Succotash With Ham

     It was more or less succotash.  And it worked out well.

     I wasn't feeling especially ambitious for dinner.  There was a package of ham chunks in the fridge and a use-it-or-lose-it onion in the cabinet.  I had bought a package of fresh mushrooms that wanted used up, too.  And we have caned corn and beans; I keep them on hand.

     But I started with a strip of bacon, cut into eight sections.  I browned it a little in the bottom of the pan and kept half the grease, adding diced mushroom and following with the onion after taking my time cutting it up.  I added the ham chunks, covered the pan and let it cook down while deciding what else to add.

     A small can of mild Hatch chilies, a can of corn with red and green peppers, and most of a can of pinto beans followed.  I used about half of the liquid from the beans, and added some Italian-blend seasoning, a bay leaf and a little parsley.  After simmering  for fifteen minutes, it looked pretty good and smelled tempting.

     Tam's not a big fan of beans, and Portobello mushrooms aren't her favorite -- but she finished a half-bowl of the stuff in short order and went back for more!  The combination had plenty of umami, a little smokey, savory and with a bit of spice.  Tam added chili-lime Cholula sauce to hers; I settled for a little black pepper.

Read It For Yourself

     The indictment against journalists Don Lemon, Georgia Fort and several apparent protestors (or maybe reporters) has been released and you can look it over yourself.

     They're accused of collusion for what reads to me as regular embedded-type reporting.  Based on what's in the indictment, they were not running the protest or even helping to plan it.  Multiple DOJ staffers are alleged to have refused to pursue the case because it was a nothingburger.  But have a look and make up your own mind, and we'll all find out what the court concludes, by and by.

A First Amendment, If You Can Keep It

     A pair of journalists who covered a protest at a church have been arrested for it by Federal authorities.

     This is...problematic.  They weren't protesting; there are knotty issues with people showing up uninvited at religious services to make a political protest.  That's the kind of tangle that keeps civil rights attorneys gainfully employed, and one that may not have especially satisfying or universally good answers once it goes to trial.  Whose rights prevail?  That's a legal battle entirely within the First Amendment, the freedom of religion and the right to protest balanced, with freedom of speech as the fulcrum.

     But arresting journalists covering the event is clearly over the line.  News is news, and our country has generally recognized a right to report and to publish, to point cameras and microphones at events as they happen, to make notes now and publish afterward.  Arresting the people doing that is always questionable, and while there can be debate over how close is too close, that's not what happened here.

     Journalists aren't untouchable -- but the act of reporting is a Constitutionally protected activity.

     Or at least it used to be.

Overheard In The Office

     RX: "Are you interested in bacon?"  [Holds out plate with a bacon/egg/cheese sandwich on whole wheat, with a couple of half-strips of bacon on the side.]

     Tam: "Yes!  But is bacon interested in me?"  [Takes bacon.]

     She considers my typical morning sandwich or bowl of oatmeal impossibly heavy, but a little bacon is always welcome.

     Outside, it's -4°F.  There has already been one water main break, and as the temperature cycles up and down, we can expect more.  Citizen's Energy inherited a system that had been struggling to keep up with aging pipes for years, through a series of ownership changes.  Citizen's, an unusual public trust, has made remarkable progress -- but it's not a task that is ever entirely done and they'll have more work before this run of extreme cold is over. 

Screamin' Cold

      As the bitter cold and deep snow goes on and and on, I find myself less willing to get out and deal with it.

     Oh, deal with it I have, from shoveling and snow-blowing and running my car a little up and down the alley on Sunday to jouncing out into the ruts on Monday to get to work.

     Monday, I carried a snow shovel.  Just in case; but our neighborhood streets had not been plowed, and I had my suspicions -- suspicions that were confirmed when I returned home.  The city had called in their contract plowing services, which mostly consist of people who own large trucks with a snowplow blade on the front, with which they pick up some extra winter cash clearing parking lots and driveways.  They're fast and enthusiastic in response to the city-funded windfall, and one of them had plowed up a nice wall of snow at the entrance to our alley some time after my neighborhood SUV drivers had all returned home.

     I turned around at the nearest intersection and parked with my headlights on the alley entrance and flashers running, wrapped my heavy scarf around my face and got out the shovel.  A couple of slow passes in each direction got a car-width of the wall knocked down, and after one more, it wasn't any higher than the ridge of snow between the ruts.  I backed my car off, made sure it was in "winter traction" mode, swung wide and took the snow as square-on as I could manage.  My old Lexus mini-SUV plowed right through!

     My tolerance for that kind of tiny adventure is fading.  I'm leaving the house with four layers of tops under my coat, double socks, multiple pairs of gloves so I can keep warm spares inside my coat or between the heated car seat and my legs, and there's just no margin for trouble.

     We're now in the coldest part of the week and I think I'm out of heavy jeans.

Compare And Contrast

      An unpublished comment accused me, "I remember when you were all giddy about the righteous shooting of Ashli Babbit."

     "Giddy," was I?  Well, you can see for yourself; this was the core of the main piece:

     Here's the situation: you and your extended family have gathered in one room of your large house for some all-hands-on-deck thing you do regularly but not frequently -- working out income tax returns, watching The Wizard Of Oz, whatever.  Your family isn't especially popular, and even internally, it has split into two groups that rarely see eye-to-eye.  But you're all there, doing the thing.

     Other people gather in a big group outside on the lawn and start yelling.  Some of them break into the house.  Some adult family members gather the kids and old folks, and get them to a place of safety.  The mob reaches the (now barricaded) French doors that lead to the room you'd all been in.  Some have signs.  Some are shouting.  Others just mill around.  You shout, "Stop!"  You draw your sidearm and point it at the threat.  One of the members of the mob batters out the glass in the door.  Another of them starts to climb through the breach.  You shoot.

     Are you a murderer? 

     What if a similar thing happened at your workplace and a security guard shot a member of the mob that had broken in while they were coming through a just-breach[ed] internal barrier -- is he or she a murderer?

     I addressed it at least two other times, here and here.

     Tl;dr on January 6 is that the mob initiated force; they broke into the closed Capitol building by force, attacked police, broke through doors, damaged public property and smashed out windows, including the internal window Ms. Babbitt launched herself through, toward the muzzles of guns in the hands of Federal officers defending Congress, resulting in her death.  You can find video of the incident.

     In Minneapolis a few days ago, Alex Pretti was recording Federal officers on his phone and more-or-less directing traffic as those officers were doing some kind of immigration enforcement along public streets and sidewalks.  A woman was (apparently) protesting and an officer shoved her to the ground.  Pretti helped her up, standing between her and the officer, and was pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by at least a half-dozen federal agents.  The agents get him face-down and it appears that one removes a gun or gun-shaped object from his waistband and moves away.  An unknown number of the other agents shoot Pretti in the back, at least ten rounds striking him, resulting in his death.  You can find multiple videos of this incident.  Pretti did not initiate force.

     Ashli Babbit and Alex Pretti were both shot by Federal officers.  But Babbitt was an attacker; Pretti was a defender.  Babbitt initiated force.  Pretti did not.

     All deaths are tragic; all avoidable shootings are tragic.  But don't lose sight of who is going after whom.

     And don't call me giddy. 

It Did Snow

     That's right around nine and a half inches of snow on the picnic table.  It was still snowing when I took the photograph, and we may have as much as a foot of the stuff now.

     It took me about an hour to shovel the back walk to the garage, get out the snowblower, clear around my car and out to the alley, and sweep the car mostly clear.  There were tire tracks in the alley, not fresh; I backed into the alley and drove up and down a little ways.  I went far enough that snow started to pile up under the car.

     Tamara took on the front walks after I was done, and that was another hour of work.

     Tomorrow is probably going to be a slow process of driving and shoveling.  It was 13°F when I was working and I managed to work up a fair sweat* anyway, so at least my cold-weather gear is adequate.  Or it was; it's supposed to get down to -5° overnight, and the morning will warm up slowly. 
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* I'd like to tell you I glowed or perspired, but no. It was heavy work. It was sweat. 

Saturday Dinner

      I'd made Hoppin' John early in the week, a big pot of blackeyed peas, ham, red, yellow and green bell peppers, a big onion, canned crushed tomatoes, sliced fresh carrots, diced fresh mushrooms, canned chilies and a couple of piparra peppers.  The store was out of Cajun seasoning and so was I, so I bought some berebere, which is the next best thing and sometimes better.  Simmered for an hour and a half, the dish was a nice treat on a cold evening.  And there was plenty left; I divided the remainder into a couple of freezer bags for later.

     Leftover Hoppin' John is Skippin' Jenny, and she skips all the happier with a little this and that added to the pan.  Last night, I squeezed a big chorizo sausage out of its casing and browned it, then sauteed sliced celery and a leek, and poured in a small can of tomato sauce.  With one of the batches of Hoppin' John thawed and stirred in, it cooked up nicely. Tam and I enjoyed it as the snow fell...and fell, and fell.  It's still falling.  There's about half a foot right now.

     Life goes on.  The Federal government is busy chipping away at the Bill of Rights, but you've still got to eat supper.

I've Been Quiet

     I've been quiet.  What am I supposed to do or say when federal forces are operating as an army of occupation in a major metropolitan area?  When they are shooting people and spinning tales about the circumstances, narrative not corroborated by video recordings of the same events?

     These are bad times.  And they are not improved by a never-ending litany of distortions, sneaky language and outright lies from the federal government -- especially the Executive Branch.  They're arresting, abusing and killing protestors, despite a stated intent to round up illegal immigrants, supposedly concentrating on "the worst of the worst," a category that apparently includes five-year-old children.

     If the idea was to go after people in this country without due authorization, why wouldn't the effort start in a red state with a large population of such people, like Texas or Florida?  With a cooperative state government and a population that voted them in, wouldn't the process run much more smoothly?  And would it not a be a model program they could use to demonstrate their predicted benign effects to the entire county?  Instead, immigration enforcement has been deployed as a kind of punishment, in a state under the governorship of a former opposition party Vice-Presidential candidate, in a city that previously erupted into violence in the wake of a suspicious police killing.  It appears to be intended to create exactly the kind of chaos and harm that is making daily headlines.

     It's an authoritarian display, one that does the country no good and one that, despite press conferences increasingly askew from reality, appears to be backfiring on the President's party.  And yet it looks like their plan is to continue and intensify the beatings until things improve for them.

     I wouldn't bet on that happening.

     Here's a little more on the topic from The Bulwark.

Lost Keys

     I stopped at the store on my way home last night, to pick up a little supper and this and that.  It was around seven p.m., dark and near 25°F.

     A chicken salad sandwich, some sliced deli ham and a bag of coffee beans for later, I was back at my car, reaching for my...  No car keys.

     After misplacing keys for years, I started keeping my house and work keys on a lanyard, clipped to my purse with a little clip like a double carabiner.  My car key and its ring go on the same clip.  Sometimes I fumble it, and it ends up jumbled in my purse.

     I did a quick dig-through in the main compartment of my purse.  Nothing.  I looked over the area around my car, very carefully.  Nothing.

     Back into the store, eyes on the sidewalk and floor.  Nothing.  I retraced my steps through the place.  Nothing.  I found a quiet corner and checked through my purse again, as well as I could without emptying it.  Still nothing.

     I let the manager know I had lost a key, in case someone turned it in, and texted Tam: Lost my car key.  Walking home.

     It's a brisk walk in good weather, several blocks.  In the dark and cold, it's lousy.  Still, I was layered up under a warm coat and I had my heavy gloves; any more, I carry a pair of thin, nice-looking leather gloves for working keys and doorknobs, and windproof motorcycle gauntlets for when  I don't need to do fine manipulation.

     Switching to the warm gloves and settling my hat firmly on my head, I set out for home.  It's not much of a hat, a beat-up denim gardening hat with a wide brim, but it's better than nothing.  Double-time up the alley to the next street north, where a gust of wind blew my hat off as soon as I rounded the corner.

     I managed to grab it before it got away and tightened up the chinstrap.  It quickly became clear that I was well-bundled -- except for my ears.  They got cold and stayed cold, but as long as I could still feel them, they were okay, right?  Step, step step.  I kept moving.

     As I approached Roseholme Cottage, a tall person was coming towards me, all bundled up, moving purposefully.  Closer, closer....  Tamara!  "Where you headed?"

     "The store!  I don't want to have to report your car missing."

     "Do you have the spare key?"

     She frowned at me.  "No."

     "I'll get it and catch up."

     "We still have to find your key."

     She was right.  I headed on home.  Tam went the other way.

     At the house, I put groceries away, spoke to the cats, and, as a last resort, dumped my purse out on the bed.  No keys.  I checked through my purse just to make sure and at the bottom of the open compartment where I keep a couple of spiral notebooks for work and two sets of clip-on sunglasses (also cough drops, a pocket rule and a magnifying glass; don't judge), there was a key-shaped lump.  It was wedged into a corner.  And yes, it was my car key.  Oh.

     I texted Tam, Found it, grabbed a fleece ear-warmer and a knit muffler, got coat and gloves together and set out again, quick as I could march.  I was facing the wind part of the time and it wasn't fun, but the added insulation kept it from being entirely miserable.  My bad knee was throbbing slightly, but, hey, what's a little exercise?

     Tam was headed out of the store as I headed in.  I asked, "Did you get my text?"

     "No."

     "I, uh, found my key."

     She gave me a Look.

     "Thank you for your help!"

     "I didn't do anything."

     "Hey, moral support.  It counts."  It does, too.  I hadn't been looking forward to the cold walk back to my car, and even less so to having a car key floating around in the great unknown.  We got in my car and returned home uneventfully, me to dinner and Tam back to her warm bed.

Hot Dog Soup

     It's Depression cooking.  Experts say it's not good for you.  It's unreasonably tasty, far more than the components suggest: Hot dog soup.

     You take whatever kind of canned vegetable soup you've got handy, and whatever kind of hot dogs.  Slice up two hot dogs per can (or three if you're using condensed soup), bring it barely to a boil, back the heat off and let it simmer.  Yuu just cut them into coins, between and eighth and a quarter of an inch thick.

     It's better with fancy soup and good hot hogs -- I had a can of Amy's Chunky Vegetable (low fat, it says right on the label) and Nathan's hot dogs.  I also had a half-dozen fresh mushrooms, which I diced and cooked in a little olive oil with truffle powder before adding the soup and slicing in the dogs.

     But it's good even with generic vegetable soup and store-brand hot dogs.  Especially on a bitterly cold winter evening.  It'll keep you going.

So, The Latest Stuff?

     It's too crazy.  "I want Greenland because I didn't get a Nobel Prize," is the upshot of the letter Present Trump sent to Norway's Prime Minister and shared with the international diplomatic corps in Washington, DC.

     Arctic-trained troops stationed in Alaska are on standby, ostensibly to possibly be deployed to Minneapolis-St. Paul in Minnesota in support of the heavy-handed federal round-up, supposedly directed at illegal immigrants but sweeping up native-born and naturalized citizens, protestors and anyone else unlucky enough to be in the wrong place or the wrong color.  Of course, they'd be handy for a quick raid on Greenland, too, so...?

     It's all too crazy.  I'm watching it, but it's unfixable in the short term and a nightmare on any scale.

About Those Borders

     Y'know, I used to play along -- "Good fences make good neighbors" and all that.  But the more I think about it, the more I'm not very concerned about border security.

     We've got effective police agencies in the United States; we've got a criminal justice system that works pretty well.  They catch criminals, especially violent ones, especially the "worst of the worst," and they generally convict them, too.  That includes criminals who aren't U.S. citizens and who didn't follow the rules when they visited.

     On the other hand, most of the offenses that involve sneaking one's own self in -- not smuggling other people or items, just ducking under the fence or overstaying a visa -- are misdemeanors.  They're crimes like parking violations or speeding tickets are crimes.  In the past, they've been handled by sending people letters or sending a single officer to go knock on a door, and by and large, it has worked.  The supposed "flood" of nefarious people without authorization to be here is propaganda-driven puffery.

     None of it justifies having masked, heavily-armed men going house to house, pounding on doors (or worse) without judicial warrants, rousting citizens and non-citizens alike and demanding to be shown proof of citizenship or legal residence.

     Could you prove you're a citizen, if you were suddenly stopped on the street?  I might -- if they'll accept a "real ID" compliant driver's license, which ICE and Border Patrol have an inconsistent record doing.  I'd have to get someone to fetch my passport and birth certificate from home if they didn't.

     That's not us.  That's a bad movie cliche, with gimlet-eyed baddies in flashy uniforms clumping down the aisle of a traincar or stopping people on the street, demanding, "Papers!"

     If that's the price of rounding up a lot of gardeners, construction workers, pea-pickers and sweepers along with a few gang members and cheaters who were already liable for regular arrest, it's too damn high a price.  It's turning the home of the free and the brave into an ugly, ugly place, where innocent people are shot or yanked screaming from their cars for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for having a smart mouth.

     While today, it's mostly funny-talking foreigners and people with purple hair, tomorrow, it could be you or me.  Turn down the wrong street in the wrong town, and it could be you this afternoon.

     Spare me the harrumphing warnings.  I'm 67 years old.  I've been poor more than once.  I've had guns pointed at me by criminals and I have had guns pointed at me by cops.  I get that life can be hard, and dangerous, and that our fellow humans are the cause of most of that difficulty and risk.  Don't tell me about those "hard men" who "stand between me and horror;" they mostly haven't been there when I needed them and have occasionally been the source of my troubles.  Arrogant, sexist, racist assholes have been more trouble to me than illegal immigrants ever have, and almost exactly as much bother as actual criminals.

Back To It

     After more than a week of distractions, I played catch-up after work today today with my hobby writing -- or, as it happens, with other people's writing.  I still had a couple of manuscripts to go over before the critique group Saturday!

     The writing in the group remains pleasantly competent.  After several years of beginner's classes, it's nice to review work in which the flaws are mainly typos and occasional infelicitous phrasing.  And this month, a new thing: a screenplay!

     Formatting a TV or film script is like writing a haiku, or perhaps a sestina: the format is fixed, inflexible and tricky.  The usual advice for new screenwriters working "on spec" is to do a slightly expanded stageplay script instead, with all of the dialog and a few hints as to scene, setting and blocking.  (Like a Shakespeare play.)  After all, the final script is always a group effort, and, as I said, the format is tricky.  --And the one I just critiqued is, as near as I can tell, a very fine example of a full shooting script, in all its conventions.

Too Much Circus, Too Many Clowns

     It is difficult to keep up with the various actions of the Executive Branch's collection of malevolent, semi-competent goons, thugs, ideologues, accelerationists and ambitious nitwits.

     In the last 48 hours or so, they yanked all federal funding to addiction-treatment programs and then abruptly restored it, after a day in which people across the country scrambled frantically to come up with some way to go on.  The grants covered a wide range of programs, and anyone inclined to do so can probably come up with a few that are kinda squishy; but the common goal of all of them is to get people off drugs, and steer them into productive lives -- instead of importuning passers-by for money, engaging in various kinds of theft and dying lurid deaths at public expense.  It's cheaper to get 'em straight, and tends to improve neighborhoods.

     This is just one corner of the churning, ill-considered mess we've got for a federal government.  Congress is still staggering around, largely ineffective, and the courts are overloaded and divided along partisan lines.

     Anyone who tells you things are going great is telling lies.

Nobody "Has It Coming" Like That

     People are sharing shocking videos on social media -- protesters yelling at DHS enforcers, getting pepper balls or spray at close range, shoving and being shoved, ICE agents falling on slick pavement, a protester taking a "beanbag" round from a couple of feet away and being badly injured.

     And the comments run to a mix of, "Aint it awful," and, "Serves 'em right."

     Yes, it is awful -- and no, it's not right.  This kind of rough confrontation is an American tradition dating back to before the Revolutionary War and it doesn't come without risk, but that's not the same as justice, which often (but not always) comes later.

     Nobody's "Got it coming" in that way.  That's what prosecutors and grand juries and defense lawyers and courts are for.  That's what probation, fines and prisons are for.

     Okay, when Wile E. Coyote's scheme to catch the Roadrunner goes wrong and traps him instead, he's got it coming; and so, too, perhaps, when a real person sets a murderous trap and then falls prey to it themselves.  But otherwise?  Stop cheering when people get hurt or killed.  Even when it's people you don't like.  That's utterly immoral.

Not Only Is Irony Dead, They're Desecrating The Remains

     So....name a capital city in which government forces are killing citizens, arresting on suspicion, beating up suspects and protestors, making door-to-door searches and generally behaving as an occupying force....

     If you said, "Tehran," you would be correct, and our federal government has condemned it, threatening to take action if it's not stopped.

     If you said, "St. Paul," you would also be correct -- only it's our federal government doing it and they are condemning the protesters, threatening to take even more action if protests are not stopped.

Nutty Times

     The problem with nutty times is that nutjobs flourish -- every flavor of 'em.  Most people just want to get to work, to the grocery, to wherever, and get back home unscathed afterward, but there are always a few fools who only want to pull things down.

     Keep your eyes open and your temper calm.  The worst of us want chaos, and no group has an absolute lock on "worst."   Don't help 'em.

Overreach?

     It has become a feature -- well, a bug -- of American politics: the party in power convinces themselves they are the eternal darlings of the voting public and, staring at their reflection like wistful Narcissus, manage to lose their majority.

     But the oscillation just keeps getting bigger, and of late the worst excursions have been based not on political philosophy but personal magnetism.  It's not really self-correcting, or at least it hasn't been so far.

     Every so often, we have bent our system so far that it rebounds -- or breaks.  I'm not sure which we're headed for this time, but make no mistake, we're not on the straight and level.

"Ripped From The Headlines"

     Recent ICE shootings (or is it CBP?  There are a lot of armed TLAs under DHS and they're not making it easy to keep track) are all over the news, and statements and counter-statements fly back and forth, accompanied by at least three authentic videos of events in Minneapolis.

     I'm not going to rehash it.  You can get all of that you can stand elsewhere, free for nothing and often worth the price.

     Nope.  I'm going to give you another incident, one in which Americans, trouble-makers and sincerely concerned citizens alike, taunted and challenged armed agents of the government, and things went horribly wrong.

     Draw your own lessons from it -- about who we are, and what we have become; about governments and the use of force; about law, order and morality.

This Cold

     Colds don't get easier as you get older.  This one keeps sneaking up on me.  Yesterday, I felt a lot better in the morning, got some things done -- and despite good cough syrup, kept coughing more and more, and running out of air when I did.

     I ended up back in bed before noon and slept most of the day; Tam woke me for dinner and I helped a little with the trash (it gets picked up Friday morning) before going back to bed and sleeping heavily.

     This morning, I feel closer to normal -- and from where I've been, an ordinary day would be a big step up.

     Update:  Yeah, didn't happen.  Managed to take care of one scheduled commitment and then had to go lay down while I coughed up -- you don't want to know.

Lots Of Heat, Little Light

     There's a war of words between the federal government on one hand and Minnesota state and Minneapolis local officials on the other hand over the shooting of a middle-aged white woman by a masked, middle-aged white man.  He is an ICE (or other DHS) agent.  She was apparently some kind of volunteer monitor.  Everyone's description of the events and individuals is highly politicized, and you can go look at the video from multiple angles before making up your own mind.  (I will note that pictures claiming to show the agent's face are AI fakes.)

     It's screwed-up all around, a literal example of why it is dangerous to get crossways with law enforcement.  Nevertheless, in such conflicts, it is not unreasonable to expect the officers to behave in an adult and responsible manner.  I get complaints when I point this out, but multiple LEOs with radios and guns and qualified immunity against one or two non-LEO individuals is not an even contest.  Shouting conflicting commands means compliance is impossible -- and makes tragedy all but inevitable.

     "She shouldn't have been there," yeah, maybe not; but there she was, on a public street.  Should we all have to get urban-combat training before we leave the driveway?  Intentional or accidental, you can find yourself in the middle of a law enforcement action before you know what's going on -- even if you thought you knew what was going on.

     Government agents shouldn't be killing random people.  Not even inconvenient or annoying random people.

     This is the stuff of bad Cold War fiction set in the repressive dictatorships of the Warsaw Pact.  We shouldn't have Feds LARPing it on American streets.

On The...Mend?

     I feel better until I start to cough, at which point my temperature spikes, I get dizzy and I start to black out.

     Haven't managed to yet and I'm hoping that will continue, but....sheesh.

Meanwhile, I Have Been Dragged Through A Knothole

      Or maybe it just feels that way.  I've had bad cold symptoms since the weekend, which seemed to be a former cold returning.  Maybe it's a new one, quick on the heels of the previous minor affliction.

     I was taking cold medicine, getting lots of tea and broth (and some coffee because, look, I'm not giving it up), sleeping plenty, eating balanced meals and Tuesday, I felt good enough to go into work.  Through it all, I could not stop coughing for long.

     After managing an hour with a prospective contractor for a tricky and highly specialized task, I had to go find desk work for a spell.  Finally broke to get some genuine cough syrup, but since I was still on a 12-hour slow-release nostrum, it had to wait and meanwhile, I was coughing worse than ever.

     Yesterday still feels like it was a week long.  This morning, I started to cough and discovered I had coughed myself sore, the muscles of my back and diaphragm aching in unpleasant and unfamiliar ways.  I have got about enough energy to cuddle a kitten, if the little cat was very sleepy.  Our two adult tomcats are too much for me -- or they would be, if they weren't well-behaved and more obedient than cats usually are.*

     So I went back to bed this morning.  I'm up for a little while now -- more cough syrup, a refill on tea, who knows, maybe even more acetaminophen if it's time -- and then back to bed.
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* In the morning and evening, the cats must be separated when fed, since they're on different diets.  Mr. Holden is reluctant to comply unless we flatter him: "Gentlemen! Sort yourselves out -- Holden, stay; Huck, come along," and Holden charges through the doorway along with Huck, "You know the rule! Tigers in the front of the house, floof lions to the back!"  He preens at bit at being called a "floof lion," and trots off to the back of the house.  With the hallway door shut, he stands up to the door and dances back and forth, anticipating food.  If they made fancy lions, far more fluffy and deluxe than the standard issue, he would certainly be one.

Let's Total It Up

     A failed coup, followed by a return to power a few years later?  Check.

     Make-believe economics?  Check.

     A number of scapegoat minorities singled out, demonized, and the most vulnerable being rounded up by masked, unaccountable Federal police force and imprisoned under substandard conditions before being deported or (rarely) released?  Check.

     Lots of saber-rattling about territorial expansion, accompanied by military action against far weaker forces?  Check.

     Intimidating the Press into compliance?  Check.

     Administration spokesmen push a "might is right" approach to foreign relations?  Check.

     These are not normal times.  This is not normal politics.  Mr. Trump's Republicans are not the party of Lincoln, Reagan -- or even Nixon.

     The Trump administration are bad guys, and they're making over the United States of America in their image.

     You can call 'em any manner of names out of history, and some of the tags are a pretty good fit, but the label doesn't matter.  What matters is their behavior, and they're spinning up genocide at home and military adventurism overseas.

     It may be possible to stop them in the midterm elections.  It may be possible to get the U.S. back on a sane and normal path.

     I sure hope we can -- because we're being led by bloodthirsty fools, and their only other limitation is their staggering incompetence and lack of empathy.  They've got the skills to make a terrible, tragic mess, and no more.

"Somehow, Head Cold Returned"

     If you were one of the people who muttered when the evil Emperor got back onstage at a plot-convenient time,* you'll know exactly how I feel at the return of my cold.  Same progression as last time: one-sided throat irritation, growing sinus congestion/overproduction, coughing, sneezing, fatigue and muscle aches.  Maybe it's the flu.  Maybe it's not.  It isn't COVID-19; I checked, though mostly just so I could tick that box.

     This is Day Three, or maybe Day Two-and-half, and it can damn well get wrapped up by by tomorrow morning.  I'm going back to bed.
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* At a certain point, some time before Jar-Jar Fetchit shucked and jived into the cast, I had decided that trying to make the storylines of any part of Star Wars add up was a fool's errand and the best approach was to sit back, enjoy the blinking lights, and let the sword fights and faster-than-light videocalls just play out; either you're happy with a universe where few controls are labelled and hyperspace navigation is like pulling into a parking space at the 7-11, or you're not.  Hey, look, it's Hero's Journey!

I Tried

     I really tried to ignore it all day.  But will someone please explain to the bulging brains of the Executive Branch that real life does not work like chess or king of the hill?  You don't win just by grabbing the other side's top dude -- and if you just pull a quick forcible exfiltration, the next in line isn't obliged to dance to your tune.

     They may yet turn up the heat if they don't get what they want, but don't be surprised if "running Venezuela" proves to be a lot more difficult than it has been made to sound. 

Squandering

     I'm watching the Trump administration press conference about their special military operation, and the lies and distortions have come thick and fast.  So has the power-worship, military might praised for its own sake.

     Someone will do a full fact-check on it.  I'm just going to note that the United States has positioned itself as an unpredictable bully, a rogue state that has promised to act however it will, without regard to international law -- over a bog-standard South American autocrat.  If he'd been a right-winger doing much the same as he can be proven to have done, he'd still be doing it, and counted as a U.S. ally.

     We now live in a changed world, and not for the better aside from the removal of cheap dictator, to be replaced by an as-yet unknown government, of an unknown nature other than they're liable to comply with whatever our current government decides are our interests.

     These men are villains.  That they took out another villain, smaller in scope and more overtly villainous, does not excuse their own crimes, the stain they have put on our national honor, and the credence they have given to similar acts committed by other governments elsewhere on the globe.  And they are promising to do more of the same.

     They have turned Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill into a pyre for civilization.

No, Look Over Here

     Every day, a new distraction.  Unless you live under a rock, by now you know about Mr. Trump's special military operation:  U.S. forces bombarded and invaded the capital of Venezuela early this morning, taking Nicolás Maduro and his wife into custody,  They're facing criminal charges in a U. S. court over narcoterrorism and unlawful possession of firearms.

     It's a hard effort to find anyone who thinks the South American autocrat is a good guy -- but neither are many of the world's leaders.  It's still not generally the done thing to go roust them, like a county sheriff cleaning out a meth lab.  The last one I remember was Panama's Manuel Noriega, under somewhat different circumstances -- and even that was pretty questionable.

      Whatever: a new day, a new sideshow, a few more corpses on Donald Trump's mountain of dead and, oh, boy, the headlines and airtime!

     Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, after all, and surely any mere domestic issues must pale to irrelevance next to these events of vast moment: arresting tinpot dictators and encouraging chaos among impoverished brown people in the Third World.

     I've been wrong -- it's as much a firehose of blood as it is a firehose of bullshit.  How long are we going to pretend it's normal?

A New Five Minutes Hate

     Smoke, mirrors and an unceasing firehose of crap.  The news cycle was threatening to slow down, and what was coming out wasn't looking too good for the incumbent administration.

     But there's always something out on the fringes, where a constant churn of ragebait swirls, both fueled by and fueling the preoccupations of the moment; a big-noise politician comments, Left or Right attacks, Right or Left defends, and whatever fire there might or might not have been is lost in the smoke and shouting.  The current fogbank is around daycare centers, primarily Somali-run or -serving in Minnesota, and the deeper you dig, the less there seems to be.

     Daycare centers tend to be marginal at best; they go in and out of business, parents get government help with the costs, some centers get grants, and there's a certain level of graft, fraud, mismanagement and pure bad luck: it's not a frictionless machine.  One or two bad actors can make the entire enterprise look shady, and that appears to be how the mess started: allegations of fraud, followed by President Trump and Governor Walz -- yes, that Tim Walz -- throwing shade at one another.  Amateur "investigative journalism" followed, and the problem with that--

     The problem with roll-your-own investigative journalism is not that the people doing it don't have a Press card or NewsGuild-CWA membership.  The problem is the same one that dogs investigation in general, and that gave rise to the Scientific Method, modern criminal investigation processes, and laws against entrapment: you can't work towards an assumed result.  You've got to follow the data, wherever it leads.  Suspicion and rumor may launch the investigation, but it cannot be the guide.  Instead, the effort has to be designed around a neutral approach.  You find what is actually there, not what you expected to see.  In reporting, that's the approach the pros are paid to take* and the best amateurs do the same.  And it's not what I'm seeing in the early "citizen journalist" videos out of Minnesota.

     People want to do what they see on TV: the news crew shows up, cameras rolling, and surprises the malefactor(s) in mid-malefaction.  But that's only the dramatic peak of a long, slow arc, weeks or months of gathering facts, assembling a timeline or sequence of wrong-doing based on fact, and running it past experts, peers, bosses and lawyers to ensure it makes logical sense and sticks to known and proven facts.

     Nevertheless, the White House yanked funding to all daycare programs in that entire state, and followed it up by freezing such funds nationwide, from Alaska to Florida, until each and every program can prove, by so far unspecified criteria, that they are on the up and up.  (And never mind that they already had to.)

     That's the smoke all over the news cycle.  At the heart of it, there may be -- there almost certainly is -- a very small fire.  But it's probably already been put out, and the details, if they ever emerge, will be trivial.

     Welcome to 2026.  Same crap, different number.
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* Or disgraced if they don't.  Oh, hey, is that Dan Rather and an anachronistic font over there?

It's A New Year's Miracle!

     Okay, it's a "miracle" in the Adam Smith sense, anyway.

     I was looking around for blackeyed peas starting last week, and coming up short.  In my one trip to the vast Multi-Mart, I...well, I forgot.  Tam strove to bring some home from the grocery last weekend and they had no version of blackeyed peas.

     This morning, I needed to go gas up my car and on the way home, I stopped at the other foodie grocer to check.  Nope.  "They ran us right out," one of the clerks told me.  Tam had offered to make another swing by our closer grocery store today in case they'd restocked, but I cautioned her we shouldn't get our hopes too high.

     Surprise!  They had set out the remaining stock.  And so, thanks to the relentless pursuit of sales, we've got one of the great miracles of modern civilization: the stuff we wanted to buy, when we wanted to buy it. 

Cognitive Dissonator

     Jack Smith sat down with a House committee concerned about his prosecution of Donald Trump.  It wasn't public testimony, but they've released a transcript, which you can read for yourself.

     Here's a quote: "There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election.  He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and use knowing — knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function."

     Pretending the Trump administration is normal, that they care about about our Constitution as amended, or about the laws, norms and traditions of the United States, is simply lying.  Lying to others and lying to yourself.

     At this point, from the not-very-covert DHS tweets about "America after 100 million deportations"* and lily-white 19th-century memes to punitive Presidential vetoes and withholding of funds, from a supine Congress to a pliant Supreme Court, we are way off the map and I don't know if we're going to get back to normal any time soon.

     Pretending otherwise won't fix it.
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* This is invidious. There aren't a hundred million illegal immigrants in the U.S.  Even if you throw in everyone who has been granted any kind of asylum or temporary protected status, it's not close.  The number is, however, a close approximation to the total non-white population of the United States.  Whoever's running the DHS social media accounts is doing a good imitation of Leave It To Beaver's Eddie Haskell as a white supremacist.