I'm Just Watching

     The more I pay attention to the news, the weirder it all gets.  I'm just watching, waiting to see what's next.

     If you put the events in U. S. politics of the past few months in a novel, you'd be accused of hackwork, melodrama, stuff that wouldn't pass muster in a penny dreadful.

It's Grill Time

     The temperature has been warming up and this past weekend, the weather suited running the grill.  Friday, our neighborhood grocery had nice corned beef brisket* at prices that were not dire and I bought the largest one my checking account and oval grill pan would support.

     Saturday, it went in the covered pan, fat side up on the roasting rack with a turnip cut into large chunks (and another one would not have been remiss) at an hour per pan, to be joined an hour into the process by potato sections, a cut-up white onion, celery and carrots.  I put the seasoning that comes with corned beef on it, smoked paprika on the turnip and some rosemary-and-friends on the potato.  Without any added liquid, it ends up with a cup and a half of broth, the turnip mushy and loaded with salt -- a little bit on the potato chunks is better than butter.

     There was enough left over to save some corned beef back for homemade hash Sunday morning (mine with scrambled egg, Tam's the plain meat and potatoes) and freeze a bag of fat-separated broth, meat and vegetables for soup later.

     That would have been the weekend's adventures, except--  Our corner store also stocks some imported South American beef.  It's pre-packaged, and more affordable than their fancy butcher-cut meat.  Tam was celebrating the arrival of a check† when she noticed nice picanha steaks in that case.  Nice, and huge; she bought one and it was plenty.  Sunday was even warmer than Saturday, and the beef got seared and slow-grilled, rare for her, medium for me.  The fat cap renders as it cooks and melts into the meat -- and, very briefly, onto the coals and flares up, when I turned my half sideways to brown the cut end!  That's when a covered grill comes in handy: close the vents until the flames stop, lift the lid, turn the meat and open the vents back up, smooth as silk.  It came out fine.  Add a bagged salad and some 1-minute nuked bone broth rice, and it was about as simple a fancy meal as could be had.
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* Presumably for Saint Patrick's day, despite the fact that the actual Irish are more likely to be eating ham.  Oh, they won't stock corned beef for New Year's, but the incorrect pinkish meat for a religious holiday turned cultural and now an informal and widely-observed secular holiday, suddenly they can't get enough.  Oh well, corned beef is corned beef.  I won't pass it up.
 
† While the average income for writers is decent money (a tad under $50K for fiction novelists), they get that figure by throwing Steven King, Dan Brown, Suzanne Collins and so on in with the regular working stiffs making three cents a word: a few dozen millionaires skews the number way up. Most writers get paid on publication -- or months later, once the check has creaked through the Byzantine financial operations the typical publisher applies to any sap whose name doesn't guarantee best-sellers. So the arrival of a check is indeed cause for celebration, and if two show up in any given week, well, it's a Jubilee.

I Can't Spend Every Day On It

     "OMG, look what the current Administration did!"  Yeah, just take it as given: every day is a new spectacle of some sort, Federal workers abruptly fired and rehired, Constitutional or customary limits tested and retested, allies insulted, bombastic statements made and so on and so forth.  It's management by chaos, government as reality TV.

     And it is exhausting.  That's a feature for authoritarians, not a bug: they want critics burnt out, worn down, going bug-eyed over an unending succession of small excursions and occasional large violations of norms.  It's good theater: "Lookit 'em run!"  "Guess they were 'triggered!'" "Cry harder!"

     I'm not crying.  I'm not triggered.  I'm annoyed.  This kind of behavior is the ruination of republics and the genesis of autocracies, and we have damned few politicians who will stand up to it.  The ones on the inside are glorying in it (and suppressing the occasional wash of nausea) while many on the outside appear to be more envious than concerned.

     There are signs the Administration may be going a little too far; there are signs that they're ignoring the warnings in those tea leaves.  But that's a flimsy hope and naked, cynical opportunism is the dominant paradigm on both sides of the aisle.

     I could poke fun at Indiana's Attorney General for attempting to language-police local news media* after his party has been telling us that scolding people for not using pronouns of choice is overbearing interference with freedom of speech.  But hypocrisy's a widespread hobby these days and what's sauce for the goose is apparently no longer sauce for gander -- and vice versa.
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* A TV news station tweeted that Indiana's Governor had issued an Executive Order "banning trans women from women's sports at Indiana schools," and were promptly reproved by the AG, "Not correct. The order banned biological males...." I guess he wanted to make sure the Governor's preferred pronouns were honored, First Amendment bedamned?

Europe Crunches Towards War

     By my figuring, the planet's been in WW III since Putin's Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine called for -- and got -- international help.

     It was a small and proxy war; the West was prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian, the last Russian or peace, whichever came first.  Awful, cynical, heartbreaking -- but not atypical.

     Now that the U.S. has put assistance to Ukraine on hold, Europe is moving to a war footing.  Welcome to 1937!

     Being the world's policeman is a thankless and not-inexpensive task.  The only thing it beats are all of the alternatives.  As we may soon discover.

An Hour And A Half Of Fun?

     I watched a few minutes of last night's big Presidential speech and picked up the box scores and highlights this morning: it mostly covered what he's already done. Republicans cheered wildly and offered standing ovations; Democrats sat, jeered a little and held up small, polite signs with simple messages like "FALSE," "MUSK STEALS" and "SAVE MEDICAID."*

     In short, nothing unexpected, right down to cantankerous Representative Al Green getting ejected for heckling the President, saying, "You don't have a mandate to cut Medicare."  (A power Presidents, as a matter of law, do not have -- which may or may not carry much weight at present.)

     Either you welcome chaos or you don't, and if you do, consider your fellow citizens -- veterans relying on benefits, the elderly and disabled relying on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  What did they ever do to you?

     But I guess we're finding out now what you will do to them -- and possibly to your own tax return, et Federal cetera.

     Tam and I watched an episode of Resident Alien instead, a refreshing, cheerful comedy about an alien sent to destroy the world who crash-lands in Colorado.  Gotta tell ya, in context he seems benign.
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* As an opposition party, their current motto is something along the lines of, "You wouldn't hit somebody who wears glasses, would you?"  Guess what?  That never did work and it's not working now.  This is no way for adults of any political stripe to behave, on either side of the equation.

The Bulwark Says It

     In 1933, Jews constituted one percent or slightly less of the German population, a tiny minority.  Tiny, visible and increasingly despised.

     In 2025, there's a tiny, visible, and increasingly despised minority in America -- and they are canaries in the coal mine.  I have no idea how to write about it effectively, but over at The Bulwark, someone does.

Grim Statistics

     Spent part of the weekend and this morning looking up some very grim statistics, but I'll spare you for now and just share the gist:

     The United States is a big, sprawling polyglot country, filled with people who came here from all over, for all sorts of reasons -- misfits and high achievers, people with a checkered past hoping to start over, people with a fancy pedigree in search of the next big thing, religious (and antireligious) nuts of every kind, people with big dreams and people with low ambitions.

     Politicians want to slice us and dice us and hammer us into molds -- "woke," "conservative," "liberal," "moderate," sort us by skin color, natal language, religion and so on and on and on, but we're all here.  Red state or blue state, red city or blue city -- it's really all shades of purple and we're side by side, like it or not, fixing one another's cars, cutting each other's hair, punching a timeclock at the factory or cattle on the open range, writing poems, building houses, spraying graffiti on walls or painting it over.

     A few of us -- a tiny minority -- have billions of dollars.  A sizeable minority of us are barely getting by.  Most people living in the U.S. are somewhere in the middle, a little worried over bills but on average, not missing any meals.  We're all a tiny bit special and we're all pretty ordinary.

     And they're all the same as you: they have dreams and hopes, sore spots and gripes.  Try to give 'em the benefit of the doubt.  Even the oddballs and weirdos.  You look pretty strange to someone yourself, right now, just as you are.

On Sunday

     It was cold outside.  I went outside anyway.  I touched some grass -- well, mostly in the process of cleaning the soles of a pair of tennis shoes, or whatever we're calling them now.  I have four pairs, one of which is about due for retirement, but they're all washable and they all got washed today.

     They still wear out at the balls of my feet and down the outside to the heel, same as always -- I leave question mark-shaped footprints, thanks to having very high arches.  It's rough on the soles.

     But I got outside.  In Nature.  With the birds and the squirrels and the plants that are, even in the cold, longing to be green again.  (That last part is just the plants.  As far as I know, the birds and squirrels are okay with being reddish or gray or whatever they got handed.)

Okay, I'll Bite

     Half everybody -- or maybe it's three-quarters by now -- has their own take on the meeting yesterday between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Donald Trump, Vice-President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and various assistants, flacks, hangers-on and the Press.

     It's not news that things did not go as expected.  Word was that Ukraine had agreed to a deal swapping access to their rare earth deposits in exchange for past and future U. S. help.

     Everybody went off-script.

     Here's the thing: while such agreements are usually worked out well in advance by underlings, who can have all manner of deep and vociferous disagreements in private, and then put forth by their principals in carefully-planned press events, that particular assortment of national leaders is remarkably lacking in political experience.  Sure, Mr. Trump was President for one term already, but before that?  Real estate promoter.  Reality TV star.  Mr. Zelenskyy was a professional comedian.  Mr. Vance spent part of one term as a U. S. Senator, after dabbling as a memoirist, venture capitalist and attorney.  The only long-term expertise in the front row at that meeting was Secretary Rubio, and it didn't appear to me that anyone was looking to him for guidance.

     Everybody's got some opinion about who was out of line and who was merely standing up for their side, but what I have to add is just this: these are not old hands at diplomatic give and take.  I did not get the impression any of them were playing a carefully calculated game.  They surprised themselves and each other.

     I'm not much inclined to give President Trump or any member of his Administration the benefit of the doubt, and I do my best to take that into account.  Conversely, I'm overly aware that Zelenskyy has had his back against the wall since the Russians first invaded.  But no matter how I feel about the participants, that meeting was a cock-up, in full view of the Press.

     And you'd have to be entirely ignorant of at least the last three or four hundred years of history to know that when major powers fail to oppose aggressive territorial expansion in Europe, it always grows to become a huge problem.