The Thing Is...

      "Every spot in history is the most dangerous," a commenter told me the other day.  Which is on one level a tautology: we're a species that floats on the edge of disaster.  Our genetic heritage tells the story of multiple narrow escapes; many of our legendary heroes, all around the globe, are clever tricksters who talk or connive their way out of trouble.

     Humanity spends a lot of time running right at the red line.

     On the other hand, we're got a regime in Washington right now that is an outlier in both degree and kind:

     Degree because they're profiting from holding office far in excess of the usual.  I have resigned myself to believing that with billions wooshing by overhead, Federal politicians all eventually conclude they'd be fools to not do as all around them are doing, and net a few million for themselves.  Okay; I don't like it but there it is.  But these guys are raking in billions, and most are not the least bit coy about it.

     Kind, because we haven't seen this level of racism from the party in power since Woodrow Wilson.  We haven't seen nativism so bullheaded since the Know-Nothings.  We've only seen this much division once before, and it didn't end well.  A little over two years ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, source of the Project 2025 agenda, told Steve Bannon on his podcast, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless -- if the Left allows it to be."

     That's not politics as usual.  That's not normal.  That's a promise to turn things over, to purge and remake not by compromise but in the likeness of just one party, just one part of the American electorate.

     So, yes, the present is always the most dangerous time -- but some presents are more dangerous than others, and they don't become less dangerous by pretending it's the same old same old.

Alea Iacta Maybe

     There's a Presidential address tonight, which the White House says will be be about "free and fair elections"* and "a couple of other things."

     If the sitting President manages to cover only three topics in the course of a speech, it'll be a first.

     But the stuff about elections puts news media in a quandary: provide a platform for yet more falsehoods about elections (including, according to credible sources, the 2020 Presidential election), or ignore it, and incur the wrath of an Administration with a history of striking back?  Brendan Carr's FCC has been uncommonly pugnacious, so we'll probably see and hear the spectacle all across radio and TV.

     Depending on what he says and takes action on, it could be a crossing of the Rubicon -- if that means anything at all under an Administration that crosses rivers-not-to-be-crossed as if they were taking commuter bridges in and out of Washington DC.  I'll be watching, if only because power-grabbing regimes count on burnout and over-familiarity with awfulness to enable their encroachments.

     Pundit after pundit, editorial after editorial has asked, "When will it get to be too much?"  I think that's the wrong question, one based an overly-simplified version of history.  There is very rarely a moment when everything changes like a flipped light switch, especially for the people in the moment; Ralph Waldo Emerson may have "heard the shot fired 'round the World" at the Old North Bridge, but he was listening in 1837, when the issues of 1775 were long settled.  Conflict had been ongoing; British troops and Colonial militias had been on the move long before.  Conversely, a lot of Americans didn't find out they were in the middle of a shooting war until long afterward.

     One day, everyone will have been against this.  One day, the current mess won't just be something happening on your computer or television screen.

     Tonight?  Who knows.  That's why I'll watch.

     Update: As a commenter pointed out, half of the Big 4 over-the-air networks won't be carrying the speech: ABC and NBC have said "No, thanks" to over-the-air; they'll stream it online, as will PBS.  CBS and Fox are unknown, but likely.  NPR will carry it on radio.  I'm mildly surprised.
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* Which, by the way, they're all been here in the United States, for at least all of your lifetime and probably long before.  Claims to the contrary (especially for 2020) have been unequivocally shown to be lies, distortions and/or bullshit-laden hot air, by everyone from investigating Feds to international observers, as well as journalists who stand to get a lot more attention from bombshells about cheating than a dull report that everything went according to routine.

Bear In Mind

      The words "Senator" and "senility" have the same Latin root, senex -- and yes, it means just what you think, only more so: "old, old man."

     U. S. Senators were supposed to be in those years between the attainment of mature wisdom and aimlessly wandering the halls in a bathrobe, and while you can't really mark them off on a calendar (well, kind of: nobody 29 or younger need apply), they're probably supposed to heed the wise council of their peers as they approach the upper limit, and step down gracefully.

     Increasingly, this is seen not to happen.  It's not an especially partisan phenomenon.  Neither are those other chief occupations of a U. S. Senator: lining their own pockets (stock markets and other investments, "campaign contributions" and so on) and getting their state (or pals and benefactors in other states) larded up at the ol' pork barrel.  I guess that's too engrossing to leave time for looking after their colleagues when they start to struggle.  (They cannot even be arsed to revise and pass -- or not pass -- laws, either, which was supposedly the entire point of the job.)

     As ever, the U. S. House runs their own Junior Varsity version of it; I remain convinced that their biggest problem is not too much dissension but a lack of tumult. If House debate were a little more spirited, it'd sort the dispirited right out, but it seems like you can't hardly get a good honest harrumph out of any of 'em on the chamber floor these days.  It's all weirdness and/or weasel-wording any more.

Idiotic Posturing

      So, the Mayor of NYC asked New Yorkers to set their thermostats no lower than 78° through these hot days -- and the Federal Department of Energy, which has given the generic version of the same advice on their website for a long time, took those pages down.

     Elsewhere, conservative politicians grumbled about "socialism."

     Of course, the Mayor of New York has no authority over people's thermostats.  Nor does he run that city's electric utility which, like most of 'em, struggles to maintain adequate infrastructure.  Power companies can usually keep up, but extreme weather events -- here's looking at you, Texas -- stress the grid, and it doesn't make any difference what flavor the local politicians are.  You can only draw X much current before it's too much, at which point the system breaks at the weakest points.  Power companies stock parts and size staff for the normal failure rate and a little more when possible, but there's a limit.

     Nature has a way of testing limits.  Nature doesn't take politics into account.

     There's nothing especially political about managing your air conditioning (or heating), either.  People who are careful about money have been doing so for as long as fuel has had a cost, which is forever (the cost of cutting your own firewood is pretty high, just not in dollars).  The poor insulation and undersized cooling here at Roseholme Cottage means we ran for years at 75° in the summer* and 65° in the winter, though I have cheated up to three degrees on the winter setting as I have gotten older.  The main positive effect of air conditioning is to lower the humidity and move the air, and if you get too far off the outside air temperature, you can start to have problems -- the A-coil may freeze up, the motors for the fan and compressor in the outdoor unit could overheat, and so on.  And boy, will your electric bills soar.  (You can also have personal problems -- going from 70° or 68° dry air into a 95° wall of wet air is physically stressful.)

     I keep the fan running in our HVAC system nearly all the time.  In summer, I add a small floor fan in the dining room/library to blow air from the floor register up, because the return intake is in that room, and there's no point to letting it suck low level cold air right back in.  In the office and living room, simple home-made extensions sit on top of the registers, and discharge cold air about four feet above floor level.  A similar trick in my bedroom makes use of existing shelves to channel the air up, and in the very worst weather, a clip-on fan pushes cool (or heated) air towards my bed.

    Some of those tricks are compensating for the 1990s upgrades to the 1920s system design, which left floor registers near room doors instead of at the farthest corner on an outside wall.  In 1920, a big coal furnace with "gravity" thermosiphon air circulation through ducts would have also kept the basement almost too warm for comfort in the winter, with air warmed by radiated heat from the furnace flowing up the outside walls to slit vents under the eaves (and up a few inside walls to the attic as well).  Forced-air climate control doesn't work that way, and the original furnace replacement was done when energy was cheap and labor to relocate registers and run all-new ductwork wasn't.  (In winter, I also run an oil-filled electric heater in the basement whenever I'm home and awake; but plug-in electric heat isn't something to turn on and ignore, and it'll never do the same job as the the smelly, sooty old coal furnace did.)  

     Big-city downtowns are full of this kind of relic infrastructure, electric wiring that was adequate in 1920 or 1930, cooling that relied on open transoms, windows and getting outside -- and people expiring from the heat.  You can stick a modern split-system air conditioner just about anywhere, but running big enough wires from the pole to the outlet to actually power it is another story.  There might not even be enough room in the conduits to do that in an old apartment building, and copper is costly.  And how big is the stepdown transformer on the pole or in a manhole vault?  How fat are the wires that feed it? 

     There are tricks.  The 110-Volt wall-socket juice my then very modern home had in 1924 is now 125 V most places in the U.S., because they have turned up the voltage on the high-voltage distribution side.  You see, the power available through a wire is the voltage multiplied by the current -- the current is limited by the "ampacity" of the wire, which is proportional to how big it is.  Big wires can carry more current.  Voltage limits rely on how good the insulators are -- and they have always been far better than they had to be.  Ceramic and glass are relatively cheap, power-line insulators aren't all that tricky to replace when they fail (if you happen to be a power company lineman -- don't try it on your own!).  So Power & Light turns up the voltage and hey, presto, they can supply 15 or 20 percent more power!

     That's something, but in a bad heat wave, it's not enough.  It helps run your TV and computer and automatic shiatsu massager and super-slice-o-matic self-cleaning air fryer with vacuum cleaner attachment on a system designed to operate a handful of light bulbs and a coffeepot, but when you and everyone else in Manhattan, or Washington D.C., or Pigsley's Corner turns on the air-conditioning and sets it to "Arctic," something will pop.  Maybe your breaker.  Maybe the pole fuse or transformer that feeds your house, and the Smith's, Jones's, Brown's and Doe's apartment house and the bungalow of old Ms X next door.  Maybe it trips a disconnector that keeps cycling, or a transformer's regulating tap-setter at a substation that gets hung up, and a whole neighborhood flickers, goes dark or browns out.  Multiply by a hundred, a thousand--  A power company crew can keep ahead of a few outages, clearing them in mere hours (hours, at 95°), but there is no politics on this planet that will make skilled electrical workers magically appear from the air, along with fuse wire, replacement transformers, and all of the massive, slow-to-replace stuff that fills up a substation.

     There's also no politics that has ever managed to overbuild power grids (etc.) to always hold up to extreme events.  Oh, Ukraine has had a little advantage from hardened Cold War substations, but only if you happened to live in area Soviet planners had deemed critical, and it was never as capacious as its Western counterpart.  Central planning won't save you -- and neither will capitalism.  If you want your power company to turn a profit, you figure out how to price it in such a way that people can afford it;  you build it for the routine loads you have, and you count on having enough staff to keep it going.  For rare localized trouble that gets too much to handle, you hire outside help. But a heat wave isn't like a tornado; it doesn't affect just a few townships at a time.

     The DOE's former advice pages and the lefty-Democrat Mayor of New York City were telling people the same thing because that's how you deal with this intersection of physics, economics and weather, period.  It doesn't matter who you are or, which party or person you voted for or how you think things ought to be done.  We have the power grids we have.  We have the outdoor temperature and humidity we have.  City cliff-dwellers in particular aren't going to be installing rooftop solar, home generators or water wheels, and the choice is to turn up the 'stat a few notches now or sweat like pigs by and by, and shovel out the vulnerable dead afterward.

     Freaking out because your side gave the same advice as the other side for coping with this is simply bullshit, practiced by people who are insanely out of touch with what it's like to live a normal life on an average income. 
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* That's not entirely accurate. I chase 15° to 20° below ambient in summer and will settle for 10° on the worst days, guided by condensation on the older windows, state of the A-coil (once it has iced up, you're done until the ice melts), and experience.

Lack Of Adulthood

      Let me weigh in on something I'm not all that qualified to write about: the renaming and denaming of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

     It's been a thing most of my life, and other than scale and influence, it's not any different to whatever artsy Foundation-with-buildings your city has, and they tend to be a thing apart, deeply rooted in the city and regional arts community, especially the performing arts: esthetic pleasures, a bit class-conscious in spots (and a bit overtly not in others), but for most events, a spot check of car radios in the parking lot is going to find more set for the NPR station than country, rock or right-wing talk.  The venue often hosts things of less upscale appeal, touring Broadway shows, popular musical acts, speakers* and so on, too, but it's got its lane.

     They're generally named after a local patron of the arts -- the Honeywell Center in Wabash, Indiana is a good example, a fine venue in a moderate-sized county seat.  The name tends to stick, too.

     So when President Trump decided to add his name to the Kennedy Center, that was a bit incongruous.  Not atypical of him; he loves to put his name on stuff.  But it felt...off.  And then they stuck the letters on the marble wall:
THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
     And that was just messed up.  Not only was the wording flat-out awkward, a low-bidder rush job on a fancy marble-clad building, the fonts didn't match.  Not even close, other than both being serif fonts on roughly Classical models.  It  looked like crap.  It looked, in fact, like something big-city people might expect to see on a building serving a similar purpose in an Indiana County seat, except that I'm here to tell you, nobody in Wabash (etc.) would've stood for such a hack job on their nice performing arts center.  If you're gonna change the name, they'd thunder, do it right!  Match the old lettering or, if you can't, take it all off and start over.  And try to follow the rules of grammar, too.

     That didn't happen at the Kennedy Center.  What did happen was, the new name went up like a bird splat on a wedding cake, a lot of exhibits and displays were put into "storage," present whereabouts unknown to the public.  The membership of the Board that runs it changed, which is a thing that Presidents can do, and a lot of the staff quit, retired or were laid off.  As time went on and acts kept canceling, there were plans to shut the Center down for a couple of years of renovation, and rumors of deep and serious problems with the building itself.  Are they true?  Who can tell.

     Now the courts have pulled the plug on the new name and the closure.  The President has pulled the plug on his involvement, saying he's "returning responsibility to Congress" for running the place, a responsibility Congress has never had.  And there are apparently "poison pills" in the Board's present funding arrangements, clauses that take money away if President Trump's name is removed from the Center.  That'll go back the court system, you can count on it.

     And this entire mess is over...ballet.  Opera.  Orchestral concerts.  Touring shows.  Or, at least, over who gets his name associated with those things, matters that, lovely and fine and uplifting though they are, have nothing to do with the average American sweating the price of gasoline and electricity or jingling coins nervously as the grocery store cash register beeps and the total increases alarmingly.  Real wages are level or declining; real prices are up.  Changing the name on the Kennedy Center -- again -- is only going to affect income for the people doing that particular job, and maybe not even them; they probably already had plenty of other things to do at the same hourly rate.

     It's just childish BS.  In the middle of a not-a-war in the Middle East, a one-side-won't -call-it-a-war in Ukraine and a generous scattering of armed unrest, economic uncertainty and serious disease outbreaks all around the world.  Does the country really have the time, money and energy to spare to keep on diddling with trivial Presidential whims?
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* The county seat where I grew up didn't have much of a venue until the renovation of a semi-decrepit early 20th-Century Colosseum (honest, that's what it was called) in the late 20th and (again!) early 21st Centuries, but we had an arts & culture crowd who did things like make sure the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra gave local concerts and Buckminster Fuller came to give a talk, and rented whatever place they could find for it -- often, the big theater at the local High School.  I was happy to listen; for just a little while, you were dreaming with Prokofiev or thinking Big Thoughts right along Fuller, at least until the final notes rang out or he said goodnight and you were still stuck in the corn-fed tail end of nowhere.  Corn- and soybean-fed, maybe.

Crazy Pills? Voters Eat Them Like Candy

      Apparently, crazy wins.  At least in some elections.

     This post could have been called, "Why I'm no longer a Libertarian," except I never was a big-L Libertarian.  The state party was always too welcoming to people whose ideas skirted racism, eugenics and/or religious extremism.  It might have been called "Why I stopped being a default Republican voter," since it used to be that most of Indiana's GOP politicians were safe choices: they didn't support change.  Cautious to the point of stodginess, when the state did manage to change the laws and regulations, they stayed changed.  Progress was slow but it didn't go backwards.

     The problem was, some voters wanted something different -- and it wasn't classical libertarianism.  It wasn't steady-on conservatism.  It wasn't New Deal progressivism, either; it wasn't even old-time machine politics, with cigars (and and more substantial rewards) for party workers and the well-connected and damn-all for individuals, groups and organizations on the outs.  No, what voters wanted was--

     But why should I try to formulate it, when Kentucky's Thomas Massie put it so well in 2017?

     "All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."*

     So far, what voting for crazy has got us is gas over $4.00 a gallon -- over $5.00 in seven states, fueled by a simmering war of choice with Iran; ballooning measles cases in the U.S., a hantavirus outbreak that officials assure us is bottled up, a rare strain of ebola without any vaccine or specific treatment erupting in Africa not far from overcrowded and under-sanitized refugee camps, and a President who just got immunity from federal income tax enforcement, while building himself a combination bunker/ballroom and declaring, "I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me."

     I'm not too keen on a nuclear-armed Iran† -- who, other than some Iranians, is? -- but bombing their nuclear program flat whenever it got too busy seemed to be working.  Not as well as the enforced treaty they were under for a few years, but it worked.  At present, they've got more incentive than ever to be building a Bomb, and I think only the fact that they can shut down the Strait of Hormuz and dare the world to do anything about it has distracted them from whatever remains of their nuke effort.  Naval mines are cheaper than Manhattan Projects, and there's less to worry about downwind if one goes off unexpectedly.

     The thing about leaving out big bowls of crazy pills is that eventually everyone either freaks out or passes out.‡  I don't know if we've reached that point yet, and I'm worried about just what form it will take if we do.

     After World War Two, the United States took on, however imperfectly, the role of the world's designated driver.  We've now given up on it and joined the partying.  It's fun, fun fun -- until we wrap the T-Bird around a tree.
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* Massie tried to keep up, but as of this morning, he's no longer the craziest S.O.B running for U. S. House in Kentucky, having lost his primary to Ed Gallrein.
 
† I'm not especially happy with a nuclear-armed anybody.  We're stuck with the countries that already are, but expanding membership in that club is a very bad idea.
 
‡ Or, in fact, leaves.

Do Your Homework, Politicians

      I usually run radio news in the morning as I clean up the kitchen and make breakfast, and this morning, they were interviewing a U. S. Congressman on a recent mass shooting in his district.

     Not knowing the man, not even knowing his party when I heard the interview, I was struck by how much he sounded like a schoolkid called on to deliver a book report when they had not read the book, right down to desperately riffing on the title.

     "Congressperson" is essentially an impossible job if you make an honest effort at it.  A good staff can help, knowing or at least looking up the things the officeholder needs to know and feeding them just enough information, right before they need to know it.  It's not even dishonest: it's effective staff command.  Nobody can know everything that job requires 'em to know; the best we can hope for is that they dig in and learn the most salient stuff, and get good support for the rest.

     But this morning's guy?  At a guess, he'd seen news reports; he had some idea of the location, might have shaken hands or given a campaign speech there, but he hadn't even hit Wikipedia for more information.

     I'd have to know more about him before I made my mind up, but if I lived in his district, I'd sure be finding out.  House and Senate seats are not sinecures.  They're not supposed to phone it in.  Do the darn homework!  Is it a hard job?  Yes, it's extraordinarily hard, and if they do it right, the paycheck-to-effort ratio is lousy.

     I'm sick and tired of Senators and Representatives who won't do the work.  I dislike 'em more than the few whose politics I dislike who actually show up to interviews and events -- and their Chamber -- with a good grasp of what's going on (or even the mere appearance of understanding): at least they put in the effort.  Even if it's glib, facile and based on a quick sheet of talking points a staffer handed 'em at the last minute, better that than trying to get by on BS and blather. 

Maybe Later

     This morning, I'm just tired of the chaos and stress.  Which is, of course, what the forces of oppression want.

     Too bad, authoritarian losers: I'm not giving up.  But this morning, I'm denying you my specific attention.  Go play in traffic or something.  Go harass the birds for singing, the butterflies for being too colorful, the ants for being too organized.  (Y'all are coming in a distant third to ants on "regimentation," which I'd think would be a good strong sign that humans aren't wired up to do a whole lot of it; but you've already shown you won't be convinced by evidence, so....)

Aw, Spare Me

     My family, what's left of it, sometimes shares nostalgic text messages about our happy childhood, and that's fine; we're all pretty old and enjoyable memories are a great comfort.

     Thing is, I disliked childhood.  I never saw anything clearly at farther away than arm's length until I was eight years old -- after being chided for years, "Don't you see it?  Oh, look there!" and not figuring out the reason why.  They tell me what a bright and inquisitive child I was, and darned right: I was trying to figure out the trick to understanding those blurred shapes.

     I spent all of first grade in trouble for not paying attention to what was on the blackboard, and all of second grade being humored as a child who was clearly, mystifyingly, unable to learn much.

     Here's a free tip: if your child is sitting a foot away from the TV or computer (etc.), it might be a good idea to get their vision checked.  Those halcyon years are apparently way better when you can see what's going on.

--

     This post started out to be a rant about news coverage of the current President, which still veers between normalizing stuff with an "Oh, that wacky, limits-testing Republican!" tone and pundits claiming that this time he's gotten himself way too far out on a limb or askew from popular opinion or whatever, and he's about to be brought to heel.  Yeah, well, his will to power is unprecedented for all it borders on incoherent -- and I can write that as someone who was reading newspapers during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, though I did need some help with the big words in LBJ's early years.  And just who or what. exactly, is going to rein the man in?  His party?  Don't count on it.  Congress?  Nope.  The Courts?  The Supreme Court is brought and paid for, or a large chunk of the Court's conservative majority is. (Look up Leonard Leo, who is to the Right what they say George Soros is for the Left.)

     The misadventure with Iran may yet prove to be an own goal he can't avoid.  Fuel and fertilizer prices are nowhere near done spiking, even if the Strait of Hormuz magically opens up this afternoon.  It will likely be a year or more before the disruption works its way through the system and once it has, prices are unlikely to drop much.  2026 and 2027 will be hungry years.  How hungry remains to be seen, and this is the kind of thing that loses elections -- but it's also the kind of thing that powers major upheavals in systems of government.  So don't tell me "We've got him now!" when that pig isn't even in the poke.

     Chaos is Mr. Trump's very own briar patch. He's not well-spoken; he has never struck me as being particularly bright in a puzzle-solving way.  But give him a clamorous mess, and so far, he has a real skill for coming out on top.  Maybe it's all just bluster and bullshit and associates who have figured out how to profit by upholding and riding his coattails, but it works for him, even as it leaves most of us worse off -- and it leaves his rank and file followers sufficiently less worse off than the people they (and he) most dislike that they have not been minding the downside.  That's a formula for a certain kind of political success, one largely confined to authoritarian, personalist movements.

--

     I believed I was out of childhood when, finally, I got to the point that I was free to starve on my own merits.  I wasn't done growing up until I learned that sometimes, you need a hand when things get bad.

     I won't believe we're done with Trumpism until we are -- and we're putting in the effort to build better checks and balances, to keep Congress, the courts and the Executive Branch more protective of their own powers and less inclined to get in one another's pockets.  If we do not, the system will remain vulnerable to whatever demagogue, from whichever part of the political spectrum, comes along next to work it for their own gain.

I Suppose I Should Comment

     It's appropriate to make some comment about the disruption at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

     It was something of a fiasco long before it started; the famously touchy President Trump has -- unusually for a sitting President -- never attended while in office until last night.  The event is often something of a mutual roast, it's always been a little too cozy, and mostly it's a rare fancy dinner for the White House Press corps, many of whom will who wallow in it while affecting disdain.  The entertainment this year was going to be a mentalist instead of the typical comedian, a transparent shying away from discord.  It was widely anticipated that Mr. Trump was going to go hard on the assembled reporters.

     And--  Most of it never happened.  Someone with a gun tried to crash the party, and failed.

     Security at events featuring high-ranking Federal politicians is always pretty tight, and the professionals do their best to manage every rational threat they can think of.  This means an irrational assailant has an advantage, and indeed, every known attempt on the lives of Presidents since John Wilkes Booth, successful or not, has been made by someone who was, in some way or another, not rational; they appear to have acted alone* in every case.  Add someone else to that kind of a plan, and it leaks -- and should.

     There's generally some distance in well-controlled space between the security gate(s) with metal detectors, suspicious Secret Service types, etc. and the room itself, and that's on purpose.  (I've had to pass though that exact kind of gantlet† on a couple of occasions.  It's serious business.)  It buys some time.  It worked just as it should last night; the would-be attacker -- whose precise target(s) remain unknown, but there's only one way to bet -- was stopped long before he got through the last set of doors.

     And I'm glad he was.  I happen to think Donald Trump is a loathsome human being, and his inner circle are no better.  They are doing immense harm to the proper functioning of the Federal government, to American society in general, and to both our country's stranding in the world and to world peace in general.  But nobody -- nobody -- not presenting an imminent mortal threat rates extrajudicial killing by some random guy with a grudge and/or a screw loose (or by anyone else, for that matter).  Impeachment, criminal trials, 25th Amendment, losing big at the ballot box?  I wish all of it on him.  But not what was successfully headed off last night.

     Of course, I have also been hearing claims it was all faked, or "allowed to happen."  I wouldn't count on it.  Everything about the sequence of events suggests very strongly one more Lone Gunman, getting as far as he got because he started out well askew.  And I think Trump and company are enormously more reactive than proactive.  They'll make hay with this; they already started to within the first hour.  But they didn't set it up.

     In a time of chaos, this is just more damnable chaos, and the worst people will proceed to turn it to their own ends as much as they can.
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* The Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists are welcome to debate that among themselves, but as far as can be proven, it is true.  (IIRC, there has been one attempt by a pair of desperate and borderline men working together, which failed.)
 
† Although the words are so widely misused that most dictionaries have given up, a gauntlet is a kind of glove, one that once upon a time was occasionally flung down in challenge.  A gantlet is a double row of your nominal peers, or perhaps Native Americans, who are going to whale the tar out of you as you run between them.  This does not sound like a good time, and heavy gloves aren't going to be much help.

Kerosene Burners

     The war between the United States, Israel and Iran has bumped up fuel unavailability and prices.  Some of it it is easy to understand: crude oil is traded globally, and tends to flow to where the dollars are.  Gasoline works the same way, and a lot of that crude oil input comes out the other end of the refinery as gas for your car.  We expect diesel to work the same way, and mostly it does, but there's a catch.

     See, diesel's down at the heavy end, with jet fuel, kerosene and home-heating oil (and past that to bunker oil, the tarry stuff they burn in big ships and old steam locomotives that didn't run on wood or coal).  And much of that gets "pre-bought" in bulk.  Airlines especially prefer to hedge their bets by buying months and months of jet fuel in advance (it's rarely a bad bet that fuel prices will go up over the long term), and a lot of it gets refined not too far from the source -- which for a lot of Europe, is in the Middle East, and you'd never, ever guess where those refineries are.... No, I'm kidding.  Of course they're located around or near the Strait of Hormuz.  There's not a lot of jet fuel refining capacity within the EU itself.  Why should they bother when Middle Eastern countries are happy to host those big, smelly, polluting refineries?  The answer to that question is coming home to roost.

     Jet fuel is a knotty problem.  The airlines have already bought it; it just can't be delivered.  And the refineries away from the conflict zone that are set up to make jet fuel are well able to make diesel -- which is not a clunky bulk-sold-in-advance market, and where the free flow of fuel to where prices are highest* leaves companies chasing after a distribution network and customers who are, however unhappily, already set up for and accepting of highly variable prices.

     Meanwhile, the economics of airlines are screwy.  Outside the U.S., many of the largest carriers are subsidized by their governments, instruments of national prestige as well as effective transportation.  By some measures, the U.S. airline industry as a whole never makes a profit: there are few losers every year, often cannibalized by their peers or propped up by past earnings, a handful of winners, and the rest break even.  Disruption in fuel supplies throws a wrench into this tipsy balance -- and prolonged disruption tosses in a stick of dynamite after it, the fuse fizzing.

     You will note an absence of hand-wringing assignment of blame.  Sure, Donald Trump's a bull in a china shop on his best days, his Secretary of Defense is a bloodthirsty pinhead with a weird take on religion, and the majority of Congress is a craven bunch of spineless losers being led around by the nose (not to mention the pompous ambition and negative charisma of the Vice President, which I won't) -- but the Middle East is a powder keg with a load of lit candles on top.  If it wasn't Mr. Trump's "splendid little war," it would be some other war in the region, and if it wasn't right now, it would happen next week, or next month, or next year.  It's going to happen, and it's going to keep on happening, as long as a politically unstable region produces such a large amount of the crude oil and its refined products that our entire civilization runs on.  The network of global trade in oil cannot be disassembled by any amount of domestic production: oil will always flow towards money.  Smart politicians would be working to reduce dependence on oil, especially as a primary energy source; this is the only controllable variable.  And guess what?  Our politicians are no smarter than the rest of us -- and our business leaders may be even less so.

     Get ready to ante up.  Again.  And if you were planning to fly anywhere soon, better count pennies.

     Update: The Strait of Hormuz is now, according to the Trump administration Iranian government, "completely open."  We'll see if everyone with a practical veto agrees -- but don't expect the worst parts of the mess to magically clear up overnight even if it's olly-olly-oxen-free.

     Further Update: No, it's a day later and the Strait is closed again.  And apparently the U. S. blockade -- as opposed to the Iranian closure -- never stopped.  They can keep this up all year folks, and they might.  This doesn't bode well for the price of pretty much everything.
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* This simplistic formulation ignores that it's a gradient, with high prices but excellent supply at one end and lower prices but low supply at the other.  The U.S. is (on average) rich, and if you've got the bucks, fueling up the Benz is no problem no matter what it burns.  A Third-World farmer might not even be able to find any to buy.  In between, countries are rationing fuel, requesting or requiring people work from home, asking "Is this trip really necessary?" and taking other economizing measures.  And airlines?  If things go on, some of 'em are going to get grounded, or go under altogether.
 
† Still the name of it.  Congress named it and only Congress can rename it, which they have not.

He Said What?

     It would have been inconceivable to my parents: a Republican Vice-President, speaking at a conservative group's event and addressing in passing a war in Europe started by and serving the cause of Russian territorial expansion said, "... a Ukrainian American [...] person got really agitated at me because I was saying we should stop funding the Ukraine war. And I still believe that, obviously, and it’s one of the things I’m proudest that we’ve done as an administration, is we’ve told Europe if you want to buy weapons you can, but the United States is not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine any more."

     The war in Ukraine slogs on, with Ukrainian innovation and yes, great heaps of weapons made in the West turning the dogged Russian advance into a meatgrinder, holding it and sometimes even turning it back.  It's one of the most impressive defenses ever mounted by a smaller country against a larger one in conventional warfare since the Winter War between Finland and, well, what do you know? -- Russia.  And that one only lasted three months.  Like every war they've been involved in, the Russian strategy consisted of throwing soldiers into the volcano, which is what they're still doing in Ukraine.  I guess it works until you run out of soldiers.

     Whatever one's opinion of the war in Ukraine, stopping Russian aggression seems like it would serve the best interest of the West.  And the war is very much a territorial war, a war of chess or of Go.  We know what both sides want and we know what counts as victory.

     Elsewhere, the VP has signed on, however reluctantly, to a war with much murkier objectives.  The last I knew, the U. S. and Iran were still running different blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and both declaring some form of victory.  Iran wants to keep on being a thorn in the side of the Middle East; the U.S. government wants....  It varies, depending on who you ask, and when.  I don't think anyone outside Iran wants them building nuclear weapons, though there's not broad agreement on the best way to prevent it.  The President might want regime change, but so far all he has managed to do is trade one collection of hardliners at the top for another collection of them, with less experience and more reason to despise us.  All anyone can be sure of is that fossil fuel prices are going up,* the stuff is getting scarce in places that relied on the LNG, crude oil and fuel that was carried through the Strait, and fertilizer and diesel fuel are in short supply and more expensive just as farms in the Northern Hemisphere enter planting season.

     If this is winning, then how much worse is losing?  I don't know; I do know the (small) crowd at the Turning Point, USA gathering the Vice President came to address were booing him over it, which is kind of like going to watch your hometown baseball team and throwing tomatoes at them.  On the domestic front, that's nowhere even close to winning.
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* Although there's starting to be some reduction in demand, for reasons that are mostly unsettling.

Dire Strait?

      Let's see -- we approached the weekend with Iran declaring the Strait of Hormuz was closed -- unless you handed them a million dollars, and weren't on a short list of enemies.  We've exited the weekend with the President of the United States declaring the Strait of Hormuz is closed, but only to vessels headed for or leaving an Iranian port (and presumably any Iranian-flagged ones, though I don't know if they've got any big tankers).  The Strait has been a battleground (battlesea?) for a long time.

     In either case, it's a lot easier to close a narrow waterway than to keep it open.  Commercial ships don't fare well in a battle -- see the North Atlantic in World Wars One and Two for examples -- and will avoid them if given the option.  All it really takes is a motorboat with a crew shooting shoulder-fired missiles while dodging big Naval vessels.  I think very highly of the U.S. Navy, but they're like elephants facing a cloud of gnats, and I'm not sure they brought enough flyswatters.  I'm quite certain Iran has brought enough crazy for the task.

     I don't know how things play out if (when?) a Chinese-flagged tanker decides to play chicken for a load of Iranian oil.  Who wants to gamble with those kind of stakes?

     We might find out.  Meanwhile, the President appears to be picking a fight with the Pope.  Historically, the Holy See is the side to bet on.  As the oldest center of power in the West, Rome has outlasted every government that presented opposition, and looked on while a few of them were stomped flat.  You may well argue the Pope is not his Church -- but the relationship is modeled after that of a Roman paterfamilias to his family, nearly absolute rule.

     Interesting times.  I wish we were not experiencing such interesting times, but so has most of humanity, for most of our existence.  Excitement is a bane, dullness a luxury.

It's Spring

     Rather than belabor the horrors and outrages of the current war, or the "interesting" leadership, I will instead point to the lovely Spring we're having.  It still gets pretty chilly; there's even a freeze warning out for tonight, though only barely.  But the yard is thick with unusually large dog-violets and Spring Beauty, not to mention a few ambitious dandelions, and some other wildflowers are sneaking in.  The bees are already at work, which is why I haven't gone after the dandelions yet -- they bloom early, and give the bees a good start until the fancier flowers bloom.

     Elsewhere, we've had four people out beyond the Moon.  They're on the return leg now, and I wish them every success.

     There's apparently a fortune waiting for the person or group who invents a reliable, small, low-mass microgravity toilet: the current mission is having trouble with theirs, the crew of last long-duration Dragon flight pretty much gave up on the one aboard in favor of more primitive arrangements, and WCs on the various space stations are large, awkward contraptions that nobody's going to stuff into a spacecraft smaller than a Winnebago.  This may end up being a good reason to pursue spinning "wheel" type space stations or large O'Neill cylinders: aside from Coriolis Effect, the plumbing operates normally.  For short-duration spaceflight, there's always the Russian solution: eat small, low-bulk meals for a couple of days before, make a pit stop prior to boarding, and exercise willpower until you arrive.  Come to think of it, that was my Dad's theory for vacation travel, too.

Ahistorical, Antifreedom, Agitprop

     Indiana's Lieutenant Governor is at it again: Micah Beckwith is making things up, claiming the Founders and Framers who set up a secular government were all about Christian Nationalism.

     He's talking nonsense.  These men represented a mix of beliefs -- Unitarian, Quaker, Congregationalist, Universalist, Deist, Methodist, Catholic, Judaism and others -- and they knew history.  They had read of and in some cases observed the damage a State Church can cause.

     And they were open to the good religious faith can create, too.  You'll find them writing of the "public utility" of religion as a beacon of individual morality.  They had no problem with individual legislators looking to their own beliefs for guidance -- but they were wary of any faith leading the government, and of any government running and requiring adherence to a church.

     This is not a difficult concept.  It's not at all hard to find in the historical record -- and even then, a few men wanted one religious sect or another upheld and enforced -- or suppressed.  (John Jay was an ardent advocate of Christianity in government -- and bitterly opposed to allowing Catholics to hold office, vote or even immigrate, calling for "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.")  Their views did not prevail then, and should not prevail now.

     Look to your faith to your heart's content.  Express it in your words and deeds.  But don't use the blunt instrument of the State to make everyone else do so -- or claim it, and it alone, should be enshrined in our government.

     America's tradition of religious freedom and tolerance was a rare and precious thing when the country was new, and it still is.

Pop Goes The Starlink?

     I'm reading this morning that another Starlink satellite has fallen apart in orbit, cause unknown.  Just a sudden cloud of debris.

     It's not believed to be of any risk to the Artemis circumlunar mission set to launch soon -- but every loose bolt in orbit is a potential problem until its orbit decays and it falls back to Earth (if it ever does), usually burning up in a blaze of glory.  Starlink satellites orbit low enough that a few shooting stars are the most likely outcome -- but I have to admit, more and more, it appears that heedless fools are filling up the sky with overly-fragile junk, and that's not a good situation.

     And none of them are more prolific at it -- or more heedless -- than Elon Musk's SpaceX.  Look, I wish he was a combination of Tony Stark and Robert Goddard, too, but the reality is, he's a talented promoter who isn't otherwise qualified to do so much as polish either man's shoes, fictional or real.

     Progress advances on the backs of flashy mountebanks at least as much as it is carried by brilliant engineers and scientists, and some men are even both at once.  (Edison, Tesla, this part is about you.)  But we need to be clear-eyed about it; one interval of tetraethyl lead was way more than enough.

--

     As for the Artemis mission itself, I wish them godspeed and good fortune, but I'm not kidding you, I'm going to worry the entire time from launch to splashdown.  There's a reason the term "moonshot" is a synonym for high risk/high reward ventures.

In A Nutshell

     Here's the problem in all its nuttiness: when you could lose this document among online postings from members of "the Manosphere" and various flavors of "Integralists" and "Christian Nationalists" with no discernable difference, then what you have is just a big stack of things that are all, really, the same thing -- and it ain't the inherent-rights-based representative democracy the Founders and Framers tried to build.

     Yeah, they didn't quite get there in many aspects; but they knew what they were reaching for, and it wasn't jackbooted bullshit marching around, waving a flag and a cross and shouting slogans.

     It's better to fall short reaching up than to succeed punching down.

Reading List

     While Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth's supposedly butched-up military machine is stumbling its way through a war of choice in the Middle East, incompetently led and sometimes reluctantly (but competently) served, it might be time for a touch of perspective on current events.  So here are some suggested readings:

     "The Screwfly Solution," by Racoona Sheldon (Alice Sheldon, more famous as "James Tiptree, Jr.")
     The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
     Practically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin -- I'm presently enjoying The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a 2002 collection of her short fiction.

     All of them examine power, and how things break, and how helpless so many people are willing to be while it happens, and (in some cases), how it might begin to heal.  We're presently oversupplied with boys who like the sound of smashing altogether too well -- social norms, people's lives, economies, edifices, anything that looks even a little fragile.  But there is a season for all things, and they mustn't be allowed to pursue ruin forever.

On Knowledge And Ignorance

     I frequently encounter -- and loathe -- invincible ignorance, the kind of weaponized not knowing that denies anyone could know anything and therefore, one person's uninformed opinion is exactly as good as another person's deep understanding.

     Well, it ain't, and knowing what you don't know is the beginning of wisdom.

     I am far from the only person who keeps running into self-made fools.  Another of the frustrated has written about it eloquently and in depth.  It's worth a look.

Public Relations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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