wide sense: my retirement was predicated on Social Security remaining solvent for another decade and the economy staying relatively stable.  Both of those things are no longer true.

     The other thing I get told is, "Your side lost, get over it."  But the Democrats were never my side.  I was closer to the more centrist Republicans, tolerant people who didn't want cultural change to scare the horses and thought budgets should balance (oh boy, remember when the GOP talked big about eliminating the deficit? They could give a rat's ass now).  Now that the Republicans have embraced authoritarianism, xenophobia, vast expansion of Presidential power, so-called "Christian Nationalism" and conspiracy theories, the Democrats are the only remaining party that values our republic; they're the only party left with much variation among their elected officials, the only party that pays even a little attention to reality.  Don't think that doesn't gall me!  Most of my life, I could rely on the Dems to be the party floating zany notions; now I have to open my browser and learn Republicans in Florida have outlawed "chemtrails" and banned any efforts to control the increasingly-violent weather.  In a contest to be the craziest major party, the GOP has a commanding lead -- one that will carry the country right over a cliff unless we are wise and very, very lucky.

     It's as safe to ignore politics at present as it is to ignore storm sirens.  Better head to high ground or the root cellar -- and better still if you know which one to choose. 

Fighting A Bug Or The Price Of Age?

     Saturday was a struggle.  My back's been hurting, and by midday Saturday, I had a stomach ache and I was feeling cold.  I kept after my weekend chores but by supper time, my hands were like ice and I was layering on clothes despite the thermostat being set to 73°F.  My knee, elbows and knuckles were aching.

     I went to bed early and ended up adding sweat pants and a T-shirt to my summer-weight nightgown.  After an hour, I put a blanket in top of the covers.  I kept waking up chilled and finally turned the thermostat up a degree.

     Over the course of a long night, my temperature slowly warmed.   I shed covers and layers, and other than my still-sore lower back, I was comfortable with the usual amount of clothing and bedding by cat-feeding time.  I went back to bed and slept for another couple of hours.

     Now I'm down to a sore back and hurting knees.  The knees are just part of the background noise these days; they're not going to get better.

     Was I fighting a bug?  There's a version of the flu making the rounds at work; I got a flu shot. but a near-miss on immunity can sometimes result in being only a little sick while your immune system goes after the virus. 

     Or did I overdo things last week?  There are a couple of power supplies in the widget I'm removing that are essentially overgrown "floor warts," 470-pound behemoths that lurk in the bottom of the amplifier cabinet, turning three-phase 208-Volt AC into 50 Volts at over 100 Amps, a yard long and about a foot square in cross-section.  A pair of smallish steel wheels slightly offset from the center of balance make it possible to move them: you grab a handle bolted to a transformer frame, push down to get the slightly heavier end off the floor, and heave to set the thing rolling.  It's still got all the inertia of 470 pounds, but roller-bearing axles on the wheels and rubber-soled shoes on me go a long way towards getting it to move.  There are a couple of tiny "speed bumps" to cross, trim on the edges of an old wiring-trough cover, so you have to acquire enough speed to keep it the thing from hanging up.  --And all that is done bent way over, hanging onto the handle and keeping the power supply balanced.  It's a recipe for back strain.

     All I can do is rest up and hope to recover, whatever it was.  Moving those power supplies is probably the worst part of my present project, and I made sure to leave them in what I hope will be their long-term storage location.

On Monday

     It looks like I'll need to go in early next Monday: the last pieces will be arriving for the replacement for a major device that has been an albatross around my neck for most of the past fifteen years.

     It's a transmitter.  The one on the air has to run at full throttle -- and a little more -- to make 100% power. When it first went on, the assigned power was lower, and it was plenty big.  The company lawyers went to work and got the numbers raised, hooray!  But it would barely achieve them.  No worries -- we'd built the "new" digital transmitter from bits and bobs of a massive solid-state analog transmitter and there was a lot left over: we had only used three of the seven big power amplifiers (call it ten thousand Watts per each).  Of course, it would need a few more parts from the manufacturer to add a couple more back in, and some of those parts were very expensive.  As in capital budget level: your department's got to put in for it in advance, and make a good case for it, and....

     Transmitters might be a critical component in my line of work, but unless they go badly wrong, they're invisible -- almost literally; years go by when the Facilities supervisor and I are the only people who visit ours.  Engineering's capital budget includes all the big, shiny, fancy technology, and all that stuff chases the technology curve, especially since everything went digital.  It requires frequent replacement.  Budgets enter the process deliberately inflated: the Corporate accountants will cut.

     The parts to make the transmitter more powerful kept getting cut from the budget.  Wasn't it working well enough now?

     It reached the point where it required constant adjustment, almost like the old vacuum-tube transmitters.  The power transistors it uses have a correlation between gain and temperature that is very steep, and unless there's plenty of power in reserve, the output varies significantly with room temperature; since it is air-cooled, in a "closed-loop" system, and the amount of excess heat it produces depends on power output, it forms an unstable system with the air-conditioning, as heat load and cooling capacity chase after each other.  At 60 to 65°F, it's about as stable as it gets, but that's not a great operating point for the cooling units: they tend to freeze up.  And things got worse.  There are "MMICs," monolithic microwave integrated circuits, in the RF signal path, and early ones tended to suffer "gain fade" over time: very slowly, they produce less output for a given input, and eventually, it won't go as high as it used to.  The early ones aren't being made any more; I can't just screw a new one in the socket like replacing a light bulb.

     It was time to add those extra amplifiers back.  Every year, I'd been getting a new quote; every year, my department head had been putting it in budget requests, and every year, shinier and more urgent things had crowded it out.  I went to the manufacturer to update the quote.  Too late.  "Oh, that equipment's not made any more.  We still stock repair parts, but the big items you need are no longer available."

     My employer replaced the cooling system; I came up with ways to scrape every last bit of reserve gain left, and finally got the transmitter back into a stable operating range.  But it is a precarious balance, and the next big decline, or the one after it, will be the last.

     We've got a replacement.  It's not brand-new; ongoing shuffling-around freed up a transmitter only a year old, retunable to our range.  I've had most of it for months.  The parts that need to be retuned, critical items of some size, are scheduled to arrive Monday.

     Installation has yet to be scheduled, but expectations are it will be some time this year.  Once it's up and running, I'll look less essential to the accountants, but having a transmitter that isn't straining to make power will be a big relief. 

Anger

     One of the things I have difficulty coming to terms with is how angry I am.  Not that Mr. Trump won; I don't expect to like Presidents.  It's a lousy job and it attracts flawed men.  No, I'm angry he won after promising, however coyly, chaos and revenge; I'm angry at the shocking extent of damage the Trump administration and a complicit Congress have done and are continuing to do to the Federal government, public discourse and the "civil contract" underlying American society.  I'm furious at opposition politicians, most of whom muster only Michael Dukakis-level responses, a kind of monotone, "Why yes I am shocked, quite shocked, at all this."  I'm furious at a complacent public, watching the rise of a masked secret police force unaccountable to local officials with very little protest -- after all, they're not coming after citizens, are they?  Indeed, they are not -- not yet.  But as President Trump has remarked on more than one occasion, "Homegrowns are next."

     Authoritarianism needs a steady stream of scapegoats.  Immigrants.  Protestors.  Racial, religious and sexual minorities.  Political opponents.  Earlier this month, the President spent time at an Independence Day rally, normally an occasion to stress national unity, proclaiming how much he dislikes -- hates -- Democrats.

     The wheels are coming off.  Checks and balances are being circumvented or undermined.  Executive authority expands daily, while Congress and the courts enable it or simply look on in silence.  History shows how this trend ends, especially if it is not stopped early, and it's not a good place.

We're In The Hands Of Fools

     I'm starting to see news stories -- you know, the kind with actual news about things that are actually happened, supported by interviews with the people to whom they are happening, genuine primary sources -- about shortages of agricultural workers: the people who set cows up for milking, harvest fruits and vegetables, work in meat-processing plants.  There's a lot of "touch labor," hands-on work, in that and it doesn't pay well.  Nor is it entirely unskilled.  The Trump administration and their Republican stooges in Congress keep claiming that those food supply jobs will be filled by former basement-dwelling shirkers, newly kicked off Federal assistance.  Even if they do exist in sufficient numbers (unlikely), I'm not at all sure I want my tomatoes picked and beef slaughtered, cleaned and cut by under-achieving potheads, filled with resentment at being yanked away from their gaming consoles; they're unlikely to be as diligent as the guy working on a temporary permit -- or despite the lack of one.

     Meanwhile, tariff madness continues: they're on again!  Or off again!  Or put off!  "90 deals in 90 days" has become two deals, not especially good ones, with the UK and Vietnam, and a series of not entirely coherent letters sent to world leaders (scroll down to read the original releases on Truth Social).  The deadline to implement most of the higher tariffs has been pushed back yet again.  --And remember, they're assessed on the importer, not the exporter: Uncle Sam has no power to make companies in other countries ante up.  The higher rates are far beyond what any company can be expected to pay without charging more when they sell the goods, and those high prices will roll downhill to you and me.

     But don't worry, Republicans in government have got their eyes firmly on the prize!  Why, just the other month, Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith warned on Facebook, "PRIDE MONTH ALERT: The Rainbow Beast Is Coming For Your Kids!" (link for proof.)  He expanded his, er, thoughts on a podcast, saying in part, "Back in ancient Israel, there was a goddess, her name was Ishtar, and she was the goddess of transgenderism, a gender-warping goddess. She was a homosexual goddess.[...] And she was represented by rainbows in her eyes. Anytime you saw her, you'd see rainbows. And it's like, wow, this is the same demonic playbook just playing out all over again."  This is a fear-mongering mish-mash with no Biblical basis and barely any footing in ancient history. Ishtar/Inanna was a Mesopotamian goddess roughly analogous to the Greek Athena, not strongly associated with rainbows (she "spans the sky like a rainbow" in one myth, seeking a lost associate).  Presumably, the Israelites encountered the Mesopotamian pantheon during their captivity/exile in Babylon, but there's no evidence they brought Ishtar home (she is not conflated at all with earlier Asherah poles and the associated goddess of motherhood, for instance).

     Elsewhere, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has weighed in on Governor Braun's Executive Order from earlier in the year, defining "sex" in the state as whatever a person was believed to be at birth,* echoing a similar Federal EO.  Indiana's being sued by the ACLU over it and the Attorney General recently issued a news release that any change to Indiana birth certificates (a process already banned by the Governor's EO) would be "falsification of records," lining up innocent clerks with possible felony charges for complying with court orders.

     So, the economy's headed over a cliff, we're likely to start seeing higher grocery prices and even food shortages (not counting eggs, already scrambled by bird flu) before Thanksgiving, and the GOP is making sure...we're safe from rainbows and congruent IDs?

     Boy, what a relief.  Who cares about a depression, as long as those multi-colored demons are kept at bay!  Bonus: an Indianapolis church thinks our government isn't doing enough: the church says they ought to be executing LGBT people.

     We're all in the hands of murderous fools.  As Roberts Rules of Order reminds us, silence is consent, and I'm not agreeing to this kind of craziness.  Look, I want people to dress modestly and keep their windowshades down, but I'm not the boss of them, their tattoos, or what consenting adult(s) they fall in love with.
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* Leaving physically intersex people, a group only slightly less common than natural redheads, at the mercy of the attending physician's best guess.  Sure hope they got it right!

"It's All About Salemanship!"

     Elsewhere on social media, a writer told the tale of doing a book-signing, and having a guy come up and ask why he ought to buy that writer's book, in a friendly, convince-me kind of way.

     It's the wrong question, asked of the wrong person.  The author can tell you what their book is about, who the major characters are, and perhaps even why they wrote the book.  They can't tell you why you should buy it and read it.  Only you can.

     To put it another way: "You have clearly mistaken literature for vacuum cleaners.  That's not how books work.  Pick it up, read a few pages.  Does it speak to you?  If not, put it down, go to the shelves and try one of the thousands of other books."

     The purpose of sales is to convince you to make a choice between essentially identical items -- Hoover or Electrolux, Camels or Luckies, MickeyD's or Burger Thing.  Books are not essentially identical, at least good ones aren't, and what appeals to one reader may leave another reader cold.  Flashy covers, blurbs, promotions and yes, even book signings notwithstanding, it's the reader who works out why they ought to buy a particular book.

Whining

     I woke up with a cataclysmic headache, grumped and stumbled my way through the dishes I put off last night, and, having taken an OTC analgesic, I'm sitting in anticipation of eventual relief.

     Why'd I put off the dishes?  There hangs a tale.  Last night, I heated up some Hoppin' John for supper;* I'd planned to add a little canned corn, but I'd used it up and not restocked.  A big can of fire-roasted chilis, simmered in beef broth, was awaiting the defrosted gallon-sized freezer bag of leftovers.  --A bag that slipped in my hands between microwave and stove, and spilled about a quarter of the contents on the stovetop, my legs, my sandals and the floor.  This mess became a short-term emergency, as I tried to clean it up without tracking the mess any further and Tam corralled the cats: bag contents into the big stewpot, bag in the sink, a long reach to the paper towel and a very slow process of cleaning up without stepping in it.  There were Words.  Dinner was delayed.

     We watched an episode of Murderbot (the bot in question is not murderous, per se, but...well, it's a long story and Martha Wells tells it better than I could hope to) and had little ice cream cups as a treat, after which Tam took out the kitchen trash and remarked, "It's about to pour down rain out there."

     It seemed to me that was important, but I couldn't remember why.  I cleaned up the dishes and put the leftover Hoppin' John into a marked freezer bag, to freeze now and discard later.  Outside, the skies broke and it started to rain.  Looking out the back window after putting the bag into the lowest drawer of the freezer, I noticed...the uncovered grill, left from roasting hot dogs and corn on the cob the previous night!

     Yeah, that would be why the rain mattered.  I dashed out and got the cover (a large heavy-duty trash bag) over the grill as the rain proceeded to come down in sheets and bucket-loads, soaking me to the skin.

     Despite the heat, I was thoroughly chilled.  And pretty well over my limit of excursions and alarums for the evening.  Back indoors, I dried off, changed into my nightgown and went to bed, leaving the dishes for later, a problem for Future Bobbi.
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* I typed "dinner," which was the big evening meal in my childhood home, then went back and changed it to "supper."  For many people, "dinner" is the midday meal.  And yes, we called it "Sunday dinner," the nice meal with rolls, salad, mashed potatoes, a side vegetable and some centerpiece meat enjoyed on the second-best china after church.  But the rest of the week, dinner was what you had before TV-watching and bedtime.  (If you were wondering, the best china -- and "the good silver" -- was only for Thanksgiving and Easter, possibly Christmas.  As an adult, I have one set of "china."  I was determined to not have any once-a-year frippery; so instead, I have what's left of the square pink Melmac everyday dinnerware of my childhood, stacked in a cabinet and never used.)  

Bots And Bots

     Blog traffic is way up -- and it's all machines.  I'm not here to feed machines.  So I took the weekend off.

     Need to figure out a way to bollix 'em.

Music For The Day

      Aaron Copland somehow managed to put the best fireworks into music, an astonishing feat even with the score in front of you, up-close magic for brass and percussion.

A Waste Of Ink And Electrons

     Over the last two days, news media have made very very sure -- to the point of program interrupting news bulletins for one of 'em -- that I was aware how the criminal trial of Sean "I have an enormous number of nicknames" Combs came out, and that another group of Men With A Theory are launching a brand new search for the remains of Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their airplane.

     Precisely why I should be concerned about the unsavory and at least partially criminal sex life of a celebrity -- a thing as statistically predictable as the sun rising in the east for as long as there have been celebrities -- and one more search for a lost aviator (she's dead, guys, and so is he) is a mystery to me.  There's a huge, tragic mess in Gaza, Iran may or may not presently have a viable nuclear weapons program,* U. S. domestic politics are getting crazier, our government is building straight-up concentration camps and treating one of the most outrageous examples as a no-humans-involved occasion for levity and Congress is in the process of pushing through a massively unpopular bill that is certain to have far-reaching effects, but I need to be told about the titillating details of what the rich and famous get up to behind closed doors, and that the sons and grandsons of the same kinds of men who misplaced her are going to go digging for whatever's left of a famous aviator and her slightly less famous crewman?

     No.  I do not.  There's actual serious grownup news to be reported and it would be damned nice if they'd act like it.

     I'm not holding my breath.
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* Fission, fusion, or--  One of the things that frets me is that a desperate and fanatical government with a smashed-up atom-bomb program probably still has loads and loads of nasty stuff with a long half-life, and a dusting of that on enemy territory does both immediate and lasting harm.  Dust and wind being what they are, most nations won't risk the fallout (other than as an add-on oopsie to actual nuclear war, at least).  Iran, however, is not most nations, and they have a history of funding groups even more heedless of consequences.

The Big Fugly

     I admit it.  I've been watching the progress of the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" through Congress with bated breath and growing horror.

     It's an exercise in geeking, in the flexing of Presidential authority expressed as the "Leader Principle:* can the Executive chivvy both houses of Congress into biting off the head of a live chicken? 

     So far, the answer is yes, barely.  For both Dems and the GOP, there's a lot not to like in this bill, from the predictable scale-back (and outright elimination) of Federal services and funding predictably opposed by Democrats to massive increases in Federal spending and a mushrooming of the Federal debt and deficit that ought to give pause to any red-blooded Republican -- but only a handful of fiscal hawks on that side of the aisle appear to have noticed.  By shoving millions of voters off Medicare, it has produced a ticking time-bomb for mid-term elections, and many of the more obscure provisions of this over-900-page monster are likely to have similar effects on voters and their votes.

     The Senate-amended bill has now lurched back to the House, where the earlier version passed by a narrow margin.  Cut in places the junior body had expanded it, puffed up where they had trimmed, it's an open question if it's still got the votes -- but the Chief Executive, who is by explicit Constitutional structure not the boss of them, is cracking the whip just offstage, and Speaker Johnson is only too happy to perform on command.  Will his fractious body of Representatives go along?

     I'd like to tell you no.  I'd like to say they're on the whole too proud and too committed to their various individual principles to bend the knee.  But I doubt that's true.  Heads in the hog trough, a hand out for handouts and only too aware of Mr. Trump's willingness to primary any Congressperson who won't bend to his will, the House may squeal but I have little confidence enough of them will stand fast.

     The Legislative Branch is choosing to sow the wind.  The midterm results are likely to blow -- if the economy or voter reaction doesn't turn stormy even earlier.
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* The term sounds a lot zippier in the original German.

At A Loss For Words

     Between Friday's batch of Supreme Court decisions and the likely passage of the unpopular, so-called "Big Beautiful Bill," I'm not sure what to say.  They amount to Enabling Acts for authoritarianism, an accretion of power to the office of the President that bodes only ill for the American experiment in self-government.

     Many of the people I most expected to react negatively to such a development are instead cheering it on.  I've been treated to amazingly unmoored nonsense in unpublished comments, notions not just unsupported by but refuted by observable events.

     Republican politicians, the President in particular, are behaving as if they will never leave office, as if their party will always be in the majority.  In a functioning Constitutional democracy (using the latter term loosely), turnover is likely; any power one party has granted to officeholders will be available to their successors, even if they're from a different party.  The conclusion is obvious.

     Most members of the House and Senate appear to be quite comfortable with this state of affairs, nearly every Republican and an apparent plurality if not outright majority of Democrats.  Polls of likely voters show the opposite.  You'd think that would be a warning flag for men and women who depend on winning open elections, and yet their behavior indicates it is not.  Once again, the conclusion's clear.

     I don't know what to say.  I've been jumping up and down, pointing out storm clouds on the horizon, lightning, walls of rain and tornado funnels, and a lot of people just smile and tell me we ain't never been wiped off the map before, so why worry now?  Congress is getting rich playing the stock market while the President is selling tchotchkes and memecoins and U.S. citizenship, playing with tariffs like a child smashing toy trains; the Administration is back to insisting on "official truth" at odds with objective reality and the Constitution is slowly crumbling under the weight of "Christian Nationalism," authoritarianism and kleptocracy.  The people who ought to care about it and are in a position to take immediate action, judges and legislators, are smiling and nodding like a heroin addict right after a big hit.

     I am without hope for our country's future.

Buckle Up

     It looks like we're in for a bumpy ride.

The Crazy Never Stops

     The Federal lunacy and cruelty is too much to keep up with, from yanking funding from a program to vaccinate children to intramural fights over the actual impact of bomb raids on Iranian nuclear facilities.  It's an ongoing "shock and awe" campaign of fucknettery, grift, Social Darwinism and junk science, ultimately self-defeating.  The question is not if it will fall apart under its own disconnection from reality and ramshackle improvisation but when -- and how hard it will hit.

     Who it will hit is a certainty, or rather, who it won't hit: the rich are safe; inside-dealing Congresspersons are safe.  And I'm not talking about the guy in your town who owns a string of fast-food franchises and buys a new Benz every year; as far as the top one or two or even five percent are concerned, he's exactly the same as clock-punchers like you and me.  And we'll be left carrying the weight when things go off the rails, our retirement and Social Security looted (five years and counting until it starts to ramp down, and not gently), Medicare hacked down to whatever minimum, health research stymied, stunted and strangled a-borning.  The "beautiful people" will float secure in beauty; the rest of us are left picking up their mess.

     Right now, it's like watching the fall of a basket of eggs dropped from a great height: it will hit; they will break.  The only question is precisely when and how far the raw egg will splash -- and how badly they've rotted on the way down.

Under The Heat Dome

     Call it climate, call it weather: either way, there's broad agreement that this extremely hot weather is unpleasant.  So far, the central air-conditioning at Roseholme Cottage has kept up; I keep the dehumidifier going in the basement and manage the temperature setting on the main floor by how much condensation appears on the longest and most convoluted duct in the basement.  73° to 75°F keeps everything manageable and comfortable.

     My car's climate control barely copes.  The system is low on working fluid and I should get it into the shop, but it's not too bad, yet.

     The kicker is the building at what I call the North Campus.  The equipment up there is happiest between 60° and 65°F and it moves a lot of air.  A zip-up hoodie over a T-shirt is barely enough, and by the time my day ends, the oppressive heat outside is something of a relief for at least the first half-hour.  Going from one extreme to the other plays merry hell with my sinuses, and while it's definitely a "first world problem," it's a problem nevertheless.

     By the weekend, the prediction is that the worst will have passed, for now.  But if it's getting this hot in June, what's August going to be like?

     Call it weather; call it climate.  Either way, it's as real as a sledge hammer.  And there's no dodging the blow.

Cease Fi-- Incoming!

     In the wake of the U.S. bombing of several nuclear-work sites in Iran, there was supposed to be a cease-fire between Iran and Israel.  The President of the U.S. said so.

     Their militaries don't appear to have gotten the message.  I don't know if their governments have.  Each is accusing the other of going back on the agreement.

     I'm not chortling at Mr. Trump's disappointment (he was chiding the Israelis on social media not long ago).  I'm certainly not cheering on the conflict; it is messy, with missiles, bombs and drones striking civilians along with their (presumed) military targets, in a region already filled with tragedy.

     Who ever calmed a hornet's nest by shaking it?

It's Alan Turing's Birthday

     It's Turing's birthday, a day to remember that the brilliant mathematician and computer theorist was an enormous part of the UK's early lead in developing computers -- until he ran afoul of laws criminalizing private sexual behavior.  Turing was gay, at a time when same-sex acts were illegal, and after arrest, trial and conviction, he lost his security clearance and was effectively unemployable in cutting-edge work.  Subjected to harsh and unusual treatment that sidelined his solo efforts, he is believed to have committed suicide.

     Approve, disapprove or ignore his affectional leanings as you wish, but bear in mind the cost to free individuals and to society in general when prejudice is made law.

"Don't Put It In The Paper That I Got Us Into A War"

      The United States of America both is and is not presently at war with Iran.  If you ask the Administration, someone like, oh, Vice-President James David Vance,* you'll hear that of course the U.S. isn't at war with Iran, only with Iran's nuclear-bomb program.

     The thing about war is that the other side gets a vote.  Flip it around; say the Royal Theocratic People's Republic of X†, no, Z‡, er, Y decided that American nuclear weapons were a clear and present danger and by dint of either remarkable aerospace engineering or a sabotage organization that leaves SOE in the dust, levels Pantex.  Downwind of that event, would you suppose our government might consider the act tantamount to a declaration of war?

     It's likely that the Trump Administration's avoidance of calling it an actual war is an effort to dodge having to go to Congress for retroactive permission, hat in hand and bearing a "What I Did With The Military This Summer" essay as called for in §1543 of the War Powers Resolution (U. S. Code Title 50, Chapter 33) -- and the problem with that is, despite the title, the Resolution doesn't give a damn if it's called a war or not; Congress gets involved "in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced— (1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances; (2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, [...] the President shall submit within 48 hours to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President pro tempore of the Senate a report, in writing, setting forth— (A) the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces; (B) the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and (C) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement."

     Only Congress has the power to declare war, and as far as Congress is concerned, only they get to decide to wage warlike activities.  They've been in the habit of passing legislation that amounts to an advance pass for the Executive Branch to get into specific fights, but even then, they want to have just enough engagement to claim credit if it works out okay -- and the Constitution gave them the responsibility.

     It's a tissue-paper barrier, one that only holds up as long as everyone plays by the rules.  "Playing by the rules" has not been a hallmark of the Trump Administration.  Nevertheless, it is there and Congress isn't liking the taste of it.

     Governments in general have a fondness for short, victorious wars.  Armed conflicts are real morale-boosters.  Governments also have a well-established history of misjudging the duration of such wars and the likelihood of success, and governments that put the decision-making for wars in the hands of one man have been especially bad at this.  Mr. Trump has got his war, however much reluctance his Executive Branch has to call it one, and we'll be finding out how that goes.  Congress has issues of its own to figure out, having to do with Separation of Powers and being treated with caviler disregard -- and we'll be finding out about that right along with them, too.

     The issue is a splitter, hawks and "Christian Nationalists" on the pro-war side (the latter are thrilled by the prospect of "war in the Holy Land"), "America First" isolationists opposed, proceduralists (sincere and opportunistic alike) among the Democrats and Republicans appalled at the manner in which the action was initiated. 

     Interesting times.  I loathe living in interesting times.  Couldn't we have a few decades of dull muddling-though instead?
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* His present chosen name, changed first from James Donald Bowman as assigned at birth and most recently, informally, styled as "JD Vance."
 
† A little bird twittered No.
 
‡ And likewise, a bear.

Fascists, Begone!

     A recent news story neatly encapsulates the present moment: a student at the University of Florida's law school wrote a paper for one of his classes arguing the U. S. Constitution was intended by the framers to apply only to white people, and only they should be allowed to vote -- and the Trump-nominated judge who taught the class awarded him top marks for it.

     The student had expressed similar views in the past, writing that non-white people should be given a decade to leave the country and that naturalized aliens were never supposed to be more than second-class citizens.  The University stood on viewpoint neutrality and free-speech rights, correctly pointing out that people have a right to speak their minds.  What finally got him in trouble was a posting on the former Twitter, saying Jews must be abolished "by any means necessary."  That resulted in his being suspended and barred from the campus, and increased police patrols in the area; the student sued and the case will work its way through the courts.  (One key issue is the difference between an abstract "should" and a concrete "must."  Holding outrageous opinions is one thing; advocating criminal action is very much another.)

     That's Trumpism in a nutshell: push to the limits, reward prejudice, and then see how much farther they can go.  This is just one example but the pattern is repeated over and over, and the people pushing the hardest often embrace the idea of violence even if they do not take action themselves --  the Florida law student wrote that if U.S. courts failed to create white rule, the matter would be resolved "not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword." Whatever a society rewards, it gets more of. This is what Trumpism rewards.

     This not what American society should reward.  That's not a matter for polite debate over tea and cookies, it's a core value.

A What, Now?

     A local radio newsperson just told me over the air that the storms that knocked out my electricity the day before yesterday -- and that of hundreds of thousands of other people along their track -- also spawned "Eee Eff Oh" tornadoes.

     Tell me you're reading copy in a "book" font like Times New Roman without telling me you're reading Times New Roman.  Old-time paper wirecopy from an Extel dot-matrix printer or an older Teletype Model 15* had a dot in the center of the zero or a slash through it, preventing confusion between "0" and "o" in the all-capital-letter output.  So, too, did some computer fonts.  Local newspeople, if they were leaving a story for someone else to read, were careful about making the distinction when they typed it up.  "Orator" was a popular typewriter font (especially in television), simple and clear.

     But it's 2025.  Nobody (well, hardly anyone) prints this stuff out and the "wire machine" is not consuming several reams of fanfold paper a day: there's no reason not to spell it out.  Those E F zero tornadoes can be just that.

     A person reading news copy has enough to do.  (Try it sometimes.  Don't go too fast!  And remember, you've got to make the sentences make linear sense using only intonation and pacing.)  These days, they're scrolling through their script with a hand or foot controller, reading it a line or more ahead if they've been in the business longer than a few weeks; in TV, they're taking it from the camera-front prompter while a producer talks in their ear and in radio, they're running their own levels, watching the clock so they don't get steamrollered by the next ad or program and making sure all the sound bites are ready.  Scoping out a "0" from an "o" (even if you typed it yourself) doesn't need to be among the tasks.
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* Mechanical teletypes made the most wonderful rumbling clatter, a sound that meant "news" to several generations; stations used to hang a microphone in the wire-machine closet and run the sound at low level under newscasts, or to at least under the opening.  Those mics were still there when the cheaper, simpler dot-matrix printers replaced the Model 15 -- and made a sound like tiny robot farts as they printed.  Somehow that noise never caught on.  

Juneteenth

     Today is Juneteenth, the day the last group of enslaved Americans of African descent learned they were slaves no more.

     Our country fought a bloody war over a matter that most major countries had already ended through legislation.  The UK ran well ahead of us in this effort, and while many people celebrate this day -- and it should indeed be celebrated -- it's also a good day to remember that doing the right thing is not always easy, quick or painless, and we're not always in the lead.  History is not a perfect, smooth upward curve. 

In The Dark

      A string of bad thunderstorms rolled across Indiana late yesterday afternoon, catching me on a break at a bookstore near work.  About five o'clock, the power went out.

     Work has a generator and an automatic transfer switch.  The bookstore, not so much.  The traffic lights, not so much.

     I was near the North Campus, where various street projects have snarled the already-busy traffic.  From the bookstore, I could see the intersection I'd need to cross to get back, a six-crossing-six (counting left turn lanes) with a two-block backup in at least two directions.  The intersection kept jamming up, minor fender-benders and gridlocks as drivers tried to sort out how to accommodate the left-turn lanes when a dead stoplight defaults for a four-way stop.  In theory, right-of-way precesses around the intersection counterclockwise, a system the works well enough when a pair of two-lane roads meet.  If no one is turning left, it often devolves into taking turns, alternating the north-south and east-west (etc.) streets.  The multi-lane version with left-turn lanes can work that way, too, but it's complicated and all it takes is one driver getting out of sync or in a hurry to bollix the whole thing.

     So I waited, texting Tam at home, nearly seven miles away: "STAYING SAFE?"
Tam: "OK.  POWER IS OUT HERE."  That was about 5:15.  I checked the power and light company's outage map, and they showed small outages everywhere, with a few bigger ones indicated.

     By six o'clock, power was still out and the bookstore decided to close.  They let the remaining customers put our selections on hold and gently shooed us out.  The big intersection was still a mess.  The store is in a large strip center and I scouted around the parking lot in my car: the way to the south, where the street narrows to a lane each direction, was moving pretty well, so I took it, aiming home.  A mile down the road, the traffic light was out, and churning through it was slow.  Two miles on, the light was working, and I was able to turn.  Next stoplight was out, but with lighter traffic, going smoothly.  From there on, including crossing Meridian Street, a major north-south artery, all the traffic lights were okay, businesses open, houses lit up -- until I got to my neighborhood.

     I drove down in front of my house.  The porch light was out: no power.  That meant the garage door opener would be out, so I parked in front and went in.  I had leftovers in the freezer, and with a gas range, that meant it was time to use them up.  Not too long after I arrived, there was an ugly gazonking noise from the direction of the substation a few block away, surely a sign of progress.  I made dinner and Tam and I watched the little battery TV in the kitchen while we ate, thinking the lights would come back on at any moment.  Nope.

     We cleared away the TV trays and dishes as best we could; by then it was getting dark enough we broke out flashlights.  I plugged my phone into the fat backup battery I keep charged up just in case, and went to bed with a book on my iPad.

     It wasn't a good night for sleep.  I kept waking up in the dark, wondering where I was and remembering, lighting the iPad back up and reading until I dozed off.  Eleven p.m., midnight, two a.m., three....  At four-thirty, I was startled awake by eye-searing brightness through closed eyelids!  I'd apparently flipped the switch for the overhead light at some point, and, the power being out, left it on.  That sixty-Watt light might as well have been a flashbulb.  I got up, turned it off, wandered out to the kitchen in time to see the light in the garage go out, went out and checked that the garage door was down, and went back to bed.

     Almost twelve hours without power.  Everything in the fridge is inedible except for Tam's soft drinks. my peanut butter cups, the UHT milk I keep in there because it's better cold and maybe the oranges.  I don't know about the contents of the freezer but I don't feel like trusting to luck.  Trash day is tomorrow and it's all going.

     We have had worse.  I think the power was out for nearly three days after the flooding Spring storms shortly after I moved in, but it hasn't been that bad since.

How Not To Get Published

     Unlike many blogs, this one has a comments section -- but it's not automatic.  I screen comments.

     From time to time, one of my perennially-unpublishable commenters accuses me of "censorship."  Nope, sorry, that's not what it is.  Censorship is when a government (or, occasionally, another powerful entity) suppresses your expression by law or force.  All I'm doing is exercising editorial discretion.  You can say whatever you like on your own blog, or in a comments section that I don't control, or paint your opinions on your own wall.  But this is my blog, and I decide what gets published.  If you want a soapbox, there are plenty available elsewhere.  This one is mine.  I am not obliged to provide equal time for differing opinions.  Just as you are not allowed to daub your slogans on my fence, you don't get to use my comments section as your megaphone. 

     What doesn't get published includes (but is not limited to) comments I deem to be inflammatory or excessively partisan, statements of opinion presented as fact, any unusual claim unsupported by evidence, and anything I suspect of being a cute attempt to smuggle in signals (if your screen name is "Horst1488," your comments are never going to be approved).  If I think your comment is too far off-topic, it's probably not going to get through screening.

     These decisions are a judgement on the comment itself or, in the case of "Horst," on the commenter's lack of taste.  They are not a judgment of the commenter themselves, nor do they represent an endorsement of the opinions expressed in the comments that do get published.

Still Making Them Famous

     It is with resignation that I note news media are still making killers famous, just as long as their victims are numerous and/or famous.  It doesn't make any difference where you look -- Fox News, over-the-air TV networks, NPR: Coverage of the attacks on Minnesota politicians gives the attacker's name over and over, mentioning the names of his victims only once or twice.

     Credible reports put that killer firmly on the political/religious Right, but that doesn't matter, either; an insurance executive was shot down on the street by a guy from the Left or the muddled middle (he hasn't been as easy to figure out) and you're ten times more likely to know his name than the name of the man he killed.

     This kind of killer appears to succeed more often when they're mentally askew.  Perhaps more motivated; perhaps they're more likely to take an unusual approach.  But we know that many of them are attracted by the idea of recognition: their crime will make them famous.  It's not a sane evaluation, but as long as we continue to put the names of these killers in banner headlines and treat their lunacies as worthy of recognition, the incentive remains.

Late Posting

     It was an overwhelming weekend, filled with the kind of stuff that ends up in history books -- footnotes, if we're lucky, but I'm not liking our luck just now.

     I have avoided the news this evening and for all I know, we're at war right now.  Or maybe just in the middle of a Tweet, Truth and Skeet storm from the Commander-in-Chief and all the assorted pundits.  Don't know.  Surely it will either wait, or hit too hard and fast to matter.

It's Father's Day

      My Dad has been gone for eighteen years now.  I still miss him.  In some ways, he left a few years earlier; his memory failed him and his last few years were spent as a relatively pleasant stranger among other strangers; but I believe he knew he was loved.

     If your father is still around, take a few minutes to spend with him, even if you don't get along.  He won't be here forever.

A Ditty For The Day

      We used to get it.

A Member Of Congress Steps Up -- And Gets Stepped On

     Arguably, he was grandstanding: U. S. Senator Alex Padilla showed up at a press conference in LA held by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and started to ask a question, giving his name and title in the process.  Three men shoved him out into the hall, where he was handcuffed by men wearing vests marked "FBI," briefly detained and then released, having not been formally arrested or charged.

     But here's the thing: Members of Congress are allowed to be just this kind of meddlesome.  It's in their job description.

     Officially, Cabinet Secretaries and Senators are just about co-equal; for diplomatic purposes (who gets their hand shaken ahead of whom or gives way in the desert line at a State dinner), the Cabinet (at 12th) is one notch ahead of Senators (at 13) and they both get to elbow aside state Governors and House members.  But in the checks and balances kind of way, Senators and Representatives are supposed to get kid-gloves treatment, especially when acting in the interest of those they represent; the military rank them above 4-star officers and Secretary Noem, were she just a bit more slick, would have countered with an impatient, "Yes, Senator?" Then let him speak, and made a non-committal or cutting remark before returning to her prepared statement. 

     She didn't.  By chance or design, a ranking member of the Executive branch caused a ranking member of the Legislative branch to be silenced, shoved aside, and restrained.  He was made to kneel before being proned out and cuffed.  It's holographic; you can take the part for the whole, and understand this to be the Trump administration's entire approach to federal governance: autocratic and high-handed, believing its authority to be unquestionable.

     This is not the way our government was supposed to function.