Politicommentary

     You probably think I have something trenchant and/or pithy to say about Mr. Trump's picks or Mr. Biden's pardons, but here's the thing: it's all sideshow.

     These things don't have anything to do with the day to day running of the country right now, and even the parts that could affect it in the future are only possibilities.  I could probably start a nice helmet fire about all or part of it, but what good would that do?

     Time enough for the Senate to show me how they're going to react.  Time enough to find out who's going to pardon whom and how that's going to work out.

     Right now, the House needs to start looking under the Federal sofa cushions for spare change before the current piggy bank goes dry.  They've got to get it done before Christmas, or they're going to be sending out cards to their constituents in the dark.  I'm pretty sure the Pentagon has a back-up plan before they have to start working by candlelight, and I'm hoping the over-the-horizon radars and earth stations for the DOD spy satellites have all got fat UPSs on standby.  But you'd never know to watch the news: it's all clowns and animal acts.

We Invented Our Way Out Of It

     Humans are clever primates.  Faced with a problem, we invent our way out.  As hunter-gatherers, we lived in small bands, with everyone a general specialist.  When we learned more things, we started figuring out some people were better at chipping flint, others at hunting, collecting edible plants, building shelter, cooking or guarding our homes through the long night.

     We befriended dogs and they befriended us.  We invented cities and agriculture not quite side-by side: many hands make light work.  Cats showed up, hunting the mice in our granaries.  We learned to preserve leather, spin thread, to knit and weave.  We developed pottery.  We started working metal: copper for tools and utensils, humble and dangerous lead, rare silver and gold,* useful bronze, brass and iron.

     And we learned about plumbing and sewers -- not once, but over and over again.  We learned about illness and epidemics, too: a bug that would wipe out a mostly-isolated hunter-gatherer band and stop, stymied by a lack of hosts, could smolder and flare in our cities, sweeping through like a wildfire.  We invented isolation, harsh and fairly effective.  We learned about cross-contamination the hard way (yet again!) and the lesson didn't stick.

     Eventually, we invented vaccines.  Vaccines are how you stuff a few hundred thousand, or a million, or millions of clever primates in a tight-packed city and avoid -- or at least control -- epidemics.  Ever since the first smallpox immunizations, some people have been skeptical.  It was gross, they cried; or it smacked of magic; or who knew what else might happen...?

     We know.  We've been running the experiment at scale, over and over, since the 19th Century.  We know what happens with communicable diseases we don't have vaccines for (epidemics), we know what happens when a sizeable segment of the population doesn't get vaccinated (outbreaks), we know the side-effects of vaccines, and they are evaluated and re-evaluated for safety and effectiveness.  Don't take my word for it, and don't follow internet memes and rumors, either -- you can go look this stuff up on Wikipedia, in the abstracts (summaries) of articles in reputable scientific journals or full articles in mass-market science magazines.  This is not a matter of debate except out at the weirdo fringe: vaccines work.  They're safe.

     Putting a "vaccine skeptic" in charge of this country's Federal health infrastructure is insane.
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* Speaking of humble and dangerous, and of gold: the ancient Egyptians apparently worked out the use of mercury and fire in refining gold, a job with such grave consequences for the people doing it that it was usually assigned to slaves taken in war.  "Mad as a hatter" (also the result of working with mercury) had nothing on an Egyptian gold-smelter.  Eventually we invented our way around that, too.

Ungentlemanly Gloating

     I'm hearing a lot of reports -- some of them first-hand -- of men, mostly young, saying -- often, shouting -- rudely sexist things to women, also mostly young.

     There's no point in quoting any of it.  You can easily find that information online if you're curious.  The words are intended to demean, to disempower and to anger.

     A frequent justification for this behavior is "Trump won," implying that, by extension, an extreme social conservatism won.  And hey, he did win, with a definitive electoral college victory.  But that system is designed to produce decisive results with population-weighted winner-take-all outcomes in most states.  As a whole, your fellow Americans expressed a much closer opinion: 75,551,895 for Mr. Trump and 72,372,332 for Ms. Harris, a difference of two percent.*

     So for all practical purposes, even if you read the results as every Republican voter wanting the ladies limited to church, children and kitchen, that's only half of the voters -- and the other half, Democrat voters, opted for a female candidate who (among other issues) had pledged to support women's abortion rights as established under Roe v. Wade prior to Dobbs.  We're all locked in this room together, the debate is not over, and dunking on people doesn't advance anyone's argument.

     Approximately sixty percent turnout means we don't know the opinion of  forty percent of the voting age adults, and adjusts the results to be 30% one way, 29% the other and 40% wondering if it's lunchtime yet.

     A recurring trope in the 1960s-70s science fiction I grew up reading was War Between The Sexes and from Philip Wylie to Joanna Russ and beyond, it never ended well.  It won't if we run the experiment at full scale in real life, either.
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* Professional drivers, closed course; do not attempt to hand-tally the votes in your basement.  These results are not entirely final, but they're not going to change much.

Well, That's Over

     It wasn't the outcome I expected -- but I wasn't expecting it very strongly.  Hope is for saps, as the Greeks warned us in the story of Pandora.  One side or the other opens up the box every election, and what comes out is rarely never rainbows and unicorns.

     On social media, a few people have written, "This fundamentally changes my understanding of the American people," or similar notions and that's what hope gets you -- it was our response to the pandemic that put a spotlight on the American psyche for me, mostly our reactions to the measures that tried to limit it: a slim majority of us are ignorant idiots, suspicious and resentful of expertise and willing to ride "You ain't the boss of me" all the way to the ground like Slim Pickens on an atomic bomb, even when reason and logic clearly shows that going along leads to the best outcome (and you can kick the would-be bosses to the curb later).

     So Mr. Trump won, both in the Electoral College and (so far) the popular vote.  A majority of us chose anger over joy, rants over laughs, an inarticulate man over an articulate woman, a promise of mass deportation and high tariffs over taxing billionaires and oligarchs while providing paths to citizenship for sincere immigrants, the government (of mostly men) controlling women's bodies instead of minding their own business.  

     As I write, control of the next U. S. Senate will rest in Republican hands by the thinnest of margins; the balance of power in the House is still undecided but it, too, will be on a knife's edge.  That's not a mandate; it's a great big caution flag.  I doubt it will be heeded.

     If Mr. Trump gets his tariffs, look for economic hard times before the middle of his term.  Look for higher prices; tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter, and are passed along to you and me.  Even when tariffs succeed in encouraging domestic production to replace imports, the heavy thumb of government remains on the scales, impeding the workings of the free market: the version made here only needs to be cheaper than the cost of the import plus the tariff.

     And about making that stuff here?  If Mr. Trump gets the mass deportations he and many of his supporters long for, it will rip out the bottom of the labor market.  Those low-wage workers will be gone, and it was never that they "did the jobs Americans won't do," it was that Americans won't do those jobs for such low pay.  Assuming the now-open jobs can be filled, they're not going to be filled as cheaply as they were, and you know where that shows up?  Mr. CEO and his Board of Directors aren't going to take a haircut over it!  You and I will pay more for those goods and services.  Of course, we'll want raises too, and when wages and prices chase one another, you know what you get?  Inflation.

     The darker side of mass deportation is that if it is carried out as described, the result will be a horror that will shame this nation for generations; the scale of the effort and the incarceration required will inevitably produce tragic results. 

     Between people who glory in chaos and violence (and/or grift), like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, between nutjobs like Robert R. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, between "Christian Nationalists" and "Dominionists" who are hoping to ride the multiply-divorced convicted felon to cultural control (look up what they say; the language is Biblical but their intent is clear: he's a means to an end), between men like Vivek Ramaswamy and J. D. Vance who have made themselves willing tools of democracy-skeptical oligarchs, Mr. Trump's second term will be fraught with wild notions, fringe theories, and cliques with interests greatly divergent from those of the country as a whole, if not downright inimical to them.  Elon Musk is brilliant promoter and a good judge of when to get into a line of business, but he couldn't manage or engineer his way out of an oversized boot with the instructions on the heel.

     A majority of my fellow citizens have chosen to run this experiment at full scale.  The party they voted for won the election.  That does not automatically mean it was the right choice.

     Time will tell. I remember how things were four years ago, how things were from 2016 to 2020, beginning with lies and ending in insurrection.  It was not a halcyon time, dripping with milk and honey.  Don't count on any nourishing sweetness this time either, not even if you're pale, hale, well-off and male.

Over The Line

     Childish violations of propriety have become a feature of one (1) our political parties, and it's the one that spent most of my life telling me it was "the party of grown-ups."

     Maybe it was, once upon a time.  But grown-up political candidates do not open a public event -- or a private one, for that matter -- by telling admiring stories about the size of a professional athlete's genitalia.

     You can tell me that it's yet another "brilliant, headline-grabbing move," and it's certainly getting a lot of attention, but it's misdirection at best, a distraction from serious issues of policy and plans.  It's bread-and-circuses bullshit, only without the bread (despite plenty of promises of bread tomorrow).

     It's as if a dumber version of Eddie Haskell grew up and went into politics, and darned near half the voters thought he was wonderful, so much cooler than any nose-to-the-grindstone striver, with most of his party's politicians emulating his odious behavior.

     Someone on social media shared a photograph of a drink that's already out at some trendy spots, a 50-50 mixture of lemonade and iced tea, with a swizzle stick made from a hot dog that's had a hole put through it lengthwise by a drinking straw.  And that's clever political commentary, as of October, 2024.

     Fates help us.

A World Of No

     A few times recently, I have encountered people suggesting -- with hope -- that given Donald Trump's age, a vote for him is really a vote for J. D. Vance, and they thought Senator Vance was a much more appealing prospect than Vice-President Harris or the former President.

     Based on exactly what?  His political record consists of service in the U. S. Senate from January, 2023 until whenever he started cutting class to campaign for the number-two job.  His book is self-pitying auto-hagiography and he has the steadfast moral compass of a blade of tall grass in a shifting breeze.  In interviews and debates, he's shown a firm grasp of Gish gallop and an aversion to straightforward answers.  He can't even manage to consistently mirror his running mate's positions.  He's demonstrably intolerant of persons different from himself; if you're not married with children and gainfully employed, he thinks you don't count.  He courts Christian Nationalist extremists and coyly turns away any criticism of it.

     Mr. Trump has the same man-on-horseback appeal as the authoritarians he idolizes, from Orbán and Putin to Perón and Franco. I don't like it but it exists.  In contrast, the Senator from Ohio has the charisma of the night-shift manager of a tire outlet announcing your credit card's been denied.  Having him one heartbeat away from the Presidency is way too close.

     Better Tim Walz than him; better Kamala Harris than the top of his ticket.

"Tone It Down?"

     While calls for the opposing candidate to cool down their rhetoric might make sense coming from a peace-and-love candidate -- Eugene McCarthy, say, or George McGovern -- it's a lot less plausible from Donald Trump, who has always campaigned by warning of a forthcoming -- or supposedly ongoing -- apocalypse and recently described Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as "...a Marxist, everybody knows she’s a Marxist," and "she has, destroyed our country with policy that’s insane. Almost policy that you’d say 'they have to hate our country.'"

     That was during the Presidential candidates debate on September 10.  You'll find similar descriptions of her in transcripts of every campaign speech the man has made since she replaced President Joe Biden, and similar dire warnings from the GOP's Vice-Presidential pick.

     The Democrats have often described Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy and freedom; the GOP has claimed that electing Ms. Harris would mean the end of the country.  These are large claims, and per Agenda 47 (Mr. Trump's internally-contradictory plan for action after a possible return to office and not, he has insisted, to be confused with Project 2025), he would certainly attempt a sweeping expansion of Presidential powers, meddle in state governments, and deploy troops against U. S. citizens and other residents.  Conversely, I'm not seeing any such Federal overreach in the Democratic 2024 platform -- except you're not going to like their plans for firearms regulation; but even that is same-old, same-old: universal background checks, red-flag laws and making manufacturers legally liable for the misuse of guns.  It ain't great, but it's all well within existing Federal purview, if they can get laws through Congress for it and if the U. S. Supreme Court lets them stand.  It's not end-of-the-Republic stuff.

     Whatever.  Do your own risk/benefit analysis.  In terms of threats to people standing for office, it doesn't matter.  Red-hot rhetoric doesn't fire up lone-wolf lunatics; and so far,* only lone-wolf lunatics manage to get close enough to try to do harm to Presidents and Presidential candidates.  These are people without coherent ideology, who often form imaginary parasocial relationships with political figures or see themselves as looming large on the stage of history.  Their motivations are murky at best, incomprehensible at worst.

     "Tone it down?"  Not going to happen, not from either side, and anyone who can picture a cool, cerebral Presidential campaign running in the United States has slept through every quadrennial contest in their life, including Bush vs. Dukakis.  It would be hilarious to see the present crop try -- if only the stakes were not so high.
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* With the sole exception of the conspiracy that included John Wilkes Booth's murder of Abraham Lincoln and the wounding of Secretary of State William H. Seward.

Interesting Times

     Let's all do whatever we can to keep the times from getting any more interesting, okay?  A little more dull routine, a few less bold strokes of BS.

Secret Agent Man

     Or secret agent woman; high-level skulldugerousness has been a profession open to women longer than many others.

     New York's state government had embedded Chinese agents for years. Linda Sun worked her way up to deputy chief of staff for the governor before being axed over apparent misconduct.  Investigators found she and her husband Chris Hu had been living the high life on Red China's dime.

     Elsewhere, the Department of Justice says Russian propaganda mill RT hired their very own influencer/troll farm.  The description in the indictment matches Tenet Media, employers of Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, among others.  Oops.

     Then there's Senator-for-hire Bob Menendez, D-Dominican Republic, D-Egypt by way of New Jersey.  He was convicted of being on the take in July, with sentencing to come in October.

     Su Mi Terry wasn't a U. S. Senator or even a highly-placed aide to an elected official.  She was a former CIA analyst turned think-tank expert at a level that included meeting with the Secretary of State -- and she was passing notes to the South Korean government in exchange for goodies.

     And here's the thing -- while bribes are illegal and elected officials and government employees are supposed to put the interests of the U. S. first and foremost, if you're not on Uncle Sam's payroll and want to go lobby for Lower Slobbovia or otherwise help advance Slobbovian interests in the U. S.* for gifts or pay, you can do that; it's a free country.  But you have to be up front about it.  You have to register as a foreign agent.  The people you're advising or lobbying or leaning on need to know that you're acting on behalf of a foreign country.

     I wonder who else is lining their pockets in return for surreptitious shilling, sharing secrets and influencing public opinion or legislation?
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* And who wouldn't?

"Don't Know Much About History..."

     Or even about Constitutionality (with apologies to the songwriters).  While most people would agree that the First Amendment protects some of the most fundamental of human rights, not everyone agrees.

     Take the GOP's Presidential candidate, speaking yesterday at the 146th General Conference and Exhibition of the National Guard Association of the United States,* a lobbying and general membership organization of and for National Guard members: "I want to get a law passed.  Everyone tells me, oh sure, it's very hard. You burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year.  Got to do it, we got to do it.  They say, 'Sir, that's not constitutional.'  We'll make it constitutional."

     It doesn't work that way.  Don't take my word for it; ask the experts.  Ask the United States Supreme Court.†  You can't make it constitutional without undermining basic rights.

     I think our flag should be treated with respect.  I think our government ought to conduct itself in such a way that only the most desperate or ill-intentioned of persons or groups would ever burn our flag with disrespect, or otherwise mistreat it.  But to do so is indeed "expressive conduct," and it should not -- per the Court, cannot -- be made illegal.

     Burning your draft card was a violation of 50 U.S.C. § 462(b)(3), carrying a fine of $10,000 and up to five years in a Federal jail.  The Supreme Court ruled that bit of fire-setting was more than free speech (it also bollixed the draft process) and let the law stand.  And yet the burning of draft cards during the Vietnam War, often very publicly, did not cease.  So I'm doubtful of the deterrent effect of a year in jail for flag-burning, especially since an exception would have to made for the proper disposal of U. S. flags, a process which also involves (respectful) burning.
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* It took me several minutes to track this down.  News reports mostly left it at "spoke before the National Guard," which is not at all accurate and gives a misleading impression of the circumstances.
 
† And read the fine print.  In at least one of the cases covered, the accused were said to have stolen the U. S. flag they burned from a post office.  Whoops -- that'd be "destruction of government property," for which they were convicted and fined.  A couple of them did (minor) jail time.  Free speech?  Sure, but you're going to have to supply your own props, not steal them. 

The Lessons They Learned

     Medical labs are their own industry.  I have a long history of minor medical mishaps and as a result, I've had a front-row seat to the change from "labs" being a matter of going off to Local General Hospital for them, to your doctor's nursing staff drawing a few vials of blood and something happens offstage, to in-office labs run by a third party (still a lot of that around), to needing to drive to one of the lab company's many locations and walking in.

     The pandemic hit the labs hard; they needed to do a lot of testing while keeping their staff and patients healthy.  Office staff jobs were cut to the minimum and made remote or at least moved well away from patient contact; phlebotomists worked alone or in teams of two and they encouraged making appointments, so waiting room occupancy could be kept down.  They rolled out a sleek automated check-in process that used a touchscreen kiosk that scanned your ID and insurance card like something out of a sci-fi film.  As Covid transitioned from being pandemic to endemic, the number one lab company (at least around here) bought the number two lab company.  They kept all of their offices as long as social distancing was mandated, and then--

     Then they did the obvious thing.  They started shutting down the least-used locations, consolidating offices in close proximity, moving out of high-rent locations to cheaper spaces.  They kept the electronic check-in and never brought back human receptionists.  And they consulted efficiency experts on just how many patients a staff of two or three should be able to process per hour, what number of no-shows and walk-ins could be expected, and how much annoyance patients would tolerate.

     --I don't know for sure about that last one, but it seems likely.  If you work the system by its own rules, current medical labs aren't too bad; I signed up online two days in advance, arrived at my appointment time and was in and out in about forty-five minutes.

     Forty-five minutes?  Yeah, I'd be a little irked, too; a half-hour would have been okay, but nearly an hour?  Except for one tiny little thing: the efficiency experts didn't count on human nature.  Three lab techs (one of whom was, I gathered, stuck on the phone, trying to untangle a terrific mess involving scrambled logistics before it became an even bigger mess), nobody on the front desk, two kiosks -- and a lobby full of unscheduled people who were hoping to walk in and get their labs without any effort.  Many of them interrupted the tech as she opened the door to summon the next patient; a few would just pry it open (no handle on the outside)  and walk in, peering into blood-draw stations until they found someone with an employee ID badge and slowing down the work.  Why, their draw would only take a minute and then they'd be out of the way, but that darned machine was telling them to come back in two hours!

     The phlebotomists are not in charge of the kiosk system; it assigns walk-ins to the next available slot, with an option to take the next no-show if that happens any sooner, and that's all there is.  There's no slipping someone in -- the test-tube labels are printed up when your assigned time arrives and the tech has them at the blood-draw station when she calls your name.  And she's working at a pace that leaves very little room for distractions and pointless conversation.

     It would be easy to blame the lab staff, but they're on the same treadmill as the patients; it's easier still (though less immediately satisfying) to blame the lab company, only we'll probably find they bled money through the Covid years (profit margins aren't great and everything shifted under them) and the suits making the decisions are layers and layers (and miles and miles) away from the point of human contact at the lab -- where people are still arriving, wanting to chat with the long-gone nice lady behind the desk and conveniently sneak their quick blood draw in between Pilates and grocery-shopping.  Ain't gonna happen and you might as well think of it as being right back to the time when you had to drive to Local General Hospital and patiently wait your turn.  Look, if you need lab work, you might want to treat that as more important than popping into the Rexall for a roll of Lifesavers.

     I found myself apologizing to the tech for people's behavior while she struggled with my rollaway vein (the obvious one inside my right elbow is uncooperative).  She sighed as if a weight had been lifted and said, "It's like this all day, every day.  They hate those kiosks."

     Might want to start figuring out how to get used to them.

Bit Of Advice

     If you're going to present yourselves as Defenders of Western Civilization -- or Civilisation, even -- it might not be a good look to be trashing and burning libraries.  Maybe take a step back from that, along with looting and beating people up.

     Frickin' barbarians.

Of Course It Wasn't Worth Getting Out The Crayons

     I didn't expect it would do much good.  If you're deep into the Trumpian Cinematic Universe, you've left objective reality behind.

     In response to pointing out that attempting a crime counts as committing the crime, even if the attempt does not succeed, I got a tortured hypothetical situation with only the slightest connection to the counting of votes in the 2020 election and disputes about the count.  Yeah, no, and not even the point; and easily dispelled by using a parallel:* the downballot Dems didn't do all that well in 2020, with narrow majorities in the Senate and House (the latter flipped the other way, barely, in 2022, and how'd that happen if the fix is in?): if they'd had a fat enough thumb on the scales to change the Presidential vote, they could have handed themselves comfortable majorities in both bodies and legislated to their heart's content.  They didn't.  Congress has been remarkably unproductive.  One commenter claimed the Democrats want a "tyranny of the majority," but given the number of times in the last forty years they've held the House, Senate and Presidency, if they were after it they'd have got it by now, with bells and ribbons and parades on May Day.  Hasn't happened and it wasn't for lack of opportunity.

     Commenters have accused me of being "ignorant," while supplying no facts or history to counter mine.  If you won't do the homework, you don't get to call other people ignorant and expect any response aside from derisive laughter.  I was able to watch January 6 in real time and there's no retconning actual events, no matter how much you may wish to or how many glittering lies your Great Leaders may spin.  (Of note, live/near-live TV coverage that day was often forced to rely on wide shots, showing the literal "big picture," the true extent of the crowd and the broad sweeps of movement, the lulls and pauses as they happened, the cries of "Hang Mike Pence" after his decision was announced.)

     They have also accused me of being a Democrat.  Nope.  I'm a Democrat voter these days, but I'm still not a registered member of any political party; Indiana doesn't require it to vote in general elections and in party primaries, they only ask which ballot you want.  I'm a small-d democrat and small-r republican, and a small-l libertarian, too.  I think it's too bad Republicans decided Christian Nationalism (with a wide streak of White Nationalism) and a cult of personality was their way forward.  All my life, I have counted on having two big mostly-sane parties running in elections that are mostly "Coke vs. Pepsi" and "Crest vs. Colgate," and keeping one another between the rails, despite the occasional John Bircher or would-be socialist in their ranks, and that they maintain internal Party discipline by pitching out the genuine nuts, crooks and extremists that sneaked in.  I can't count on the Republicans to clean up their own party any more, and they're immune to any shame when their worst ideas and politicians are revealed.  At best, the GOP are the Whigs and Know-Nothings of our time, riding a ticking clock to irrelevance; at worst--  Well, extreme parties have ruined nations and instigated wars plenty of times in the past, and the price is always paid in blood and ignominy.
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* One of the better examples of this way of reality-testing is physicist Richard Feynman's work investigating the Challenger disaster: he looked into the history, engineering and production management of the Space Shuttle's liquid-fueled engines, and found the same pattern of each successive level minimizing the risk analysis of the preceding level that had doomed the solid-fuel boosters: if the engineers determined there was a one-on-ten risk of failure, their bosses, not wanting to look bad and knowing how cautious the engineers were, reported it as one in a hundred, and this happened over and over, all the way up: there were design problems, but there was a problem with management culture that kept them from being recognized and fixed until we lost a Shuttle.  And even then, we lost another one....

Is It Worth Getting Out The Crayons?

     I was going to refute in extensive detail a commenter who loftily informed me that "January 6 was not an insurrection" because there weren't stacks of dead bodies and no buildings got burned to ground.  But it's simpler than that:

     Sorry, old boy, there is no ineptitude exception for insurrectionists.  The mob that stormed the capitol was seriously lacking in command, control and communications -- not to mention intelligence -- but they did have a clear aim: to interfere with the certification of Electoral Collage votes and to apprehend or hang one or more elected official (the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House),  They didn't succeed.  They were poorly organized, despite the presence of members of a few militia-type organizations.  Too much would-be brass, too many undrilled troops, zero sergeants -- and you won't go too far without noncoms.

     You know what we call unsuccessful bank robbers?  Bank robbers.  You know what we call the perpetrators of unsuccessful robberies, like the guys who broke into a local gun store and found all the guns in the store's vault or armored display cases?  Burglars.  If a man runs up to you on the sidewalk, sticks a gun in your face and demands your pocketbook, he's an attempted robber even if a car comes around the corner and he panics and runs away.  (That happened to me, and while I was sure glad to not be shot and to keep the $2.75 in cash money that I had at the time, the perp had nevertheless committed a crime.)

     You don't get a pass for being lousy at it.  People were injured and killed.  Historical properties were damaged.  I watched real-time video, handheld stuff, security cameras, some professional coverage, whatever the networks could lay hands on.  It was a mob assault with the intent of overthrowing the normal functioning of the Federal government and installing a different President than the one who had been duly elected.  And not just duly elected, but repeatedly challenged in court and every challenge found meritless.  Every recount -- even the ones most suspicious of the results and set up to be well outside normal channels -- found the same winners and losers as the original counts.

     The candidate the mob tried to put in office had lost the election.  That makes their actions an attempted coup -- an insurrection.

     How sad for your bloodlust that it wasn't as productive of carnage and otherwise terrible as it could have been, I guess, though at the time, I thought the country had a very narrow escape from a truly dire outcome, and I still do.

     I am stunned that the instigator of that insurrection has been given another chance at the office.  Win or lose, his party will come to regret it.  History shows that autocratic usurpation never comes to a good end; the only question is how long it will take and how many people will be maimed and killed before the sickness has run its course.

     I'm telling you now, you don't escape a wood-chipper by jumping into the maw and hoping to ride it out, and you sure don't avoid the guilt by volunteering to gas the thing up and push the starter button.

They've Told Me Who They're Voting For

     It doesn't change how I plan to vote.  A few of my commenters are true-red Trumpists, and have told me how the former President "really loves this country." to which I can only point out that he loves it so much that this man who swore an oath to protect and defend our Constitution attempted by multiple mean to overturn an election which he lost, including inciting an insurrection that interrupted Congressional certification of the results and resulted in multiple deaths, and when out of office, hewing to his unsupportable Big Lie of a stolen election,* he called for the Constitution to to be suspended.  The man swore an oath to protect and defend it, and that oath -- and the U. S. Constitution! -- means no more to him than an empty pop bottle, to be tossed out if it gets in his way.

     His running mate is hardly better; Senator Vance first swore an oath to our Constitution in 2003 and again when sworn in as a Senator a few years back, but he has called for Jacksonian defiance of the separation of powers and muses that the United States is "...in a late republican period," referring to Rome right before Caesar ended their Republic.

      I don't have any x-ray vision into their hearts, nor do I into President Biden's, but he's been swearing the same oath to the Constitution (without picking away at it afterward) and taking Uncle Sam's paycheck for half a century now, and if he didn't love this country, he surely would have gone into a different line of work.

     It is unlikely any of these people -- or Vice-President Harris, who has been swearing the same or similar oaths since at least 2011 -- do not love our country.  My concern is that they will play by the rules.  Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he will not.  Sen. Vance has implied he will will not.  By my lights, that's disqualifying, right there.

     That leaves whoever the Democrats end up running.  It could be Joe Biden in a coma -- I can at least count on them to get us to the next election with a functioning American republic.  The GOP's picks are far too willing to pull it down.
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* He has a long history of claiming any contest he does not win has been "rigged."  The Emmy awards, for example.  So his veracity in making that claim is questionable, at best -- as is his sincerity.

I Don't Get It

     Caesar did nothing good for the Romans and left chaos in his wake.  Oh, they sorted it out, painfully, bloodily -- but the Republic was gone, never to return.

     We've kind of got King Log -- if you can call President Biden that, considering that he's managed to get a lot done despite a nearly deadlocked Congress.  Replacing him with King Stork is not an improvement.  Sure, the stork makes more noise and flaps around a lot, but perhaps the eager should review the fable.  You and I are, like the rest of the 99%, small and tasty.

Unexpected

     Sure, he was on the short list, but most pundits put him near the bottom of it.  J. D. Vance will be running for Vice President on the Republican ticket, beard, suspected eyeliner, literary ambitions and all.

     His book received mixed reviews -- no one said it wasn't well-written, but critics were divided on his self-appointment as the interpreter for a whole region of the country and one he had not, in fact, grown up in.  If you want a take on transplanted Appalachian culture, his is as good as any; but there are a lot of transplants who headed to the manpower-hungry industries of what would become the Rust Belt, and a lot of takes on how that worked out.

     Senator Vance has issued mixed reviews of his new boss over time, and you can take them as a record of how his thinking has changed; he has moved in an ever more authoritarian direction, following his party's lead, and is very much the darling of the Federalist Society, and of the Heritage Foundation, the latter responsible for the "Project 2025" blueprint for, well, you can go read the thing yourself.  It changes the nature of government meddling and nudging, but not the amount of it.  And it throws open the door for the types of prejudicial treatment of people that would gladden the heart of the odious Woodrow Wilson.  It's not a good look.  Polls give Sen. Vance's party a 50/50 chance at implementing it, which is certain to provoke a strong reaction.  Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has promised a "bloodbath" if he fails to take the Presidency.

     Interesting times, either way.

     I hate interesting times.

It's Christmas For Conspiracy Theorists

     If you don't know someone took a shot a former President Donald Trump yesterday, doing only minor damage to him, killing an innocent bystander and injuring at least two others, then you have been living under a rock well past the last trolleycar stop.

     The TV and online talking heads were on it nonstop after it happened, mostly reporting the basic facts listed above and admitting they didn't know anything more.  The shots came from an apparently unsecured rooftop overlooking the venue, and that -- as so far reported -- is a significant failure.

     I have worked engineering support for TV reporting from a Presidential candidate appearance, though with smaller crowds.  I'm not going to get into any detail, but the U. S. Secret Service doesn't kid around.  They identify the sources of risk and they get them under control.  There are locations where they've asked utilities to weld down manhole covers along the route of a motorcade.  Their normal, known way to deal with vantage points is to put their own person with a gun up there, or get a cooperating agency to do so.  Did they miss this one?  Did the individual(s) assigned to it get sneaked past, taken out, distracted?  I don't know.  We may not ever know.

     What we do know is the dizzy-minded of every stripe are fabulating; online, I have heard everything from accusations of a "Reichstag fire moment" to "a Leftist plot foiled."  It's nonsense.  Not that knowing so will stop the firehose of BS, but it's all wind.

     The first claim is easy to disprove: nobody's that good a shot, not with a bobbing, weaving, gesticulating target.  At the reported distance, under the known circumstances, no one could pull off a near-miss of that nature on purpose, period.  And without a Number Two already in place, ready to step up and wave the bloody shirt, no even semi-sane conspiracy would take that risk.

     The other extreme is harder to debunk, but the historical examples (with one or two possible exceptions*) show that it takes a lunatic to get by the security around Presidents and Presidential candidates.  From Richard Lawrence's attempt on President Andrew Jackson in 1835 through the assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, the attempts on former President Theodore Roosevelt, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and president Truman,* the assassination of President John Kennedy and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy to attempts on Presidents Ford (two) and Reagan, only people adrift from reality have been unpredictable enough to bring the means of doing harm within range of Presidents and Presidential candidates, at least within U. S. boundaries.  Nearly all of them have acted as "lone gunmen."  Plotters plot and all plots leak, without exception.  It only takes one Smedley Butler, only one cinematographer with a longer lens and better microphone† than plotters realize, one disaffected member of the group, one misdirected message, one nosy reporter.  And both FBI and the Secret Service are listening; researching for this post, I was impressed by the number of attempts they have foiled.  There's zero likelihood of a plot.

     It is, I am almost sorry to tell you, "the usual noise in here." Having sown political violence -- and our history shows it is always lurking -- the harvest followed.  Keeping the civility in civil society requires constant effort from each of us, and we haven't been doing a very good job of it in recent years.  My sympathies are with the victims, as are the sympathies of any decent person.
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* John Wilkes Booth was (arguably) sane and part of a wider plot; the Puerto Rico nationalists who murdered their way to within shooting distance of President Truman may have been fanatical but had no history of insanity.
 
† Perhaps I shouldn't point this out, but the power switches on many wireless microphone transmitters are lousy and, worse, talent has a habit of turning them off and then forgetting to turn them back on, so the switches are very often bypassed. 

Dipping A Toe In

     The headline was interesting, combining two facts: more than forty percent of the U. S. population lives in coastal counties, and sea level rise is accelerating.

     People have differing opinions about climate change.  That's normal for our species -- in an age of space travel, people have differing opinions about the Earth being a sphere or flat, after all.  But while only twenty-four people have ever been far enough into space to get a really clear look at the big blue marble we live on, well more than a third of Americans can ride a bicycle to the sea shore and have a look for themselves, year after year.  Far fewer will find themselves under water in the near term -- in many places, the land rises quite steeply from the shore, after all.  Storm surges will be more of a problem, from the southernmost tip of Texas all the way around to New York City once in a great while, depending on the whims of hurricanes, themselves getting stronger and more frequent.

     Call it climate; call it weather.  Either way, the graph of water level over time says it's coming.  Does the name matter when your beaches become scuba sites or you're sloshing around the ground floor of your house in gumboots, salvaging what you can from the storm?

     It's certainly going to have an effect on the discussion.

     Of course, we said that when men went to the Moon, and we're not out of flat-Earthers yet.  Still, it's a lot harder to breathe water than to pretend geosynchronous communications satellites or the GPS and Starlink constellations are fake.

Both-Sideserism (Thumb On The Scales Edition)

     New York Times: "Joseph Biden may be too old to serve second term, should drop out of election now."

     Also New York Times: "Donald Trump may be too great a threat to the republic to serve second term, voters must decide."

     But, hey, apparently neither one of them has eaten barbecued dog like RFK Jr., who absolutely swears that he would never, ever eat human flesh and never has, and that's the honest truth as far as he remembers.