Rankings

     GDP -- Gross Domestic Product -- is an imperfect measure of how well a country is doing.  You can't look at it and infer, for instance, how well plumbers in Beijing, Vladivostok, Kokomo and Kerala are doings relative to one another.

     But it's what we've got, an apples-to-apples yardstick that tells us a little about the average wage-earner and a lot about countries as a whole.

     By that yardstick, the U.S.is way out in front, with China and the EU  jostling for a fair second place.  The rest of the world is a lot worse off -- Russia is down between Canada and Italy, with an economy thirteen percent the size of the EU or China, eight percent that of the U.S.  Call it 2.5 trillion dollars.  California's most recent GDP numbers, over four trillion, put it well ahead of the the sprawling giant.  If California were a country, they'd rank about fourth (and they'd be spending a lot more on defense, so don't get too complacent out there).  Gavin Newsom is running a larger country than Vladimir Putin, despite having a fraction of the land area and less than a third of the population.

     When you see Russia referred to as a "paper tiger," that's the kind of thing they mean.  The butter is spread very thin over there -- and thinner still, given what Mr. Putin's government is spending on guns instead.  That's a big slice of the planet, and a big chunk of the world's population, on short rations and fighting what amounts to World War One with added robot bombs.

     China is gleefully watching Mr. Trump run America's share of Western Civilization down the garbage disposal, thinking they'll end up on top.  It's a lot more likely they'll go down the drain along with us, if it comes to that; based on past performance, their response to a global war or the next pandemic is likely to come up short.

     With the rise in preventable disease, trade wars, regular wars, growing disregard for the rule of law, devaluation of science and increase in illusory BS (much of it driven by AI), humanity seems determined to dig themselves into a new Dark Ages.  While there's evidence they're not quite as "dark" as popular opinion believes (nor the collapse as sudden), it's not a bright time, and as a species, we're not too bright if we fall into it because we've decided we don't like our neighbors and tolerating harmless weirdos is too much work.

     The hopeful side -- and the scary side -- is that the United States is an 800-pound gorilla, the only on on the planet.  When the U.S. has a cold, there's sneezing all around the world.  And we've got our act together, we tend to pull everyone else along.

     The barbarians are at the gates -- and a lot of them are coming from inside the walls, where they've been all their lives.

It Is True

     Or at least it's true for me: the older I get, the less I like snow.

     We've got a bit of it, and cold temperatures to go with it all week.  The temperature will only occasionally take a quick look above freezing and then duck right back down.

Giardiniera

     The Italian pickled vegetable mix is a favorite of mine, but our corner grocer doesn't stock the brand I like best.  They've got a nice Chicago-style, which is pickled, the brine poured off, and smothered in good olive oil, wonderful stuff in a sandwich or (the hotter kind especially) added to lean-meat chili, and they carry a vinegar brine version that is a bit mushy.  My guess is the maker cans it up hot, ideal for preservation but not what I'm after.

     But even those have a particular flavor profile that appeals to me.  Still...  I was looking up the spelling of "giardiniera" a few days ago and happened across a refrigerator-pickle version that appeared to be well within my abilities: no worries about putting it up and having a jar explode or go worse.  A good strong brine, half white vinegar and half water, boiled with plenty of pickling salt, seasoned with coriander, mustard seed, peppercorns and oregano, and a little fresh garlic in every jar.

     So I made the stuff -- cauliflower, red onion (I'll get back to that), celery, three hues of bell peppers and purple, white and orange carrots.  You chop the vegetables quite coarsely, boil the brine, load up several canning jars with the mix, a bay leaf and a couple of chunks of garlic,* then fill them not quite all the way with the hot brine, let it cool to room temperature, put the lids on and refrigerate it.  After a couple of days, the result is spot on: the precise flavor and plenty of crunch.  They'll hold up okay in the fridge for several weeks; the salty brine's got an acidity of about 2.5%.  I used some in an omelet for brunch today, with bacon and Swiss cheese: the very thing for a cold morning!

I'm not enough of a photographer to get a really good picture of the stuff.  Yes, that's a bay leaf.

     The red onion means the brine goes pale lavender and the cauliflower turns pink.  If you'd rather it didn't, use a white onion, or even peeled pearl onions.
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* The recipe calls for three jars and two cloves of garlic.  The only way to do that is to cut them in thirds and put two in each jar.  As things worked out, I had extra vegetables and brine, so I made up one more jar without garlic.

Traditions

     Thanksgiving, Tam and I had the traditional Roseholme Cottage* meal: turducken baked on the grill with roast vegetables and bacon-mushroom gravy.

     These are treats that usually come only once a year (one year, I had picked up a "safety" turducken roll at the grocer's in case the one I had ordered didn't arrive, and we had it for Christmas dinner) and we're happy to have them.

Turducken roll, fresh from the pan, freed of its netting. (Tam Keel photo)

Turducken roll being sliced: turkey, duck, chicken, sausage stuffing. (Tam Keel photo)

Bacon-mushroom gravy: a roux of bacon fat and flour, cooked golden-brown, to which chicken-mushroom broth is added. Once it begins to thicken, the bacon is snipped into it.  This isn't health food but it's certainly good!  There's a knack to making smooth gravy, but it's easier to learn than to teach. Cook the roux well; keep the broth, water or milk cold; don't stop stirring.
(Tam Keel photo)

     The day was bitterly cold and blustery, which made the grill a little more of a challenge.  But it worked out.
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* The name comes from the English grant of arms to someone who had the same last name as my family -- a "naturally-colored" rose on a gray or silver background.  Red or white?  I don't know.  The title that came with it amounted to a GI Bill, way down in the lesser peerage: the grantee gets the title, his firstborn gets a lesser one and the next generation, well, by then they're supposed to have land, a big house and a steady income from rents, and there you go, Squire.  I have no idea if that guy was an ancestor; the name is more of a toponym.

Giving Thanks

     Today, I'm working to embrace the thought that as bad as I think things are, they could be a great deal worse.  While I'm apprehensive about the future, the present is not really all that bad -- and for that, I am thankful indeed.

     Tam's away today, working, though she hopes to stop by for the holiday meal.  It's getting to be time to start the turducken.  Bacon gravy and roasted vegetables will accompany the nested birds and their sausage stuffing.  (I don't do a whole turducken -- maybe someday! -- just a smaller subset, a kind of turducken roll, better suited to two people and a few days of leftovers.)

Suspended Judgement

     Fulton County, Georgia is dropping the sweeping election interference case against Donald Trump and a number of co-defendants, stemming largely from the then-President's phone call to state officials, asking them to "find" sufficient votes to ensure his victory on the 2020 Presidential election.

     Now it will never be resolved.  And look, there are all kinds of problems with the case, especially now: there's no way a sitting President can be hauled into court; they can be impeached by Congress, and I presume they're still liable for traffic tickets, but anything in between is Constitutionally off the table.  And the case wasn't well handled by prosecutor Fani Willis in several different ways.

     But having the charges dropped, especially over side issues and Constitutional preemption, is nowhere near equivalent to being found innocent (or for that matter, found guilty) in a trial.  Assume everyone involved was as pure and guileless as the driven snow and it was all a matter of misinterpretation of highly figurative speech along with an earnest diligence to ensure no vote went uncounted and it still leaves a loophole that a subsequent unscrupulous President facing an uncertain election could drive an armored column through.

     This is the kind of swerve that brings down empires.

     In my opinion -- and this will make some readers boiling mad, if they're still bothering to read, though if they are, they're clearly not coming to the forest for the hunting -- there's one chance left: if the Democrats win control of both houses of Congress in 2026, they can impeach President Trump, haul evidence and eyewitness testimony into the light, and come to a decision, one way or another.  That would bring the mess and ambiguity to an end.  Oh, we'd still argue about it; there will be hard feelings no matter the outcome.  But it'd be done and not hanging out there, a festering sore of a brass ring for the next would-be autocrat to take a grab at.

     The American Experiment is teetering in the balance.  The formation of our constitutional republic, a remarkable democratic step, marked a change that swept through Western civilization and beyond, ending royal rule even in places where the Crown remained as a ceremonial head of state.  Whatever comes after the end of rule by the ongoing guidance and consent of the governed is unlikely to be an improvement for the common man.

Speaking About Deep Weirdness

     It's well known that tech zillionaire and all-around oddball Peter Thiel is a major backer of U.S. Vice-President J. D. Vance -- and look, I'm not the boss of him; he can spend his money any way he likes.

     But he's got some far-out notions, and he's happy to share them in front of a sympathetic audience, stuff that seems like it would be a better fit in a Jack Chick tract than in a speech from a supposedly forward-looking, high-tech Silicon Valley figure: he's thinking the Pope might be the antichrist.

     Religion is not my beat; I'm not going to tell anyone how they should be practicing theirs when I have never figured out my own.  Nevertheless, this old and highly-charged trope, from a major backer of a politically prominent adult convert to Catholicism, is way over the top.

     Much of this article is paywalled; you can noodle around and find most of the details of Thiel's talk online.  The Veep needs to hear some pushback.  I'm sure his good buddy (and sometime employer) has a smooth line of stuff, but it's a line that diverges radically from the mainstream of American thought, and we are better off with politicians who aren't being towed along in the wake of one set of outré opinions.

     Make Dr. Strangelove a dark fantasy again.  Kubrick wasn't supposed to be a prophet, just a storyteller. 

Lack Of Posting

     I haven't posted much this week -- current events leave me struggling to keep up with the craziness of it all, from a Russian-inspired peace plan for Ukraine that's surrender in all but name to the Department of Defense* deciding the Scouts are no longer okay† to pal around with, it's an unending string of preposterous stuff, most of it at the hands of comic-opera boobs; or it would be comedy, if it wasn't all too real and therefore only sad at best to tragic at worst.

     You don't need me to point it out and mocking it is pointless.
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* Congress named it, Congress renamed it, and if it wants to be renamed again, Congress is the only part of the Federal government that can do so.  If it wants to go by a tougher-sounding nickname in social settings until then, that's fine, but no one is obliged to go along.
 
† Yes, let's see, an organization for young people that is devoted to the notions of community service, patriotism, preparedness, physical fitness, outdoors and camping skills, respect for established institutions and competent adults, why would any decent military organization want anything at all to do with that?  Scouts have had their controversies but their aim remains noble.

The Ipcress File...Again?

     I found Len Deighton's not-quite-Everyman spy Harry Palmer the long way 'round and in reverse, starting with the book series by Charles Stross, a crossover between British spy novels and Lovcraftian horror,* The Laundry Files.  That led to Deighton's books (well worth reading) and from there to the films starring Michael Caine (well worth watching), and when one of our streaming services offered a preview of the updated, reimagined TV series version of the first novel some months back, of course I watched it.

     But it was one more streaming service, and expensive at the time, and there wasn't much else on it I wanted to see, so--  Maybe later.

     Much later, AMC finally re-released the series 1990s Remember WENN, (set in a small, independent radio station between 1939 and 1941 or so) and the first two seasons were available with ads on a free streamer.  I watched those, found it to be just as good as I remembered and wanted more.  The last two seasons were only on a couple of pay services, and one of them seemed like a better deal than the other.

     It wasn't until I'd signed up for it and saw their line-up that I realized why: they've got the TV series version of The Ipcress File, too.  So I've been watching it.

     The director and actor's Harry Palmer isn't Micheal Caine's.  The plot isn't exactly Deighton's either -- but he hadn't bothered to name the character to begin with, and the new guy is as delightfully competent and cynical as his predecessors in print and on film.  It's very stylish fun, set in a lovingly recreated 1960s (minus a few anachronisms most viewers will never notice) and I'm not entirely sure many of the reviewers figured out we're getting Harry's take on the story -- and Harry's looking up from fairly low on the class-system totem pole, with a complete lack of respect for the people who are supposedly his betters.  This is very much not James Bond, without bothering to sneer at the Bonds of fiction; Harry's much too busy to bother with that sort of thing.  He'll leave it to the empty suits who came from proper families and went to the right schools.

     They've taken such liberties with the plot that I'm not sure how it will end -- and I'm looking forward to finding out.
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* And also between computing history, a bit of math theory and a stack of D&D-type gaming, as things go on.

There Is Still No Antimemetics Division

     I read and enjoyed There Is No Antimemetics Division in both text forms, and it turns out there's a short film, as well.

     It's well done, and if you enjoy this sort of thing, here you go.

Great Moments In Geography

     This morning, a BBC World Service news anchor interviewed Mandy Gunasekara about her thoughts on the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference winding down in Belem, Brazil.  She was Chief of Staff at the EPA during the first Trump administration and more recently, an employee at the Heritage Foundation, where she helped write parts of "Project 2025" addressing climate.

     With that setup, the Beeb on one side, Heritage Foundation on the other and COP30 under the lens, you can well imagine how the interview went.  There were no surprises.

     Except for one thing; when the recent uptick in the size and scale of natural disasters came up, Ms. Gunasekara mentioned the current administration's work in the U.S., "building stronger, more resilient coastal cities all across the country."

     That, I think, merits parsing.  It's not coal vs. solar or CO/CO2 vs. particulates, well-trod ground with well-worn arguments.

     1. If the Trump administration is "building...cities," anywhere in the U.S., it's news to me.  I suspect it would be news to them.

     2. If they're "building stronger....cities," I'd sure like to see the details.  Does an infusion of National Guard picking up litter and showing the flag count?  Does sending in what appear to be poorly-disciplined ICE/Border Patrol squads to round up people for being too brown in public, demand papers, detain them (often in poor conditions) until their status is resolved and ship them out if they sneaked in count?  'Cos you can argue the legal side of it all you like, but roving raid teams don't do anything to make a community stronger or more resilient against natural disasters and shrinking the labor pool is more likely to make preparation, clean-up and rebuilding more difficult.

     3. Last but most saliently, how, exactly, does she think they're "building...coastal cities all across the country?"  The United States has a lot of coastline, but we've got a lot more interior.  And while I used to joke that I didn't need to move to Florida when I retired because rising sea levels and unpredictable New Madrid fault meant warm Gulf waters were headed for me right where I am, the Feds throwing up a series of shiny new bouncy coastal cities against need would be...impractical.  Not to mention the last thing I would expect from an administration that argues the climate is perfectly A-OK, and a worse tomorrow will never come.

     It has been said the Flat Earth Society has chapters and members all around the globe.  I think we'd better sponsor Ms. Gunasekara's membership.  And maybe check to see if she needs a new hot water heater or some pretty plaid polka-dot curtains for her office, possibly in sky-blue pink.

     It's not too much to require that a person's words make sense, no matter what their politics are.  Alas, the BBC interviewer was out of time, and probably far too polite to insist. 

Winter Again

     I think the thing that bugs me most about Daylight Savings Time is that it makes wintertime darkness hit abruptly instead of sneaking up.  One day it's still light at dinnertime and the next day, bang!  Dark!

     Every year, I realize all over again how poor my night vision is.  I'm grateful there are streetlights along most of my routes to and from the various work locations.

     The other interesting thing is that darned thermostat. The house used to be only a little chilly at 65°F.  Now even 68° feels too cold.  It must be out of calibration.  Yes, that's got to be it.

Attention, Mike Johnson

     Yes, Mike, you're Speaker of the House.  Bear in mind that it is not the senior legislative body.

     Speaker Johnson had opined that the U. S. Senate should "fix" undefined shortcomings in the House bill to release the Epstein files that made it to the floor over his efforts to stop it.  The Senate took note -- and unanimously voted to approve the measure exactly as passed by the House.  Which it was, and there you go.

     The House and Senate aren't supposed to be telling one another what to do -- and the Senate in particular is touchy about its prerogatives.  They are, after all, the more august collection of legislators (though these days, picking "white" as the natural hair color of any member of Congress will win handily on percentages), and they never lose sight of that.  Ancient Rome had a Senate, after all, and our Senators get pretty sure they were born to the purple.

     I'll give the Speaker credit for one thing, though: he sure doesn't know when he's whupped.

     By and by -- the Department of Justice has thirty days to let their fingers do the walking and they may take every one of them -- there will be plenty of people sieving through the Epstein files slime, looking to see what kind of dirt they can get and who they can get it on.  My guess is there won't be many surprises, and it will be a series of small icks in the face of the greater awfulness of the whole scheme; True Believers will be able to maintain their happy illusions and the Truly Appalled will find plenty of awful things to point at.  Hey, remember when politics was a little less like a tour of the sewers?

     The French occasionally shove huge spheres through the main drains in Paris, pushing all the big, nasty chunks to the outflow where they can be safely removed.  We get the chance to do so in Washington, DC every even-numbered year, and too often we decide to just leave it all where it fell.

No Shortcuts

     "Make it didn't happen" is one of our great human weaknesses.  When things occur that make us unhappy, we want to find some path back to the status quo ante.  It's rarely there.

     I mention this because there were some expressions of pleasure on social media that parts of the GOP's MAGA alliance was unraveling over the Epstein files.  Yeah, don't get too comfy and start singing the Munchkin song.  These sands are shifty indeed.  They kept shifting all weekend and into today.

     It sure would be nice if the two big parties would go back to being the same old Republicans and Democrats of my early adulthood, aging New Dealers and younger progressives against rock-ribbed conservatives and their louder, not so gray allies, but it's not going to happen.  It's especially not going to happen with Mr. Trump's stalwarts suddenly freezing, their hard shells crumbling away, and besuited Reagan-Bush-Goldwaterish hybrids emerging blinking into the light of a new day while the Dems magically grow spines and they all walk towards the rising sun in spirited, earnest debate, almost safe to ignore between elections.  Dream on.

     The only way through the present mess is through it, and there aren't any promises about what we are when we get to the other side.

House-To-House Incivility

     I saw the film "Civil War" last night and...wow. Reviewers got it wrong; they focused on the lack of clarity in who's rebelling and over what (we barely know the first and never learn the second*).  Genuine soldiers on both sides come off okay; the danger is always from combatants with no flag.

     On one level, the basic plot is "A Star Is Born" with street combat; on another, the divided future, with real war burning, people far behind the lines ignoring it, power cuts and water shortages nearer the lines, with quiet atrocities and fighters hardened to them feels only too real and only too likely.  This is the future some of our fellow citizens think they want, bloody, divided and lawless, where "what kind of American are you?" is a life or death question and it's fatal to be too foreign in the wrong place at the wrong time.

     Arguably, the ending is a little too easy -- but it's miles and years from the ending of the larger (and, I hope, fictional) story it is told within, a story whose beginnings we never learn but can see all around us, a story written in blood and fire and loss.  This deadly chaos is the enemy, even more than the politicians and fools who long for it.  If it comes, it will leave damage for generations afterward.† I'm no longer sure we will prevent it but we had damned well better try.
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* There are vague hints that suggest water issues in the states mentioned as seceding -- California, Texas and Florida -- and the film shows water shortages in New York city; but water appears plentiful elsewhere and prolific water use sets the tone for a visit to a town largely untouched by war.  While Washington, DC is said to be a place where journalists are shot on sight and the movie's President is apparently a bad guy, we only hear him uttering broad and harmless platitudes in speeches while refusing to hold talks with advancing secessionist forces.  Who started the fighting, over what, and who made it worse rather than negotiating an end is simply beside the point of the story.
 
 † Most American lack recent experience of war, or even recent experience of the scars warfare leaves behind.  Most of the real Civil War's battlegrounds are softly eroded and grown over, a century and a half later.  Look at Ukraine, look at Gaza; look and ask yourself what it's going to take to fix just the physical damage, if and when.

Inhumanly Talented?

     I don't think "talent" is the right word for Mixmastering vast amounts of stolen intellectual property, but didja hear the story about the singing cowboy whose Microsoft Copilot ran off with his ChatGPT account in OpenAI's truck?  It's playing out right now on the country music charts, as least in the ratings for downloads.

     Country music has long been a rich source of parody, and is not above self-parody; the best of it is as deep and rich as any genre, sharing roots with blues and folk music, cross-pollinating with rock again and again, sharing bits of swing and occasional jazz riffs.  At its worst, Nashville's Music Row turns out stuff as homogenized as anything from Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building; but we don't remember any of them for their worst or even average music.  We remember their best work.  AI only creates an average of hit songs, empty, catchy sound as disposable as a gum wrapper.

Speculative Fictions

     There are a couple of comments sitting in the "to be screened" stack that I'm probably not going to publish.  Not because they're insulting or threatening; not because I disagree with their content, which I mostly don't.

     Nope.  The problem is that they indulge in a mental game that I think is pointless, one that I speak out against: they're trying to project the future.  They're trying to play serious chess with politics.

     I'm a lousy chess player, but even I know those sixty-four squares and thirty-two* pieces add up quickly to a staggering number of possibilities, and the more moves ahead you're looking, the more there are. And that's with only a limited number of motions available.  Politics is played on a much bigger board with many more pieces, and every one of them, even the pawns, decides its own moves.

     The next move, maybe -- rarely -- even the next two, might be obvious.  Try to predict too much further and you're unlikely to be right.  And it's rarely necessary; you can find out by waiting and watching.  Things that are genuinely unworkable aren't going to work; policies and actions that prompt widespread protests are worth investigating: why are they being promoted?  Why is there protest against or (also rarely) for them?  Who likes the notion?  Who hates it?  Find out as the thing moves.

     And learn the lesson of Cassandra: There's rarely any award for being right.  Work on being nimble instead.  Saying "I told you so" as the boulder crashes down is a distant second to dodging the damned thing before it hits you.
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* Or, if you're on my side of the board, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, more...checkmate....

Keyboard In The Gutter

     Was it only yesterday that a big tranche -- or perhaps a splatter -- of Jeffrey Epstein's emails were made public?  Politicians are circling the fetid mess; most Republican politicians say the contents contain nothing significant, showing only that President Trump and the late sex offender moved in the same elite circles, while their Democrat counterparts are highlighting passages and conversations that put Mr. Trump in a bad light.

     Absolute smoking-gun evidence or sweeping exoneration has yet to be unearthed and I doubt it will.  The emails do show Epstein and most of his correspondents were shockingly shallow, banal and unconcerned with the fiddling details of spelling, grammar or even coherence, reveling in sleazy innuendo and treating women as property: America's financial and social elite is riddled with mentally-lazy creeps.

     What did the President know and when did he first learn of it?  I have no idea.  I doubt these emails will reveal it.  What they do show is a bunch of emotionally stunted, manipulative men whose lives are lubricated by gobs of money, sliming their way through life along and over the edges of moral behavior with no regard for boundaries, scorning probity as a scam for chumps.

     A few online commenters have cautioned, "What if there are Democrats among Epstein's circle?"  I'm sure there were; I'm sure many of them are still in public life and they deserve to be removed from office just as much as any Republican running with that crowd.  Turf 'em all out.  Primary them.  Get some new crooks in there, people with fewer connections.  They may still be terrible people, but it'll take them awhile to pick up the game, and if we keep voting the old ones out and new ones in, they'll have less time to wallow in the ooze.

     Another question the emails don't answer is how Jeffrey Epstein funded his decadent lifestyle; at times, they imply something on the very edge of blackmail or extortion, but -- yet again -- hard evidence isn't there.  Just a lot of skin-crawling stuff, hints and nudges.  He's clearly trading in influence and access.

     If you're happy making excuses for gazillionaires with stomach-churning private lives, nothing in the emails will change your mind.  If you were looking sidelong at this sort of thing already, here are steaming piles of the same ick.

     This isn't the big chunk of files that Congress may yet release, but those are probably going to be pulled from the same cesspool.

     F. Scott Fitzgerald's, "The very rich are different from you and me," wasn't written in admiration (or even in quite that way) but in disappointment; and Hemingway's rejoinder, "Yes, they have more money," is far too glib.  An excess of money lets people people be even more who they already were.  Freed from the necessity of earning a living by the sweat of their brow, a lot of people turn out to be self-indulgent moral cripples for whom other individuals aren't quite real -- especially those others who work for wages.  We live in a representative democracy; why are we letting these wretches run our government?

Word To The Wise

    A reminder for anyone who needs it: having voted for a politician does not make you complicit in his (or her) crimes and missteps. You're not stuck with them to the bitter end. You can always say, "Hell, no," and walk away at any time.

      Today would be a great day for that.

     Repudiating one politician and their circle over horrific behavior doesn't require you to abandon your political ideals, either.  You can keep right on favoring small government or large, being a hawk or a dove, a rugged individualist or a deep believer in community.  None of those notions is attached to any one politician.

Veteran's Day

     Today marks the end of fighting in the first really big mechanized war, one that left scars twisting across the face of Europe still visible today.  Today, the guns fell silent -- and today is the day we chose to honor all who serve in uniform.  Not the date of a tremendous battle, or of an occasion of valiant heroism.  No invasion hit a beach or border on this date.  This isn't even the date the treaty that officially ended that war was signed; that wouldn't come for months later.

     No, today is the day the warriors laid down their weapons, and began the long road home to try to rebuild the peace.  That peace barely held for a generation, and they were back fighting again; but that war came to an end, too.

     All wars come to an end, but the men and women who fight them, who train for them, who hold the line in peace and in war, go on and on, overworked, underpaid and often underappreciated.  Think of them on this day, not as the pawns of generals and admirals or arrows on a map, but as people, doing a difficult job, often under terrible conditions, persisting.  Don't take them for granted.

Let's Make An (Or)Deal!

     The Federal government is on track to re-open, possibly as soon as late Wednesday afternoon.  Senate Democrats made a deal with the GOP, in which the Dems get...  Well, let's see...  Oh, here it is, a vague promise of a vote on extending COVID-years ACA subsidies that will almost certainly be DOA in the House.

     What went on behind the scenes is unclear.  The eight Democrats who voted with Republicans were headed for retirement, or won't be on the ballet until 2028, and/or from states where they can't possibly lose an election, and there's a message in that.  In my opinion, neither party has been covering themselves in special glory in this fight -- but we're not paying them to go roll in glory like a dog wallowing in a festering deer carcass anyway; we're paying them to not make too big a mess of things, and...yeah, they're not great at that.  From the outside, they were stuck unless somebody blinked, and with House members mostly out of town and needing to fly back, and the FAA starting the throttle back on air travel, blinking was certainly on the menu.

     Now we're back to the original mess, with the added fillup of screwed-up SNAP payments and overtaxed food pantries, and Thanksgiving is just over two weeks away.  Don't look for anyone affected by that to be adding their Senators and Representative to the prayer before the holiday meal.  Primary season starts in March, only four months away: voters will remember, and primaries keep on cranking through until well into August, by which time Fall election campaigns will already be underway.  Could be kinda ouchy; the only question is if elephants or donkeys get the biggest pinch.

Souped Up

     We've had over an inch of snow in Indianapolis and it's been cold, with overnight lows in the twenties and highs barely breaking freezing.  So I wanted something warm for supper.

     I work later than most people and I'd just as soon get to bed early, so anything fancy was off.  A bottle of almost-homemade vegetable soup, a half-pound of ground beef and a sausage squeezed from its casing made a good start.  Preparation is easy, just brown and drain the meat, add the soup and a bay leaf and let it simmer for five minutes or more.

     The soup is tomato-based, with okra, corn, onion, lima beans (trust me, you'll hardly notice) and I don't know what all else.  The sausage was andouille, and it was a little strong for the mild vegetable soup.  Not unpleasant, but I wanted something to pair with it -- and remembered the Chicago-style giardiniera in the fridge.  That turned out to be just the thing; a few forkfuls stirred into a bowl of the thick soup added a nicely savory flavor.  (It's not the spicy-hot version of pickled vegetables -- YMMV and if you like heat, that's an option.)

     Next time, I'm going with mild Italian sausage, or even a genuine "banger," but I'll keep the pickled vegetables in mind.

Well, That Was Fun....

     Except it wasn't fun.  I was watching the Sunday morning political shows, mostly, and dozing, a little, and eventually decided to make some brunch.

     It was going to be pretty good brunch, too -- roast beef hash with canned mild chilies, a little onion, a dab or more of Chicago-style Giardiniera, a bread-crumb crust and eggs cooked on top, served with cheese.  But it wasn't to be.  I turned on the kitchen TV and the channel I wanted wasn't there.  It was one of the ones I'm responsible for, though not one of the big ones.

     So much for breakfast!  After a little more checking, I fired up my computer and started troubleshooting remotely, texting my boss at the same time.  He was aware of the problem, but busy with other things.

     I didn't find anything easy, so I brushed my teeth, got dressed, packed some snacks and went to the transmitter.  A redundant communications link had half-failed, which should be a minor problem, something that makes no impact and you solve during regular business hours.

     Yes, it's no problem -- unless the automatic switch that makes it redundant happens to have been hooked up backwards.  I looked and looked, and it didn't occur to me for a long time, until I was peering at the back of the conglomeration, seeing green lights where there should have been red lights, and red lights where they should have been green!

     You see, if you have two identical widgets, call them A and B, and a smart switch that selects between them, it's all well and good; if A is running and it conks out, the switch goes to B, and vice versa.  But if it was connected backwards?  A keels over, and the switch, automatically, selects what it thinks is B -- but is in fact A, and A, being dead, does nothing.  And the switch, while it is pretty smart as such things go but not quite as smart as one might hope, assumes it is not being lied to, and B must be as defunct as A.  So it does nothing.

     We have backups on our backups, and that kicked in -- losing a few minor channels in the process.

    I moved the connections to where they should have been all along, the two ends did a complicated handshake, and hey, presto! Everything was working, with the failed part safely sidelined for later.  And it only took three hours.  Well, four.

Oyster Stew

     I haven't lost the knack of making oyster stew.  There's not much to it, and the big brand name in condensed soups has their own mild version, though I haven't found it in stores around here for some time.  But there's a knack to it, and multiple places to go wrong.

     Canned oysters were scarce for a long while, too.  They're back now, at least some of the time (months with R in them?)  So I was determined to give it a try.

     You start by making a thickener of flour, water, a little salt,* a dash of hot sauce or Worcestershire sauce and a glob of butter.  Stir that up to a smooth paste and add it to the contents of a couple of 8-ounce cans of oysters, liquid and all.  Simmer over low heat until the oysters start to curl and set aside.  Scald four cups of milk and a little butter, or three cups of milk and one of cream, then add the oysters and let it sit a spell, over very low heat if you like (but keep an eye on it!).

     Serve with a dash of paprika, parsley or chives, hot sauce and pepper on the table, and crusty bread or crackers.

     Variations: add cooked potato and/or sauteed onion and/or celery, cut small.

     It's warm and filling on a chilly evening.  Oysters aren't for everyone; if you're curious but unsure, look for a ready-made version and give it a try.  The scratch version is strong and has more zing, with big, meaty oysters.

     The gotchas: blend the thickener smooth, not lumpy.  That means cold, cold water and plenty of stirring before you add it to the oysters and their liquid (and then turn on the heat).  Don't overcook the oysters -- and really, really don't overcook the milk.  It's done when it's bubbly around the edges and steam is rising from it.  You can cook both at the same time, and old recipes assume you will, but that means dividing your attention.

     Depression-era bread and milk can be this recipe without the oysters -- and you can still find people who were happy to get even that much.
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* One and a half tablespoons of flour, two tablespoons of cold water, a teaspoon or so of salt -- old recipes have even more salt, but even a teaspoon was plenty for me.  It does need a little, but you can always add more to your bowl.

Oh, Noooooes!

     I'm still hearing a little freakout over New York City's Mayor-elect.  Thing is, he's not the first socialist to get himself elected mayor of an American city; he's not even the first one to win in NYC, and the city's still there.  Wikipedia's got a list, starting with John C. Chase in 1898.  There's a whole clutch of them in the early decades of the 20th Century, food for thought if you're pining for "the good old days."*

     Milwaukee had a nearly unbroken fifty-year run of them, from 1910 through 1960: that's two World Wars and a Great Depression.  I'm sure they all said and did things that I'd disagree with (not an unusual distinction among politicians) but the city survived and even thrived.  (It took heavy lifting to interrupt the string: a Democrat-Republican fusion candidate won and served from 1912 to 1916.)

     U. S. mayors do not serve in a vacuum.  They're working in concert with a legislative body and a court system; everybody in town knows where their office is and can look up their number, and all it takes is a faltering trash-collection system, faulty sewers or a botched response to a bad snowstorm to get them tossed out on their ear in the next election.  We vote mayors in, we vote mayors out, and when they lose, they hand over the keys and combination for the safe to the next officeholder in due order. 

     Mayors from one of the major parties are closely watched by their political opposition; Mayors who have expressed leanings towards the edges of one or the other big parties get even more scrutiny (this is where most of the recent socialists fall, being both Democrats and DSA members) and mayors affiliated only with a third party (or none at all) can expect to get it from both sides.

     So I'm not worried.  There are plenty of people and groups to do the watching and start yelling if he goes off the rails, and they're already on the job.
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* They weren't quite as halcyon as some people like to claim, and you can chop your own wood or shovel your own coal for a winter if you'd like to find out for yourself.  My parents grew up on the trailing edge of that technology, and even through the rosy-hued spectacles of childhood, it didn't look that great to them.  Even spending time in the disused attic of a house that had been heated by coal is a marked education -- pun intentional.  Coal soot takes considerable scrubbing!

They Won

     Democrats won resoundingly yesterday, from Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York to centrist Dems in New Jersey and Virginia. Down-ballot races also went Democrat; school board elections, largely nonpartisan, rejected book-banners and candidates endorsed by "Moms for Liberty," the conservative group that made headlines when their Noblesville, Indiana chapter approvingly quoted Hitler's opinions on education in their newsletter.

     Politicians (and pundits) tend to over-read election results and this will be no exception.  The common threads of the last two elections are the cost of living (rent, groceries, utilities) and the general unwillingness of  Americans to be bossed around; go too much deeper than that and you're on thin ice.

     Mamdani, for all that he's made out to be a boogeyman,* has more in common with Indiana's Eugene V. Debs than Karl Marx.  He has been sharply critical of the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, especially their dictatorial leaders.  As Mayor of New York City, he'll be working with a 51-member City Council.  Unsurprisingly, the Council membership is overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, Democrat.  But New York City being as assorted as it is, they're an unusually wide range of Democrats, so don't expect the new Mayor to make a bunch of drastic changes.  (At least one prominent online opinionator lamented that in NYC, "women will be forced to cover themselves from head to toe...and hot dogs will be replaced by goat meat."  I can only conclude he's never seen Mrs. Mamdani, and doesn't grasp that goat meat would be a significant -- and not inexpensive -- upgrade from the mysterious contents of lower-grade frankfurters.  And all that along with not understanding that the City Council makes NYC's laws, not the Mayor.)

     All of these newly elected officials will be operating in the same old framework, in which (despite what certain politicians appear to believe) we don't elect Czars or dictators who rule by fiat (or even Chevy), but politicians who must negotiate and compromise with their peers and whatever other branches or units of government their own interacts with, politicians who must answer to their constituents via direct contact, the press, and eventually the ballot box.  The truly awful ones will reveal themselves in due course, either by trying to enact lousy notions into law or via an inability to work and play well with others, and some of those will discover they are "one-term wonders" or laughingstocks consigned to the sidelines.  This is entirely normal, and the system has survived all manner of wild and crazy ideas and people.

     Truly transgressive behavior in American politics consists of trying to unduly expand the powers of an office, of ruling unilaterally, of not understanding that Americans are at heart a mob, and a mob with a very wide range of ideas and beliefs.  We can all agree that we don't agree on much, and we should all agree that we ought to give one another as much latitude as we can manage.  Our worst failings begin when we forget or ignore that.
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* He is, as has been pointed out by more insightful people, exactly what President Obama was accused of being: a socialist Muslim born in Africa.  I guess we'll all get to see how that goes.  Maybe he'll even read the newspaper funny pages on the radio!

"Running Board"

     I used a slang term the other day, one that might not be entirely clear outside of my line of work, "running board."  No, not those things along the bottom sides of an old car that make it easier to get in and out, where Doc Savage rides when he and his intrepid crew speed to the scene of another exotic crime in Depression-era NYC.

     "Running" as in "operating," and "board" as in "audio board," which is to say an audio mixer or audio console.  Nowadays, most people have seen a sound-mixing board, the kind of thing used at a concert or in a recording studio, often a vast and confusing array of controls, knobs and lights.  It's literally the heart of the effort, where all the microphones and other sound pick-ups connect, their levels are adjusted and mixed, and the end result goes out to the amplifiers, recorder, streaming box and/or broadcast transmitter.

     The technology grew up slowly, from a rack filled with amplifiers, volume controls, switches and maybe a jackfield like an old-time telephone operator's panel.  Eventually, the control arrangements became more or less standardized, first in homebuilt systems (some of which might be mounted through a single slab of wood or Bakelite, a "board," or built into a freestanding desk, a "console").  Those early efforts still had most of the electronics mounted in a row of tall equipment racks, with only the controls in front of the operator.  Western Electric and RCA, along with a little company in Quincy IL called Gates, were among the first to put the whole works into a large, desktop enclosure with a row of knobs along the front.

     Those early audio boards were the center of small radio stations: every audio signal that came and went would flow through it, and mastering the controls, in all their arcane variations, was an essential skill for the technicians -- "engineers" by convention if not degree -- and eventually the disc jockeys who replaced them and the studio announcers they'd worked with.  (Big stations and networks would have a "master control" setup, an audio switching system that selected among multiple studios and mixing consoles, but that was big-time stuff indeed.)

     As time went on and electronics got cheaper, stations might have a multitude of audio consoles -- one for the newsroom, one for recording commercials and local programs, one for on-air operations -- along with their associated equipment.

     And then a funny thing happened: audio went digital.  Digital audio works like any other big computer network: there are central computers that do the work, mixing, recording and playing back, and screen/keyboard/mouse or specialized hardware "control surfaces" where humans work the controls.  The big or small "audio board" of today still looks a lot like the old 1940s ones, if you'll allow for slide faders instead of rotary controls and push buttons instead of a fancy lever switches, but not a single note of audio passes through it.  Nope, that all happens in equipment mounted in tall racks down the hall; only the controls are in front of the operator.  Just like it was when the idea was first starting out.

Maybe People Elect Who They Want

     There will be fuming over the results of today's elections.  There always is.  National elections can be confounding -- the popular vote is often close, the Electoral College tends to amplify the margin of victory, and some bickering is inevitable.

     But regional elections, even statewide elections?  Look, the people of AOC and MTG's House districts knew what they were getting when they voted.  In New York City, the three frontrunners in the Mayor''s race had clear platforms and didn't do much hedging.  Nobody walked into a voting booth and rolled a three-sided dice.  Gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey were similarly forthright, and here's the thing: if the individual states are indeed "50 experiments in democracy," if the people of cities get to pick their own Mayors and so on, you're going to get an assorted collection.  Virginia isn't Ohio.  NYC isn't Dallas.  Get 'em into office and see what they do.

     Indiana's Micah Beckwith certainly lost no time showing who he is after Election Day.  Cruising into office on Governor Mike Braun's coattails, I think Hoosiers hoped for a safe, pro-business Republican* in the hot seat and didn't pay much attention to the malicious imp riding shotgun alongside him.  Said imp's latest has been to chortle that the interruption in SNAP benefits is "a great opportunity for the church."  --Most candidates come with a pretty clear label, but you can't be sure until you uncork 'em and get a good whiff.

     If people elected skunks or roses Tuesday, it'll be obvious soon enough.  Let's see how the latest crop does before freaking out.
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* Oh, well.  Like a lot of GOP Governors, he's trying to be a mini-Trump.  And like most of them, the act's not ready for Broadway.

It's Still The Economy, Stupid

     Governments have a pretty good history when it comes to screwing up economies.  Fixing them, that's another story.  Herbert Hoover (eventually) and Franklin Roosevelt expended enormous effort trying to claw their way out of the Great Depression, and only blunted the worst of it while the whole planet rode the roller-coaster.  Subsequent presidencies bobbed around like a cork on stormy seas as various economic troubles came and went, and frequently lost elections over them.  The government -- any government -- doesn't run the economy, but the economy sometimes runs government, and can run it right out of town.

     Viktor Orban's experiment in "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, which has looked a lot like a more-polite version of one-party autocracy with fancy trimmings to keep the EU from more than mild disapproval, may be about to relearn that lesson.

     Here at home -- how 'bout that promised prosperity?  Have groceries gotten any cheaper?  How about utility bills?  Has anyone's gazillionaire boss handed out big, fat raises, or are most of us fretting over our chances of being swept up in an Amazon-style massive layoff?

     Promises of pie in the sky only work until the pie fails to arrive.  And wow, is it ever failing.  When the AI/data center bubble pops -- which it will -- the fallout is liable to be messy.  Just ask SNAP beneficiaries, presently unbenefited thanks to the government shutdown. 

Not A Fan, But

     They pulled me in: I didn't watch the World Series, but by the fourth game, I was keeping track of how it was going.  Some of the greatest baseball players of all time were battling it out, and despite an early adulthood spent listening to Cincinnati Reds games with an ear only for upcoming commercial breaks,* even I can tell we will not see their like again soon.
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* "Running board" for a sporting event can be a great time to work on small engineering projects, but you have to spare half an ear for the game.  Baseball is especially good; basketball and football can slam to a sudden halt without much warning and you'd better not stray too far from the controls, but the end of an inning is telegraphed in advance.  Most play-by-play and "color"/stats teams sum up significant moments before the ads begin, leaving the board op plenty of time to stroll down the hall, push a button, flip a few switches, log the break and put the game back on.  And if you missed it?  In my 20s, alone in a big studio building, it was very convenient that the network amplifiers were in a rack just outside of the Engineering Shop/transmitter room, along the hallway back to the control room. The CBS and Reds amplifiers had great big knobs on them and if you had noticed the commercial cue at the last minute, you could knock the volume down to zero on your way past (so you didn't get network "filler" on the air), race down to the control room, hit the Start button for the commercial, turn off the network audio on the audio mixer, then walk back up the hall and return the amplifier volume setting to normal.  Those big knobs -- and the heavy-duty attenuators they controlled -- weren't stock; one of my predecessors had set it all up for exactly that situation.
     So if you're listening to the big game, and a local commercial starts a little late?  --I don't know; these days, the people doing the radio play-by-play can start their own commercial breaks, and like as not, there's no one minding the store back at the station.

Alas

     One of the problems with figurative language is that you set out to describe a regime composed of cranks, crooks and grifters, and instead find yourself insulting noxious, loathsome toads, a largely harmless class of amphibians who benefit us by consuming deleterious insects.

     Linguistic flights of fancy can be great fun, but bad and dangerous people are what they are; comparing them to other dislikeable things only obscures the evil acts they enable and commit.

     If prominent members of the Trump maladministration would commit themselves to consuming at least their own weight in harmful insects every year, I might grudgingly find they were of some use.  This, however, is unlikely; they are indeed useless excrescences at best, like warts or skin tags.

About That Economy

     Okay, it's just one set of hoofbeats.  Might be a horse, might be a zebra.  But it doesn't seem like a good sign when a major candy distributor files for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween.

     Sure, SNAP benefits have been shut off by the shutdown (there is, of course, a lawsuit.  Wonder if you can cook that up and eat it?  Nope).  Sure, ACA subsidies are expiring and there's no plan to bring 'em back; if you got your health insurance through the Feds or one of the state exchanges, the price is going up, and possibly by quite a lot.  And there's a whole big mess around Federally-subsidized flood insurance, too.  But candy at Halloween?  The people who usually couldn't afford it still can't; this is result of people who once could deciding they'd better not.

     Oops. 

Tool-Geekery

     It's expensive enough that I can't recommend it unless you really need one -- or have money to spare.  But it's as neat a combination of useful tools as I have encountered, and comes packaged in a carrier that keeps all of it together.

     I'd better start at the beginning: for a couple of decades, I have carried and used a Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company Mini-Ratchet set.  They use a proprietary 1/4" spline drive, and come packed in a neat little box with a wide array of bits, a screwdriver handle, extension, a couple of tiny spin handles and a clever small ratchet with 12° indexing.  It was a small company, and I think it changed hands a few years ago; their website shows most things as "out of stock" these days and there's no contact information now, but they keep the copyright up to date.  Their big set includes 44 bits and easily fits into a cargo-pants pocket.  It is also around $180.00 now.

     Or it would be, if it wasn't always listed as not being in stock.  And it is handy, with almost every driver bit you might need.  There was a time when you'd call up the order department and the nice people there would ship the stuff in advance of your check, if they remembered you from previous purchases.  (Yes, that was a long time ago.)

     Stumbling around on a big sales site, I discovered Wera Tools has the next best thing, their "Tool-Check" line.  Sorted out into Imperial and Metric sets, with a number of interesting variants, the basic versions have 37 bits, a small screwdriver handle, a short (locking) extension and a nice small ratchet with 6° indexing, packed into a neat little carrier with places for every piece.  They use standard 1/4" hex drive (with an adapter for the sockets).  Prices run about $100; a little more for the larger sets and a little less for the smaller ones.  It has most of the driver bits you might need, and since they use standard drive, you can add more.  (The set sensibly includes two #1 Philips and three #2 Philips, the most commonly use-worn types, and you can always stow the spares elsewhere and sub any added bits in their places.)

     Wera's even got a modular system that will let you add and expand the carrier with other small sets.  It's decent quality; give me a few years to stress-test my set and I'll give you a full report, but I don't expect any bad surprises.  You might know Wera from their Kraftform ergometric grip, one of the most widely-imitated driver handle designs in the world.  I'm not saying they've been watching some of you guys work, but their line includes screwdrivers that can be used as chisels without wrecking them, and beefed-up ratchet handles with striking surfaces intended for hammering.*
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* I have to admit that at my work, we've referred to linesman's pliers as an "electrician's hammer" for years.  A good set of Kleins will stand up to this kind of abuse, but the company doesn't encourage it.

Milestone

     I did something today I have done only four times before in 38 years of my job: I put a new transmitter on the air.

     In this case, it's new only to my immediate employer, having already served for five years elsewhere in the corporation.  But it's new to us.

     Depending on how you look at to, they have only had four or five different transmitters since the station first went on the air, and I am the only person who has worked on all of them.  I was the last person to operate their first transmitter, an all-tube 1950s behemoth that took a little coaxing to get working again (and every second of tuning it up was an adrenaline-heavy thrill ride).  Now I'm the first person to put their newest transmitter on the air, a device so rich in surface-mount components that there's no troubleshooting most of it down to the level of individual parts: most problems, you trace back to whatever subassembly has gone wrong, and order a new one.

     The previous transmitter, in analog and digital configurations, served for over 29 years, and it's still a backup.  The 1950s giant lasted for 32 years, counting backup service and that record will probably be broken by the one I just shut down.  Except for a few hours here and there -- the day we overloaded the big generator during a power outage was the longest, five or six hours -- it was on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly three decades.

     The transmitter I put on the air today will probably still be on the air when I retire, and that's a strange feeling.

What, No Monday?

     I was up late Sunday night for no good reason, and slept in a little Monday -- but I have to admit it, the strangeness and unpleasantness of current events leaves me spoiled for choice and lost in the noise.  Which strain of awfulness is so dire as to invite further comment, and what stands on its own, inherently horrible?

     There's a giant hurricane headed toward Jamaica (and Cuba afterward), the eye moving slowly but circulating wind gusts inside the storm in excess of 200 miles an hour; at the same time, Indiana's Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, who has picked up a reputation for condemning every rainbow flag or lapel-pin listing pronouns as "grooming," has found himself right next to a real case of felony child exploitation charges involving the son of his podcast partner, and has nothing whatsoever to say about it.  Both of these are tragedies, one of unthinkable scale, the other of unspeakable harm, and yet they're nearly lost in headlines clamoring things just as bad, if not worse.

     Most of it defies easy remedy.  If you want to do something, donate to your local food pantry -- money, time and/or food.  With SNAP and WIC funding unavailable (and the Feds too busy dreaming up new Hatch Act violations to find creative solutions) and Federal employees not getting paid, they're about to be hit by a flood of need far in excess of their resources.

     We are careening towards a precipice -- and there are many, all far too near: economic, weather (or climate; go argue with the dead about terminology), politics, and that unlovely extension of politics, war, all of it on both national and global scales.  Which will pop first -- and how many of the rest will follow -- is a fool's bet and will eventually be a career for historians.  "Events leading up to..." and we are in the middle of them.

When The Feds Say "Do This" And "Don't Do This" At The Same Time

     There are a number of Federal grant programs, some dating back decades, that aim to help survivors of domestic abuse, human trafficking and violent crime.*  Many of them are written in such a way that the immigration status of the victim is no bar to getting such aid, and some even have provisions to make it possible for victims to seek permanent residency.  The notion is that crime is crime, victims ought not be made to suffer further, and escaping an abuser shouldn't make it less likely that a person could get permission to stay here and even work towards citizenship.  For most of these, the money flows to individual states, and from them to non-profit aid groups (as well as local police, prosecutors and public defenders).

     Mr. Trump's Justice Department is no fan of such open-handedness, especially the sweeping inclusion in the Violence Against Women Act, and has issued guidelines restricting the kinds of legal services this money can be used to provide to people without legal status in the U.S.

     The problem is, that's not what the law says.  That leaves the states stuck at a fork: they can obey Federal law, passed (and later reauthorized) by Congress and signed by Presidents, and get sideways with Justice in the doing, or they can go along with DOJ's guide, and get sued six ways from Sunday for noncompliance by attorneys for the victims who don't get help.  Unsurprisingly, twenty states opted to do the suing themselves, and are hoping the courts will sort out the contradiction.  The clock is ticking; unless there's a preliminary injunction or other resolution, the new rules go into effect in November, and it's not entirely clear what is and isn't covered.

     This is one part of a broader tangle of preexisting Federal law, contradictory Administration guidance, and puzzled state agencies and nonprofits suing to hold the status quo or at least get the courts to weigh in on which set of rules to follow.  Do we follow the law, or Executive Branch whim?  At one time, I thought the proper course would be obvious to nearly every American; these days, I'm not so sure.
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* Violence Against Women Act, Victims of Crime Act, and, slightly less directly, Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, among others.

Steak, Sure, But The Risotto!

     Dinner tonight was a splurge.  Our corner grocery had good -- well, not insurmountable -- prices on ribeye steaks, so I bought a couple of small ones.*  They didn't have any lump charcoal, and I'm out, but they had "assorted hardwood" firewood and I decided to try it.  The hardwood kindling I use burns down to coals, after all.

     It turns out that a wood fire works fine in my covered grill: close the cover once it's well underway, and it smolders with little or no flame.  Splitting the wood down to grill size with a hatchet -- not an axe -- and a mallet isn't quick or especially easy, but it's not all that hard.  I'd get a real axe and a proper wedge if I was going to do it often.

     Along with the steaks, I picked up a bagged salad and some cherry tomatoes.  You're not going to find them in a salad kit: cut tomatoes don't keep.  Adding them really helps.  Some sliced olives are a plus, too. And I snagged a box of assorted fresh fancy mushrooms and Alessi brand dehydrated mushroom risotto.

     Alessi's shelf-storable pasta dishes, soups and rice have never let me down.  It's about as good as scratch-made (Italian grandmothers will disagree).  I cleaned and cut up the mushrooms -- trumpet, maitake and golden oyster -- and put them in a covered grill pan with glob of butter, parking the whole thing on the back of the grill as soon as the fire had caught.  The steaks followed in order, on a perforated stainless-steel tray, medium for me and very rare for Tam.  The rice just simmers once it's been stirred into boiling water; you set the heat on low and ignore it.

     As the steaks came off the grill, I brought in the cooked mushrooms and stirred them into the creamy risotto, and the combination smelled delicious.  It tasted delicious, too, an excellent accompaniment for the little steaks.  Throw in some well-cooked stew meat or sausage, and the rice dish could have been a main course.  I had a last few nibbles when I was clearing away the pots and pans -- it was just that good.
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* The child of Depression babies, I'm usually half-convinced the economy is about to tank, so why not have something special for supper once in a while?  Growing up, we had steak for supper most Fridays, once Dad had a good job.  He never tasted a steak until he was an adult, and he was bound and determined to make up for lost time.  These days, that would be quite an indulgence (and what would my doctor say?), but I'll have one every so often, until I get priced out.

Lift The Curtains

      Canada ran a TV ad in the US that included excerpts from a Ronald Reagan radio speech about trade barriers, back when he was President, and the ad leaves the impression the late President was no fan of tariffs.

     President Trump was annoyed, firing back on social media, "The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. [...] Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED." (You can go read the whole thing on "Truth Social" if you like.)  And indeed, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute said the ad “misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address.”  As CNN notes, they didn't explain just how.  It's a whole Dance of the Seven Veils, over something that is part of the public record.

     Why take someone else's word about it?  Newsweek published the entire text of the radio address and you can read it for yourself; Mr. Reagan makes it clear that he's opposed to tariffs in general, greatly prefers free trade, and has imposed very specific tariffs on some Japanese products in response to their failure to abide by a previous agreement -- and that he hopes to resolve the issue soon and return to free trade.  But see for yourself.

Ah, Cleverness

     It would make me happy to have something witty to say about the demotion of the East Wing of the White House, and the monster of a ballroom that (supposedly) will rise in its place.  But I don't.

     The money for this work is coming from "private donors."  At the same time, the present government shutdown means SNAP and WIC coffers will -- probably -- run dry, just in time for Thanksgiving.  There's some private help, but it's pretty paltry compared to the big government programs.

     You don't have to believe that government food assistance programs are a good idea to understand that shutting them down abruptly is a bad idea.  It's a rugpull, just as the heating season is starting up.  It'd be one thing if Congress, after due debate, ramped them down, but this is, well, cruel.  And all the more so in the light of a lavish building project for the Presidential mansion.  It might be "The People's House," but don't count on getting in if you show up for dinner unexpectedly, no matter who's living there at the time.

     States and cities and private food charities are scrambling to make up the shortfall, but they're not going to have enough.  One of our local food banks has already extended help to Federal employees working without paychecks -- yes, they've opened the doors to the families of TSA agents -- so they're already under an extra burden.

     Somebody tell me how this is making us great again?

Pulp Fiction

     I wrote yesterday in a rush, and at first sight, it implies something I had no intention of saying, something I don't believe in: I said recent events were like a scrambled Atlas Shrugged, lacking John Galt.

     Ayn Rand was a huge fan of pulp fiction when she was younger, translated stuff in Russia and the pure quill once she came to the U.S.  Those stories were generally cast in the Gothic mode: there's a clear conflict between good and evil, a villain -- and a hero.  Robin Hood, Zorro, general Western Sheriffs, the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, Batman, G-8, Doc Savage: they appear at key moments, solve the crime, vanquish the bad guy(s), save the day!   When Rand turned to novels, she used archetypes for her characters; of course she had a hero.  It's larger-than-life pulp.  A lot of famous literature is, if you take a step back.

     In real life, the guy who rides in big and bold to save the day is as likely to be a villain as a hero, if not more likely -- Napoleon springs most readily to mind, but you can fill in the blanks.  Good guys getting through tumultuous events and carrying the gen. pop along are likely to be committees: the Founders and Framers of the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution; the leaders, generals and admirals of the Allies in WW I and II.

     A recent news commentator opined that the Democrats are unlikely to sweep the midterm elections despite widespread disapproval of Republican performance in office, because voters see Dems as "weak" and the GOP as "strong."  Since when did we stop rooting for the underdog?  We got into two world wars a bit late, on the side that looked weak -- because it was the proper side; because the other guys were authoritarians with no respect for individual freedom, for freedom of the press, freedom of religion.  Unlike the pessimistic commentator, I don't think we we've lost that.

     We're Americans.  We dance right up to the brink.  So far, we've always known when to step back.

     (PS: Tam said, "So you're rehabilitating Ayn Rand?"  I don't think so.  She fell for her own fiction; you shouldn't.  There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around in fiction, SF especially, everything from The Moon Is A Harsh Matters to The Dispossessed and beyond.  None of them are guidelines around which to remold society, a project that always involves oppression.  One of the overlooked things about the governments that arose from the American Revolution is that in large measure and at every level, the people involved were trying to hold on to what they had and keep it going, not knock it flat and build a New Citizenry from the rubble and ash.  For better and worse, there weren't any huge departures from the trajectories they were already on.  Eventually, the most contradictory elements came into conflict....)

Hurtling Though History

     Photographs of the destruction at the East Wing of the White House from yesterday and today suggest that this Administration is speedrunning the notion of "ruin value."

     Or perhaps it's the boast of Caesar Augustus, who claimed to have found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble -- only, you know, the average Roman was still living in a flimsy apartment house, hoping the lightweight upper stories wouldn't catch fire while the Emperor was fiddling around with his building plans.

     Hey, did you hear about the anthrax outbreak in Argentina -- the country our Federal government just bailed out and is talking about importing cheap beef from?  Dig in!

     It's like someone threw Atlas Shrugged in a blender, only with no John Galt.

No More Kings

      The "No Kings" rallies across the country appear to have gone without a hitch: no tea thrown in the harbor, no throwing things at the police until the police shot back, plenty of U.S. flags, silly inflatable costumes, and hand-made signs.  Between five and seven million people took part, very probably the largest mass protest in our history.

     And we do have a history with kings.

     Rule by decree is bad; Congress and not the President is supposed to have the power of the purse (it's right there in the Constitution).  There's still a broad consensus about this, but it's weakening.  It shouldn't, no matter who is President.  Love him, loathe him or feel indifferent, all Presidents are obliged to play by the rules, and when one won't, it's not a thing to chuckle over, it's a reason to chuck him out.

     The first chucking-out is going to be Congress.  Even when they're not shut down by an unwillingness to negotiate across party lines, the present Congress has been largely supine, bullyragged and led around like dull oxen by the Executive.  That's not how it's supposed to work.  They're due for a housecleaning, starting with next year's elections

     Our government is a circus.  We need the clowns, the ringmaster, the lion-tamer -- the whole thing.  One guy leading a herd of elephants to trample it all down isn't much of a show.
  

Which Way Does Your News Lean?

     Look, all reporting bears some imprint left by the people that report it.  Selection of stories, choice of people to interview, questions asked, and so on.  Good reporters work to minimize this; they research and check facts; good editors call 'em on it when they fail to, and send them back to mill to grind more finely. And honest media outlets label opinion as opinion when they present it.

     Not all outlets are honest.  Sometimes they're lying to themselves.  Sometimes they're trying to pick winners and losers instead of just reporting who won or lost.  And sometimes, they're lying to you.

     These guys do their best to sort 'em out.  It's a big job and they don't always keep up, but they don't stop trying.

     Which direction do your news sources lean?  Do you know?  Are you sure?  Find out.

Conan The Historical Preservation

     Robert E. Howard's house, now a museum, is falling apart.  The Foundation running it needs our help.  While the author of Conan the Barbarian -- and a great many other cracking good stories featuring wonderful characters in fantastic situations -- hasn't lived there in quite some time, having ended his own life in 1936 -- the house still stands, restored much as it was.

     Few fantasy and SF writers get much physical recognition; Robert A. Heinlein's houses in Bonny Doon and Colorado Springs (much changed) bear little memory of him; you can look at Octavia Butler's typewriter, but not her workspace; Ray Bradbury's basement office has been recreated here in Indianapolis with original artifacts and there's a museum dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut not far away.  But the actual places where it happened, where the magic met paper?  Those are few and far between.

     You can help save Conan's birthplace.

Spooky Season

     No, not goblins and ghosts and things that go bump in the night -- spy stuff.  Intel stuff, open-source and covert, military and political.  Come to think of it, some of that stuff might go bump in the night, or possibly ka-blam.

     There's a new podcast out, from a source that seems unlikely at first sight, and they're doing good work, serious work, talking to newsmakers a little but mostly to people who avoid headlines, about things that sometimes make headlines.  Sources & Methods is not the usual fare, and in its best moments, is as fascinating as a good spy novel.

Diversity Fire?

     One of the big TV networks is splitting up, spinning off its opinion-focused cable channels and websites from the main news and entertainment operation, and who could blame them?  Their audience goals are very different, and opinion TV rises and falls on the tides of politics; today's soaring eagle is tomorrow's albatross.  Meanwhile, the more mainstream outlet strives to serve (and gather) the widest possible audience.

     That said, mainstream TV in the U.S. still skews white, male and upper-middle class in a manner very disproportionate to the population as a whole, and news staffing leans more that way than entertainment.  One fix, long required by the FCC, has been not diversity hiring but diversity outreach: licensed stations are required to cast a very wide net when seeking employees, and to document their efforts.  The theory is that talent (and the enthusiasm required to employ that talent for the relatively low pay earned by most positions) is rare enough that qualified applicants will have a fair chance -- if they know the jobs are open.  And it has worked; TV today is more diverse than it was sixty years ago, for all that it remains less diverse than the country as a whole.

     Large broadcast companies have supplemented this with news (and entertainment) sub-groups that look for stories about, from, or of interest to underrepresented demographic groups and while it might be tempting to ascribe that to some notion of liberal uplift, guess again: those groups are markets for advertising, and if you can expand the reach of some generic cop-and-lawyers show by adding a Goth-y computer gamine, a lady boss, a gay cop or ensuring that the cast is a cross-section of America, they're gonna do it, and pick up an extra ten or twenty percent in ad revenue because they've got better ratings among red-headed working mothers of Latvian descent, etc. than the competing networks; likewise, news divisions don't want to miss developing stories just because nobody on the staff speaks Spanish or is likely to notice a wave of murders among an ethnic minority or a pandemic emerging among a disregarded group; those are legitimate news "beats," and you need reporters who know the territory.

     So it's not a great sign when a line like this scrolls across social media:
     "NBC News has laid off 150 employees, eliminating teams dedicated to Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ issues."
     The details are not quite so dire, some of them will land jobs on one side or another of the split; but the teams will be gone, out from under the current glare of official disapproval, just a little more compliance in advance.

     It's become fashionable, at least in some circles, to sneer at the notion that diversity is a major source of our country's strength, but the version of that sentiment without layers of gloss and varnish is that we're a chaotic, cross-grained mob who, faced with a problem, will try to solve it in a dozen different ways and fight among ourselves over who has the best solution even before it is solved -- but we will solve it, and then bicker about the solving while tumbling towards the next crisis.  Hammering our lovely, awful mess into some square-cornered whitebread straitjacket isn't going to make us better, and you can take that to the bank. 

Sometimes, Silence

     Occasionally, I'll look at a current issue, dig a little deeper -- and decide not to say anything about it.  I had an idea for this morning, but it's just not worth it; I'd be adding more heat than light about something both contentious and impossible to resolve, a matter of opinion and taste rather than fact.

     People are entitled to their own opinions.  Even when I think they're wrong.  Even when their notions are morally suspect.

Remember WENN

     It's back!  The TV series Remember WENN ran on AMC for four seasons starting in 1996 and then vanished.  A mostly-gentle comedy, it follows the career of a plucky young woman from Elkhart, Indiana who arrives at a radio station in Pittsburgh in the late 1930s to work as a radio scriptwriter.  The sets and costumes are first rate, the dialog is period-snappy, and while the technology isn't one hundred percent consistent, it's generally so close you'll never notice.  (I will, especially using carbon and ribbon mics together in the studios, but here's the thing: they're all real microphones, and it's not that far off.)

     It's on AMC and another streaming channel now.  I watched the first episode again tonight.  It's just as charming as I remember.

Peace In Gaza

     As I write this, a long day of speeches and congratulations is underway.  Smiling politicians in nice suits (or the local equivalent) are applauding one another.  That's fine, and I'm not going to say anything snippy about the political figures involved because, hey, they did it.

     All peace in the Middle East is temporary -- but that's true of all peace, everywhere, and of all wars, too.  What's important right now is the last of the living hostages have been freed, prisoners are being released, and people in Gaza aren't being bombed or shot at as they begin, however tentatively, to return to their homes or to the rubble where their homes once stood.  Reports say food and other aid is moving   Maybe it will last a week, a month, a year or only a day; but every day that passes without war in the region is a better day.

     I hope everyone involved -- even the individuals I don't like -- has many better days to come.