Enough With The Tapdancing

     It's annoying.  It's terrifying, and most people are nowhere near concerned enough: the President of the United States spent a good part of the weekend just past angrily posting on his social media platform, complaining about not being allowed to rule however he sees fit.  I've been looking for neutral coverage about it and of course, it's difficult to find.  You can go straight to the horse's mouth, though.

     Most of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell came in for harsh criticism, as has D.C. Federal Court Judge James Boasberg.  For those of you keeping score at home, that'd be senior members of a co-equal branch of the Federal government and the chair of a Federal agency whose independence most economists say is key to financial stability. The same series of posts claims, falsely, that the 2020 elections were rigged.

     News media also came in for threats; during a 20-minute briefing on Air Force One, the President accused U.S. media of promoting false stories and "not wanting the U.S. to win," cutting off ABC reporters from asking further questions about halfway through.  On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened broadcast license-holders over their coverage of President Trump's war-in-all-but-name with Iran, posting on X, the former Twitter: "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions -- also known as the fake news -- have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. [...] The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."   The law might be clear but Chairman Carr is not:  Most national and international coverage is done by networks and the Associated Press,* while FCC licenses are held by individual stations and group owners; ABC/CBS/NBC and Fox own only a few TV stations, while NPR, PBS, CNN and AP own none.  But threats are threats, and the Chairman is hoping station owners will act as his catspaws against the networks and wire service -- and there's a good chance at least some of them will.

     This is all the stuff of dictatorial rule, of "moving towards the Leader" on the part of underlings, and when you throw in the President's announcement that the fight against Iran will end "when I feel it in my bones," and giving his "feeling" that they were planning to attack as one of the Administration's reasons for starting the "excursions" in the first place, it forms a very ugly picture.  President Trump want to rule like a Roman emperor or a modern autocrat, unfettered by the petty concerns of courts or legislatures, indifferent to public opinion, steered by his own whims.  And much as he rails against the Press, they have continued to sanewash and normalize his dictatorial aspirations, to whitewash his tirades, racism and incoherence, apparently in the vain hope that if they pretend everything is normal, it will all eventually go back to normal.  Just keep throwing raw meat to the beast and pray it will go away?

     Appeasement never works.  Hope is nothing if you won't get out and push towards your goal.  Rust never sleeps -- and neither does the authoritarian impulse and the willingness to be ruled, the will to power and the lazy desire to let somebody else do the heavy lifting.
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These days, AP is also a software company: as computer-centric "electronic newsrooms" emerged, AP became a leading supplier of newsroom systems.  Think of it as Windows Office scaled so an entire newsroom can share it, with GUI conventions markedly different to those of Windows and Apple, though slowly converging.

Easy Listening

     When I was young and (some) regular household electronic devices still had genuine light-up vacuum tubes inside, I took Radio-TV Production classes for all three years of High School.

     The man who taught that subject was middle-aged and very heavy.  He'd worked his way through college as a jazz and middle-of-the-road music deejay before getting into news (and part-time police work, but that's another story), and told stories of the days when even a medium-sized directional AM station was a Big Deal, with full-time engineers on duty to turn the knobs.*

     One day, a particularly apple-polishing student lamented that there was hardly any jazz at all on the radio any more, and he chuckled.  "You watch TV, don't you?  Listen to the theme music.  Nearly all of it is light jazz of one kind or another."

     He was right.  Most of it still is, with some notable exceptions, and if you want background music and have a an Alexa or similar widget that only needs a single song to go searching for more of the same but different, you can spin up a nice fifteen minutes or half an hour of undemanding entertainment by asking it to play the theme from "Mannix," "The Wild, Wild West" (TV show) or something along those lines.

     Semi-relatedly, when I was even younger, I was a fan of both "The Wild, Wild West" and "Love, American Style," and it wasn't until years later that I realized what they had in common was that they were as close as TV ever got to newsstand pulp magazines.  There are other good examples, but those two had taken the essentials and run right from pulp-paper page to the camera lens.
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* That's not all they were doing.  Directional antenna arrays for AM radio are large, from two to as many as nine towers in the 100-foot to 700-foot range and spaced about that far apart, with a large, complex gadget called a "phasor" (no, really) to feed the right amount and phase angle of radio-frequency energy to each one, and a smaller gadget called a "phase monitor" to ensure it was all working as it should.  They were drifty, and regular readings had to be made, along with occasional adjustments.  Over time, the change to transistors and then integrated circuits meant the phase monitors got better and better, and as computers replaced log tables and slide rules, the design of phasors and antenna arrays became less art and more science.  Eventually, it became obvious even to the FCC that most of the drifting was not, in fact, the big hardware, but the little gadgets we used to check it every half hour.  30-minute checks became three-hour checks; engineers on duty 24/7 were replaced by a requirement for one full-timer with the right license and, eventually, "whoever," a part-timer to occasionally look over the automated monitors and make sure the EAS tests ran.  But oh, it used to be a thing, once upon a time.

Connections

     Most people are familiar with organization charts, graphics showing lines of control and responsibility; most people have seen the overthought/paranoid version stereotypes in films and on TV, too, tangled spiderwebs of colorful string connecting photos and newspaper clippings, sometimes three-dimensional.

     There's an outfit that's been tracking the connections between modern conservative authoritarian organizations, finding unlikely linkages between strict Islamic regimes and the Christian Nationalist far Right, obvious ones between authoritarian-inclined European governments with anti-LGBTQ laws and organizations that seek to roll back the rights of women in the Third World, between the current incarnation of the Republican Party and their counterparts in Europe, South America and Africa -- and it's much more of an organization chart than a parody maze of neon-hued yarn.  And one of the most connected nodes has a familiar name: Project 2025.

     Read it or don't.  Believe it or deny it.  But over here on the distaff side, I'm not seeing a dime's worth of difference between a bunch of bearded religious authorities who want me to shut up and focus on making the menfolk happy in Texas and in Tehran or Kabul, except one group has a very firm grasp on power and the other is still groping for it.  (Oh, and different hats.  How very nice.)

     Things are bad and there are a whole lot of folk out there, foreign and domestic, doing their level best to make them even worse.  And they're sharing notes, in some cases while fighting each other.

How A Bill Becomes Law (In Indiana)

     With the 2026 legislative session wrapping up this weekend, it's a little late, but the Chamber of Commerce has a nice PDF with a flowchart graphic that explains the Hoosier process of turning a bill into law.  It's not an easy procedure, and combined with our part-time legislature, I'm sure it spares us no end of trouble.  Every new law creates a new kind of crime -- and not every bad, distasteful or unpopular thing needs to be outlawed.

Hey, Look

     It's eleven at night and the cat wants me to go to bed so much that he's trying to steal things off desks so I'll chase him down the hall to my bedroom.  And if you don't mind, that's what I'm going to do.  He's positively indignant that I haven't laid down so he's got a warm place to sleep.

A Roaring March Day

      This morning, it was over 70 degrees outside and dark, as thunderstorms -- even a tornado or two, farther north -- rumbled across the state.  By midday, clouds and sunlight were chasing one another, pushed by strong and gusty winds, and in late afternoon, it poured down rain.

     A little before sunset, I had to go outside at the North Campus to check on a client's equipment just as the rain was tapering off; I'd worn a zip-up sweatshirt, since temperatures were supposed to hit 30 overnight.  It would surely still be 40 or higher at the end of the workday, right?  The inside of the front door of the building was fogged up.  It was above freezing outside, barely.

     I'd had enough foresight to bring an insulated vest but I'd left it in my car.  It was still better than nothing.  I walked around to the client installation to the whistling of wind through the pine trees, wishing I'd brought a coat.

     That's Indiana in March.  The whole month will go back and forth like this.  We're in for a slow warm up through the weekend, with another swift drop starting late Sunday, probably with more storms.

     Meanwhile, my raccoon man had to cancel.  Something about not wanting to be on a steep roof during a thunderstorm, a decision that speaks well for his judgement.

Not A Euphemism

      We have raccoons in our chimney.  There is no fireplace at Roseholme Cottage, but there used to be a coal-burning furnace, with a flue ten inches in diameter feeding the chimney at a point about four feet above the floor, well below where the gas furnace and water heater now connect with standard four-inch flues.

     The big, capped flue and empty lower chimney must have looked like a good deal to the raccoons this Fall.  They came and went fairly quietly, with occasional scrabbling sounds; the main gang (the official collective nouns include a nursery, a mask or a gaze) in our neighborhood lives in the storm drains, and relocates during heavy rain.  But a few of them favor rooftops, and they'd spent some time on our neighbor's roof and chimney a couple of years ago.

     They began using our radon vent pipe as a handy ladder to our roof, and getting in the chimney.  I figured the furnace fumes would force them out this Winter, but apparently once they're lower than the connection point, the draft draws in sufficient fresh air.

     Now they're living in there, coming and going at all hours, making various raccoon noises, and being worrisome.  It's gotten to be too much.  I've scheduled a raccoon relocator to stop by tomorrow, look the situation over and give us a quote, and there's a chimney firm lined up to follow him with a genuine raccoon-proof cap, or proof until the raccoons figure it out, and clean the chimney out before they install it.

     Ahh, Nature!  This is at least less strange than the squirrel that had apparently become addicted to furnace fumes, and would wriggle into the flue and lay there, inhaling hot carbon monoxide and shutting down the furnace by obstructing the draft.  That was quite a few years ago and I eventually installed a hardware-cloth barrier in the flue.  There's no easy fix for raccoons -- clever, strong and dexterous, they call for heavier forces than I can bring to bear.

Public Relations

1. Local, Local, Local
     Indianapolis had its very own electric power utility for decades, and people liked Indianapolis Power & Light.  Rates were low; while the other large utilities in the state served mostly rural customers, IPL's customer base was the dense Indianapolis metro, and they leveraged efficiencies of scale and Hoosier frugality to deliver reliable power at low rates.  They put one of the city's first radio stations on the air, and followed it up in the late 1950s with the first or second commercial TV station*

     By 1957, IPL was out of the broadcasting business -- and very firmly in the Power & Light business.  They made money for their investors and kept on delivering power to customers at some of the lowest rates in the state, while maintaining and expanding their generating stations.  In 2000 or 2001 (sources differ), international power giant AES bought IPL, and in 2021, they retired the IPL branding in favor of their own name.

     Now AES itself is being snapped up by "a consortium led by BlackRock subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners and Swedish private equity firm EQT AB [...] for a total enterprise value of $33.7 billion [...]."

     AES has never been quite as well-liked as IPL; rates have gone up and reliability is not quite what it was, at least in part thanks to a growing population and aging infrastructure.  The sale to the consortium is even less popular; recent announcement of public open houses resulted in what are being described as "credible threats" on social media.  Events were rescheduled, and have now been postponed indefinitely.  The goodwill IPL built by being the all but invisible, affordable suppliers of wall-socket juice is gone, just when the company most needs it.  And the state regulator is feeling the heat.

2. National and International
     Meanwhile, I'm hearing an old familiar tune: "Now the President has finally gone too far!  His supporters will turn on him!"

     Gasoline prices are skyrocketing and stocks are tumbling as I write this, and the surprise-war against Iran is leaving the usual piles of dead and injured in its wake.  I still wouldn't get too excited about the prospects for a man whose public image has already survived a bungled pandemic response, an attempted and ugly coup, two impeachments, felony convictions, civil sexual assault conviction, an unpopularly harsh ramp-up of immigration enforcement and a sprawling sex-crimes scandal, not to mention his own rambling and semi-coherent speechmaking.  While he's shed supporters here and there, the people who love President Trump really, really love him, and by now they have years of practice rationalizing away any negatives.  If the economy tanks hard, Donald Trump may yet succeed in Hoovering himself off the national stage just like Herbert did, but A) I would not count on it and B) a hard crash is a lousy thing to wish on your fellow citizens.

     Unlike nearly all of his predecessors, this President can't be steered much by public opinion, especially in this second term, and to the extent that he is, it's by crowd reaction at his events, which are not a balanced cross-section of the American electorate.  I don't know how we and our country are getting out of this -- if we manage to get out at all -- but expecting a miracle is a recipe for disappointment.
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* Supporters of competing WTTV and WRTV (then WFBM) claims to be first are still duking it out -- in May, 1949 IPL's WFBM was inarguably on the air first, but their transmitter promptly failed, and they were still repairing it that November, when WTTV came on and stayed on.  But the joke's on them: in 1944, experimental W9XMT was the first TV station on the air in town, and the Wm. H. Block Co. department store received a license for WWHB in 1947 and got as far as transmitting test patterns before deciding the television business was too iffy for them.

Ugh

     A nasty headache has had hold of me all day, from a morning of wordless, sensation-based nightmares to an afternoon of slogging though basic chores.

     I blame research, or maybe the time change.

     Also, could governments maybe not site their nuclear-weapons research efforts in cities full of historical architecture?  That'd be nicer for everyone.  Even the the U.S. and the USSR mostly figured that out, and they could barely agree on what was for lunch.  Also, you know, cities, kinda full of people who weren't in on the plan and probably wouldn't have agreed to it if asked....

What's With Iran?

      Wander around social media in recent days and you'll probably trip over someone reminding that "we created the mess in Iran."  It's almost true, too -- but it's not the whole story.

     I guess I could remind you, "War is not healthy for children and other living things,"* like the brilliant Lorraine Schneider, gone too soon, but if you haven't noticed that by now, you haven't been paying attention.

     So how did that part of the world end up where it is at this moment in history?  Some of the blame lies with Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of no less a figure than Theodore, who masterminded the events that brought the Shah to the fore in 1953.

     But here's the catch: the Shah of Iran, the guy they threw out in 1979, was already the Shah by that time, and had been since 1941, when his father was forced to abdicate.  After WW II, he tried to modernize by convening the country's 1906-created elected legislature for the first time -- and stacking the deck by appointing senators who were aligned with his power.  Subsequent elections undermined this convenient arrangement, leading to the opposition party winning a majority and triggering the oil nationalization crisis that spurred Western intervention.

     And that Shah's father?  Here's where it gets even weirder, because Reza Khan (later Reza Shah) was not, in fact, the scion of some ancient Middle Eastern ruling family.  He was almost Just Some Guy, who ended up in the messy ending of WW I and the ongoing Russian Revolution and civil war that followed it as a soldier, an officer, fighting the Soviet Union, sometimes with the British.  And in 1921, the British helped in the coup that collapsed the Soviet-dominated Persian government under Amad Shah Qajar, who was at that time, yes, you guessed it, the Shah of Iran (no relation); and his was the long-established ruling line, or as close as it gets in that part of the world.  For the new government, Reza Khan was Minister of War.  In 1923, he stepped up to Prime Minister and by 1925, he'd convinced the rest of the government to depose the Shah.

     That left a vacancy at the top, and, ahem, one man was ready to...is "serve" the right word for an autocrat?  His peers voted him in.

     That's how Reza Khan became Reza Shah Pahlavi, and how his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, became next in line for the throne he'd later be kicked out of.

     We can't blame the CIA for all of it.  We can't blame the Brits for more than their share, or the USSR, or the various Iranian governments or even, I suppose, lay it entirely at the feet of Reza Khan.  But it was a world-class mess long before the the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini grabbed the top spot in 1979 -- and one of his political motivations was that he blamed Reza Shah for the murder of his father, when he was two years old.

     I have simplified some things, and skipped steps; the details of what happened and who was trying to accomplish what at which time are tangled at best; there are few unbiased histories or first-hand accounts. This is history so thick you can stack it up like mud bricks.  This is history plastered with warning signs.
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* I have distinct memories of a counterfeit postage stamp with this image on it somehow passing muster in the U. S. mail and making the news afterward in the late 1960s or early 70s, but I can't find any mention of it online.

Noem Out, Mullin In

      Does it make a difference?  There are questions about what DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was spending her department's money on, especially the fat stack of cash resulting from the giant omnibus bill Congress passed, but both she and current U. S. Senator/possible new Secretary Markwayne Mullin are pretty much in lockstep with the rest of the Trump Administration on immigration and other issues.  If he avoids making a new series of TV commercials with himself as the star in the public's dime, and maybe sells off a luxury jet or two, I'll count it as a slight gain.

     The Senate will be short one Republican until Oklahoma's Governor appoints a replacement (and despite his recent showing of independent spirit, you can count on the new one being a Republican, too) -- but the slim GOP majority in that body already falls well short of the 60 votes needed to steamroller Democratic opposition.

     "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," except, presumably, for his taste in shoes.  I've have never been terribly impressed with Senator Mullin's verbal abilities.  He comes off looking a bit light on intellectual horsepower, but the job calls for administrative ability and we'll see how he does.  He likes to present himself as a brawler, which often doesn't augur well in a leadership job.

     I'm not a fan of deporting otherwise law-abiding wage earners who pay taxes just like the rest of us; it seems to me that if you could ease 'em into citizenship, it would count as a win.  But present policies are not going to change, despite the new name at the top.

When Is A War A War?

     The Washington, DC press corps keep asking about the conflict with Iran: "Is it a war?"  Trump administration officials keep responding, too; you can't fault them for lack of answers.  But apparently, it depends on who you ask and how they're feeling.  It's certainly not a war per the U. S. Constitution, which requires Congress to pull that lever.  Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Archivist of the United States, former Director of USAID and General Factorum Marco Rubio (he's a Cabinet working group all by himself) has called it a war, told reporters it's not a war and then explained, "They declared war on us," which is what you can expect from even a grotty little theocracy nobody likes after a wave of aerial attacks has knocked out a lot of their military and killed their Supreme Leader and most of his backup singers, along with an unknown number of civilians.

     War or not, it's leaving the usual piles of bodies and burning through munitions and materiel at an appalling rate, faster than the Iranians can make more but also faster than the United States can.  Word is the Iranian government is picking a new Supreme Leader,* and word from the Israeli military is they plan to blow him up, along with any successors.  The problem with that is, they'll run out of guys to do the surrendering, which neatly mirrors the Swiss plan for self-defense, but in a part of the world with a lot more practice in chaotic amateur armed conflict.

     I don't know if that would be a war, either.  And the dead aren't expressing an opinion.

     War, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler famously observed, is a racket, and we'll find out what's making noise by and by.  War excuses all manner of abuses on the home front, too.  I wonder what they'll be? 
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* No matter how many times I type it, it looks like a title from a comedic opera, or maybe a brand of cigars.  But it's no joke.

Yes, You're Right

     I'd like to apologize to everyone who told me that if I voted for Kamala Harris, the United States would get in yet another war in the Middle East.

     I did, and now here we are, at war in the Middle East.  You were right.

An Umbrella Won't Help

     There are credible reports of high-ranking U. S. officers describing the current situation in the Middle East,* including U. S. involvement, in terms that are, how to put it, distinctly not military.

     Nope, they've been speaking of it in religious terms, and I don't mean the Sermon on the Mount.  I take offense at this -- not at their belief, but at applying it to their jobs in that way.  Even if they were right -- and I don't have an inside line, or any certainty that anyone else does -- it's not their job.  It's not the job of their troops.  Mere humans don't get to put a thumb on those scales, one way or another, and our secular Constitutional republic is not in the "Holy War" business.  Shut up and soldier. 

     As a general reminder, various preachers in the West have been talking up Armageddon any time war flares in the Middle East since at least World War One and the upshot has always been that the war came and went and their coffers were all the richer, every time -- but the sky never did split, and the official word is still, "No man knows the hour."  You can look it up for yourself, which I think was one of the points of the Protestant Reformation.
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* Various news organizations are nudging journalists that "Ayatollah" is not a political office but a religious title and there are plenty of them; the late Ali Kamenei's political title was "Supreme Leader."  The same memos point out that what's going on right now does not count as a U. S. war unless Congress declares it, which must be a huge comfort to the dead of this and the many other undeclared conflicts we've waged. 

Reefer Alliance

     Sometimes, the Fates serve something up that's so on the nose, you know the fix is in.  Case (literally) in point, United States v. Hemani, now before the U. S. Supreme Court.

     Uncle Sam says Ali Danial Hemani is a pot-swilling terrorist supporter, who shouldn't be allowed to own guns on account of being an habitual drug user, since, as question 21.f. on the BATFE Form 4473 quaintly asks and warns, "Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance? Warning: The use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where you reside."  It's right there in plain text:* even pot use is a downcheck, and the buyer will not, in fact, be purchasing a firearm that day if the answer "Yes."

     On the other side, the defense says he's an almost stereotypical Texas gun owner, a pillar of his community, active in religious organizations and youth sports, who just happens to enjoy a little herb from time to time.

     I have no idea if either of these description is anywhere close to reality.  I never met him and I haven't been following the case.  What I do know is that we've got the Feds on one side, and on the other, everyone from the NRA to NORML, from the ACLU to Gun Owners of America is weighing in or even filing Friend of the Court Briefs.

     It's one to watch, and in the meantime, always ask, "Who brought these brownies?" before digging in.
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* Of course, the current version of the same form still gives you three choices for the answer to question 14, Sex: Male, Female or Non-Binary.  Presumably anyone who ticks the third box vanishes from Federal sight immediately, since the Federal government only recognize the first two options now, and the sale is denied on account of there not being anyone buying.  And they were just right there...!

Did My Taxes

     I decided I had better do my taxes before the last minute.  I knew it was going to be painful, since I started receiving Social Security early last year -- but hey, they're not taxing that, right?

     Wrong.  There's a $6000 income deduction for old people like me, but it starts getting pro-rated down once your total income exceeds a certain threshold, and mine had.  They took every dime I paid in Federal income taxes and wanted in excess of $4000 more.

     This is the kind of thing that is easier to take if you have been preparing for it, and I had -- but it's more than I expected.  Nevertheless, I paid it, and what the heck, I always did like like beans and rice for dinner.  But the man who tries to hector me about the worker's paradise the GOP is building had better be able to duck. 

Yah, Yah, Yah

     So I guess we blew up the Ayatollah, or maybe the Israelis did -- of course, he was like 86 and they were shopping for a new one already, and while many of the people of Iran may be delighted he's gone, his replacement is likely to be more of the same, or worse.

     Bear in mind that the West bears most of the responsibility for the hostile, inward-looking nature of the Iranian government: we'd stuck the Shah in place after U. S. and British oil interests had freaked out when the country shambled itself into a left-leaning government in the 1950s that nationalized their oil businesses.  The Shah dug in like a tick on an elephant and began to live large on oil money, with his very own secret police doing secret police things, and the same Iranians who'd opted for that scary socialist government (at a time when the Soviet Union could still make a compelling case for rapid industrialization under a command economy -- they had excellent PR for a few decades, especially in the Third World) came to resent it, and their religious nationalists particularly resented it.  By the time things went bang, they were thoroughly pissed off at anyone who wasn't them, and it was in that mood the government of present-day Iran was formed.

     They don't like anybody, and the vast majority of the present-day population has grown up knowing most of their neighbors don't much like them.  If anyone's thinking there's going to be a rapid pro-Western realignment among the gen. pop. while the government folds...think again.  We might see some serious chaos; we might see the most hard-nosed hardliners claw their way to the top, or a floundering government of second- and third-rankers, but the good ol' days of the good ol' Shah aren't coming back and attempts to jam a new Shah into the socket are liable to backfire.

     You can't do any nation-building from bomb-dropping altitude, no matter how high you can make the rubble bounce.

So, Um--

     I picked the wrong Friday to skip posting.  The stuff I had in mind is largely moot, because as of middle-on-the-night thirty, we are at war, or as close as make no difference, especially if you live in Iran.  Or, in fact. Israel, or on or near a U. S. military base in the Middle East.  The Iranians haven't targeted embassies yet.  We didn't warn 'em to get non-combatants out of target zones -- or warn our own service spouses and families, for that matter. 

     But that's not the first teensy oversight.  Congress didn't get a chance to weigh in, either, and there are no indications they're planning to.  This is hinky, considering that the declaring of wars would be a power the United States Constitution (perhaps you have heard of it?) reserved exclusively to the actual legislators of the actual legislative branch.  Cynics will point out the Presidents have sounded the bugle and sent the troops marching off multiple times in the last century; from the Korean War onward, Presents have acted and Congress has scrambled to catch up, usually slapping a hasty authorization onto a fait accompli or some other Italian speed job.

     Nevertheless, 'tain't according to Hoyle or, in this case, all but one of the delegates to the Constutional Convention:
     "Pierce Butler of South Carolina was the only delegate to the Philadelphia Convention who suggested giving the executive the power to take offensive military action. He suggested that even if the President should be able to do so, he, in practice, would have the character not to do so without mass support. Elbridge Gerry, a delegate from Massachusetts, summed up the majority viewpoint saying he 'never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.' George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and other contemporaries voiced similar sentiments."
     That's how Wikipedia puts it, as of this writing.  If you want to argue with the guys who were there, knock yourself out -- but you're wrong.

     Then there's one other finicky detail--  The Iranian government are bad guys.  They executed a large number of protesters recently, as in thousands, almost certainly tens of thousands, most of who had done no more than ditch work or school to go wave signs and shout, and they're a known source of material support for Mideastern (and other) terror organizations.  They're not nice guys; the West helped make them that way, but they have stayed that way and give no sign of backing down.  However, they hadn't started a fight with the United States.*

     Jus ad bellum is the notion that nation-states cannot (well, should not) just start up wars for the hell of it.  It's why heads of state or legislative bodies issue justifications that are sometimes absolute smack, like Vladimir Putin's assertion that Ukraine ought to be part of Russia because, well, it always was, and therefore it is perfectly okay to send in the Russian military to kill 'em until they go along with his notion.  Defensive war is held to be inherently justified: when Ukraine fights back, they're acting by the rules, and in defense, a country can even war partisan war, using informal troops without clear lines of command.  But the aggressor has got to show cause, and a country's got to be behaving very badly indeed before it's okay under international laws and treaties to try to knock sense into them.

     There is an entire messy body of international agreement covering this stuff, one that boils down to "Nation-states don't get to start wars unless they can establish a broad consensus the state being warred against is extraordinarily bad, but nation-states can always defend themselves against wars someone else started against them."  We...didn't manage to fulfill either one of those conditions.

     Do I think the United States government is a better government than the government of Iran?  I sure do.  They kill far fewer of the people who protest against them.  On a per-capita basis, it's a stunning difference.  Do I think Iran's government is a threat to peace in the Middle East?  Unquestionably.  --But that doesn't justify an undeclared war, set in motion by the Executive Branch of the U.S. government without formal declaration (by Congress, whose responsibility it is) or even the merest fig leaf of justification.

     Putin's war on Ukraine is still worse than Trump's war on Iran but make no mistake, they're different intensities of the same bloody color.

     Time will tell how this will play out and in the meantime, your "peace President," the guy I was told would keep this nation out of foreign wars, has launched yet another military intervention into another country, and it's not a quick bombing run or an overnight "Mission: Impossible" leader kidnapping.

     And in the meantime, how about that economy?  How about those Epstein files?  How about cratering Presidential approval ratings?  ...Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain!  The Big Giant Head is talking, and what it's saying is, "War!  War!  War!"
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*In fact, we were in diplomatic talks, albeit "indirect" ones, which is perhaps the most grade school method of diplomacy, "Millicent won't let you sit with her at lunch until you stop chewing on pencils," one side says to an intermediary, and the other side replies to the go-between, "Well, Millicent chews on her braids and and it's gross, and besides, she farts all the time and you can tell her I said that," and then a spokesthing announces to the press that they had a productive discussion, while waving a toothmarked pencil to clear away a faint, lingering stench. 

Politics Potpourri

     State of the Union, Checked: CNN did the good kind of fact-check, long on facts, cites and links, short on emotions.  It turns out -- and I know you'll be surprised -- a lot of the President's speech was not true.  Or even close.

     What The Hell's The Matter With Kansas:  This one's not easy to write.  The thing about authoritarianism is the thing about bullies: they pick on the easy targets first.  The Federal government, in the form of ICE, CPB, etc. descends on LA or Minneapolis-St. Paul or wherever and rounds up people for the crime of being too brown and/or foreign in public, sorting them out afterward, slowly and with plenty of trouble, but if you're not brown and/or a foreigner, it's mostly just something on the news.  When Federal officers, mostly far from home and new to this kind of mass enforcement, face unexpectedly obstreperous opposition and pepper-spray protesters at close range or even shoot and kill them, if you're not minded to be out protesting, well, that's more stuff on the news, happening to someone else, and never to most people -- though in the Twin Cities, it did finally inconvenience enough people that there was some stepping back.*

     So here's some more people who are just faces on the screen, some of 'em kind of off-putting, but that doesn't rate what happened: the Kansas legislature recently decided the sex listed on Kansas driver's licenses has to match the holder's sex at birth, period, no exceptions, no do-overs, and passed a law to require it.  This is not a problem for at least 99.9 percent of Kansans, but that 0.1 percent is some 290,000 people, and if ten percent of them, 29,000, had changed their driver's license (previously allowed) so Bruce and Barbie had an M and and F on their license to match their haircut and wardrobe (if not more) despite having been born Bettie and Bill, they'd better set aside time to-- And here's the rugpull: They don't have time. As reported, the state sent out letters this week to everyone who had made such a change they could find, warning them their driver's licenses were invalid as of today.  Driving on an invalid license in Kansas is a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a $1000.00 fine and up to six months in jail.  If they're going to update their license, they'd better get a ride. And the papers are reporting they didn't all get notification.

     You don't have to like 'em.  You don't even have to disagree with the law about which letter goes in that part of their driver's licenses.†  But what's the point of making 'em criminals before they even get a chance to comply?

     Many readers are going to look at that and say, "Those people? Who cares," and I get it as only someone who lived in a cheap apartment downtown and worked late shifts can get it: street queens aren't any nicer than born-female streetwalkers and it's icky to have to dodge 'em to get to your car.  Lots of "those people" are scary; but having worked in media and met lots of interviewees, I know they're not all that way.

     And I know bullies may start with the easy targets, the weirdos, the foreign kids, the kids nobody likes; but they never stop there.  They'll work their way up, and eventually, we will all have to choose: be a victim, or an oppressor?  That's a bullshit choice.  Be a person, and let other people be people, too.  If they're not breaking the law, leave 'em alone.  And speak up when bullies go after them.  Stand up.
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* Just how much is in question, as enforcement efforts appear to have moved to suburbs, exurbs and county seats, and meanwhile the Federal government has imposed economic sanctions on Minnesota, the whole thing looking more and more like some kind of scaled-down war.
 
† Though I do have to ask, why is it there?  Photo, height, weight, hair and eye color are all on the license so Officer Friendly or the bank teller can tell if it's your license. Unless they're running genetic tests, the "sex" part of the ID makes more sense if it tracks what people look like.  If they get arrested, the police will strip-search them and if there are any lurid secrets to be found out, the police will do so then.  Me, I don't wanna know. 

History Rhymes

     I've been reading The Big Con, David W. Maurer's entertaining 1940 study of confidence men and confidence games.  All of the high-money cons, a thousand dollars and up (way, way up, even then) require a mark who's willing to get involved with what's presented as crooked deal -- a stock-market scam, a "fixed" athletic contest, illicitly-obtained inside or advance information on outcomes, and so on.  The genuinely honest won't be drawn in.

     Oh, it's cleverly presented, usually in a "cheating the cheaters" framework.  You don't have to be more than a little larcenous to be pulled in; but it's always a something-for-nothing deal, an opportunity for profit apparently far out of proportion with the necessary investment.

     A lot of con men started out in Indiana.  It even shows up in nicknames, like the Indiana Wonder and the Hoosier Kid.  An insideman for the Wonder mused, "At one time, you could go to almost any [Indiana] County Fair and some farmer would take you aside and show you some new kind of flat-joint [slang for a crooked gambling device] that he had invented."

     This springs to mind when the local TV news reports yet another heated city or county meeting over yet another data center being planned or built.  We've already got a lot of them here, thanks to cheap land and affordable power, and the AI boom is pushing the demand for more.  There's a lot less "there" there in AI than meets the eye* and I suspect a lot of the boom is a bubble.  When it pops, local governments that have made tax concessions, helped secure loans and spent on infrastructure may be left holding the bag -- or "the poke," a short-con in which what the mark thought was a securely-wrapped bundle of money in big bills he'd put a much smaller security deposit on turns out to be a stack of carefully-trimmed newsprint.

     It'll be a whole new kind of Indiana Wonder.
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* AI counts, in part, on "pathetic fallacy," the same thing that underpins animism or a child's play with plush toys, dolls or toy soldiers, imbuing an inanimate object with emotion and genuine agency.  We're strongly wired to do it -- but that doesn't mean there's really a ghost in even the most clever of our machines.  Confidence games also rely on our will to believe, our desire to play along, our need for wonder.  This is not a coincidence.

SOTU, Sorta

     It was a campaign speech.  I kept dozing off as he droned on and on, from distortion to misstatement to outright lie, with a few stops for non-partisan moments recognizing heroes and outstanding athletes that it would be petty to criticize.

     But it was a campaign speech, and not even one of his best, full of scorched-earth partisanship and moments for the base to applaud.  I was offended by his claims about the economy -- things might be looking up for the owner class, but down here where you punch a time clock, my bills haven't stopped going up and my paycheck is nowhere close to keeping pace.

     If you're a big ol' Donald Trump fan, it was probably a fine speech, despite the record-setting length, right up there with Cold War screeds from the leaders of the Soviet Union.  If you're not a fan, there was nothing in it to win you over.

     From where I stand, the President of the United States is living in a fantasy world, along with most of his party's office-holders and good many of the opposition's.  They're all clueless limo-riders who haven't had to buy groceries at the supermarket since they were in college, if then, and the venture capitalists who collect 'em like trading cards are more of the same.  These are not people to trust holding the future -- they don't care about breaking it because they think they've already bought it. 

     As for actual content, like the possibility of war against Iran, the looming shortage in farm workers, the steady increase in the price of almost everything?  Forget it.  He did assert unilateral authority to levee tariffs except in the way recently barred by the U. S. Supreme -- but he was careful to shake the hands of the Justices on his way in, because he can't afford another slap-down from them.

     We were screwed at sunrise on Tuesday.  We were still screwed at midnight last night.  The State of the Union speech didn't change anything.  No, wait, it changed one thing: leading stocks were headed down, down, down yesterday and this morning, they're slightly up.  That's got to be great news for anyone with a significant stock portfolio, like the president and board members of the corporation I work for.  I couldn't be happier for them!  --But it hasn't changed a thing for me, and it won't, same as it hasn't for the vast majority of Americans.

Rush, Rush, Rush

     This morning is off to an early start, at least for me.  There's a small project underway at work that has been put off and put off, thanks to bad weather, a lack of any local firm to do the parts we can't do for ourselves, and higher-priority stuff.

     Or it might be.  The bulk of the work will be outside and it's pretty cold this morning, colder than originally predicted.  That's all contracted out, and it's not my call; either it'll be warm enough, or it won't.

     Either way, I need to get a move on.

What Flavor Popcorn?

     The State of the Union speech is coming up, and not only do they cram the Senate into the House chamber (where you know the Senators check for gum stuck under the desks) along with its usual denizens (and they don't even get assigned seats), Cabinet members sit in the front row, alongside the Justices of the U. S. Supreme Court.  The President is currently furious at six of the nine Justices, and won't that make for an interesting evening?  The Joint Chiefs are in there, too, along with retired members of Congress.

     Looking it up, one of the news services points out that the President and First Lady also invite non-politicians to seats in the gallery, "to help put a human face to the President’s message for both policymakers and viewers at home." I'm not sure just what they think the various pols, judges and military officers are -- has anyone checked on David Icke recently?

     Me, I figure they're all entirely too human, even the ones I loathe most, and given the line-up and the times, my only real question is, what flavor popcorn should I make for watching it?  Hi-yo, Incitatus, away! 

Yeah, Nothing Saturday

      I was busy with the fiction critique group -- those folks are good writers and getting steadily better -- and the news has done nothing to disabuse me of the belief that we've gotten ourselves locked into the dumbest timeline.

     This morning (1:30 a.m., really the middle of the night), the Secret Service shot and killed a time traveler nutjob man who'd got inside the security perimeter at Mar-A-Lago carrying a shotgun and a gas can and didn't surrender when confronted.  The President has been rather publicly in Washington, DC this weekend, the club has Head-of-State level physical security layered atop the usual "private resort for the insanely wealthy" stuff and the U. S. Secret Service is known to be very good at what they do, which makes the entire thing fractally dumb.  (Unless, I suppose, he was targeting some other member of the exclusive club, in which case it's just ordinarily stupid, though on a grand scale.  But how likely is that?)

     Moral consistency and my own crazy notions both insist that heads of state (etc.) ought not be assassinated.  Oh, I think a lot of them are crooks, fools or villains; when it comes to U. S. Presidents and members of Congress alone, I've got lists and lists of them who should have been hauled up on various charges, tried and, if convicted, punished as the law requires.  A few of them were even run through parts of the process, though I think not nearly enough.

     Don't tell me those politicians should be above the law or immune from prosecution, "so they'll be free to make hard decisions;" that's let-George-do-it irresponsibility; it's lazy bullshit.  Presidents and Congress can equip young men (and women) with explosives and firearms and send them off in the middle of the night, singly or en masse, to breach defenses and do harm to people and property, and deciding to do so should not be undertaken lightly nor free from consequences.  If it's wrong to undertake such actions against a heavily defended Head of State, it's even more wrong when done to any more vulnerable target.  They ought to think it over and be answerable for it on multiple levels when they do wrong.

     But, hey, dumbest timeline: I don't expect things to get any better or make more sense any time soon.  We're stuck in this chair for the entire duration of the root canal and the only way to get through it is to go through it.  I hope it doesn't hurt too much.

Half A Vote

     There's a former friend who's annoyed at me.  You see, we didn't vote for the same person for President, and he thinks I stopped being his friend because he didn't vote for Kamela Harris.

     "You couldn't possibly have thought I'd vote for a Democrat!"

     You know what?  I didn't.  But I didn't think he'd vote for a thuggish authoritarian who had, at best, egged on an unsuccessful coup, either.  That's why we're not friends any more.  I don't hate him; he's not a bad guy himself, despite making such a bad choice; but I'm not friends with authoritarians, period.

     Too many people treat voting as a binary choice, and back themselves into a corner, trying to justify their pick.

     Even when there are only two choices on the ballet, you always have three choices.  Can't stand one of 'em and the other is someone who shouldn't have the job?  Then skip the contest!  Yeah, people keep saying, "Hold your nose and vote," and you really should take a look at all the candidates; could be the positives of one will outweigh their negatives, or you can be pretty sure one of the other branches of government will keep them in line.*  But if not, why not just pass?  A vote is a reward, and if neither one has earned it, withhold it.  Or go shopping for a third party candidate, because a vote is also a signal, and if the lunatic from the steam-clean-the-sewers party gets a big pile of votes, that part of the electorate is telling candidates they think it's time to get down there and flush out the pipes.

     Voting for the same party you always have and then retconning your choice no matter how big a stinker the person is?  That's a bad approach.  It's lazy and thoughtless.

     I get that in the 2024 election, a lot of voters decided they were okay with cult-of-personality neo-fascism, or whatever the historians are going to call it, and that's one problem; but another problem, maybe a worse one, is that big block of voters just went into the booth and pulled the lever for R (or D) because they always do, having already made up reasons why that was okay, or coming up with them afterwards, and for the Rs of that group, sunk-costs fallacy means many of them still are.  Telling them "you voted for this" only reinforces it, no matter how bad prices get or how many people Federal almost-police kill in the streets and detention camps.

     Vote smarter.
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* I admit it, I'm a big fan of divided government.  I think having an Executive from one party and a majority of the other in the legislature keeps them focused on two things: the tasks that actually need to get done, and harmless sparring with one another.  With both those branches under one party's thumb, they start servicing their base with frippery and bullshit instead of ghetting down to useful work, and if they've got the Judicial branch, too, look the hell out.

Not In The Job Parameters

     U.S forces, by Presidential directive, are stacking up within striking distance of Iran -- and look, he can do that, shuffle the U. S. military around on U.S. soil, the open sea and (by agreement) the territory of our allies.  The job includes "Commander in Chief," after all.

     What no President can do -- Republican, Democrat, Whig or George Washington standing clear of parties in disgust -- is start or declare a war.  That's up to Congress, the majority of whose members have to worry about re-election in the very near term, whose consensus contains the aggregate wisdom of 535 men and women (stop laughing).

     Of course you wouldn't know that from the way our current President is talking about it, as he opens the first meeting of his "Board of Peace."  Nope, he says we'll know his plans for using armed forces against Iran in a week or ten days.

     That ain't how it works.  I'm sure my comment filters will get a few "Nuh-unh, he can, too, and besides [other President] did it."  I don't care.  The ones who have pulled that kind of trick in the past were also in the wrong, and the incumbent has already broken the rules by kidnapping a foreign head of state in a military incursion.  It doesn't matter that the guy they grabbed was a bad guy; it doesn't matter if he was helping out drug smugglers, masterminding the whole drug-gang show or, despite being a bloody-handed autocrat busy running his country into the ground, had stood well clear of the whole dope thing: other countries still aren't supposed to send soldiers in and grab him.  Ya don't do it.  There is -- well, there was -- a rules-based international order; there are ways to line up a criminal leader for arrest and trial (and yes, they're pretty toothless as long as he or she is careful where they go visiting) but they do not include TV plots from Mission: Impossible or The A-Team.

     Russia, the smallest and weakest of what passes for a Great Power these days -- and they wouldn't even be one, without the nuke in their teeth and the mad gleam in their eye -- has been hacking away at the notion of having rules for the game ever since they grabbed the Crimean peninsula.  Red China would like to (little matter of Taiwan), but all their neighbors are watching.  Our President shouldn't be picking up an axe and joining in.

     But he has been and he still is.  In a better timeline, Congress would be straining at the reins, digging its heels like a mule.  This Congress is more like a Pomeranian purse-dog: yappy and occasionally it makes a smelly little mess in there, but mostly it's just riding along.

You Want The Truth?

     Me, I'd just as soon have my MGB fixed and get to wear a shiny hat.  The truth doesn't change anything. 

     But the truth about the Epstein files is, the people with the most power -- not necessarily in the files themselves and possibly entirely unconnected from that sort of wrongdoing (or maybe in the thick of it) -- are busy, in a kind of jostling and organic way, picking out patsys from the next ranks down, most of whom will have been up to some kind of Epstein-related lawbreaking anyway.  They'll throw 'em to the wolves, er, public (and courts) and those malefactors will get whatever they get, based mostly on how good their lawyers are.

     That's it.  That's what will happen.  No matter what's in there or how damning it is.  The highest and mightiest will not be felled, unless there is also some enormous national-security stuff involving the U.S. and/or the UK and Europe, or staggeringly huge sums of money.  Because none of these politicians -- not one! -- gives a single, solitary gosh-darn-it over what happened to a bunch of cute girls at the hands of creepy, wealthy men.  They all know in their grisliest viscera that's just the way of the world: girls and young women are a consumable commodity to the wealthiest people.

     I'd like to tell you different.  I'd like to, but I can't.

About Those Headlights

      Okay, I thought the normal beams were dim.  The lead guy at the oil-change place laughed when he checked them.  His trainee looked puzzled and said, "What?"

     "That lady's headlights are out."

     I've been driving with only the running lights working (unless I had the high beams on), which explains why they were so pitiful.  Oh, they're kind of white, and they do light the road some, which works okay if there are streetlights -- but it means oncoming headlights are dazzling in comparison.  And they live in the same twin-bulb fixture as the actual headlights, so if you look at them during the day, they do light up, they just look like lousy lights.

     They're okay now.  The drive home tonight was a lot better than any since it started getting dark early.

     Changing the bulbs was as dusty-dirty as I expected, and they had three men on the job.  It would have taken me four times as long, if not longer, so I'm resigned to the additional cost.  And I got the oil changed at the same time, so it counts as a win.

     Bonus, sort of: they slapped a battery analyzer on it, just in case, and my battery could be happier than it is.  They don't sell 'em but they suggested I might want to shop around before too long.

Successfully Marketed To

     I have been chairing an online writing-critique group for over a year now, and while the microphone in my laptop is more than adequate to the task -- it's a MacBook Air, bought during the pandemic specially for online meetings -- I've been wanting to try something else.

     Vintage microphones appeal to me and I own a few; but they're fragile for such everyday use, and interfacing them to a computer calls for extra hardware.  I'm especially fond of the classic RCA ribbon microphones, like the Type 44, a ribbon mike nearly as big as your head, with an instantly-recognizable angular case.  RCA also made a "Junior" velocity microphone, the 74-B, about half the size.  I used to own one of the big ones, but sold it when I was between jobs.  Even forty years ago, the price of one of those would buy a lot of meals.

     These days, you can hardly look at an original Model 44 for under $4000, and don't expect nice plating.  Modern exact-copy versions from AEA sell for that much and more; there's at least one other near-match model that goes for less but it's still four figures.

     The little 74-B is scarce, and prices are equally stratospheric.  Electro-Voice made a similar-looking line of mikes about the same size that commands less on the used market, and I own one that's still got the original ribbon pickup or "motor." The problem with those is they're a dice roll: the factory "repair" was a rough replacement of the fragile ribbon with the innards of a rugged dynamic microphone, and any E-V ribbon mike you find has about a two to one chance of having been "repaired" that way.

     A company called Behringer makes audio gear.  Much of it is popular with podcasters and not too many years ago, they started making old-timey-looking mikes with modern condenser elements.  One of them is the BV-44, which despite the name is just about the same size as an RCA 74-B.  It's got a USB output, so it plugs right into a computer.  And it sells for the cost of a fancy dinner, if you don't go too wild with the sides and skip dessert.  I've been looking at them for several years and I finally bought one.  It's not a ribbon mike, but even inexpensive condenser mics sound pretty good these days. 

     There's an amusing sidenote to this.  If you look at the working microphones of this style, they've all got a metal grille with an offset pattern of round holes, staggered like brickwork.  This provides the most open area, so the sound can get in.  (There's thin cloth inside the grille, too, and the whole thing is supposed to cut down on wind noise and the impact of plosive sounds on the mike element.)  In the old days, rather than risk an expensive mike as a photo prop, radio networks used wooden models, cut and painted to match the microphones, for publicity shots and advertising photos -- but the holes in the "grille" of the prop version were drilled into the wood block in a grid pattern.  About half of Behringer's advertising art shows a grid pattern of holes in the BV-44 grille, too -- but the real thing has an offset pattern, just like the big boys and for the same reason.  I suspect the art department got out a little ahead of the engineering and production side.

Our Fog

      Every once in awhile, Indianapolis remembers it started out as a swamp, and throws out a pea-soup fog of impressive thickness.

     Oh, there's fog all over central Indiana this morning, tapering off into Illinois, but the heart of the city holds it cupped, like someone with an unexpected handful of overcooked oatmeal and nowhere to put it down.  From the front windows of Roseholme Cottage, the houses across the street are mist-wrapped mysteries, hazy shapes bulking from the gray that might conceal anything (but probably only nurses, retired dog-walkers and a guy who deals in used vehicles of questionable provenance).

     My car has gone somewhat foggy, too.  A week ago Sunday, I worked a late shift and on the way home,  noticed the normal-beam headlights were unaccountably dim.  Most of my night driving is on well-lit city streets, but there's a stretch along a nicely-wooded road, and thinking back, I realized I'd been having more and more trouble there with the headlights of oncoming cars.  I'd been blaming bright HID and LED bulbs, but those didn't suddenly appear on the market last November.

     It's time to replace the headlight bulbs of my car,* a task that carmakers have been making more and more awkward all my life.  It looks like the passenger-side change requires removing a large plastic cover (held with snap-in plastic rivets), unbolting the windshield-washer reservoir and setting it aside, popping out a twist-to-remove weatherproof cover (with wires through it) and reaching into the back of the light housing, where the socket comes out, bulb and all, in another quarter-turn-twist assembly.  At that point, you can finally unlatch the bulb from its socket and reverse the whole process.  The driver's side requires a similar procedure, minus the big plastic cover and bottle of windshield goop.

     Or I could just go to the oil-change place and have them do it while getting fresh oil and filters, which is what I will probably do.  It's filthy work, outdoors, and well, I'd as soon not.
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* My previous string of Hyundai Accents were successively named The Hot Needle of Inquiry, The Hotter Needle of Inquiry and either The Hottest Needle of Inquiry or The Needle of Inquiry So Hot You Would Just Plotz.  The Lexuses (Lexii?) have been much nicer, and I have never been sure if they should be The Pride of Chanur, The Solar Queen, or Unexpected Expense, but in either case, the present one rates a II after it.  (I tried The Skylark of Space for the first one, but it didn't stick.)  And bonus points to anyone who recognizes where all of the ship names comes from -- or all except the last, which was my own invention but is unlikely to be unique. 

Back Drying -- For Now

     The replacement fan impeller for my dryer arrived Friday.  I'm not terribly superstitious, but I was tired; I waited until Saturday to install it.

     The project didn't start well.  I assumed I needed to remove the drum, and when I got that far, I found that I didn't remember how.  There's a little trick to it.  Checking with an online repair video -- definitely not AI -- I learned the drum stays put for a fan replacement.  I rethreaded the belt (I'll be back to that) and took the front off the fan housing, a half-dozen sheet metal screws.  Sure enough, the fan had broken all around the hub, as expected.  I still needed to remove a lint and hair ball, a circlip and a round spring clamp.  The fuzz took a lot of work with regular needlenose pliers; it was really compressed.  For the next step, I could have sworn I had circlip pliers, but apparently I do not.

     You can use tiny round-needlenose pliers to remove a circlip, but the task requires patience.  The clip tends to slip off the tapering round jaws.  It took me five tries.  (And knowing the ways of circlips, I'd ordered a new one; in fact, I paid more for the parts because the cheaper places didn't stock them.)  Somehow the thing did not fly away to Parts Unknown when removed.  The clamp is easy; it's got three "ears" that stick up, two on one side and one on the other, and you just grab them with a pair of pliers and lift it off the hub.  The hub came off in pieces and the rest of the fan followed.  I used a cloth to remove the big chunks of lint and plastic and vacuumed the rest out before starting to install the new impeller.

     It wouldn't go on.  The shaft is D-shaped and everything needs to be lined up just right -- but it wouldn't go on even then.  It started and then stuck. I pried it off and cleaned the motor shaft with a rag.  It didn't help much.  I took it back off and cleaned up sprue around the opening with my pocket knife.  That worked a little better, but it didn't go far when I started it on the motor shaft..

     The instruction video had listed a deep-well 9/16" socket and a soft-headed hammer, showing how to tap the impeller in place.  I had them sitting ready, and proceeded to carefully apply force, expecting the worst.

     Nope.  Bit by bit, whack by whack, the impeller settled home.  I installed the new spring clamp around the hub, and then tackled the circlip.  It isn't any easier to use the wrong tool to install them than to remove them; after six tries, I got it about three-quarters engaged and popped it the rest of the way into the groove.

     From that point, reassembly is, as they say, the opposite of disassembly: cover, brace, feet (the fan cover fastens to the bottom of the chassis at two points), then the front of the dryer goes back on, two clips at the base that fit into slots, re-installation of the door switch in its holder, two sheet-metal screws at the top to hold the front to the sides (making sure the alignment pins are in their corresponding holes). Next, the wiring goes back in its clips and the top is lowered and latched.

     Tam came downstairs for the plugging in, exhaust-duct connection and, at last, the test run.  I set the dryer to run without heat and pushed the start button.

     It ran, and we looked at each other.  Whattaya know!  "Tam, keep an eye on it.  I'm going to check the exhaust opening."

     Outside, the little louvers had popped up, and there was a scattering of plastic fragments in the flowerbed, the same color as the broken fan.  Clean air was coming out of the vent.  I yelled, "It looks okay," into it and came back inside.  We watched the dryer run a little while longer.  It was...mostly smooth.

     Mostly.  There's a little vibration and rumble.  You can't see the drive pulley (it's on the back of the motor that the fan is on the front of) without removing the drum, but when I restrung the belt, it felt a little rough.  So I'm pretty sure that's going to be the next project.  I vacuumed a lot of drive-belt particles from the bottom of the dryer, too.

     Today, I'm on the third load of drying, and the machine is still running and still rumbling -- no worse, but no better, either.  I think I'm going to skip machine-drying my tennis shoes for awhile; even with pillows along for the ride,* they thump around pretty hard, and the drive pulley is the same decades-old plastic as the fan impeller. (Update: no, it's metal.  The tension idler is plastic but felt okay.  I may have worn out the support rollers I replaced a few years ago.)
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* This is the best trick I know for washing trainers: add a pair of pillows!  They keep action in the washer from becoming too chaotic, cushion the leaping-around in the dryer, and it fluffs your pillows at the same time!  But it's a lot of mass in motion with the shoes alone, and when you add wet pillows (washer) or damp ones (dryer) as well, it's a lot of load.  If things are going to break, that's going to make it happen sooner.

He Said What?

      Look, if you're going to put your political party forward as the party of moral probity and traditional virtues, admitting (or even claiming) you have snorted cocaine from the seat of a toilet should be an absolute bar to holding any public office, ever.  Period.

     And yet....


     I don't think we should cut politicians much slack for having smoked pot; it remains Federally illegal and it was against most or all state laws when our known pot smokers did so, even if they were only smoking it for the articles didn't inhale.  Drinking to excess is reprehensible, especially while in office.  But these are now vices at the outer edge of social acceptability, legal in many places under the proper circumstances.  Using cocaine...is not.  Snorting Bolivian Marching Powder off the seat of a commode previously used for its intended purposes is way beyond the pale.  Even joking about it (and make no mistake, that will be the face-saving retcon, despite the story having been told in utter seriousness) indicates a marked degeneracy.

     Many people in the current Administration make my skin crawl, and none more than our Secretary of Health and Human Services.

A Book And Some History

     Paperback books really got their start after World War Two as the pulp magazines were fading away -- but Uncle Sam gave them one heck of a jumpstart.

     As anyone who've served in our armed forces can tell you, service life, even during a global war, consists of a great deal of "hurry up and wait."  Once the traditional idle vices of the soldier and sailor have been used up -- complaining; telling more or less true stories of misadventure, home life or even derring-do; smoking; and idle speculation about what the brass have in store next -- and the pastimes so often assigned by non-commissioned officers (polishing shoes, peeling vegetables, making beds, shining the shiny things and painting the painted things) have been wrung dry, what's left?

     Assuming fighting, drinking and/or sex are off the table (which they usually were), one of the more portable options was reading.  But supplies of Astounding, G-8's Battle Aces, Spicy Detective or even Ranch Romances were a bit scarce, especially close to the various fronts, and the magazines were too large for easy shipping -- or a uniform pocket.  Besides, the War Department wanted to have a little say about the content; some of those pulps, well, phew.  Hardback books were even more unwieldy than pulp magazines, and they couldn't hand out Reader's Digest to everyone in uniform -- there was a war on, and paper was strictly rationed!

     But that digest size just about fit military pockets-- In 1942, a bunch of publishers, booksellers, librarians and authors got together (only so very slightly encouraged by the Office of War Information) to create the Council on Books in Wartime, under the motto, "Books are weapons in the war of ideas," and they intended for America's warriors to have the best armament possible.  They dreamed up (among other things) Armed Services Editions, genuinely pocket-sized, lightweight paperback books to suit every reader (within reasonable limits).  ASE reprints were hammered out by the millions, everything from William Makepeace Thackeray to Edgar Rice Burroughs, from H. P. Lovecraft to Thurber, Tolstoy and Thoreau.  They were printed on digest-sized presses, two books at a time, and then cut in half, resulting in a book longer than it was tall, just a little smaller than postwar paperbacks.*

     They were widely popular, carried, read, shared, swapped, and passed from hand to hand until they fell apart.

     And then, not too long after V-J Day, the presses...stopped.  As life returned to normal, the paperback book started showing up, filling the spots pulps once occupied.

     Elsewhere and years later, the delightful lunatics at Field Notes, who gave us the motto, "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now," were casting about for a new project.  Their line of notebooks includes constant variation, and they decided to do one rather wider than it was tall -- or vertically-hinged; it's got a cover on both ends for the two orientations, one short and wide, the other tall and skinny.  And someone in their office with an eye to history, or perhaps to recent books about history, saw it was just about the same size as an Armed Services Editions book.  They borrowed the bright primary color covers of the wartime books for theirs, and....

     Ordinary minds might have thought, "H'mm," and moved on.  For Field Notes, it was an opportunity.  ASE printed mystery novels, including a couple by Raymond Chandler, but Dashiell Hammett (a WW I veteran who had re-enlisted in 1942, despite being 48 years old and suffering from tuberculosis) was skipped.

     So they fixed it.  You can buy their brand-new, near-perfect match ASE edition of The Maltese Falcon right now.  It's a good story, well worth reading even if you have seen the film -- and the book and film are a remarkable example of how to go from the page to the screen.  Not everything makes the leap, but it's surprising how much does, and in which ways.  And you can hold in your hand the same kind of book that troops serving in WW II held, passing time in print while an entire world hung in the balance.

     I'm not getting paid to shill for Field Notes.  It's fine by me if you pick up a $1.50 used copy to read instead, or not at all; multiple versions have come out since the story was first serialized and with the film, it's practically an institution.  Copyright was renewed in the mid-1950s, so royalties from the Field Notes reprint will go to whoever presently holds the rights.

     It is indeed the stuff that dreams are made of -- but I'm not asking you the play the sap for me.
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* Alas, the paperback book is no more.  Paperbacks comprise something more than seventy-five percent of the Roberta X Library of Science Fiction, Fantasy and (separately shelved) Mystery, so this hits close to home for me.  Literally; bookshelves are what we have in the dining and living room instead of wallpaper.

Subverting The Future

     The FDA has declined Moderna's request for review of their mRNA flu vaccine, stymieing a path to approval for using the vaccine in the U.S.; that's a fact.

     I can't verify the follow-on yet; the only source is a single user on "X" (formerly Twitter), Leah Libresco Sargeant, who claims, "Moderna's CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases...," sidelining develpment of mRNA vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, shingles and herpes because without access to the U.S. market, the effort is likely to lose money.

     Big if true, and a real loss for humanity.  Moderna's a for-profit corporation, not a charity, and they didn't make the rules: if the corporation doesn't make money for its investors, the investors stop investing.

     The flu vaccine rejection is a direct result of RFK, Jr's thumb on the scales.  A successful vaccine is almost literally a "better mousetrap," and Moderna's track record is good -- not a sure thing, but about as close as it gets.  Americans voted for this, and the Senate didn't stop it.

     UPDATE: the quote looks legitimate; the original source appears to be a (paywalled, scroll quickly!) Bloomberg News article, itself quoted in Biospace, which was linked to by a piece at Marginal Revolution.  That's as much as I've found.

Rewriting Everything

     Not only does authoritarianism edit the past and abuse the present -- it wants to the steal the future, too.

     It's especially after the future for women.  The Heritage Foundation has a long-term blueprint to shove women back into "church, children and cooking," whether we want it or not -- and they're utterly serious about it.

     It's fantasy bullshit.  My mother was born in 1931, to parents who were born in the 19th Century.  Her mother was a schoolteacher who raised six children, ran a household, and worked all her life, at paying jobs and charity work.  My Mom worked full-time until her first child, worked part-time afterward, was a Girl Scout troop leader and, when my baby brother was older, a Cub Scout Den Mother; but by then, she was already working full-time again, too.

     She kept house all along, and did most of the cooking (dishes and routine gardening fell to the children when we were old enough, followed by lawn care and eventually some of the cooking and other household chores), and her jobs weren't inconsequential; starting as a secretary, she became an insurance adjuster, adjuster/manager, and ended up in the company's main office, handling claims running to a million dollars and more.   Mom and her mother were lifelong Republicans, active in their churches, and involved in local politics; but they certainly don't fit the mold today's conservatives would condemn them to.  And yet there they are, square in the past Heritage is busy lying about.

     This is -- as I wrote yesterday -- dictator stuff, and it aligns squarely with the social roles the WW II Axis powers assigned to women.

     For all their red, white and blue, flag-waving, publicly-praying poses, Mr. Trump's party is selling what the West fought to stop.  Polling suggests it's not quite working for them, but bear in mind that Axis leaders never let a little thing like public opinion get in their way.  Americans need to keep pushing back.

Rewriting History

     It starts small.  It starts with something that doesn't matter to most people.

     The Trump administration removed all mentions of transgender anything from the Stonewall National Monument, which is pretty weird since drag queens were among the most enthusiastic rioters after police raided the Mafia-run gay bar.  --But it's also weird because unless you're a member of the LGBTQ+ community or a student of political uprisings, the Stonewall Riots are a single line in a high school history book, if that.  And the National Monument consists of short sections of a few city streets and a park smaller than most suburban driveways; you'd have to read the plaques to notice that the alphabet-soup designation had been replaced by "LGB."  Then a few months later, they removed all overt mentions of bisexual people (presumably so Suburban Mom and Dad, unlikely to visit Stonewall to begin with, won't have to explain "bisexual" to Junior and Sis). Most recently, they took down the rainbow flag that had flown over the park in one form or another since 2017.

     This is a National Monument that matters a lot to LGBTQ+ people and a little to history buffs interested in how the powerless push back against the powerful -- and hardly at all to anyone else.  Maybe twelve percent of the population at the outside.  Why even mess with it?

     How about a smaller group, with a more broadly-known history?  Per the U. S. Census, a bit less than two percent of the U.S. population are Native Americans.  People with a little Native ancestry but no meaningful cultural connection,* like me, might bulk that up by another two to five percent.  But just about all of us learned about Custer's Last Stand.

     The Trump administration is busy revamping historical displays at Little Big Horn, polishing the General's tarnished reputation and sweeping mention of broken treaties and Federal government bad faith onto the ash-pile.

     Or take some even more general history, the General in question also having been our first President: at the President's House Site in Philadelphia, there was signage describing the nine enslaved people of George Washington's household at that location, with additional information about Colonial and early American slavery.  There was.  It's been taken down.  It's a matter of historical fact that George Washington owned slaves, most via his marriage to Martha Custis, and what details we have are mixed.  He appears to have freed one small group by leaving them for a year and a day in a location where such "abandonment" amounted to manumission -- but he owned other people, fellow Americans, until the day he died.  You won't get any of that nuance in Philadelphia now, only silence.  They've been unpersoned.

     This is dictator stuff.  Most of the West was shocked by Winston Smith's job in 1984 -- but Stalin had been retconning Soviet and Russian history for decades when Orwell wrote the book.

     History can be ugly.  Messy.  Imprecise.  It is by turns tragic, amusing and embarrassing.  We tell children simple, uplifting stories about their forebears, and hope it will inspire them to do better -- but as we grow, we learn more and more of the real story, and the more complex lessons it teaches.  Sanitizing and simplifying U.S. history, sweeping awkwardness under the rug, pretending "those people" were never there, or only on the sidelines, is morally impoverishing.  You're not obliged to like all our history, or think every bit of it was a good idea -- but you damned well ought to know what happened, by whom, to whom.  We can, at least, know why people were there, what blew up at Haymarket and who was killed or injured, even if we can never know for certain who threw the bomb.  History, as accurate as we can get it, matters far more than vibes.
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* I've checked.  Apparently, liking butter beans and cornbread doesn't count.  Harsh but fair.

Above Freezing!

     Today, the high reached 40°F.  Tonight's predicted low will be 33°.  We haven't seen our last freeze of the winter, I expect, but we're supposed to mostly stay above freezing for the next week.  We may see the upper 40s or even 50 by the weekend.

     It's a small respite, but I'll take it.

Heavy-Duty Cotton Twill

      A commenter asked, "What's a dungaree, anyway?"

     It turns out that's quite a question.  The easy answer is that it's a heavy, hard-wearing, twill-woven cotton fabric, typically yarn-dyed -- a sibling to denim.

     The harder answer branches and twines.  About as soon as people figured out some things -- wool, cotton, flax, hemp (and so on) -- can be spun into threads and the threads woven into cloth, they started working out various ways to weave it.

     Canvas -- from an Anglo-French or Old French root -- is heavy-duty cloth in a plain over one, under one weave, and it was first made from hemp: cannabis in Greek, or cannapaceus in Vulgar Latin.  The Dutch turned out a really tight-woven version suitable for, oh, sails, and called it "canvas cloth," except the Dutch word is "doek," and there's your canvas duck.  "Cotton duck" is canvas without the hemp.  Canvas is heavy stuff, great for tents, bags, maybe capes.  But it's stiff.  It doesn't drape nicely, and it'll sandpaper your skin.

     There are flexible weaves that are still tight, like twill.  It's an old pattern, and there's no telling it if was invented to make a pretty design, move better, wear less -- or someone just lost count.  Humans like to fiddle, and as soon as we had looms and some free time, we started trying things.  Twill weave was probably invented more than once, and there are multiple patterns that count as "twill."  But it's ideal for clothes.  By the Middle Ages, the French were making a good twill, "sergé de Nîmes," which you and I know as denim.  In the 19th Century, Levi Strauss started using it for workwear after Gold Rush miners -- miners! -- complained the canvas he made jeans from was too rough on their hides.

     (Wait, what's "serge?"  It's a specific two up, two down twill weave that flows nicely and the word meant "silken."  And "jeans?"  Weavers in Genoa, Italy copied the French weavers of Nimes, right down to the blue dye: blue Genoa cloth became "blue jean" material.  The name went from the cloth to clothing -- and "denim jeans" is either redundant or a well-hedged bet.)

     The thing is, another people had beaten French (and Italian) weavers and San Francisco tailors to the idea: in India, they'd been spinning and weaving cotton* for centuries if not millennia (when Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BC, his troops soon swapped their woolen clothes for comfortable local cotton), and their wardrobes tended more to folding than cutting and sewing.  Twill had long been woven in and around the city of Dongri, giving rise to the Marathi word dongrī for the cloth, Urdu dungrī and Hindi dũgrī  -- and, by the 1600s, the English word dungaree.  It was a short step from the name of the cloth to the workwear, and thus we get dungarees.  The Indian original was yarn-dyed, and so is the thread for the modern cloth.  Yes, it's likely that hard-wearing farm (etc.) clothes of radically different cut and design were made from essentially the same fabric; when the human race comes up with a good idea, it tends to spread, getting reimagined as it goes.
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* Of some note, when you see pictures of Gandhi quietly sitting on the floor, running a spinning wheel?  He's not engaging in a gentle pastime, he's being defiant.  The Raj was happy to use Indian cotton -- in their own mills, mostly in England, and to sell the cloth back to Indians at a nice profit.  Just like marching to the sea to boil out salt, they didn't want the Indians doing for themselves.  This policy...engendered resentment.  You'll notice the Raj isn't around any more -- and the Indians have a spinning wheel on their flag.

I Didn't Think It Was Supposed To Sound Like That

      Saturday is my day to do laundry.  Especially this week -- I've got to fill in at work on Sunday.  So it had to get done today.

     First load, tops and delicates, a surprising amount of which can go in the dryer on low.  Which is where I put it.  I loaded the air-dry stuff onto plastic hangers and started the washer filling for the week's worth of work slacks that follow.

     H'mm, the old dryer's sounding a little rough.  I decided to check the outside vent as soon as I got upstairs.

     It didn't look too bad, but what was clunking around?  I did have three hooded sweatshirts in there....

     I took the slacks down and loaded the washer.  The dryer sounded worse.  It seemed to be varying in speed as the drum turned.  Was it a drive-belt issue?  Overloaded?  Motor failing?

     Most dryers have synchronous motors.  They need to be extremely unhappy before the speed starts to vary, and they usually don't last long after that.  And the noise was getting worse and worse, with occasional banging sounds.

     I decided to put everything on hangers and let it air-dry while I had a look at the dryer.  Not great, but it's winter and a pretty cold day: the air in my house is plenty dry and a little extra humidity wouldn't hurt.  A fair amount of messing with damp clothing later, I opened up the dryer.

     It still didn't look too bad.  I  found some lint balls in the exhaust vent, and maybe the belt is wearing faster than I'd like, but that was all.  In a spirit of trying things, I got my portable vacuum and started cleaning the squirrel-cage blower; the machine has been taking longer and longer to get clothes dry recently, and it did have some lint build-up on the vanes.

     In the process of cleaning the fan, I eventually realized the impeller was turning independently of the drive shaft.  Oh, it would turn if the shaft was turning, too, but it's supposed to be rigidly coupled.  And it was wobbling quite a bit.  That's the kind of thing that would account for the racket the dryer was making.

     Double-checking the drawings online, it looks like the motor shaft is D-shaped and the fan is clamped to it, with a matching opening at the hub.  I've ordered a replacement impeller, clamp and circlip.  Replacing it is probably going to be a fussy project, down at floor level, and until it arrives, we're out of the dryer business.

     In the meantime, my load of work slacks was done -- two pairs of medium-weight cargo slacks, a matching pair with a warm winter lining and three pairs of heavy double-front dungarees.  I improvised an indoor clothesline in the basement and plugged the dehumidifier back in.  I'm checking the progress of my tops and some time before bedtime, I'll move the dry ones to storage and bring the slacks upstairs, to dry where it's warmer.

     When it comes to clothes dryers, I have a skewed view: my Mom used the same 1949-vintage one well into the 1980s, getting it repaired as needed, and on some level, I may believe they're supposed to last forever.  I'll see how the repairs go.  The parts sites show a lot of the components for my dryer as "unavailable," so the clock is ticking.