Found It

     Space Service, the book I was after, showed up at a well-known online auction site for slightly more than the dust jacket I almost bought.  It's on the way to me now.

     Better still (but to the detriment of my lunch money), the suggested purchases included another anthology edited by Andre Norton, Space Pioneers.  The same publisher, cover art very similar in theme and style -- and another case of collector rather than reader prices.  A check of Alibris and AbeBooks found better deals, and why not order it now?  I'll be skipping the expensive vending machine treats at work for a while to make it up.

     I'm curious to find out more about the series.  There was a third, Space Police, but I'm not finding any others.  The books don't seem to be very well known.

Nice Of Him

     The other day, I almost bought an obscure anthology edited by the late Andre Norton* that I wanted to read.  Space Service is long out of print.  I recognized most of the authors and a few of the stories.  Norton's judgement of what make a good SF story is trustworthy† and it looked like the kind of good old stuff I'd enjoy.

     The book was never published in paperback as far as I can tell, and the print runs might not have been very large.  Used copies are expensive -- but a seller at one of the big aggregators listed it for $10.00.  I ordered it on sight.

     Five minutes later, an email arrived directly from the seller: "Did you notice that you ordered a dust jacket, no book?"

     I had not.  It was there in the description, if I'd read that far.  I told him so and he helped arrange cancellation of the order.  The guy was even gracious about it.

     Of course, I'm still looking.  The cheapest copies are almost within reach of my somewhat skinflint sensibilities, but I can't justify it until payday.  If then.  Who knows, maybe one will turn up at a better price in the meantime.

     And if it doesn't have a dust jacket, I'll know where to go to buy one.
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* Andre Alice Norton, changed from Alice Mary Norton...so she could cash the checks for her first few novels, published under her pen name!  Starting with fantasy books, by the time her first magazine SF story was published, she was using "Andrew North" as her byline but getting checks with her right name on them.  Why all the names?  The past was a different country even in SF, and it took a long time for women writers to get much traction.  See also C. L. Moore and C. J. Cherryh.
 
† Her story sense in general was outstanding.  She turned out a number of engrossing and entirely credible Westerns, sagebrush, horse sweat, six-shooters and all, which is particularly impressive for a librarian from Cleveland, Ohio who was of somewhat fragile health.

Oh, Goodness!

     The day is almost over and I haven't posted anything!

     Look, we warmed up to temperatures in the teens today and there's three inches of snow on the ground, over a layer of ice.  I think I did well to get out of the house.

Omelette-Topped

     Corned beef hash is a favorite of mine, though presently available canned versions fall short of the mark in my opinion.

     The best kind is home made, with fresh potatoes and left-over corned beef brisket, both of them diced and fried together.  Next-best is served at SoBro's Good Morning Mama's, with their hash browns, onions and shredded corned beef brisket.

     But my quick home version has been evolving.  Mary Kitchen brand over a breadcrumb (Panko) and/or cornmeal* crust is pretty good.  Mixed with diced onions and/or fresh or canned peppers is even better, and I like to top it with an egg or two.

     Tam's no fan of the eggs, which, in fairness, can be a little thick and rubbery.  So this morning, I was thinking about brunch, and that she does like omelettes, and how would it work out to top the canned hash with omelette batter?

     I started with the usual, a heavy sprinkling of cornmeal with some onion powder and Italian-mix seasoning, and spread the hash over it and turned the burner on, medium heat.  Next, I made basic omelette batter: mashed a couple of saltines in a measuring cup, added a little water, let it sit a bit and then stirred in a couple of large eggs (egg$?)† slowly: you want to get them very well mixed without beating a lot of air into the batter, at least if you don't want it to come out fluffy.  (Not that fluffy topping would be bad -- I'll have to try that sometime, with three eggs and a lot of fork work.)

     With the corned beef hash starting to sizzle, I poured the omelette batter over it and snipped a Pippara pepper into rings scattered across the surface.  I covered it and gave it five minutes, then alternated stretches of three minutes uncovered with five minutes covered until the bottom crust was browned.  After the first 5-3-5, it should be firm enough to lift up with a spatula and check.

     How did it turn out?  I liked it; Tam didn't want to try.  Maybe next time.  (She's holding out to walk over for slow-cooked ribs at Fat Dan's, one of her favorite lunch choices. The sidewalks and streets have a few inches of wet snow over a glaze of ice and it's plenty cold, so that's not a walk I'll risk, not with two bad knees.)
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* Masarepa cornmeal is my preference. It is pre-cooked, and browns to a nice crunch.
 
† Y'know, I'm starting to think neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Musk's "DOGE" cares about or can do anything about the price of eggs.  Gee, thanks.  But we've got 'em now and it's not like you can stuff 'em in the mattress to save for later.  Eggs, I mean.

Yeech

     Today was a miserable cold, wet day, and tonight all that dampness is going to freeze.  The rain will turn to snow and Sunday with stay below freezing all day.

     And there's no one to blame for it.  It's just plain old winter weather, in an especially inconvenient form.  It's kind of a relief, really.

Keyboard: Back

     Taking my coffee-splashed keyboard as far apart as possible without prying at the switches uncovered pockets of coffee and gave me a chance to scrub the chassis and keycaps.  After drying overnight, I put it back together yesterday morning and tested it last night.

     So far, so good.

Forget It

     I admit it: I have lost all hope for the immediate future.  Things will continue to get worse, not better, and the most we can hope for is a valiant rearguard action against a rising tide of not just authoritarianism, but ignorant, meme-level authoritarianism.

     The future is here and it is staggeringly stupid.

     At 66, I may not live to see the end of it, especially if the current Administration crashes the economy or stumbles into a world war.  Even if all they manage to do is hose Social Security, Medicare and ACA-driven insurance markets, they'll do me real harm.

     This is not to say our Federal bureaucracy is a model of perfection; it's messy.  It's slow.  It is undoubtedly wasteful -- but you don't fix that with a handful of 20-something software engineers and deep, uninformed cuts.

     Every government that has prided itself on "efficiency" has been heedless of human cost, indifferent to human suffering, injurious to individual freedom and dignity.  The Trump Administration's unwarranted vandalism to USAID has already cost lives and will cost many more.  They're dinking with the military, with the VA, with Education, and they're lurching towards a Constitutional crisis with the potential to do immense harm.

     And some of you are still cheering for this.

     Me, I'm resigned to hanging on with no prospect of a better life and scant odds it will stay even as good as it is.

     You wanted King Stork.  Well, you got him.

Clumsy

     Things aren't going great this morning.  I've been using a Qwerkywriter II keyboard for several years.  I really like it, and since I bought it during the funding phase of the maker's Kickstarter, the price was substantially lower than what they cost now.

     This morning, I knocked about a third of a cup of coffee into it.  I usually put my coffee cup on an elevated coaster between the mousepad and the keyboard and today, a little distracted while moving my right hand from the mouse to the keyboard, I caught the upper edge of the cup and over it went.  (I have to pay close attention to where my hands are in relation to external objects; starting out severely nearsighted seems to have left me with a lousy sense of where things are unless I slow down and look right at them.)

     There's a lithium battery in the keyboard.  To make matters worse, I take my coffee with cream and sugar.  So immediate action was required.

     Once I had the keyboard draining and cleared off the desk to wipe up the worst of the spill, my computer crashed and started an update!  I had to ignore it while I got the battery out (only a little coffee on it), wiped up the coffee on the desk, rinsed off some small items and started opening up the rest of the keyboard.  It's got several tricky screws and I've only accessed the worst-soaked part so far.  Full disassembly will have to wait.

     I can't afford to replace it at present.  The exact model is no longer made, but the current version is a functional equivalent.  So I'll see how the cleaning process goes.

A Tune For These Times

     Round and round and round it goes -- mostly.

Reading For Our Times

     While many people have read and enjoyed the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, his "Space Travel Trilogy" is less well known.

     The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is, at first sight, a straightforward space adventure of its day: our hero stumbles into a secretive mission departing for the planet Mars and is abducted.  Arriving at Mars, he and his captors are separated, have various adventures and are reunited.  --But all is not as it seems.  Like the Narnia books, there is considerable Christian allegory at work.  It's entertaining fiction, and is probably the most widely read book of the trilogy.

     The next two are...different.  Perelandra is a fairly overt struggle between Good and Evil, in which Lewis treats in some detail the banality and pettiness of evil.  I was reminded of it when I read Adam Serwer's 2018 essay "The Cruelty is the Point" in The Atlantic.  While C. S. Lewis devotes considerably more wordage to the topic and addresses it within an explicitly Christian context, the parallels are indeed striking. Professor Weston, the villain of both Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, has many counterparts in current politics, willing and even eager to commit cruelties both great and small, allegedly for the greater good but in fact, largely for their own sake, artifacts of a corroded soul.

     The third book, That Hideous Strength, is a cautionary tale and one the years have brought into ever sharper outline.  Combining elements of Arthurian legend with the mythos established by the preceding two books, it investigates both the risks of reducing of the human experience to a series of algorithms and the perils of AI simulating human behavior.  You do not need to share the religious spin Lewis gives these themes to follow along -- and the entire story is set within the exciting tales of a young academic who is drawn into and the ultimately rejects the machinations of the antagonists.  I won't spoil the story with too many details, but it's well worth the read, full of tension and excitement.

     Lewis saw trends well in advance of his time.  He filtered his impressions through his own education and religious beliefs, but his unwavering belief in the value of the dignity of the human soul shines through his work in a way impossible to ignore.

     Those three books offer a perspective sorely lacking at present.

Buttered Saltines

     I had a good one all lined up, a blistering piece about how the protege of a billionaire who doesn't think freedom and democracy are compatible was pushing an extreme version of the unitary executive theory in which the courts must never, ever review the Constitutionality or reasonableness of Presidential decisions.

     It's a notion that runs counter to the principle of judicial review, the Major Questions Doctrine and the Administrative Procedure Act.  Perhaps it's exactly what you might expect from a man whose membership in the ruling elite is highly contingent.  He was, after all, willing to exploit his own mother's addiction and dysfunction to further his ambition, an act roughly on a par with sending her out to walk the streets for his own gain -- although at least then, she would have been better able to refuse to go along with it.

     But no, never mind.  If that could reach you, you have already been reached, and if it cannot, you're a lost cause.  Or at least a lost symptom, netted, reeled in and and ready to be sold.  Realization will arrive with the filleting knife, if it ever dawns at all.

     So I'll stop and instead remember the simple joy of a little butter slathered between two saltines.  It was a treat when I was a child and it's still a treat now -- and still, so far, an affordable one.

Hamfest Missed

     There's a hamfest near Indianapolis today and I was going to go -- but there's also flu and worse circulating, and I kinda didn't want to give my fellow hams a chance to disappoint me, either.

     At an outdoor flea market, there's more space to avoid germs and more chances to overlook the politics that were starting to infect hamfests even before the pandemic.  It used to be just looking askance at CBers* and griping about the FCC and the ARRL (and whatever feuds were infesting the local repeaters), but people started drawing partisan lines.  Me, I just want to look at interesting old junk in person, and swap signal and weather reports over the air.
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* And refusing to sell them linear amps.  4 Watts is plenty, guys.  If you want more, study up for a ham ticket.

About Those Frogs

     In a move that is more rock-throwing than frog-boiling, FCC head Brendan Carr has started an inquiry into KCBS in San Francisco, a radio station that had the audacity to -- gasp -- report on real-time events in public view as they were happening!

     Commissioner Carr says the station has been sent a letter of inquiry, pending "...a formal investigation[...], and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public-interest obligations."

     Indeed, the radio spectrum has limited space for stations, which are charged with operating in the "public interest, convenience and necessity."  We've also got the First Amendment, the relevant sections of which read, "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press [...]."  The FCC has their own read on how those principles interact.

     The old Photography Is Not A Crime website was built around the fact that in the United States, it's not a crime to take or to share pictures of anything in public view.  If you ever wondered why the government kept extending the fences and "No Trespassing" areas around Area 51, now you know.  And if you can photograph it, you can report on it.  Simple as that.*

     Then-candidate Donald Trump was very open about his plans for Federal forces to round up and deport illegal immigrants if he won the Presidency.  He did and they have begun, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)† doing most of the work.  So the Press knew well in advance and looked for activity.  When ICE acted in the San Francisco area, KCBS covered it, who-what-when-where-why, live as events went down.  "What" included ICE raids in East San José ("where"); "who" involved uniformed agents in unmarked vehicles.  It's not a secret: anyone could see what was going on.  Commissioner Carr is nevertheless unhappy.  (The Völkischer Beobachter, er, New York Post seems worried about "rootless cosmopolitan" involvement -- but having been there, I can tell you the distance between corporate shareholders and a field reporter is impossibly vast.  Not only do the shareholders not tell 'em what to do, they don't even know who they are.)

     Elsewhere, there's unhappiness all around in Denver, where ICE covered up a home-security camera while knocking on doors.  Border "Czar" Tom Homan wants an investigation -- not into the illegal interference with video recording, but into how local news reporters found out about the raids that, this past October before he'd even got the job, he had promised were coming.  9News reporter Chris Vanderbeen has the skinny on that (BlueSky thread):
      "As a local news operation, it's routine for various people to tell us [...] when a boatload of federal agents are amassing in a parking lot [...]  A number of our crews went to these staging areas and then -- mostly this is because it's what journalists do -- they followed the teams when they went out on the raids. [...] Keep in mind, the ICE presence was OBVIOUS to anyone nearby too"
     His thread is accompanied by multiple pictures of uniformed ICE agents in marked vehicles.  A crew from the Fox News Network was embedded with at least one ICE squad in the area during the raids.  These were not covert operations.

     This isn't a new administration finding their way, unsure of the rules and customs; the principles of press freedom and "in public view" are very well established.  And, yes, there is always some tension between what the Press wants to drag into the light and what governments want to keep quiet.  That's normal.  In the United States, our Constitution and legal tradition favors truth and daylight over night and fog --  or Nacht und Nebel, if you'd prefer it in the original.
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* Interestingly enough, if you're in the military or working for Uncle Sam or a government contractor, there may be things in public view that you, personally, cannot talk about or share images of.  But that's a you and your employer issue.
 
† You'll recognize them in the field by their vests and jackets that say "POLICE ICE" in letters at least six inches tall.  They are indeed ICE, Federal Agents, but they're not, strictly speaking, police; it's there to keep other kinds of law enforcement from making embarrassing mistakes with firearms, etc.

Loosely Translated

     "Boys throw rocks at frogs in fun, but the frogs die for real."
     --Bion of Borystenthes

Ticking Away To Spring

     We're a week into February.  Three weeks to go and it will be March -- and you can see Spring from March.  Dimly at times, but it's there, looming up from the fog.

It's Veiled Threat Season!

      Checked on comments yesterday, only to read, "Your liberal bias is showing."  Ohhh, nooooes!  Jeepers, what'll I do if people find out I voted for Kamala Harris?  What if they learn I think there's still systemic racism around that we ought to be engaged in ending, or that I am a-okay with same-sex marriage,* think government regulations often serve the common good or that trans people shouldn't be erased or even made to ride in the back of the bus?

     How will I live it down?

     I still don't think an unlimited government is an unlimited good -- and Mr. Trump and his minion Mr. Musk (et barely-adult subminion cetera) are presently engaged in showing exactly the kinds of harm governments can do when unrestrained by Constitution, law and tradition.

     Another commenter mentions a handful of minor actions by the Biden Administration, many of which were held by courts to be over the line, apparently on the theory that if a Democrat President bumps into legal limits, a Republican one should be allowed to take a sledgehammer to them.  Yeah, wrong: when the Dems got slapped for stepping over the line, they took it and stepped back; in the case of student loans, they tried multiple approaches, mostly one at a time.  Comparing that to a full-on partisan assault on intentionally balanced and impartial Boards and Commissions, to a multi-pronged attack on Congressionally-established Departments and budgets, is claiming apples and hand grenades are the same because they are both dense objects that can be thrown.

     Both of my would-be and vaguely-threatening commenters appear dense and can be thrown, too.  Such boys are usually thrown for a loop when a woman tells 'em, "You're not the boss of me."  You don't get to police my opinions.  Go strain at Democratic gnats while swallowing Republican camels whole in someone else's comments.

     Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, his appointees and all their little Misters, along with Karoline Leavitt, the Administration's Baghdad Barbie of a Press Secretary, may indeed succeed in making a huge mess of our Federal government, leaving our Constitution, laws and customs in tatters.  Certainly Congressional Republicans are not going to stand up to them, with several already on the record acknowledging and shrugging off the illegalities being committed.  Their Democratic opposite numbers have largely been ineffectual, their leadership making only feeble protest.  That doesn't mean I have to go along with it.  Wrong is wrong.  The Constitution says what it says, the laws say what they say, and simply because the Trump Administration is getting away with high crimes and misdemeanors at present doesn't they're not going to get slapped down, one way or another.  Maybe in the near term; maybe only in the history books.

     They're villains.  If they will be numbered among the most infamous or are merely minor malefactors who will rate no more than a footnote remains to be seen.

     But my addled commenters, intent on herding the wimmenfolk back into line, need have no doubt about themselves: faceless members of a hateful mob, intent on excusing the actions of men to whom they are nothing at all.
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* Why should the expense and unhappiness of divorce be limited only to heterosexual couples?  Divorce attorneys have to eat!

A Reminder

     Blowing past all Constitutional limits on the power of the President might make you happy when the guy in the White House is doing things you approve of, but what happens when he does things you didn't want?  What happens when the other big party is in power?

     Or were you not planning on ever having another election?

Regressives

     The "Repeal the 20th Century" boys were active in my comments yesterday.  It turns out they don't give a darn about rising egg prices, as long as they can keep African-Americans and women from voting, as long as they can ensure I can't get a bank account or a loan without a man to co-sign it, as long as they can repeal same-sex marriage, antibiotics, food safety, anti-trust laws and television.

     They're not just willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- if the baby isn't a healthy, white heterosexual male or his largely silent and totally complaint female helpmeet, they're more than happy to throw the baby out.

     To hell with you guys.  We're not running history in reverse.  It might be what you voted for, but you're not going to get it.  Not even from the grifters you voted in.

"Run The Government Like A Business"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Played Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Don't get played.

Played, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

     We got played.

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

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

It's Black History Month

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

"TDS"

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

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

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

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

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