The More Fool Me

     Maybe I should be less trusting.  I skipped my muscle relaxer yesterday so I could drive to the orthopedic specialists.  My back hurt pretty bad despite OTC pain reliever but I could take it, because I was going to make some progress.  It wasn't easy to find the place, a building ticked behind other buildings, nestled between busy Shadeland Avenue and the freeway.  After a couple of false turns, I was there.

     The office is on the second floor and out of habit, I started up the stairs.   By the landing, I was sure that had been a mistake, but it was too late to turn back and take the elevator.

     Up to the office.  No one in line, a couple of people in the waiting room.  To the receptionist window.
     "Date of birth?"
     I told her.
     "Do you have an appointment?"
     "No, I'm a walk-in.  The online nurse said it was okay?"
     "What are you here for?"
     "My back.  I strained it a week ago Sunday and it still hurts.  Pretty bad."  The small of my back was, in fact, a knot of fire at that point.  Taking the stairs wasn't a wise choice.
     "Oh, we don't do back pain walk-ins."
     "What?"
     She repeated the statement.
     "But the nurse--  Here, I can show you."  Which I did -- called up the conversation on my phone and handed it to her.
     She agreed the nurse had told me to go that office for my back pain.  Unfortunately -- and she wasn't unsympathetic -- the nurse was wrong.  They could maybe see me on the 18th?
     That was a week away.  By that point, as the Stoics put it, either the pain would come to an end or I would figure something out.  I thanked her and left.  Since I had the app open, I texted to the online help system that the ortho clinic didn't accept walk-ins for back problems.  They expressed sympathy.  You will not be surprised how very little pain relief there is in sympathy, no matter how sincerely meant.

     I took the elevator downstairs.

     I've got an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Friday, I'm going to grovel for four more sets of twice-a-day anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxers.  What I have will run out Sunday and I'm not confident my back will be better by then. 

     Update: I do not, in fact, have an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Either I misunderstood the nurse at the clinic last weekend or she misspoke.  It's for July 14, and now I can't see the ortho specialist until June 22.  I went ahead and scheduled it, but I'm going to try for the regular clinic tomorrow.  I'd go today (Friday as I revise this) but the muscle relaxer has me way too out of it to drive.

Punished For Retroactive Bad Taste

     There was a time when you didn't mess with The Mouse.  Used to be, if legislators started talking about the need for copyright reform, you knew one or more of the copyrights covering a certain famous animated cartoon rodent and his pals was about to expire.

     Back when every major TV network changed hands and ended up belonging to one huge corporation or another,* Disney got hold of ABC.  They've never let go.

     And they had deep pockets.  TV networks in the United States own only a few of the stations that carry them, with the remained being independently-owned "affiliates."  ABC's got seven stations that are all theirs at present.  And in the U.S., the FCC regulates stations: anyone using up over-the-air RF spectrum has to have a license.  Networks themselves don't get a lot of FCC regulatory interaction; the individual stations do have to promise to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what they say and do, and to respect themselves and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and....  No, wait,  that's Girl Scouts; but the FCC regs for broadcast stations are almost the same thing, plus a pile of technical stuff.

     ABC was a latecomer among radio networks; NBC had "Red" (primo stuff) and "Blue" (B-grade, things they were trying out, some highbrow shows that didn't make a profit) networks serving different stations and went into WW II under an anti-trust cloud because of it.  Once the war was over, Uncle Sam made 'em sell one off, and of course it was Blue that went.

     A candy company bought it up and eventually changed the name from "Blue" (c'mon, the word already had that connotation) to ABC, the kid brother of networks, gamely charging after the older, larger NBC and CBS (and Mutual), doing their best to keep up.  The first two were already into TV and as television bloomed, ABC leapt in after them, underfunded, scrappy, willing to try almost anything.  (After a few experiments, including developing Meet The Press, Mutual stuck with good, dependable radio.  They're gone now.)

     ABC remained the upstart network for decades, until Fox (entertainment, not News) came along and showed there were realms of edginess yet to be explored.

     And with that as background, their evening talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, a few days before the White House Correspondents Dinner, made a tasteless joke about the First Lady and how she'd look at the dinner, referencing the 23-year age gap between her and Mr. Trump (and perhaps her usually-serious expression): he said she had "a glow like an expectant widow."

     It's funnier if you don't see public figures you dislike as quite human.

     It's not funny in hindsight after a guy apparently tried to make her a widow at the dinner.

     It's much less funny if you react in an all-too-human way: the Trumps aren't laughing.  FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has crossed swords with Kimmel and ABC once already, and blinked, announced the handful of TV stations directly owned by ABC are now up for license renewal, well ahead of schedule.  They've got thirty days to get their paperwork together and filed (and there's rather a lot of it), and they're going under the microscope.

     This is bureaucracy-as-punishment, and it is punishment not so much for a crass joke but for failing to predict the future when the joke was told.  It's a clear violation of the First Amendment, which protects even cruel and insensitive speech.

     The Mouse still has deep pockets, and though they have, finally, let the earliest version of their well-loved Mickey slip out from beneath copyright protection, Disney may decide to fight this one out; knuckling under will just get them more of the same, and the burden is likely to be laid more heavily on them than the three other major networks.  Or they may try judo: those "O&O" TV stations represent the smallest part of ABC's income; running them, mostly in major metropolitan areas, is more for prestige and ready access to newsmakers and they could easily sell them off and stand back, largely insulated from the wrath of Chairman Carr and the President he serves.
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* Arguably, when General Electric bought RCA, NBC wasn't their main interest: RCA had a nice collection of lucrative government contracts, including plenty with the Department of Defense, plus an array of patents to warm the cockles of shareholder's hearts -- or wallets.  Nevertheless, GE held on to the network through some years of David Letterman ribbing that kept the company name front and center, before selling it off and making money on the deal.

Okay, I Did It

     I'm not thrilled about it, but there is so little good information available for older people trying to navigate the governmental and financial bureaucracy that I gave in and joined AARP.  I still think they're kind of manipulative, but probably less so than the fast-talking insurance hucksters and pettifogging bureaucrats, and I'm tired of it taking me two hours to figure out if I can rollover my work 401(k) into my personal (and embarrassingly thin) conventional IRA without taking a bath on income taxes.

     (Apparently, no, though the IRS presents the information in a confusing enough manner that it it might mean no taxes.  I'm still not entirely sure -- but me needing to pay them is probably the way to bet.  But if it was a Roth...?  I don't know, especially since I get taxed if pull money out of the existing IRA, so doesn;t that make it a Roth?  I may have to go ask the bank, though the last time I did that, they tried to refinance my house and rope me into some high-risk/high yield investment scheme and it took a rather tense meeting with a couple of suits in nice offices to convince them that I do not like gambling, I do not want all my financial stuff in the same bank, and what I wanted was an account that going to still have some money in it even if Wall Street decided October, 1929 might be fun to replay.  The number of people I knew who had their retirement plans wiped out in the dotcom bust has me convinced it's better to plan poor and be able to collect on it.  Think of it as choosing known mild disappointment over lasting regret.)

     This is going to at least double my junk mail, mostly "retirement planners" and great deals on funeral services.  Since I plan to be cremated as cheaply as possible and have most of the dust dumped out at radio towers (some are really easy to get to -- just sneak in and pour it out!), and my "retirement planning" doesn't include enough surplus to pay a planner, it's all just more trash.

Easy Listening

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

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

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

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

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

Noem Out, Mullin In

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

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

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

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

Reefer Alliance

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

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

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

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

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

A Book And Some History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Five Minutes Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imperfection Of Justice

     Justice is imperfect.  We are, after all, only mortal, and that includes police, perpetrators, victims, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, juries and legislators.  Sometimes the malefactor gets away with it; sometimes the innocent are punished.

     Perfect justice is like a frictionless surface or an ideal gas: it doesn't exist.  It's an abstraction, useful for addressing general principles.

     A general principle can be more practical; for centuries now, Western legal traditions have emphasized caution and restraint, that it is "better that ten guilty go unpunished than one innocent person suffer."  Bleeding-heart nonsense, you say?  It predates the American Revolution; the Founders and Framers were well aware of it and applied it.

     Quotas of arrests and prosecutions are not compatible with that approach; tell traffic cops they need to write a dozen tickets a day, and they will; tell prosecutors they need to file ten cases a week and they will.  And when the Federal government says they're looking to denaturalize 100 to 200 naturalized U/ S. citizens a month?  They'll do their best.

     If they'd said they were planning on yanking the papers and kicking out naturalized citizens who had committed grievous crimes, nobody'd bat an eye -- in fact, when the initial crackdown on people in this country illegally was framed as going after people who'd committed serious offenses, it wasn't especially contentious.  (When it turned out that any crime at all, or even the most vague suspicion of crime sufficed, then debate became acrimonious).  But setting a quota means A) the lowest-hanging fruit goes first and B) the bar of what constitutes a sufficiently-grave crime will be raised and lowered to match the quota.

     Kick out the truly bad folks?  Fine. Kick out some arbitrary -- and far higher than previous practice -- number of naturalized citizens so you can "make the numbers?"  That's not justice; that's the philosophy of a sweatshop paying workers by the piece.  Except the sweatshop's got a final inspection process before they box up the product and ship it out.

How Does It Work Elsewhere?

     The Bulwark compares the health care system in Japan to ours.  We don't come off looking so great.

     I can only point out yet again that universal health care is apparently so terrifically difficult that the only modern, industrialized country that hasn't come up with some way (and there are many) to deliver it is...us.  If that was the cost of a few trips to the Moon, then, really, we should have stayed home.

Lessons For The Day

     First lesson, when recovering from a cold, Mandarin oranges are delicious -- and so are imported, dark-chocolate-covered cherries! (One of the first and, by an effort of will, only two of the second.)

     I managed to get to the grocery today, the first time I have left the house since last Saturday.

     Second lesson: Washington rarely gives you what you want.  The Epstein Files were released today -- almost entirely redacted.  Most of the blanked-for-declassification documents nuclear-weapons historian Alex Wellerstein unearths and FOIAs into the light have less blacked out on the page.  Yes, I said it: you can find out more about the once Top Secret U. S. plans to nuke the Moon than about most of the men in nice suits featured in photos in the Epstein Files, their faces entirely elided.

     It's sure nice the Great White Father in DC has managed to clear that up.

Is He Dumb, Or Does He Think We Are?

     I admit it: my views on health insurance/health care have changed.  Coming up with a system that ensures all citizens get adequate health care is apparently so incredibly difficult that every industrialized democracy (and larger autocracies) except the U.S. has figured it out, in several different ways.

     Rand Paul, talking about the expiring Obamacare subsidies on Meet The Press this morning, first complained, "It's the artificial demand  that has driven prices up," by which he apparently means the weakly-enforced requirement (not to mention general individual desire) that everyone buys insurance.  How is that an artificial demand?  Was the point to have more health care for more people, or to encourage the weak and poor to die off?  Because the second is what we had before ACA, and what we have a little less of now.

     But that logical glitch was nothing compared to what followed: asked what he would do, the Senator from Kentucky explained that his plan would "...let Americans buy their healthcare at CVS, at [list of large retailers], at Amazon, and when you have a million or more individuals, that's bigger than any corporation," quite sensibly implying that per-person costs would fall; a sufficiently large pool of people is statistically predictable, allowing the insurer to manage risk, and the more of them you've got in the pool, the better that's going to work.  It's a great idea -- and works even better as it is scaled up.  It'd be a real hum-dinger if the insured consisted of, oh, the entire population.

     Don't hold your breath.  Not for an insure-everyone plan, or even for bopping over to Walmart to pick up their nationally-sold health-insurance package during the post-Thanksgiving sale.  If you take a look at Open Secrets, the majority of the top five political contributors are insurance companies, hospital corporations, and pharmaceutical companies; healthcare and HMO's are in the top twelve.  They know who to schmooze in Washington, and exactly how.  Every part of healthcare has an ownership/administrative layer taking a cut, and they'd all like a bigger slice of the pie.  It forms a kind of financial ratchet, and an increase at any point results in every part of the network turning the dial up.  It's a mess because it is a mess; the ACA legislation tried to make it less messy without asking any part of it to accept a smaller slice and, unsurprisingly, all that did was bake the messiness in. 

     Maybe Rand Paul is right; maybe it'll take a "Category Killer" to do to the insurance/medical complex what they did to the office-supply store, the corner grocer, the independent drugstore and the five and dime.  But while those little enterprises got squashed like bugs, Here Be Dragons, and it may have to all fall apart before it can be remedied.

     I'm not holding my breath for that, either.

     Pie in the sky is lovely to look at, but it's not nutritious. 

Ah, Cleverness

     It would make me happy to have something witty to say about the demotion of the East Wing of the White House, and the monster of a ballroom that (supposedly) will rise in its place.  But I don't.

     The money for this work is coming from "private donors."  At the same time, the present government shutdown means SNAP and WIC coffers will -- probably -- run dry, just in time for Thanksgiving.  There's some private help, but it's pretty paltry compared to the big government programs.

     You don't have to believe that government food assistance programs are a good idea to understand that shutting them down abruptly is a bad idea.  It's a rugpull, just as the heating season is starting up.  It'd be one thing if Congress, after due debate, ramped them down, but this is, well, cruel.  And all the more so in the light of a lavish building project for the Presidential mansion.  It might be "The People's House," but don't count on getting in if you show up for dinner unexpectedly, no matter who's living there at the time.

     States and cities and private food charities are scrambling to make up the shortfall, but they're not going to have enough.  One of our local food banks has already extended help to Federal employees working without paychecks -- yes, they've opened the doors to the families of TSA agents -- so they're already under an extra burden.

     Somebody tell me how this is making us great again?

Jawboning

     "Jawboning" is not just rustic-sounding slang for idle talk; it's a term of art.  Specifically, it's when a person in a position of government power uses that power to lean on citizens.  It's considered an abuse of office and can even be a violation of the law.

     Jawboning is what FCC Chair Brendan Carr did to ABC over (intemperate at best and possibly tasteless) comments by comedian Jimmy Kimmel.  The precise comments don't matter.  You can go look them up, and depending on your politics, they may make your blood boil or elicit a shrug.  They're not especially funny, but that's how it goes with topical satire: not every bit lands.

     The FCC doesn't regulate networks.  They regulate individual TV and radio stations, most of which are owned by a handful of very large corporations -- large and hoping to get larger.  For them to grow any further, they're going to need FCC approval.  There are limits -- "ownership caps" -- on how many stations in a given market may be owned by a single company.  Nexstar, one of the largest, is in the middle of a huge merger with another big owner, and they'll need a new, higher cap.

     So when Brendan Carr went on a podcast and said, "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead," Nexstar was listening.  They announced the ABC stations they own weren't going to carry Kimmel's late-night talk show.  Sinclair, another big group owner, followed suit.  ABC responded by dropping Kimmel.

     ABC can do that.  They're his employer; if they don't want his show, they can (within contractual limits, and we can be sure attorneys for everyone involved are very, very busy right now) pull the plug.  Likewise, network affiliates are not necessarily required to carry every show the network shoves down the pipe (though, yet again, contacts and lawyers are involved).  The entity who crossed the line was the FCC Chairman, who was essentially saying, "Nice TV stations.  Be a shame if something happened to them," to individual ABC affiliates.  FCC regulations are many and complex; dig deep, and everyone's got something that might not be quite right.  "Give me the man and I'll give you the crime," or give him the station, in this case.

     It was jawboning.  In the Bible, mighty Samson beat a thousand men to death with the jawbone of an ass; here, a single ass is jawboning the giants of broadcasting to their knees over misfiring political humor.

     Is that really a good outcome?  And how will the next FCC Chairman use that power, if it goes unchallenged?   Even Brendan Carr once thought it was a problem, before he got control.

Try Harder

     Commenting, it would be nice if some of you'd look up how paying tariffs actually works, and if you want to ring in Marxists in connection with them (for pity's sake, why?), you might want to look up what Marx et al had to say about tariffs (not much; he wasn't even sure if he was for 'em, against them, or neutral.)  Don't take anyone's word for this, and if you slept though the part of History class where they talked about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, don't try to BS your way through; you can look it up, too, and get the gist in about ten minutes.  (tl;dr: it didn't do what it was intended to do.  Surprise!  But go see.)

     Likewise, if you want to talk about public media, you might want to be sure you know the difference and relationship between CPB, PBS and NPR.  CPB doesn't produce programming or run a network; claiming "their stuff" is "biased" is nonsensical.

     I keep buying ducks and buying ducks, and some people insist on eating the feathers and then complaining about the taste.

A Mighty Own Goal

     As I write this, the U. S. Senate is poised to pull the rug out from under funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the next couple of years.  CPB gets less than 0.01% of the Federal budget.  Oh, it's big money for you, me or your local factories, but it's still a rounding error compared to military expenditures, highways or servicing the Federal debt.  The House has already approved this recission, and the Senate just had a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Vance (wearing his President of the Senate hat, and I do wish the Framers had come up with a different title for the job) to keep the legislation moving.

     CPB is a Federally-funded private non-profit corporation that in turn funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) -- largely indirectly.  By law, they're only allowed to spend five percent of their budget on themselves -- salaries, staplers, coffee machines.  65% of their budget goes directly to public radio and TV stations, everything from tiny, one-man stations deep in the Alaskan wilds to massive operations like the WGBH stations in Boston.  About 25% goes to production companies, which make programs for public radio and TV.

     The big public stations have multiple income streams -- those annoying pledge drives, strings of grants, endowments and "underwriting" sponsorships.  NPR has been a political football for decades, and set out some time ago to ease off the Federal spigot; around one percent (1%) their funding comes directly from CPB.  PBS has taken similar steps, but -- television's spendy -- are more reliant on CPB.  There's a catch, though; I'll get back to that.

     The Trump administration doesn't think NPR and PBS are being fair to them, and that's why they want to defund CPB.  I have not noticed this in actual NPR news segments, those five-minute blocks at the top and/or bottom of the hour; they're radio newscasts, strictly limited for time and focused on things that are, in fact, newsworthy.  While they're a little more relaxed than the ABC "Contemporary" news of my youth and more buttoned-down than NBC's hipper "The Source" a decade later, NPR matches any of the old classic top-of-the-hour radio news, CBS, NBC, Mutual or what ABC branded as "The American Information Network."*  The long-form stuff has a much greater proportion of opinion to information, and both NPR and PBS have had controversies.  While CPB's rules have some sober language about balance and perspective, the Fairness Doctrine is long gone, and nobody benefited more from the ending of it than the political Right.

     But NPR and PBS are not living off CPB dollars.  NPR outright sells ads on their streaming services (it's legal), albeit delivered in the same subdued manner as their over-the-air underwriting announcements.  Nope, the CPB cuts hit local stations.  This does loop back around, and there's the catch: in the indirect way networks operate in the U. S., member stations pay the networks, and between a quarter and a third of the funding for NPR and PBS comes from membership and programming fees those stations pay.  The big stations will tighten their belts, lay off janitors and newspeople, and keep on keeping on; they'll probably drop some programs, too.  But those tiny little stations, in Alaska or Montana or wherever, in backwater towns where the commercial AM station went dark and the FM got moved to the nearest sizable city?  Their local NPR station, over at the State School of Cow Mining (etc.), is the only source of local news and weather warnings, and it's got a staff of three, or two, or one: they don't have any janitors to lay off.  Those stations rely on CPB money to meet payroll, rent tower space and pay the power bill, and when it goes away--  Hey, maybe the Cow-Mining College or the Town Board will kick in a few more bucks, for old time's sake -- if they can afford it.  And if not?  Well, gee.  Better buy a NOAA weather radio, if you can pick up one of their low-power stations. (Kinda thin in some states.)

     Those small towns, those rural spaces, they're not generally hotbeds of big-city liberalism, and neither are their radio stations.  They're red spots on red maps -- and they'll be hardest hit. 

     The CPB cuts are an own goal.  NPR and PBS stations -- the survivors -- will have less reason to toe the Federal government's line, and more reason to be fractious.  
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* Speaking of money and news -- post WW II, U.S. radio networks were, by law, singular.  NBC had previously operated multiple networks, with NBC Red and NBC Blue at the forefront; they had to spin off Blue, which became ABC.  ABC started out in fourth place, behind NBC, CBS and Mutual -- Blue network had always been something of a "second string" network for NBC.  By the late 1960s, with radio losing badly to television, ABC came up with a way around the law, becoming not one but four radio news services over the same physical network: they offered different newscasts around the hour, each one suited to a different radio format; Information at the top of the hour, very conventional radio news suitable for middle-of-the road and all-news formats; FM and Entertainment at :15 (or :45, it's been awhile) and half-past the hour, both more relaxed and quiet, and Contemporary, available as a fast-paced two-minute newscast at ten til the hour and a five-minute newscast that ran from :55 to the top of the hour.  If it sounds a little crazy, it was -- but it meant ABC could have as many as four stations in a given town all carrying an ABC newscast, with lovely, paid ABC commercials in each one; and it meant ABC offered specialized news products the other three networks did not.  To my larger point, the actual content of these newscasts was almost identical: news is news, war, famine and natural disaster, and you got largely the same on-the-scene soundbites from all four versions.  The style of delivery differed; the focus varied slightly, especially when it came to celebrity items.

An Organization Not Known For Surprise; Numbers That Will Remain Officially Unknown

     So the new Pope is an American by birth, though he most recently spent many years serving in Peru.  Like his predecessor, the first Pope from the New World, he is likely to bring a different perspective to his Church.  Nevertheless, and despite wild talk of the political leanings of the man, bear in mind that his Church has lasted longer than even the most generous read of the lifespan of the Roman Empire, and that as a result, it is institutionally conservative in a way few (if any) other organizations even come close to.

     Don't get pulled into the speculation.  This was a routine (if major) event, one that has happened many times before.
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     Elsewhere, the Trump Administration has announced they will no longer be determining, sharing or tracking the price tag of damage done by large-scale natural disasters.  Combined with an ongoing push to diminish the the role and functions of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), this might have the effect of minimizing the impact of news about such disasters, and possibly reducing voluntary contributions -- except, of course, that insurance companies (and many state governments) gather such data, share it with one another and often release it publicly; also "if it bleeds, it leads" in news coverage, and nothing bleeds headline ink and newscast opening video like a big disaster.

     Hurricane season, tornado season and wildfire season will be interesting this year.  Pretending a thing isn't there doesn't make it go away.  Never has, never will.

Report Card Due

     The next set of U.S. GDP numbers will be released in a few days.  On March 27th, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will look back at 2024 and the numbers for the fourth quarter of that year.

     A month later, at the end of April, the earliest look at GDP for the first quarter of 2025 will be released.  This doesn't quite provide an apples-to-apples comparison, but it'll be numbers that can be held up side-by side.  There is one caveat: the Trump Administration plans to remove the kinds of government spending that are normally included in the formula, and I'm not sure if that's happening for the numbers to be released this month or if it will be introduced in April.

     It has never included some of the biggest chunks of "government money" -- transfer payments like Social Security don't go into the math.  But the government spending is not small; The U. S. went from -9.3% growth in four years under Herbert Hoover to +10.1% in twelve years under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the huge bump comes from 1941 - 43: WW II spending.

     So we'll see what comes out, and what the pundits think it might mean.  BEA is filled with exactly the kinds of math, statistics and economist geeks you'd hope it would be, and they love to share their numbers.  There will be plenty to look at.

     (Speaking of GDP and industry, how many of you have read of Samuel Slater?  Oh, we all learned about Eli Whitney, who turned cotton -- and, somewhat inadvertently, slavery -- into an industry, but once you have the fiber, it's still got to be spun, and it was Slater who got the U. S. into the business of spinning on an industrial scale and helped fill New England with mills.)

I'm Just Watching

     The more I pay attention to the news, the weirder it all gets.  I'm just watching, waiting to see what's next.

     If you put the events in U. S. politics of the past few months in a novel, you'd be accused of hackwork, melodrama, stuff that wouldn't pass muster in a penny dreadful.

Forget It

     I admit it: I have lost all hope for the immediate future.  Things will continue to get worse, not better, and the most we can hope for is a valiant rearguard action against a rising tide of not just authoritarianism, but ignorant, meme-level authoritarianism.

     The future is here and it is staggeringly stupid.

     At 66, I may not live to see the end of it, especially if the current Administration crashes the economy or stumbles into a world war.  Even if all they manage to do is hose Social Security, Medicare and ACA-driven insurance markets, they'll do me real harm.

     This is not to say our Federal bureaucracy is a model of perfection; it's messy.  It's slow.  It is undoubtedly wasteful -- but you don't fix that with a handful of 20-something software engineers and deep, uninformed cuts.

     Every government that has prided itself on "efficiency" has been heedless of human cost, indifferent to human suffering, injurious to individual freedom and dignity.  The Trump Administration's unwarranted vandalism to USAID has already cost lives and will cost many more.  They're dinking with the military, with the VA, with Education, and they're lurching towards a Constitutional crisis with the potential to do immense harm.

     And some of you are still cheering for this.

     Me, I'm resigned to hanging on with no prospect of a better life and scant odds it will stay even as good as it is.

     You wanted King Stork.  Well, you got him.