Progress!

     After three days out sick and dizzy, I managed to bathe and visit the grocer's this afternoon.  Hooray, me!  It wasn't a very dramatic cold but it knocked me about flat.

So, How's That "Super Intelligence" Going?

     Gizmodo, 21 hours ago: "The FAA Is Rolling Out Its AI Air Traffic Tool Nationwide."
     FAA, 3:54 p.m.: Nationwide ground stop.  "All departing traffic should remain groundstopped until further notice." In other words, no end in sight.

     Microsoft, busily implementing AI, suffered a huge outage yesterday through today in many of its web-delivered services.

     At Microsoft, armies of technicians and engineers dug in and have largely got the services functioning again.  FAA has fewer people -- there's your lean, "running the government like a business" approach, in this case Earl's Discount Variety, where they have only one clerk on duty at a time, who also stocks shelves -- but I have no doubt they've got everyone with a clue hard at work solving the problem and they will eventually succeed.  Sorry about your vacation and that critical overnight air express shipment!

     There seems to be a common thread here, and you can expect more of it.  "A.I" as it presently exists is not up to doing critical tasks.  Hey, maybe it will be, some day.  It's pretty convincing to a lot of people right now.  But when put to the test, it keeps collapsing like air-whipped bullshit on a hot summer's day, so maybe -- just maybe -- we might want to wait and keep on playing with it in applications where it doesn't gum up great swathes of email or endanger air travel, air travelers, and all us people on the ground under airplane routes?  Or, I guess, we can wait until it really screws up and manages to kill a bunch of people, and live with the reaction.

     Oh mighty Googly AI, what is the "Butlerian Jihad?"

     Update: Here and elsewhere, some skeptics have said AI is unlikely to have been the cause of the FAA ground stop.  Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy's statement is incoherent, pointing to outdated "analog communications systems" causing "data network overloads."  The most generous reading of this patent nonsense is that their links between ATC centers and radio transmission/reception sites* are presently using voice-over-IP, which is a relatively straightforward replacement for dedicated analog lines, and that the VOIP system shares the same (presumably secure and in some way isolated) data network as all the rest of the FAA comms -- radar info, the (originally) teletype system for notices to pilots, routing and scheduling comms and so on.  What might overload this?  As it happens, VOIP data usage is pretty steady; silence fills about as many bits as conversation.  The other data is likewise consistent.  The NOTAM system is busy and gets more so for spicy weather or high-traffic periods, but it's plain text, low bandwidth.  The ACARS system that texts with plane crews is a similarly light load.

     Hey, you know what would overload those data networks?  Starting up a big, fat, interconnected AI that is intended to sort out optimum traffic routings on the fly, and has to keep communicating internally as it shuffles things around!  It's a problem in the same class as playing chess with itself, a known heavy burn of computational horsepower, and high traffic if the information about the pieces on the board is scattered across an entire continent and constantly changing.

     I stand by my theory: managers pushed to get the shiny new AI claptrap up and running, and it ate up the available bandwidth and then started crowding out all the other traffic, crashing their nationwide network before anyone caught on.  VOIP would have been the next-largest user of bandwidth and got hit the hardest.  There's almost certainly not going to be any one place where some team of geeks gets a real-time visualization of the total network traffic, so it may have gummed up and been restarted more than once before they realized they were hosed, gave up and started trying to get the things they broke working again.

     Update 2: The Secretary is saying the excessive traffic and subsequent crash was caused by contractor L3Harris (a merger of defense contractor L3 and electronics conglomerate Harris), working to upgrade copper infrastructure to fiber-optic, and that they either installed "a bad switch" (not like a light switch -- more like a mini telephone exchange, but for data) or were incompetent.  Bear in mind that all the work has to be done while the system is up and running, since it operates 24/7; and that the older hardware used between the analog radio gear and data network makes it especially easy to screw up in ways that might spam the network.  So yes, it could be that.

     FAA went into the Trump Presidency with a geek shortage, and DOGE hit them hard.  This is not conducive to maximizing uptime on an aging system,  Start making changes and, oops, what happened?  
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* With a very few exceptions for ACARS, the military (UHF) plus long-haul stuff (HF) over oceans and in the outback, aviation comms are line-of-sight amplitude-modulated VHF voice in one band stuck in between the high end of FM broadcasting and TV channel 7, using essentially the same system no matter where you fly. "Line of sight" can be a very long way when one end of the link is way, way up there where airliners fly, but it's not infinite and there's a whole network of ground stations bristling with antennas, variously used by various flavors of air traffic control.  It is indeed complex, and yes, it can go very wrong if changes are made incautiously.

Happy Birthday, Doc Savage

     Or so Kenneth Robeson wrote: "An old notebook...entry: 'This thing started November 12, 1932.'"

     That gets a little complicated, given that "Robeson" never existed.  He was a house name at pulp publishers Street & Smith.  Lester Dent, who came close to being a Doc Savage character in real life,* wrote most of the stories. Dent, publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L. Nanovic came up with the character, his backstory and his associates, and presumably one of them made the actual notebook entry.

     Doc went on to hundreds of pulp-magazine adventures, a string of paperback reprints a generation later (when I found them), fan stories, new stories, incorporation into Philip Joe Farmer's "Wold Newton" family tree of fictional heroes, villains and superheroes, even more reprints and a remarkably awful George Pal film.

     And he may have had a real-world antecedent: Colonel Richard Henry Savage -- 19th-Century U. S. military officer, adventurer, world traveler and author of popular adventure and mystery novels. Or perhaps Colonel Savage was the model for Doc's father, Clark Savage, Sr. 
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* Originally a telegrapher, he went on to become a private pilot, ham radio operator, amateur sailor on the high seas with his own boat, world traveler, pioneer of commercial aerial photography and inveterate gadgeteer.  Among other things.

Home, Sick

     I'm in Day Two of a cold that has me home and sleeping a lot.  I have named it "Tamaritis," in honor of the first known patient.  (She says she has no idea where it came from.  Possibly elfshot, or a gladhanding candidate for political office, which amounts to the same thing,)

     It is some kind of a respiratory bug.  Hers settled in her lungs.  Mine's gone after my sinuses so far, with some of my usual inner-ear symptoms like dizziness, disorientation and a decided tilt to either the universe or me, depending on one's point of view.  A constant for both of us is utterly vile chills, the kind of creeping coldness that nothing seems to mitigate.  It seems to search out the infected person's weak points.

     I have continued with salt-water gargles when my throat gets scratchy, honey-sweetened hot lemonade* (I used up all the lime concentrate and the honey's getting low) coffee† and chicken soup.  There's a microwave-pouch version of the latter that's pretty good.  Tonight is Trash Night, so I shall endeavor to persevere in doing my part by cleaning out the fridge and changing a couple of litter boxes.  You would not want me operating a motor vehicle at present.  I'm having a tough enough time navigating on my own two feet.
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* And not, I hasten to point out, hot-honey sweetened lemonade.  Who knows, it might help, but I shall put off that experiment until I think I really, really need it.
 
† No known therapeutic value but I wouldn't want to do without it.

It's Veteran's Day

     It's a day to remember the living, the people -- mostly regular working Joes and Janes -- who go and do the hard, often dull, occasionally dangerous jobs in the country's armed forces.

     Today is a day originally marked over a century ago by the people who thought they had just finished a horrific war that would end wars, a war that left scars twisting across Europe that in places have still not healed, and may not for centuries yet to come.

     What they did not know is that their war would be followed by others, even worse.  By a century of war.

     We're in a new century now, and war persists.  It chews up and spits out the people who put on their country's uniform, for long hours and low pay.  Spare them a thought.  Give them your thanks.  Their job is to stem the tide, to confront the horror and drudgery so that you and I don't have to.  It is a gift beyond price.

I Still Don't Trust The Future

     The recent impeachment effort is one of the reasons I'm unsure how much change we're going to see when Congress turns over in January like pond water.

     There were enough House Democrats in Washington and enough Republicans playing hooky that had they bothered to show up, they could have carried a vote to impeach Secretary of Defense Hegseth.

     On the other hand, there are not -- and will not be -- sufficient votes in the current Senate to actually oust the guy.  Nope; the Senate would have cleared their slates, shoved the furniture around to set up for the big event, made sure the Secretary and whatever legal counsel he had -- possibly Attorney General Todd Blanche himself -- were set up with carafes of water and coffee, comfy chairs and microphones, etc., let Senators do a little chastising of their opposite numbers, let the Dems chide the impeachee and the GOPpers congratulate him, broken for lunch, come back, held a vote finding him not guilty and been done in time for a nice supper, maybe even drinks before.  What's the point?  Setting a few more of my tax dollars on fire?

     They can run the process after the first of the year and maybe have a whisper of a chance of success, if the majority can find a handful of Senate Republicans minded to play along.  By then, the new minority party will have a better idea who they want to blame, and it might be him.

     This is all the old familiar song and dance, and if if I wanted to watch the same-old same-old done to perfection, I would have changed the channel to Bugs Bunny, who's got more panache and can carry a tune (Oh, that Mel Blanc and his successors and uncredited peers!).

     The Fed.gov has got a long way to go to earn my trust, no matter who's turning the crank.  I'm more inclined to let the Democrats finish their audition -- but make no mistake, it's indeed an audition.  I sure hope they've rehearsed!

     Around four this morning, I woke from a realistic dream in which I'd been out working in the front yard of Roseholme Cottage, the neighborhood looking even more haggard than it usually does this time of year, trees going bare, the vacant homes dark, the smashed house to the south a little more dilapidated, plumes of smoke rising in the distance, angled by the breeze.  A dark flying thing came burbling down from high in the gray and cloudy sky, small straight wings, big front tapering back to the tail, getting bigger and heading right for me!  I looked at it a little too long, figured it to hit to the south and ran around to the north side of house, yelling for Tam to take cover.  I curled up against the foundation as the drone missile impacted some distance away with a muted noise, shutting my eyes and wishing I'd told my parents I loved them more often.  The light got very bright red-yellow-orange even through my eyelids and I thought, "Is this really it? The fighting wasn't that bad! I wasn't supposed to end this way!" And then I woke up.

     Yeah, ask me how I feel about the future.  My subconscious knows. 

Like Fish Flopping On The Dock

     My Dad was an avid fisherman -- he liked the quiet.  He liked being in nature.  And he liked fresh-caught fish.  (Just about ruined my palate for anything but!)

     But it wasn't all Zen-like stillness and delicious aftermath.  You catch a fish and take it out of the water, the creature is desperate to get back to where it belongs.  It flops and thrashes around in this new, strange environment, trying to get traction, trying to move productively, trying to survive.

     Say hello to this strange period of legislative overlap, in which the departing Representatives and Senators try to get in their parting shots, while the incoming class tries to find their bearings and talks about their ambitious plans, which have yet to meet the slow gears and millstones of government.

     Like fish out of water, all that action can be unsettling.  Where's it all going?  Will dinner escape?

     It's a good time to step back and just watch.  There's not a lot to be done.  We voted.  You can call or write your Congresscritters, but the old ones aren't much minded to listen and the new ones can't do anything yet.  They're all going to do just whatever they're going to do, and there's a lot of be learned from paying attention.  How do they act when largely unconstrained by consequences?  What do they plan when their future still looks unlimited?

     They'll tell you who they are, if you look and listen.  My Dad could read the riverbanks, the shape and the shadows and the flow of the stream, and have a pretty good idea of what was in there before he baited the hook.  Our elected legislators are often more transparent than an Indiana waterway, and it can be surprising what bait they'll lunge at. 

Suspicious Urgency

     It's not even a "suspicion."  It's confirmed.  The Governor of Texas has long had sweepingly broad emergency powers, and they're been invoked often in last decade or more.  Push the correct magic button and the Lone Star Governor can rule by decree, with a scope and finality that leaves our current President's ultra-Wilsonian approach to Chief Executive power in the shade.

     During the long, cozy Republican trifecta in that state, this level of control has not received a lot of pushback -- a squabble between the city of Austin and the state over COVID-19 restriction during the pandemic and in 2022, a single, solitary Republican state legislator trying to get traction for a bill that would limit the Governor's emergency powers to something more similar to those in the other 49 states.

     He hasn't gotten anywhere.

     And then -- Then Texas went and elected a Democratic Governor.  And filled all the other top jobs on the state's executive branch with Dems, too.  Now Texas House Representative Brian Harrison's old bill is back and he's getting headlines, calling for a special session of their legislature to ensure that Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa does not inherit "what are, in effect, nearly all the powers of a dictator," before they lose control.  Ooga-booga!

     It didn't bother him so much over the past four years that he kept after his original bill, but now...!

     I've got no problem with legislators not wanting the Executive to go all Il Duce.  I'm less sympathetic when their level of concern varies depending on which side is holding the scepter and orb.  The Founders and Framers understood the danger of unchecked Executive power and they took steps to keep it reined in.  One of the jobs of legislators and judges is to ensure those reins remain in place, despite Party bonds or personal friendship.  They, ahem, have not been doing anything like an adequate job of it for quite some time, and one of the clearest lessons to be taken from the most recent election is that they'd better get back on task -- and it would play a lot better if it didn't look like a hasty partisan hack-job.

A Cross-Grained People

     I'm still thinking about the recent elections.  They have restored my faith -- not in the essential goodness of the American people, at least half of whom have below-average ethics and morals, but in our cussedness.

     Some years back, or m,ore like some decades back, one or the other party had got themselves a Federal trifecta, and many of the more voluble Senators and Congressthings on the winning side were going on chat shows and talking about a "permanent majority."  Even back then, my immediate reaction was, 
"Nuh-unh."  It doesn't work that way.  Never has, never will.  Oh, sometimes one party holds the upper hand for a good long time, but it doesn't last.  There's a war or an economic downturn or some fundamental change elsewhere in society, and politics gets shaken up.

     The guys who wrote the U. S. Constitution were not perfect men and neither was the document they produced (and they knew it.  Why do you think it's got the amendment process written right in?).  But they read history.  They knew that human nature remains constant, but governments change.  They tried to write around the worst ways of changing but they knew it would happen.  And as people go, Americans are a cantankerous, ornery lot.  We're perverse and uncooperative.  We like to blame the people we voted in to run things, and to vote them out if things aren't going as we'd like.  There's been a lot of back and forth about our 15-bean assortment of a culture, one side saying our diversity is our strength, the other saying our unity is our strength, but both statements are true and the real source of our strength is that we don't fall into line well; we're fractious and taken as a whole, we're very willing to take the bull (or the BS) by the horns and change course.

     I'd about given up.  It looked to me like the bully-boys were going to ride high, wide and mighty until they'd driven the whole shebang over a cliff.  They still might, but the electorate did their best to head it off last Tuesday, whooping and hollering and waving a big bandanna.  We've taken some damage, bit we just might get through this and get back to normal for awhile.

     At least, until next time.  But I'm believing there will be a next time, that the pendulum will keep on swinging, and that's a relief.

Interesting Times

     We're in for some interesting months, I think.  Chaos is threatening to break out among the GOP, from the #2 seat in the party organization challenging the Chairman (both of them the President's choices for their jobs, as is traditional) to Susie Wile's departure and Stephen Miller's elevation.  Miller is not much for details and building consensus, and with a wide-open Presidential primary less than two years away, expect a lot of churn in the Cabinet.

     Meanwhile, the Dems are in the position of a car-chasing dog that has unexpectedly caught several.  Theirs is the more fractious party, and the details-and-consensus job is even more important.

     We're going to have two years of divided government for certain, and while I think a government with one foot stuck in a bucket and bag over its head governs best, and there's a whole lot of rancor all around, they are all going to have to learn how to work and play well together in order to accomplish the essential tasks.  At this point, the two big parties barely agree on just which items are essential and I suspect they'll find out by screwing up before they're able to move forward.  I very much doubt the current President will add much to that effort -- that duck's not just lame, he's seriously irked, and preoccupied with constructing monuments to himself.

     In the meantime, a lot of rocks will get flipped over and a lot of pale, squirming things will feel the light of day.  I think that's for the best, too, and it's one reason the parties in power do change: voters start to suspect the grift, graft and surreptitiously crossed palms are building up excessively, and we count on each party to keep an eye on the other.   Both of them like to talk about "historic mandates" when they come out on top but it's more like a cat barfing up a hairball.

     It's been awhile since the muck was turned over, so try not to be too surprised by what floats to the surface.

The Cold Caught Me

     Tam's been fighting an atypical cold for several days, one that started with chills and fatigue, and settled in her lungs.  I've been doing my best to treat her while avoiding it: healthy meals and "hot toddies" of limeade sweetened with wildflower honey,* the best and least-processed kind I could find, for both of us.  And saltwater gargles for me when I wake up with a scratchy throat.  (I'm not real fond of those, but they seem to work.)

     I woke up with chills in the small hours this morning, and about enough energy to wrestle a noodle if it wasn't especially ambitious or al dente.†  I called in sick and have been taking it easy, still hoping to mitigate symptoms.  After the summer of back trouble, I don't have the reserves I once had.  Managed to rustle up some breakfast for lunch and I'll try to get an early start on Trash Night -- I'm not going to be at my quickest with that chore.
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* This is an old folk remedy, but what's in it will do you no harm and might help: plenty of Vitamin C and mildly antiseptic citric acid in the lime juice, while the honey is both soothing and a mild topical antibiotic.   Best made double strength, with boiling water to dissolve all the honey, then diluted and cooled with room temperature or chilled water.  I make two cups at a time in a Pyrex measuring cup, by eye and experience -- enough honey to cover the bottom easily, enough lime juice concentrate to cover that or a bit more, then a cup of boiling water and vigorous stirring before cooling it down with another cup of water. 
 
† Man, being bit by a noodle is the worst!

That'll Leave A Mark

     I woke up this morning to discover the GOP had received significant chastisement at the ballot box, in ways and places I had not expected.  Scare ads about wokeness, "communism" (socialism, which you are free to loathe, is not communism, despite decades of mostly Soviet Russian propaganda blurring that line; will you please go read some history?) and a tiny minority within a tiny minority* did not stampede voters away from Democrats and towards Republicans.  High fuel prices, high grocery prices (etc.) and an unpopular war appeared to motivate voters, as did grabbing and deporting people's coworkers, friends and relatives: it turns out that stuff annoys folks a whole lot.  Plain talk about corruption and good governance helped the victors.

     Politicians of both parties need to get out of their tight-knit, self-congratulatory circles and go talk to people.  Some of the most stunning and decisive upsets were by candidates who got out and listened to voters -- all of the voters -- in their state or district, and then spoke about how they would address the issues that they learned mattered.  What they go on to do (or even attempt) will tell the tale, and could turn an election win into a lasting legacy.

     Vindictive fanatics and blinkered ideologues lost last night and pragmatic politicians won.  If the 2026 winners govern as pragmatically as they campaigned, they can do a lot of good.  If they're another pack of empty, slick-talking suits and Party hacks, voters can boot them out, same as they just did the last set.

     Nobody should take this outcome for granted.  This is not a time to relax, hold hands and sing songs.  Come the swearings-in, it will be time to get down to work.
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* The unsuccessful 1970s tennis player, a weightlifter guy and a handful of student athletes notwithstanding, the overlap between transpeople and active sports participants is unsurprisingly minuscule.  This is a non-issue, best left to the various bodies that regulate their respective sports.  People that don't like it can form their own particular softball leagues, precisely as all sorts of Americans have been doing since time immemorial.  "What would I do if accosted by a hairy weirdo in the locker room?"  Pepper-spray them, just as I would any credible threat.  And if there's an earthquake -- a far more likely occurrence -- I'll run outside, away from buildings.  Grow the hell up and stop whining that the entire world must be Nerfed for your comfort.

I Voted

      Tam and I went and did it, colds notwithstanding (hers is way worse -- mine is still tentative, which is good, since Amazon screwed up the delivery of cold supplies that was supposed to happen tonight*).  There wasn't much of a line at our usual polling place† but there was a good crowd and people were arriving steadily.

     As I write this, tonight looks like at least a mild drubbing for the Republicans, who have earned it fair and square.  Control of the Senate is still undecided, but whoever gets it is not going to have the kind of majority that will let them do just anything.  This should (it won't) calm the doomsayers on either side.

     And it looks like Indiana, in a largely rural U.S. House district, has replaced by-no-means-a-maverick Republican Victoria Spartz with gay Democrat J. D. Ford (who looks more like the guy who arrives to repair your furnace than a man with a Bachelors in PolySci and Criminal Justice and a Masters in Education).  He's highly qualified and ran a good campaign, but her non-support of Ukraine despite being from there was a big negative.

     There's a lesson to be learned from this election and I hope both big parties are taking notes.  It's a lot more than just "Orange man bad" and they had all better dig in and wise up -- and stop lining their own pockets while the voters get the short and nasty end.
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* An absolute cock-up and one that ensures the next time I feel lousy, I will drive to the drugstore for cough syrup, Dayquil and kosher salt like I used to.  They claimed it was out for delivery, and then suddenly said, "oopsie!" and moved the arrival to 24 hours later.  Amazon has just about enshittified themselves into irrelevance and I'm sorry to see it, but hey, it's their company to wreck.  Next!
 
† Marion County is a "vote anywhere" county but we've been favoring a pretty little Lutheran church a couple of bus stops away.  Even when there's been a longer line, the crowd is nice and it moves briskly.  They don't have free coffee like the giant Methodist church on Illinois St., but it's easier to get to and even if we drive, the parking's good.

Oops

     I had meant to post yesterday.  I even had a topic picked out.  ...I think.  Today, Tam and I plan to vote, despite a cold that may be in motion from one of us to the other: she's had it for a couple of days and says it's on the wane, and my throat is feeling a little irritated.*

     Maybe I'll dodge it, maybe I won't, but I'm going to do my best to go vote anyway.  If you haven't voted yet, I encourage you to do the same.  You probably spend every other day of the year annoyed the politicians won't do things the way you want them to, and today's your chance to give 'em the what-for.  I wish those office-holders would spend a little less time slinging hollow mud, and a little more time worrying about actual wrongdoing and the long, ugly trip down from the Tarpeian Rock.  Today's the day we can remind 'em of the ancient truth, Arx tarpeia Capitoli proxima: what goes up must, in the fullness of time, come crashing back down.

     Or as they say on building sites, "Headache!"  Here's hoping the right people wake up with one tomorrow.
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* Even after I served chicken soup with hot, honey-sweetened limeade for dinner last night!  Alas, it's more of a treatment than a preventative, which explains why it apparently did her more good than me.

A Sad Halloween

     Friday night, while Tam and I were watching television (an episode per night of the current season of Slow Horses), a fire truck siren got steadily louder and then came to a stop outside.

     This was worrisome -- the tree-smashed house next door remains wrenched open, walls leaning and propped up, while insurance companies, the homeowner and the city wrangle over what's next.  There's a lot of broken wood in there, along with plumbing and wiring.  If some enterprising urban salvager got into trouble....

     I peeked out the front window.  There was a police car in addition to the fire truck, and as I looked, two more black-and-whites showed up.  The police and firemen converged on a house across the street that has been ill-starred.  The present owner spent a few years running some kind of used-vehicle operation out of it, which had resulted in semi-decrepit cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats and so on being parked all over the neighborhood, often with expired tags.  That had lead to less than congenial feelings, especially when he had scruffy guys living in his residential-sized garage and working on the cars (etc.).  (No, I am not making this up.)  But that enterprise had faded out, and an older woman had been living there for several months, waving and saying hello and radiating goodwill.

     Over the next hour, Animal Control arrived, and a car and a van from the Coroner's office.  Yes, we were Gladys-Kravitzing from time to time, as we heard the coming and goings.  Tam saw Animal Control taking a lovely setter-type dog to their truck, and eventually all of the public safety personnel and vehicles left.  Checking the usual sources didn't turn up anything and it wasn't until an encounter with another neighbor today that I learned the current resident had come to grief in the privacy-fenced back yard, and was found by a welfare check.  Nothing that will make the news other than an obit.  She was a pleasant neighbor and I will miss her. 

     Then on Saturday night, a late-night text let me know that another neighbor had passed.  I knew her, and had taken care of her cats from time to time.  She'd been on a long, hard health journey with an unavoidable outcome, and had chosen to spend as much time as possible at home with her cats instead of pursing radical intervention.  It was a situation with no good answers; she picked her path and stuck to it.  She had been in the hospital for several weeks and some of her cats had already been adopted out.  I'm told the rest have foster homes while awaiting permanent adoption.  This is another neighbor I'll miss; she lived here long before I moved in, and was one of several kind souls who look after our neighborhood ferals.

     We're only here for a little while and there's no telling when we'll depart.  Smile and say hello; be kind to animals.

At Least I Painted

     Voting, not so much.  Too many people.  I was never very good around people -- shyness, I liked to claim.  I'm the retiring type, happier behind a keyboard or a radio microphone.

     The truth is, I've always been a little bit scared of people.  I used to believe my fellow humans were basically good, just a little bit too loud, too heedless, moving too quickly.  Since 2016, since the pandemic, since January 6, I've stopped believing in human goodness.  Oh, I'm still not quite convinced most people are evil.  They're just indifferent, often easily led, unwilling to do the math.

     They are, in fact, the brutes and louts I always feared they were.  I don't trust them a bit and I find it more than merely difficult to be around people, especially in crowds.

     Tam plans to vote on Election Day and will chivvy me along.

     And hey, the heavy-duty primer goes on quickly and dries well.  I covered the worst worn and missing paint on the windows.  The maker says it can be applied right down to 35°F, so I might make more progress with it yet this year.

Took The Day Off

     The paint has come off the window frames around the living room windows, especially the sills.  Those windows are original to the house, so the wood's over a century old, and it holds paint...badly.  There's time enough this Fall to slap some modern white primer on them and I was planning to do so this weekend, until the weather service predicted rain.  So here goes, and while it won't be pretty, the bare wood is even less so.

     I'll also be trying to vote.  The line at the early voting site was at least a half hour long Tuesday, and I couldn't spare the time.  Today, I can.  If it doesn't work out, I'll go to the regular polling place with Tam on  Tuesday.  I can show exactly why I have become enthusiastic about voting, too -- these guys, who are delighted by Donald Trump's Republican party and see our present moment as their chance to press even more in that direction.  I'd like to tell you they're a joke, cartoonish figures from a Margaret Atwood novel, but it has never been safe to ignore their kind: at one time Afghanistan was one of the more forward-looking and egalitarian of Muslim nations; at one time, Germany, humbled and staggering, was nevertheless a leader in freedom of thought and intellectual pursuits at all levels.  It didn't last.  Decency and fairness are fragile states which require looking after.  If people don't maintain them, authoritarianism and hierarchy is ever ready to fill any gap, ooze through any crack, stamp on the weak and woo the powerful.  If civilization is only a coat of paint, it's the paint that preserves the essential structure underneath; lose it, and the whole thing is threatened.

     So I'm voting.  It's just one vote, but I've got it and I'm gonna use it. 

It Always Does, But...

     The last week or so before an election is always pretty wild, but the candidates and politicians campaigning for them are crazier than ever this year.  The TV ads here in Indiana -- usually a sure thing for Republicans, outside of a couple of U.S. House districts and city offices in the larger ones -- are just batty.  And the wildest so far are attack ads on the Democrats who, almost to a man, are the kind of Dems you get in Indiana: military vets who went to a name-brand university and have held smaller office, running the American cursus honorum in due order. And yet, somehow, their Republican opposite numbers, following much the same path, paint them as wilder than any coastal megapolitan firebrand, out to collectivize our kitchens in the light of blazing bonfires of brassieres and tax dollars.

     The actual difference between Indiana Democrats and Republicans used to be the color of their tie and if they were going to raise your income and property taxes, or sales taxes and license fees.  Presently, our GOP pols range from wild-eyed Christian Nationalists to lukewarm X-Nats to hoping they don't get primaried by one, while the Dems cover a spectrum from 1970s-style liberalism to nth-generation scions of political dynasties who live like wealthy Republicans, but wouldn't think of stepping outside family tradition.  We're lucky most of them are politicians first and foremost, with the exception of a handful of wild-eyed state office-holders in the mold of Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, bearded fanatics who differ from the Taliban only in their choice of wardrobe and which direction the writing runs in their holy book.

     But if all you saw were the mailers, billboards and TV ads, you'd be pretty sure we're about to be overrun by a horde of gay transsexual communists aiming to tax everyone into poverty while running employers out of the state on a rail* and/or bought-and-sold apparatchiks snuggled in the pockets of big business and/or cynical grifters whose parents and grandparents are their only qualification for office.

     While Indiana has its fair share of losers, flakes and crooks in and running for office, we do not, in fact, have any more than is sadly normal for that line of work, and once next Tuesday has come and gone, we still won't.  I'm hoping we'll have a few more Democrats in office and a few less Republicans, for the simple reason that the Republican politicians as a group are presently a whole lot crazier than the Democrat ones, and far less inclined to respect the rule of law.  Play. By. The. Rules.  Stop trying to create second- and third-class citizens.  Stay out of people's bedrooms and doctor's offices.  C'mon, this isn't that difficult; just nib out.
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* I'm still trying to figure out how they're going to be able to tax people who won't have jobs.  My goodness, you don't suppose those ads are supposed to induce unreasoning panic instead of cool reflection?

"Be Seeing You"

    Walter Koenig passed away earlier this week.  We're down to Kirk and Sulu from original Star Trek cast.  Koenig was an interesting guy -- gentle, kind, opinionated, a little geeky.  He was fun in Star Trek, but I came to appreciate his talents as the psi-cop "Bester" in Babylon 5.  Bester -- named after SF writer Alfred Bester, who dreamed up one of the first psi-cops in fiction -- was a truly chilling character, a guy with considerable power and authority who radiated menace and who, over time, proved to be an example of the principle that "hurt people hurt (other) people."

     And he was about as unlike Walter Koenig as could be.  Nevertheless, the character was unmistakable, as real-feeling as anyone you ever met, and not someone you'd ever want to get on the wrong side of.  (And he inevitably said "Be seeing you" in parting, an allusion to The Prisoner.)

     Koenig was 90.  In addition to acting, he directed and wrote screenplays and novels.  He lived a long life and did good work.  I'll miss him. 

Newspaper Stew

      It came to me as email spam from The New York Times -- second only to the NRA for desperate pen pal behavior -- and I decided to give it a try, a fairly conventional beef stew with an easy approach to making a roux, one I have used before.

     It's not a cheat; you flour the meat and brown it in butter or oil.  This naturally forms the basis of a meaty roux, some in (mostly stuck to) the bottom of the stewpot, some on the meat.  Comments to the article complained of blandness, so I added pepper, a pinch of salt and a little dried garlic to the flour -- and I used Wondra, pre-cooked flour that is almost impossible to turn into lumps (and it never tastes "raw").

     Shaken up in a big Ziploc bag with the flour mixture, browned in extra-virgin olive oil a little at a time and set aside in a bowl, the stew beef looked like a good start.  I sauteed about half a (leftover) white onion, chopped (another deviation from the recipe, since they add the vegetables much later) before deglazing the pot with a mixture of mostly red wine and a little bit of vinegar (at this point, I discovered I didn't have any red wine vinegar -- so an equal amount of balsamic vinegar with a touch of white vinegar for acidity filled in for it).

     Deglazed, the roux dissolving into the wine, the meat goes back in, with about twice as much beef broth as wine added.  The whole thing gets bay leaves and is brought to boil, then turned down to simmer for an hour and a half.  I sprinkled in a little Herbes de Provence and went away to do laundry.

     The recipe calls for adding carrots and onion after the hour and a half is up.  I thought that was a great idea and had a small red onion and baby carrots, but it needed celery, so I added some.  (Onion, carrot and celery is one of the "trinities" of cooking.  Watch for these; they can be counted on to work well and they're what our palate expects.)  That gets covered and boiled gently for ten minutes, then a potato is cut up and added -- they called for two, but I went with just one.  That gets another half hour, with done-ness of the potato as a guide.  I added three Shishito peppers, sliced into rings, about halfway through that time, as a hedge against blandness.

     The end result was an opaque, flavorful broth with nice vegetables.  It needed a dash of salt at most, and not even that if you mopped it up with crusty bread.  Well worth the fairly low effort required -- I like any dish I can let simmer and just look in on from time to time while I get other things done.  I froze the leftovers in two batches, and there's a couple of weekday suppers, ready to go.

Unexpected Physics

      Oldies TV network Me-TV has been running The Wizard of Oz film most of this month, along with various (old) behind-the-scenes shows about it.  And they've run The Wiz, the much later reinterpretation of the first Oz story (and one that correctly puts Dorothy in silver shoes -- the ruby slippers in the classic film were substituted because the red stands out wonderfully in Technicolor).

     The Wiz was playing this afternoon while I did my various chores, and I'd watch for a bit whenever I took a break.  I was doing just that when Dorothy (Diana Ross) and Toto (some nice stage dog) encountered an unrecognizable Micheal Jackson as The Scarecrow, being hounded by crows who were singing--  They were singing--  Oh, wow!

     What they were singing was social commentary, expressed in the informal or joking version of the laws of thermodynamics:
     1. You can't win.
     2. You can't break even.
     3. You can't quit the game. 
     Economics is known as "the dismal science," but let me tell you, thermodynamics is pretty dour, too.  In The Wiz, the Scarecrow is as crab-bucketed a character as ever was, literally pulling quotes by great thinkers out of his head while the crows caper around him, eating the products of the garden he's supposedly protecting and chortling about how stuck he is, unable to get ahead, unable to walk away.  I hope this isn't a spoiler for anyone: Dorothy eventually shoos them off and gets the scarecrow to walking, in a dance number that shows off Jackson's remarkable abilities.  And in the meantime, audiences have had one of the fundamental truths of the universe sung at them.

     Of course, humans are localized entropy-reversers.  We may not win at thermodymanics, but we can cheat a little.  We can push back, and that's what Dorothy does for the Scarecrow: helps him stand up and start pushing back.

     I am far from the first person to notice this.  One of the others is a huge physics geek, and dug into the history of the plain-language version of the three laws.  It's worth watching!

Vacuum Of Nope

      So, week before last, I dropped the motor unit of my "Amazon Basics" rechargeable, HEPA-rated stick vacuum by not realizing that I was holding on to the wrong part when I unlatched it from an accessory.  Bang! Down it went from waist height, striking the floor with the hinge over the dust receptacle cover and leaving me holding the business-end widget.  Of course hinge broke and the cover came off, leaving me with a nasty splash of hairballs and dust on the floor and a useless vacuum.

     Solvent glue didn't work -- wrong kind of plastic.  There's no way to build up tooth enough for epoxy to get a grip.  I might be able to use 2mm nuts and bolts to fasten a piece of aluminum across the break, but the size of the hardware is a clue to the scale of the thing: it was only strong and large enough to keep a small plastic cover in place.

     I liked that little vacuum a lot.  It was relatively light and didn't strain my back, plus it was quiet enough that Holden the big baby tomcat could (barely) tolerate it.  (My old upright sent him cowering behind the couch.) So I went looking for another one.  It was an inexpensive import and surely the big retailer still offered--  No.  There were some similar models from companies with imaginary names, some with good reviews, some not so good, none of which looked to use the same filters as my defunct Amazon.  After a couple of days spending spare time looking, I gave up and bought a name-brand, well-reviewed, line-powered stick vac.

     The box was pretty heavy.  I unpacked it today, put the big stick vac together, gave the floors a once-over and it's a nope.  Oh, it'll replace my ancient upright, which is overdue.  The roller design on the carpet attachment is great, and doesn't build up hair at all.  But it's too loud (Holden just reappeared as I started this paragraph, looking around for the dire howling Thing) and it's too darned heavy.  It can't be my daily driver.  And it turns out I dislike managing the cord.

     Back to the internets, I guess.

"You Should Smile More. You're Prettier When You Smile."

     You should walk a mile in my ears.  Men (especially) say things to women that they think of as well-intentioned -- but which communicate something quite different.

     For instance, looking pretty to the men around me is, in fact, not one of my goals.  I hope I'm neat, clean and reasonably well-groomed in the eyes of everyone who sees me, but the choices I make in attire, grooming and even facial expression are for me and nobody else.

     Another aspect of it is the assumption of an avuncular relationship.  Wrong, buddy.  I've been walking around on this planet for a long, long time, and I have outlived all my real uncles, of whom there were many.  At 68, I do not need any new ones.  Friends, acquaintances?  Sure!  That's fine.

     This my blog.  You get whatever I have been thinking of, most often the parts that I believe will be of more general interest, or that I am worrying about, or I'm enthused over.  Including politics.  Don't like it?  Go read something else.  Come back later, if you wish; there will probably be something else at the top of my blog.

     Just understand that I'm not your niece.  I'm a mean old lady, and I have a few things I can do very well indeed, and many more that I can muddle through with.  Sometimes I write about them.

Tired

     I have spent the entire work day -- 9:30 in the morning through 8:00 at night -- working with a very sharp factory support engineer to get a vital piece of equipment (okay, a small TV transmitter) functioning normally again.

     We succeeded.  Ten and a half hours of geekery in the constant roar of cold air and noise with no lunch, just a few snacks and sips of water and tea, is tiring.  I'm going to take the victory, however impermanent it might be, and go to bed.

Falling Behind, Catching Up

      I find it difficult to write these days, mostly due to politics and business.

     One one level, a lot of the GOP seems be adopting an apocalyptic "victory or ruin" approach to elections, and an increasingly authoritarian style when they do win.  This is not a viable long-term approach in a democratic republic -- or in any other kind of democracy.  It is one reason I have put off retirement; a fixed income is perilous if there are major disruptions.

     More immediately, my line of work is undergoing a series of consolidations and adjustments that mean more and more work is being done by fewer and fewer people, and to step out of the game of musical chairs at all means losing your place.  The big owners are more and more remote, the pay gap between the corporate bosses and the clock-punchers is getting larger and larger, and as far as they're concerned, "artificial intelligence" is probably going to make most of us redundant before too long anyway.  There's a lot of incentive to keep on getting while the getting is at least adequate, because tomorrow it may all go away.

     But all of this (and plenty more) is not at all conducive to calm reflection.  I'm running as fast as I can to stay caught up, knowing the music will stop and at that point, the question will be not if things are bad but how bad they are, and how quickly will they get worse.

     I was hoping to retire in more or less genteel poverty, under a largely stable national and local government, in a world that wasn't notably more screwed up than the one I grew up in (which had an ample supply of problems, many without clear solutions, but people were at least trying).  That's not what we've got and navigating the present makes me feel like a drunk on a highwire.

Chilly Night

      This morning, a sign of the changing seasons: it was 61°F inside Roseholme Cottage and I ran the furnace for the first time this Fall.  

     Between the ancient thermosiphon (or "gravity") coal converted to gas forced-air furnaces* in my long-ago duplex and the smelly, cantankerous oil-burning furnace in my first Indianapolis home, the first furnace run of autumn always worries me.  It wasn't too many years ago that the furnace here had a cracked heat exchanger (which I smelled and then saw) and had to be replaced.  The process went okay this year.  Now it's a toasty 64° and I'm enjoying a plate of Breakfast Hash for lunch.

     It's a fancy variant of Breakfast Hash.  I don't make the stuff much, partially because I need to pick up a decent modern wok or deep cast-iron skillet, and because I've cut way back on potatoes and rice; the doc is right about enjoying that stuff sparingly.

     Still, every once in a great while is acceptable, and today's mixture of diced potatoes, scrambled eggs and a couple of strips of bacon is accompanied by sliced green olives, pickled okra and mild banana peppers, a hot piparra pepper,† a whole fire-roasted piquilla pepper and a half-dozen little peppedew peppers, all of them pickled and, except for the very last, chopped up.  
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* They were an education in the start-up process, with a large ring burner in the old coal combustion chamber and a candle-sized pilot flame in the center, all under a thick steel plate and with a thermocouple stuck in the pilot: if the pilot went out, the furnace couldn't open the gas valve, since the tiny current from the thermocouple powered the controls.  A normal start took nearly a minute, from the tiny click of the valve, the whoosh of gas, the long pause 'til the burner caught and a muted roar as it heated the air enough to trip the fan control.  The fans were different on each side of the duplex -- an external squirrel-cage unit in the cold air return on my side, but the other side had a much larger horizontal squirrel-cage fan inside the hot-air distribution octopus at the top of the furnace and an external motor hanging in a spring-loaded mount driving a set of belted pulleys to run the fan -- a little one on the motor and a large on top of the furnace.  When that system kicked on, the motor would bounce in the springs and the big pulley would wobble and yaw until the fan rotor came up to speed and stabilized.  The entire top of the furnace flexed; the bearing for the fan was in great shape but the sheet metal hadn't been designed to support a fan and the reinforcement wasn't enough to hold it steady.  My furnace guy -- the only one in town who would work on such historic contraptions -- swore it was perfectly normal behavior.  Still, knowing what was lurking down in the basement, I laid in bed on many a winter night, counting the seconds after the first click and rush of gas....twenty-two, twenty-three, twent- foomph, there's the fire, okay, one, two...fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seven--...click, whirrrrrrr, there's the fan, all right, I can go back to sleep.  Running big transmitters for work, I applied the lessons the furnaces taught me, learning the sounds of a normal start-up and often noticing when it stalled before my coworkers did.
 
† For my taste, these are hot enough that just one is plenty in this, and two or three in a big pot of chili.  However, they're very tasty and YMMV.

Wait, What?

      It's a cold, wet morning in Indianapolis, and checking on Indiana fuel prices has led to a chilling discovery: while the state has suspended the 37 cents-per-gallon gasoline road tax, the corresponding 63 cents-per-gallon tax on gas-station diesel* remains in effect.  The road tax money is earmarked to be spent on just that, and the reason for the disproportion will be found hauling freight trailers on the interstate.  The overall state budget has been running a surplus and it will supposedly be used to make up the lost revenue.  Indiana drivers will be well aware that our usual road spending is, um, thrifty, and so I'm not sure if this will make driving much worse.

     I was hoping to sweeten the pot for a field technician planning a swing through the state; we've got a widget he's far more qualified to look over than I am (the book for the thing is more of a user's manual) and we'd like to see him sooner rather than later.  You'd never guess what the powerplant in his service truck full of test equipment, replacement parts and tools runs on, not in a million, jillion years -- but it ain't ethyl.
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* "Red dye diesel" is not taxed by Indiana; it's intended for use in off-road farm machinery, though the Governor has decreed farmers can now use it in their on-road transportation.  Everyone else needs to stick with the undyed version and pay the tax.  If you pull up at the Co-Op in your Benz, they're going to send you on your way unfulfilled.

A Happier Note: Food

     This morning, I had a treat: a toasted ham, cheese and egg sandwich on rye bread.  It's every bit as bad for you as you might think, consisting of a fried egg sandwiched between two thin slices of lightly-fried ham and slices of Havarti cheese on the outside, fried in a nonstick pan with a little butter.  When the cheese is melted and both sides of the bread are toasted golden and crunchy, it's ready.  (A little mustard or hot sauce would not be out of order, though I passed on 'em this morning.)

     Look, I had oatmeal yesterday and I'll probably have it tomorrow, but there was only a little bit of bread and ham left today and it wanted used up.

Points To Newsfeed, Shrugs

     Look at almost any newsfeed; sure, Fox News and the sites to the right of them are whistling in the dark more loudly than ever, but from the center onward, things aren't looking great for the Trump administration and it's rubbing off on a lot of Republicans, even in states and districts long thought "safe" for the GOP.

     Does that mean the upcoming election will be a romp for the Democrats?  I doubt it.  It's likely they'll do better than expected, but I don't think we'll see a dramatic majority for them in the Senate.  But the image of Republican politicians is getting tarnished even in the demographics most favorable to them, and that slide is unlikely to reverse as long as fuel (and everything downstream of it) remains expensive, Iran remains defiant, and the Russians keep pounding away at Ukraine.  Spin can only do so much, which President after President has learned the hard way.  Mr. Trump is not so much on learning, but the bill comes due nevertheless, and he's not the kind of guy who will happily pay up on presentation.

Events Leading Up To....

     Tamara's line for times like these is "Events leading up to...," that part at the beginning of a history book (or maybe a chapter in an especially thick one) recounting the factors, actions and events before some kind of noteworthy change for good, ill or maybe just very different.  Steamships, wars, disasters, revolutions: Archduke Ferdinand's murder, the promulgation of the first written code of laws, landing on the Moon, the Russian or American or French Revolutions: they didn't happen in a vacuum.

     We're living in "Events leading up to," but leading up to what, I can't say.  I don't know.  It's a cusp, a discontinuity.  The three branches of the Federal government are at war among themselves and with the public; it's a low-key, slow motion war (unless you happen to be Ilhan Omar, a tree on a public golf course in Washington, D.C. or an immigrant with less than spotless papers or less than impressive wealth) but it's unsupportable nonetheless.  You can see it in the polls, in the President campaigning in what should be safely Republican states and districts, making dire warning that he may be "the last Republican President."

     As an amateur student of history, that particular warning doesn't bother me.  While the United States of America has had a de facto two-party system almost from the outset, they've not always been the same two and their disagreements haven't been consistent.  The emerging parties named themselves the Federalists (more or less Hamiltonian, big-government as their day saw it) and the Republican-Democrats (roughly Jeffersonian, generally small-government), but only one has survived to the present day, and it with only half its name and few of the original principles or core issues intact, due to the changes under Andrew Jackson,* Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.  On both sides, party names and key issues have come and gone.  Who remembers the Whigs, the Know-Nothings, the Anti-Masons?   The spot the Republicans now occupy has seen the most changes of name, and both sides have had huge discontinuities, with the emergence of Jacksonianism for one and the collapse of the Whigs for the other.  Nobody weeps for them now except students who didn't study hard enough for the test.

     The thing about historical discontinuities is that although the term is bloodless, the real-world working out is not always so.  Things are not great now.  They could be much worse and I don't have any confidence they won't be.

     It's time to stock up on canned goods again.  Just in case. 
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* I somehow managed to conflate him with Hamilton in an earlier draft, resulting in "Alexander Jackson," a hybrid who is best not speculated about.

Y'know What I Want?

     I want to get back to a country where it's (mostly) safe to (largely) ignore politics.  The problem is, of course, that politics isn't doing a very good job of ignoring us.

     No matter who or what you blame 'em on, fuel prices, inflation, various kinds of food contamination, a slow-growing measles epidemic, simmering war in the Gulf and Ukraine (and a few other smaller hot spots) is affecting all but the most wealthy of us, every day.  Meanwhile, those rich people keep on getting richer while the rest of us are running as fast as we can to stay where we are.  I know I am; adjusted for inflation, my pay has gone steadily down for the last 25 years, and probably longer.  There's nothing "trickling down."

     If a politician ran on a platform of Make America Boring Again, I'd be seriously interested.  We've had way too much excitement.

Everybody Out Of The Pool?

     The Trump administration's DOJ -- far more a creature of Presidential whim than ever before -- is investigating the member news organizations of the White House Video Pool over their not covering the President on events that CNN (a long time member of the Video Pool) is barred from attending.

     To explain all this, I need to start by taking a long step back, to the White House Correspondent's Association.  The roots of it go back -- allegedly -- to Theodore Roosevelt's time in office, but the official founding of the organization was in 1914, during a time when -- wait for it! -- the odious Woodrow Wilson, then President, was feuding with the press and threatening to stop holding press conferences altogether.  They managed to broker terms between a President angry over what he saw as publication of off the record information, and a press corps hungry for news.

     There's only so much room in the White House, and even less when a President travels.  The WHCA operates as a kind of as "funnel," sorting out precedence (and, traditionally, seating arrangements) in the White House press room and selecting a subgroup of reporters to provide "pool" coverage for the entire membership when it's impractical (or impossible) to haul the whole bunch of them along.  In theory, they are the eyes and ears of the nation, and in practice, their membership and leadership represents a broad spectrum of political leanings and news philosophies.  This happens not because they're all so very chummy but because they're highly competitive and the only way to avoid anyone having an unfair advantage is to all be watching one another, all the time.

     The Video Pool reflects this.  There are many events where one or two cameras (a main and a backup) are all there's room for, and the outfits with the most experience making moving pictures and the best tech and production support comprise the Video Pool: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox News.*  They're not there to be the President's best pal or worst enemy, they're present to get whatever is newsworthy, and to share it with the other members of the pool and the rest of the WHCA.  When the President decided CNN (after trying to ban CNN, MS Now and Politico from White House press coverage and being told by the courts that having invited the press in, he didn't get to be picky-choosy about kicking some of them back out) was uninvited to those events that required Video Pool coverage, the other members of the pool declined to step in.  If CNN was the WHCA-designated Video Pool lead and they weren't allowed to do the job, none of the rest were going to pick up the slack. 

     DOJ is crying foul over that, saying such a showing of press solidarity may constitute illegal collusion under anti-trust laws.  Bartleby may "prefer not to" all by himself, but if he's been getting together with the other scriveners and stepping away en masse, well--  The courts will get to figure this one out, but the Press has considerable freedom, which the Federal government is Constitutionally disallowed from abridging.

     What, exactly, that might mean in this context remains to be seen.  Most administrations manage to do their work without needing to test every damn limit and norm; even the prejudiced and haughty Wilson saw the light of sweet Reason (or at least of bittersweet Compromise).  This crew, not so much.
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* This is in rough order of the formation of their TV news operations, with CNN and Fox News coming along well after the other three.  Bear in mind that pool video is share and share alike, and it's a prestige gig for the videographers and reporters, real "Don't screw this up" stuff.  They don't get brownie points for playing partisan gotcha, they get 'em for eye-catching, attention-grabbing coverage, period.  There is always a mildly adversarial relationship between Press and politicians, and I wouldn't have it any other way, no matter who's involved: you want 'em looking close.

The Case Against Public Execution

     The most recent barbarism from the Trump administration is the planned public execution of the man who committed the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting,* by firing squad.

     While I am opposed to the death penalty on moral, economic and margin-of-error grounds (you can't unkill the person if the verdict was mistaken), there's no question that the man in question committed the crime, nor that it was heinous; his actions were those of a bloody-handed barbarian and had he been stopped by being killed, I wouldn't have shed a tear.  I won't weep for him if he is executed as planned.

     I will weep for us.  Our Federal and state governments execute people rarely, and not in public.  It does not have a deterrent effect, and in his case, it will only make him a martyr for the cause he embraced.  He was paralyzed from the waist down by an injury sustained when people ended his murderous rampage, and while I have no pity for him over it, shooting a man in a wheelchair (or strapped to a support) only makes the spectacle worse.  There's no claiming the moral high ground after such an act.

     And possibly even worse, it's one more trial balloon for authoritarianism: can the government execute a man on live TV without pushback?  Will the sensation-hungry flock to the online video, share screengrabs and clips on social media, cheer on the administration for doing it?  If it flies, they'll do it again, and again, and again.  They've already shown a considerable taste for blood, and executions are much easier to control than street violence and enforcement overreach.

     It's one more spot of mold on the rotten fruit of Trumpism.
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* You do have to specify the date, there having been another one at the base in 2014. 

About Those Odds Of Civil Unrest

     ...Maybe they just went up.  Consider the source, but the source's source is a well-respected Denver TV news station.

     The world is such a giant shitshow that I'm still kind of hoping I never woke up from anesthesia when they did my cataract surgery and it's all some horrific nightmare as the last neurons fire in near-random order.

Political Predictions

      With the mid-term elections about a month away, I'm going to make some guesses:

     One in ten to one in twenty chance of political violence -- roughly on J6 lines but state/local, the probability starting on Election Day and continuing until after the counts are finalized.  It only takes a handful of violent fools to make a mess, and we have no shortage  Those sound like long odds, but with fifty states, I will not be surprised at all by one or two instances.

     75 percent chance of something ugly and stupid happening at a polling place that is significant enough to make national news.  Much more likely to be county-level law enforcement or self-appointed nitwits than any Federal force.  Related, two in three of some kind of brawl among voters (let's all remember that campaign laws mean you cannot wear your political-slogan T-shirt to the polling place.  Smile and talk about the weather, and keep the line moving). 

     50/50 there's an ugly legal fight over a close race for a high office -- U.S. House or Senate, the many elections for Governor.

     85 percent chance of a premature declaration of victory by the President, and that's being optimistic; I think he'll call the outcome a win for his party even if it's a rout.

     Speaking of routs, I don't think we'll see one.  The House will probably get a Democratic majority; anyone confidently predicting which party will take the Senate is whistling in the dark.  But it is unlikely either party will sweep into office with a commanding majority.  Both bodies are closely balanced now and they will almost certainly be closely balanced after the dust settles.

     I think there is a one in four chance of something spinnable happening between now and Election Day.  It may or may not be staged and it's unlikely to originate at the highest levels, but if anything occurs, it will be spun and spun and spun.  I encourage you to ignore it when you vote -- bad stuff can happen at any time, society never runs out of violent idiots, but giving them a "heckler's veto" cannot prevent it or heal whatever harm they do, only make it worse.

     And speaking of harm, I predict Vice-President James David "JD" Vance* will continue to exhibit the charm and charisma of an STI.  Most Veeps are their party's next in line to run for the highest office but he is likely to face a crowded primary field in 2028.  The President's crude schtick† still holds appeal to his base and he knows how to work it; Vice-President Vance remains uncomfortable and awkward around the modern GOP base -- or almost anyone else not well-insulated by wealth and power.

     This election -- and the two years that follow -- is most likely to be a brutal slog.  Norms have been broken and institutions have been demolished with nothing to replace them.  Many will have to be rebuilt from scratch no matter which party is ascendant, but neither party's politicians have shown much appetite or aptitude for the job.

     They'll have to do the work nevertheless -- or find their way through the smoking ruins of Caesarism.
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* Named James Donald Bowman at birth.  Yes, I often point this out.  For a man who sneers at other people who have re-invented themselves, he's certainly done a lot of it -- "hillbilly" to Marine to attorney to venture capitalist, poor student to scholar, lower-class to upper-class, Protestant to atheist to Catholic, child of poverty to rich man.
 
† You can call this "Trump Derangement Syndrome" if you like.  I think it's a rational response to a crude, preening bully who is nowhere near as smart as he believes himself to be, but I'm not the boss of you.

Morning Pun

      So the radio ad offered "Free gutter examination," and I thought it would be nice to have a professional look at 'em.  I called the number and get an automate scheduling system.  Okay, fine; they've got an opening only an hour away and I took it.

     An hour later, a mobile mammography van pulls up and an absolute hippie nurse steps out, flowers painted on her face, white macrame shawl, darnedest look I've ever seen.  "Get in," she says.

     I ask what's the deal.

     She gives me a look, the kind hip and happening young people reserve for the clueless old.  "You scheduled this, didn't you?"

     I'm still puzzled.

     She looks at her clipboard, reads me my own name.  "Signed up for the freak udder exam, just an hour ago, right?"

     Man, I have got to start looking this stuff up.

Peposo

     I made peposo for dinner last night, and it was fantastic!

     Put too much salt on the meat at the start, and had to dilute the broth at the end.  Next time, I'll do better.  But what even is peposo, and why is it a big deal?

     Well, it's kind of connected to one of the most famous domes in the world, Filippo Brunelleschi's vast brick dome on Florence Cathedral, a job he inherited with no blueprints or guidance from the man who'd spent most of his life designing and managing the construction of the rest of the building.  The style didn't provide sufficient support for a masonry dome -- and he chose something slightly lighter but even less strong for the job!  It's one of the first examples of an engineered structure, with hidden tension elements and an internal design that keeps the whole thing hanging together by its own weight, while guiding stresses to supports and pitting force against force to minimize the worst.

     And here's the thing: brickwork is slow.  If you've ever had the pleasure of watching professional brickmasons at work, you know that when the whistle blows, they're a blur of motion, each step blending into the next, mortar applied, bricks laid, everything squared and trimmed in motions that might well be a dance.  (And at break time, it all stops on a dime, bam!  Only to start again at the same pace when time's up.  --Because it's a process; only rarely does one mason work alone.)  But it still moves one brick at a time, and past their normal speed, you cannot hurry it: one flaw can doom an entire wall.

     Brunelleschi's masons were building a dome hundreds of feet up.  The main route up and down was  a complex winch he'd designed, and even by the standards of the Middle Ages, it was slow.  At noon, bringing the whole crew down for lunch and hauling them back up afterwards took time, far too much time.  You don't ask brickmasons to work without lunch -- especially not when you're the high-and-mighty builder at ground level and they're way up there, assembling a dome that will bring your reputation crashing down with it if it fails.  (Also, they've got a lot of bricks up there -- oops, one less, look out below!)

     While Brunelleschi was negotiating for more bricks from his supplier, he noticed the brickmakers would set out covered ceramic pots right by the kilns at the start of their day, and haul them back at noon, with the most delicious aroma wafting out when they lifted the lid and speared out chunks of meat.  What -- the stories tell us he asked -- was that stuff?  Oh, nothing much, really, they said -- they'd buy tough meat, cover it with wine and toss in some salt and a lot of black peppercorns, and let it bubble away for half the day or longer in the heat of kilns.

     Brick holds heat.  The builder was buying as much brick as the place could sell him, and they were shipping it still warm.  What if they made more of that beef and wine stuff, and shipped it to building site with the bricks?  He'd make 'em a deal on it....

     And so (or so they say), every wagonload of bricks arrived at the cathedral with a hot pot of stew, got winched up to the dome, and he had a couple of shelters built up by the base of the dome where the crews could have their lunch.  And you thought DoorDash was new!

     It still isn't a complicated recipe, and the outcome is still pretty magical.  Cracked peppercorns and Chianti, a little garlic and olive oil to brown the beef in before simmering, and two or three hours of simmering, mostly under a lid -- you would never predict the outcome, which is not especially peppery or wine-flavored, just tender and full of umami.

     Tam and I had our peposo with steamed mixed vegetables and good crusty Italian bread, and agreed we'd have it again.  It's not a difficult entree to prepare, and the result more than repays the small effort.  Those brickmakers had the right idea. 

I've Figured It Out!

      Various teams and individuals have been searching for Amelia Earhart -- or what's left of her airplane -- ever since she disappeared, especially after WW II.

     And it's a fascinating mystery; as things stand, both the famous pilot and her navigator Fred Noonan are under a bit of a cloud, which is almost certainly unfair to both of them.  But as long as there's no evidence, all anyone has is guesses about what happened and why.

     Many of the teams have been connected with Purdue University, where Earhart was a guest lecturer -- but more than that, the university put up the bulk of the money for the Lockheed Electra airplane she was flying when she went missing!

     Purdue's administration is, um, not to put too fine a point on it, parsimonious.   There's an expedition to a likely prospect just offshore of a tiny Pacific island right now.  (Don't get too excited -- the wings and fuselage of an airplane are not too dissimilar in outline to many kinds of ocean-going vessel; the Pacific is vast and has seen plenty of war, storm and plain bad luck afloat, and how likely is a nearly 90 year old, mostly aluminum airplane to survive in shallow salt water?)  You've got to wonder, though -- if they do  find the plane, is Purdue still holding on to an insurance policy, waiting to collect if they can come up with solid evidence the plane went down?

The Semi-Ancient World, Through Dr. Stephen Ressler's Eyes

     The centuries between the Romans and us -- the so-called Dark Ages -- were darkened by plagues and population loss, by painful decentralization across Europe.  But people did plenty of interesting things.  Progress continued.  Last night, Tam and I finished watching The Great Courses series "Understanding the Marvels of Medieval Technology," conceived and taught by this guy, as kewl an engineer as there is (also a retired Brigadier General). Highly recommended geek history!

     If you enjoy the late Henry Petroksi's books, this will probably be right up your alley.

Been Quiet

     I had computer problems the last few days -- stumbled into a stupid trap link.  I think I rooted out the worst damage, but who can be sure?

     A different bug is making the rounds, especially on GMail, a fake "event invitation" that comes from the pwned account of a trusted contact.  I've received two of them and they're innocuous-looking enough that I hovered over the link before thinking better of it. It's easy to get so used to the routine spam and phishing that some of the old-time malware will bite you.

Chicken Salad Cordon Bleu

     Because why not?  Our corner grocer makes a first-rate chicken salad sandwich, served on a fresh-baked croissant, and despite the -- shudder* -- lettuce leaf they add on the bottom.  The greens make for longer shelf life; they'll make up a batch of sandwiches in little clear plastic boxes, stick them in the self-service deli cooler, and often sell out by the time I stop by after work.

     They were out last night, but had the makings: nice croissants in boxes of four, and plastic containers of their roast chicken salad.  The problem with this is, Tam's not a fan of the stuff.

     Tamara's okay with ham and cheese, though, and I was out of Swiss anyway.  Good Black Forest ham, sliced Swiss cheese, vinegar-dressing coleslaw on the side: a light supper.

     Putting together a sandwich for Tam, I was thinking about how to use up the ham before it expired, and added a slice of ham to my sandwich, cut in two with a little spicy mustard between them, to the bottom of my chicken salad sandwich. (No, I didn't buy lettuce; I'm still a little wary of raw vegetables I didn't grow myself.*)  This turns out to be outstandingly tasty, and I recommend it to my readers.
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* It's annoying.  I like salads, and I like not having to buy all the ingredients and build them myself even more.  Thanks, Trump -- cutting way back on food inspectors, that's some real effective government streaming from you and your party right there.

Leftovers? Luxury!

     Last Wednesday, we had sliced zucchini in puttenesca sauce, with a little ground sirloin and pancetta* in it.  The sauce is absolutely delicious, and carries the squash along nicely.  Then Saturday, I'd made grill-baked meatloaf -- well, not exactly made: the butcher counter at or neighborhood grocery makes "Italian  meatloaf," ready to go in a foil pan, with bell pepper rings and a couple of cherry tomatoes on top.  Cooking it on the grill sounds crazy, but it works; the foil pan goes on mostly-flat perforated grill pan and enough to the hardwood smoke permeates the meatloaf to give it a nice flavor.  My covered grill hits 350°F easily with hardwood lump charcoal. (Fresh green beans, steamed with slivered almonds, on the side -- a four-minute microwave dish.)

     Both meals resulted in leftovers -- more than half a small meatloaf and a fair amount of tasty, meat-laden puttensca sauce.

     Sunday dinner was obvious.  I set the sauce to thawing while I chopped and sauteed a small white onion, followed by mixed exotic mushrooms (King trumpet, maiitake and oyster).  A small can of plain tomato sauce and some sliced olives, a pipparra pepper cut up small and pickled red peppers followed, then the thawed puttensca and, once it was bubbling, the meatloaf, cut into more or less meatball-sized cubes.  With a little grated Parmesan cheese on top, it was a nice ragout.  Leftovers?  Sure.  But what leftovers they were!

     I keep wanting to try baking bread in the covered grill.  It'll be tricky, but it might be very good indeed.
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* The one thing I'd do differently is that I bought a small container of cubed pancetta and some of them were a little tough even after slight browning and long simmering.  A little dab is all it takes, so the slightly more expensive but oh so delicate thin slices would be better, scissored into bits of flavor and added to the ground sirloin very shortly before pouring in the sauce.

About "A.I." And Data Centers

     You want to know what I think about so-called "Artificial Intelligence?" I think it ought to be banned while there's still less there than meets the eye, while it still hasn't got hands.

     I still think there's a very large element of scam to it, and a lump of self-delusion equally as large.  It's the Internet meme, "If friend-shaped, why not friend?" writ large: "A.I." usually simulates an affirming if not outright obsequious collaborator.  There is still nothing inside the box; it can't feel pain, it has no theory of mind, and there is no actual self-awareness at the center of it.  Say it kills us all, or brings about a golden age: either way, there's no part of it that knows what's going on, or that grasps the difference between Utopia and Ragnarok.

     "A.I." is deadly the way a four-year-old with a handgun is deadly, only more so, because the code has no emotional bonds to Mommy or Daddy and it never will.  When research is done on these simulated-intelligence programs, it should be sandboxed and firewalled as if it was refined plutonium, not offered up for any fool to play with.

     And as for the data centers it (and, apparently, everything else) runs on, they're an enormous vulnerability, and one I thought we'd outgrown.  Go back a step or two in technological development, and they're an approximate analog to telephone switching centers ("telephone exchange"); CLifford Exchange was (and is) near my house, just a few blocks over and north on College Avenue.  Typical of post-WW II exchanges, it was a semi-hardened building: very few windows, stout steel doors, thick brick and concrete walls, backup power.  It wouldn't survive an atom bomb, but it has shrugged off storms, floods, being struck by vehicles, tornadoes and civil unrest without a mark.  The only destruction it has suffered was the loss of the larger of the two buildings that once comprised it: telephone switching equipment is minuscule these days, and the real estate was worth more than the empty building.

     Data centers are built using the same methods and materials as your nearest Target, Meijer or Walmart, just like the ones that have the roof peeled off in summer storms or get looted during riots.  Their best physical security consists of chain-link fences and ordinary locks.  If they're so darned important, how come they're built like big-box stores or modern warehouses?

     At one time, the distributed nature of a pretty clever computer (or three) on everyone's desk and, eventually, in everyone's purse or pocket, all interconnected via the Internet, was seen as a great strength, and the fat nodes on the network were understood as weak points that the system was designed to route around in case of individual failure.  Suddenly it's utterly vital to stick one or two or a dozen around every county seat?

     In Frank Herbert's Dune series,* computers are strictly limited in function and computing power; centuries before the setting of his stories, machine intelligence had reached great heights of power and tyrannical authority over humanity, and was only defeated after a long and bitter struggle.  High drama indeed, later novelized as The Butlerian Jihad, named ostensibly after a key character in the battles, though probably a nod to a 19th-Century utopian novelists's cautions about machine intelligence.  Maybe the time to deal with that sort of thing is before it becomes a problem?

     In February 2024, writing about the possible overturning of Chevron, I included "Artificial Intelligence" on a list of things about which I preferred our generally ineffectual Congress get expert advice, but now I'm wondering if the Feds are listening to the right kinds of experts -- better philosophers than tech moguls, better ethicists than software engineers.

     The price of getting this wrong is exorbitant.  
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* The first book is great; I think it kind of tapers off from there, though not for lack of worldbuilding.

CNN Still On The Outs

     Apparently, CNN's out of the video pool for now.  They've got access to the White House, but not Air Force One or special events like the recent state dinner.  The other members of the pool don't agree, but so far, there's no explicit policy, just a series of pointed snubs and counter-boycotts.

     Beside's the Executive Branch doesn't have any pressing problems to deal with -- just a little pocket recissioning, a tactic of highly questionable legality, in which Congress sets up a government program, funds it -- and the administration declines to spend the money.

     Boy, it's sure good there's not a war on, or a price crisis in anything important, like food, housing or fuel.

They're Back In! --Except Where They Aren't

      Around 12:30 yesterday afternoon, the White House started reissuing passes to journalists from CNN, MSNBC and Politico.  They were back!

     Well, sort of.  CNN had long been a member of the cool kid's club video pool, and the administration, having kicked them out of it, is maintaining a sphinxlike silence on whether they're allowed to swim again.  In solidarity, the other members of the pool -- ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox -- are sittin' on their cameras and whatever dignity they can muster.

     The issues here remain that, A) Having opened their doors to the Press, Federal institutions can't kick 'em out without "due process of law," meaning there are charges and a rebuttal and a determination from the git-go, or it ends up in court anyway; and B) Having opened their doors to the Press, Feds cannot give individual reporters or organizations the bum's rush over what or how they write.  Clearly actionable stuff might rate legal cases for libel, slander or over national security issues, but calling the President a big ol' meany or accusing Cabinet members of being stupid or excessively flatulent (or even just saying their approval numbers have reached new lows) are criticisms that Uncle Sam's official and loyal servants must endure -- and have had to from the first days of our Republic.  These are things that stem directly from the Bill of Rights and about which there is no lack of statute and legal-case precedent.  (This doesn't stop the back-and-forth; a local pundit reminds us that it's an ongoing struggle and I think it probably always will be.)

     If the Press, in their various and sundry slants, attitudes, angles, opinions, perceptions and limitations are blind men looking at the elephant (or, occasionally, donkey) of government, then let's have as many of 'em, and as many different kinds, as we can get -- because what no one seems to remember from the children's book is that when you put together all the disparate descriptions of the subject animal, you get a pretty accurate overall picture of the beast itself.

     Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner:
     For years, the easiest way to get journalists to pay attention has been to feed them. Not feeding them can have the opposite effect.  CNN* and MSNBC showed up to cover the big state dinner for China's President Xi last night, and were sent home without so much as a roll or a stray fork in their pockets, let alone any video or sound bites.  This appears to be more limits-testing, and it's an area that is at least slightly gray; limited-access events (as opposed to press conferences) do have greater leeway for discrimination.  (And there's no word if Politico tried to get in and was sent home without dinner.)  What's next?  I don't know, but it's clear this bit of middle-school jostling is far from over.

     Conflict between the Press and the President is always uneven -- one has a bigger megaphone, but the other has the Secret Service, not to mention the Border Patrol, Space Force, Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard.  The Bill of Rights offers a little more balance, but when you come right down to it, one side's got locked gates and people to guard 'em, while the other side's got old-fashioned Mark I ears and eyes, a pen, a voice recorder and a camera.  If we want to keep an eye on what our elected officials are up to, we need those ink-stained wretches, even the ones whose fool notions we detest.
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* To be fair, CNN sent a list of who they were sending and the administration returned it with a note: only videographers and sound technicians were invited. CNN replied it was everyone on their list including reporters and producers, or nobody, and the upshot was, nobody, not even if they wore their best outfits and had a guide to which spoon to use for what dish.