What Are The Odds

     What, do you suppose, are the chances that a man who still denies he lost an election to the Presidency and incited a (dimwitted) insurrection to stop it after running through a great many legal-system gambits will try a rugpull on midterm elections that are likely to cost his party at least one house of the legislature and maybe both?

     This guy figures it's a likely bet.  He's probably right; losing will be somewhere between personally frustrating to catastrophic for the incumbent, who is not a man who will put up with that.  What form i will take and how well the effort is likely to succeed, that's another set of questions.

     We'll find out.

"We're All Looking For The Person Responsible...."

     Who's most likely to commit politically-motivated violence, the Left or the Right?

     It is unlikely to surprise you that the answer is "people askew from reality," close to a wash between Republican-or-farther-right and Democrat-or-leftier, with "fricking incoherent" in close third place.

     Most people, including the ones with political opinions that many Americans find reprehensible, know you can't assassinate your way to a better world, and a little selective murder produces only more dead people and grieving families.  While major political upheaval often involves killings, it doesn't work the other way (and most Americans are not looking for major upheaval -- again, not even a majority of the ones you disagree with most).

     Don't get sucked into the nitwittery.

Yeah, Nothing Saturday

      I was busy with the fiction critique group -- those folks are good writers and getting steadily better -- and the news has done nothing to disabuse me of the belief that we've gotten ourselves locked into the dumbest timeline.

     This morning (1:30 a.m., really the middle of the night), the Secret Service shot and killed a time traveler nutjob man who'd got inside the security perimeter at Mar-A-Lago carrying a shotgun and a gas can and didn't surrender when confronted.  The President has been rather publicly in Washington, DC this weekend, the club has Head-of-State level physical security layered atop the usual "private resort for the insanely wealthy" stuff and the U. S. Secret Service is known to be very good at what they do, which makes the entire thing fractally dumb.  (Unless, I suppose, he was targeting some other member of the exclusive club, in which case it's just ordinarily stupid, though on a grand scale.  But how likely is that?)

     Moral consistency and my own crazy notions both insist that heads of state (etc.) ought not be assassinated.  Oh, I think a lot of them are crooks, fools or villains; when it comes to U. S. Presidents and members of Congress alone, I've got lists and lists of them who should have been hauled up on various charges, tried and, if convicted, punished as the law requires.  A few of them were even run through parts of the process, though I think not nearly enough.

     Don't tell me those politicians should be above the law or immune from prosecution, "so they'll be free to make hard decisions;" that's let-George-do-it irresponsibility; it's lazy bullshit.  Presidents and Congress can equip young men (and women) with explosives and firearms and send them off in the middle of the night, singly or en masse, to breach defenses and do harm to people and property, and deciding to do so should not be undertaken lightly nor free from consequences.  If it's wrong to undertake such actions against a heavily defended Head of State, it's even more wrong when done to any more vulnerable target.  They ought to think it over and be answerable for it on multiple levels when they do wrong.

     But, hey, dumbest timeline: I don't expect things to get any better or make more sense any time soon.  We're stuck in this chair for the entire duration of the root canal and the only way to get through it is to go through it.  I hope it doesn't hurt too much.

Not In The Job Parameters

     U.S forces, by Presidential directive, are stacking up within striking distance of Iran -- and look, he can do that, shuffle the U. S. military around on U.S. soil, the open sea and (by agreement) the territory of our allies.  The job includes "Commander in Chief," after all.

     What no President can do -- Republican, Democrat, Whig or George Washington standing clear of parties in disgust -- is start or declare a war.  That's up to Congress, the majority of whose members have to worry about re-election in the very near term, whose consensus contains the aggregate wisdom of 535 men and women (stop laughing).

     Of course you wouldn't know that from the way our current President is talking about it, as he opens the first meeting of his "Board of Peace."  Nope, he says we'll know his plans for using armed forces against Iran in a week or ten days.

     That ain't how it works.  I'm sure my comment filters will get a few "Nuh-unh, he can, too, and besides [other President] did it."  I don't care.  The ones who have pulled that kind of trick in the past were also in the wrong, and the incumbent has already broken the rules by kidnapping a foreign head of state in a military incursion.  It doesn't matter that the guy they grabbed was a bad guy; it doesn't matter if he was helping out drug smugglers, masterminding the whole drug-gang show or, despite being a bloody-handed autocrat busy running his country into the ground, had stood well clear of the whole dope thing: other countries still aren't supposed to send soldiers in and grab him.  Ya don't do it.  There is -- well, there was -- a rules-based international order; there are ways to line up a criminal leader for arrest and trial (and yes, they're pretty toothless as long as he or she is careful where they go visiting) but they do not include TV plots from Mission: Impossible or The A-Team.

     Russia, the smallest and weakest of what passes for a Great Power these days -- and they wouldn't even be one, without the nuke in their teeth and the mad gleam in their eye -- has been hacking away at the notion of having rules for the game ever since they grabbed the Crimean peninsula.  Red China would like to (little matter of Taiwan), but all their neighbors are watching.  Our President shouldn't be picking up an axe and joining in.

     But he has been and he still is.  In a better timeline, Congress would be straining at the reins, digging its heels like a mule.  This Congress is more like a Pomeranian purse-dog: yappy and occasionally it makes a smelly little mess in there, but mostly it's just riding along.

Let's Total It Up

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

     Make-believe economics?  Check.

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

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

     Intimidating the Press into compliance?  Check.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discontinuity

     Ever bend a hard plastic rod?  Many plastics will go quite a ways, and then, all of a sudden--  They break. 

     Mr. Trump's Republican party is courting chaos like a lovestruck teenager.

     In Missouri, both sides were playing chess -- until one side pulled out a baseball bat.  The legislature passed a bill to rearrange Federal House districts, with a map that will flip one of the two usually-Democratic districts in favor of Republicans.  Opponents fought back, with a ballot-initiative petition drive to put the new map up for a statewide vote.  You can do that in Missouri, but it takes a pile of signatures, and they've got to come from at least six of the state's eight House districts. 

     In fact, it takes a tick over 100,000 signatures.  The petitioners have collected well over 300,000, from all eight districts.  So it'll almost certainly go on the ballot, and per established precedent, the law is frozen once enough signatures have been turned in, while Missourians wait until it is determined if the signature requirements have officially been met, and until they've had a chance to vote on it if the number beat the minimum.

     The Republican Secretary of State says no; even if there are enough signatures, he can just declare the referendum unconstitutional all by himself.  And if so, the whole thing goes off the courts to work out.  It's not how the Show Me state has dealt with similar referenda in the past.  The power to shout, "Allee, allee, oxen-free," and dump the process has never been asserted by the Missouri Secretary of State before.  It seems, well, not the way a proper Republic goes about such things.  It's high-handed.  Authoritarian.

     In a state whose citizens are nationally famous for mulishness, it might not be the course of action that a sober, cautious politician should choose.

     I guess we'll find out.  Bending, bending--  Whattaya think?  Snap, or will it stay bent?  And what gets that treatment next?

     It feels like the lights are about to start going out, like the walls are closing in.  There's a lot of ruin in a big, well-established country, but there's no damn requirement to test that proposition to destruction.

House-To-House Incivility

     I saw the film "Civil War" last night and...wow. Reviewers got it wrong; they focused on the lack of clarity in who's rebelling and over what (we barely know the first and never learn the second*).  Genuine soldiers on both sides come off okay; the danger is always from combatants with no flag.

     On one level, the basic plot is "A Star Is Born" with street combat; on another, the divided future, with real war burning, people far behind the lines ignoring it, power cuts and water shortages nearer the lines, with quiet atrocities and fighters hardened to them feels only too real and only too likely.  This is the future some of our fellow citizens think they want, bloody, divided and lawless, where "what kind of American are you?" is a life or death question and it's fatal to be too foreign in the wrong place at the wrong time.

     Arguably, the ending is a little too easy -- but it's miles and years from the ending of the larger (and, I hope, fictional) story it is told within, a story whose beginnings we never learn but can see all around us, a story written in blood and fire and loss.  This deadly chaos is the enemy, even more than the politicians and fools who long for it.  If it comes, it will leave damage for generations afterward.† I'm no longer sure we will prevent it but we had damned well better try.
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* There are vague hints that suggest water issues in the states mentioned as seceding -- California, Texas and Florida -- and the film shows water shortages in New York city; but water appears plentiful elsewhere and prolific water use sets the tone for a visit to a town largely untouched by war.  While Washington, DC is said to be a place where journalists are shot on sight and the movie's President is apparently a bad guy, we only hear him uttering broad and harmless platitudes in speeches while refusing to hold talks with advancing secessionist forces.  Who started the fighting, over what, and who made it worse rather than negotiating an end is simply beside the point of the story.
 
 † Most American lack recent experience of war, or even recent experience of the scars warfare leaves behind.  Most of the real Civil War's battlegrounds are softly eroded and grown over, a century and a half later.  Look at Ukraine, look at Gaza; look and ask yourself what it's going to take to fix just the physical damage, if and when.

Too Far Out

      As nearly as I can figure, the President of the United States is waging low-grade war on some parts of the United States.

     I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.  I'm pretty sure "Nacht und Nebel" was never U.S. domestic policy.  Or at least it didn't used to be.

     But I'm so old-fashioned and out of touch that I didn't think Presidents could suspend freedom of speech, so what do I know?

     I'm working on a short story.  Fiction.  The fascts, er, facts are too darned hard to look at for very long at a time.

Utter Nutjobbery

     In a piece of propaganda better suited to Joe McCarthy's Red Scare or worse, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is vowing to go after "Leftist terrorists" in a news release almost too unhinged to be believed.  But it's as real as any of Stalin's purges, and you do have to wonder just how far he and men like him are willing to go.

     Here in the real world, almost every one of these political assassins and mass killers are lone wolves,* most of them espousing incoherent notions that barely fit any category of political ideology.  In recent years, a preponderance have leaned more Right than Left, but in either direction, their notions are a far cry from any Republican or Democrat platform.  Their ideas are generally, well, unhinged.  And if AG Paxton was merely one nut chasing after a whole sackful of them, I'd ignore his release as unworthy of adult attention; but he's got the entire might and credence of the state of Texas behind him, and woe betide any loudmouthed fools who come to his attention.

     This is going to come to blood, by and by, and I think the forces of Trumpism, of American authoritarianism, are longing for it.  It does not take two willing participants for that particular tango and so here we are, with the Sword of Damocles one hand of a steadily ticking clock.

     I wish I had not been born into such times.
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* I have written about this before: murderous madmen have an advantage.  Most people who struggle with sanity are harmless; most of the violently-inclined are more dangerous to themselves than anyone else. But the sober, serious men and women who work to protect at-risk individuals and society as a whole are focused on predictable threats, not someone who kills over harsh words, perceived slights or because they got up on the wrong side of the bed.  And while all conspiracies leak, an individual acting alone is difficult to spot before they strike.

Yes And No

      At a recent press conference in Texas in the aftermath of the shooting of ICE detainees by a criminal (who appears to be a nihilist without partisan ideology -- literally, just there for the violence), U. S. Senator Ted Cruz decried violence and I agree: don't go shooting people, especially not law enforcement.  Not only is it wrong, they've got an effectively unlimited supply reserves; shooting at them is just fancy suicide.  It's not effective opposition.

     But there's some evidence this shooter's political motive, if we can dignify it as that, was simply to make things worse.

     So there's that.  Ted Cruz and I are in agreement: don't go shooting people.  I believe just about everyone agrees.

     The Senator also implied, strongly, that we're obliged to respect law enforcement officers, and there, we part company.  Oh, it's a good idea to treat them with what amounts to respect; no other arm of government can do you more immediate harm.  Further, the majority of LEOs are decent folks, working a very difficult job.  But gangs of masked men, in motley scraps of uniform, badge numbers covered if they're wearing a badge at all, grabbing people off the streets on vague suspicion like the bad guys in a straight-to-video movie or cheap video game?  I'm not obliged to respect that.  It's not respectable behavior.  It's not how any of us were brought up to expect police to act.  I certainly fear it; it looks like a gang kidnapping, and those are things to fear.  The Senator can claim it's okay-fine and any red-blooded American ought to cheer it on, but I don't think it is and I won't cheer for it.  I want 'em to act like proper cops, with proper warrants and a proper respect for their fellow humans.

     I sure don't think anyone ought to be sniping at them.  That's plain wrong.  That's bad-guy behavior.  No, it's worse-guy behavior.  The proper response to a Federal law enforcement agency that's behaving like a gang of masked bandits is to vote in Senators, Representatives, President and Vice President who will make them stop that.  The fix for lawlessness is not more lawlessness, until we end up in a frikkin' Judge Dredd comic book.  The fix is more lawfulness, and that comes from the top down.

     Why, it could start with something as simple as a U. S. Senator with an inside track to his Party's leadership, standing up and telling them, "Enough is enough."

     I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to happen.  And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is demonstrating his party's concern for lawfulness, telling Sean Hannity a few days ago, "Trump 2028.  I hope this never ends."  Yes, he's pressing for a third term, despite that pesky 22nd Amendment limiting Presidents to two at-bats and no more.  Ted, Lindsey?  Respect starts at the top.  Try respecting the U.S. Constitution.

Us, Them And The Excluded Third

     The problem with two-value logic is that it doesn't scale directly.  It's a handy way to build small widgets; relay logic, TTL and CMOS have been a backbone of my work for decades.  It's great basis for computers, but to get anything done, you have to lay in a machine language and start clocking data and instructions through the hardware; to do anything big, you need to stick a more human-parsable language on top, with an operating system to shovel in coal and an assembler to turn your code into ones and zeros.

     Likewise, out in the world of human interaction, if you want to draw one line down the presumable middle and call one side Us and the other side Them, it doesn't scale worth a damn.  Worse yet, it sticks everyone from your cousin who thinks the rate of social change is too high (and what's with all the pronouns?) to militia members bursting from the back of a rental truck to beat up Pride paraders on one side, and your Granny who wants to have Social Security and Medicare expanded (and why are rich people not taxed more?) to a mob of anarchists, Leftists and looters along for the grabbing taking over a town center on the other.  Cousin and Granny aren't into the violence, despite harsh words at the Thanksgiving table, and they don't approve of it, either.

     Even all that and everything in between manages to leave out the real problem, the real enemy of civil discourse: the muddy thinkers who believe they can assassinate their way to a better world.  Go back to the previous paragraph: even the worst of 'em, Left and Right, aren't directly out to kill.  Intimidate, silence, drive out, injure, steal?  They're often okay with that, and it's not good.  Some of 'em would like to trigger widespread conflict.  But it takes a sharply bent mind to murder like lightning from a cloudless sky.

     When a prominent public figure gets shot, or people in a supermarket or school (etc.), we want it to make sense.  We want the shooter to not be someone from "our" side.  (I sure do!)  Quite often, when the malefactor's politics are known, they're garbled, but yeah, they lean one way or the other.  (And it's a mix if you look at 'em all.)  Nevertheless, the essential difference is, that person thought they could improve their world through murder -- and nearly everyone around you, all of your fellow citizens, the religiously devout and the scoffers, the Left and the Right, the politically active and the people who ignore it, do not agree. Even most of the worst of Us -- and Them -- don't agree.

     There are arguments and frantic sweeping-under-rugs about which "side" is the most violent, including a DOJ report that got yanked from their website.  The reality is, most people are not violent; most politically-active people are not violent, and even most of the persons at the far fringes of Right and Left that do endorse violence draw the line short of assassination and mass murder.  Most people with strong feelings would rather yell at one another, vote at one another, wave signs at one another.  Some of them will throw punches and rocks, break windows, start fires.  And yet they still stop short of killing.

     Trying to pin the blame on political opponents, and then painting that entire side as supporters of it, is false logic.  It's not who they are.  It's not even who the worst of them are.  It serves to legitimize increased political violence in return; it makes all of Us -- and Them -- worse.  And the excluded third category, lone wolves divorced from normal logic, normal social strictures, normal morality and ethics, are still around, like sparks from a fire.  We can pour water on the sparks -- or gasoline.

Prediction

     I continue to condemn violence against people -- even ones who ideas I despise -- who are running their mouth and otherwise engaging in normal, peaceful political activity.  In a contest of ideas within a free democracy, violence has no place.

     The most recent assailant, when they catch him, may claim political motivation, but he (or she, or they) will most likely turn out to be like the vast majority of these killers, a person obsessed with high-profile murderers, and their primary purpose will have been to make themselves famous.  They'll be someone who lives in the borderlands between sanity and insanity.  Such people -- and the half-baked notions they espouse -- don't deserve serious consideration as anything but criminals.

     Politicians often seek to exploit these crimes (or more accurately, the public's reaction) to further their own interests.  They will seek to boost whatever cause or program they were already favoring.  Others will express sincere sympathy, and I trust them a little more than their opportunistic peers.  Both the sincere and self-serving/cause-serving reactions can be found all across the political spectrum.

     Less universally, for every high-profile death, there are barbarians who will express glee.  It's unseemly.  Ungracious.  You can dislike or disagree with a man's ideas -- or even the man himself -- without dancing in his blood when he is killed.

     When the most recent attacker is hunted down, he (etc.) is going to be one more warped flake hyped on nihilistic fame, just like the vast majority of similar murderers. 

     Update: the killer is still not found, and my in-house subject-matter expert reminds me that the late Charlie Kirk had critics to the Right as well as to the Left, many of them extremists who decried his lack of antisemitism.  So the killer's screed -- of which there will probably be one -- is as likely to lean that way as the other; the "No enemy to the (Left or Right, depending on the speaker)," types should bear in mind that most shades of political opinion have foes who are even farther in their own direction; the only ones who don't are so far out that they're off the map.
     The other point that merits bearing in mind is that a 200-yard rifle shot is not, in fact, all that far or difficult; hunters and U. S. Marines routinely do this with stock AR-15s and hunting rifles, however James Bond it sounds to you or me.  It's a chilling reality.

What Day Is It?

      It's Star Trek day, among other things, the day the first episode of the series aired on NBC, the first step in a long cultural arc that took science fiction from being that crazy stuff your parents razzed you for watching and your English teacher despaired of you reading* to a cherished institution featuring Star Wars day every May and Star Trek day as summer comes to an end.

     Fun stuff, but it's a reminder that every day is History Day.†  I was reminded of that more forcefully while listening to a radio news piece from Kyiv this morning, covering the Russian drone strikes in that city.  The reporter had been awakened in the night by the sound of incoming Sahed drones and recorded parts of her story with the engines of the weapons throbbing in the background.  It's an eerie sound, and reminds me of Edward R. Murrow of CBS, broadcasting live from a London rooftop during the Blitz.‡  Or, much later in that war, the guttural buzz and sudden halt of an incoming V-1.

     We're in the run-up to World War III, or at least to a wider European War.  This time, America First holds the White House and Congress; Zelenskyy is no Churchill, nor is Putin Hitler: history does not repeat.  But it does rhyme, and the present verses carry a familiar rhythm.

     I hope I'm wrong, but there's a chill in my bones that freezes optimism.
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*Not quite a decade later, my high school offered a class on "Science Fiction."  But the English department was pretty desperate, in that huge Sports, Shop and (slightly) Math-heavy high school.  My Dad, on the other hand, never stopped regarding it as silly stuff, unworthy of adult interest.  He preferred Westerns.
 
† Is there a History Day?  Well, yes and no.  It's not just one day.
 
‡ At first, BBC didn't want him up there, and refused use of the roof of their main studio location, Broadcast House, fearing Germans might use the sound to fine-tune their bombing.  Eventually, someone realized the value of broadcasting live coverage of the attacks, and British resolve in the face of them, to the then-neutral United States.

Cease Fi-- Incoming!

     In the wake of the U.S. bombing of several nuclear-work sites in Iran, there was supposed to be a cease-fire between Iran and Israel.  The President of the U.S. said so.

     Their militaries don't appear to have gotten the message.  I don't know if their governments have.  Each is accusing the other of going back on the agreement.

     I'm not chortling at Mr. Trump's disappointment (he was chiding the Israelis on social media not long ago).  I'm certainly not cheering on the conflict; it is messy, with missiles, bombs and drones striking civilians along with their (presumed) military targets, in a region already filled with tragedy.

     Who ever calmed a hornet's nest by shaking it?

Ah, The Question

     Is it "monkeywrenching" if it has nothing to do with environmental activism, and isn't strictly illegal but just a little sand in the juggernaut's gears?

     Probably more polite to leave Edward Abbey's term for his destructive friends to use, and find some other name, like "malicious compliance."

Darwin Doesn't Need Your Help

     Channel-surfing this morning, on three separate occasions I happened on an NBC reporter, live from the latest big wildfire in southern California.

     She was about as close to the fire as she could get, with smoke drifting through and hints of flame in the background.  The report had "B-roll" shots from even closer, nightmarish images.

     But what kept giving me the shivers was the immediate background for the live report: A downed high-tension power line, the pole slanting away from the viewer's lower left to center screen, with a couple of crossarms making a steeper angle from lower right to upper left, big insulators gleaming, fat cables in slack catenaries crossing behind her making a dramatic scene--

     Dramatic and potentially fatal.  A downed live power line does not always arc, smoke or hum.  Electricity itself has no color, no smell, no sound.  Not every inert-looking wire is dead.  Power companies do not protect the high-voltage lines with the kinds of fuses and circuit breakers that trip once and stay off until reset.  They use "reclosers:" gadgets that open on a fault, wait some set amount of time, re-energize and try again, over and over.  It takes less human intervention and most faults -- a swinging branch, an incautious squirrel, a Mylar balloon -- will clear themselves.  Your lights at home flicker a little, maybe go out and come right back on.

     You not only can't tell if a downed power line is live or not, you can't even count on it to stay off!  California electric utilities routinely shut off power in lines feeding fire zones, especially if there's an evacuation.  They (somewhat reluctantly) shut them off in high-risk areas during fire season; power grids allow a certain amount of re-routing, though it takes extra effort.  Re-routing can light up a previously-off downed line, too; there's nothing magical about monitoring a power grid and the central control at even the most up-to-date utilities have only a limited picture of what's going on.

     The voltage gradient from a downed power line tapers off gradually with distance, in a logarithmic or inverse-square way.  The current is limited by the resistance of the soil, and current  across a resistor gives us a voltage differential.  The reality of this rough math means if you're too close, even standing with your feet too far apart can be fatal.  Holding onto a microphone connected to a wire plugged into a camera that is itself connected to a van some distance away will be fatal if the juice comes back on.  Oh, maybe she's got a wireless mic; maybe the camera is plugged into a video-over-cellular backpack.  Maybe -- and even then, maybe a long step to get back to the news van and make ready for her next live report will be her last.

     In most TV markets, the news photographers (don't call 'em "cameramen," they're photojournalists), any tech who runs a remote truck and as many live-news reporters as can be rounded up and made to hold still for an hour are subjected to regular training sessions on the dangers of overhead* and downed power lines.  The industry didn't used to do 'em, but a string of fatal and near-fatal accidents over thirty years ago caused our insurance carriers to insist.  The NBC crew ought to know better.  I hope they don't learn better the hard way.
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* Overhead?  Way up there?  Yes indeed.  For a terrestrial microwave link, those trucks carry tall pneumatic masts that will easily reach power lines -- if the operator was fool enough to park under them.  Filling in on an ENG shift, I was once waved into a spot at the State Fairgrounds, started the mast up, grabbed a reel of audio/video cable and stepped out of the truck to run it into the venue -- only to look up and see they'd put me right under a ridiculously low power drop.  I darned near broke a wrist, flailing for the air compressor shutoff, and had a short, heated discussion with the well-meaning Fairgrounds worker.

Margaret Atwood Says She's Not A Prophet

     Indeed, Ms. Atwood says The Handmaid's Tale drew on historical and (then) contemporary events -- which is one of the reasons she, somewhat sniffily, eschews being lumped in with "Science Fiction."  It's also one of the reasons I, somewhat sniffily, have shelved that book with my other science fiction books: all SF is, in one way or another, linked to current and past events, and to the writer's perception of them.

     You can read The Handmaid's Tale as a warning -- just as you can Le Guin's The Dispossessed; and they both warn about the harm caused by trying to hammer everyone into the same mold and the endless cruelties we inflict on one another when we don't stop to think and to care.

     The lesson is the same: Live however you choose -- but don't force the weird people across the road or the dull people next door to live the way you do.  Treat other people politely; you're not obliged to respect their choices but you don't get to be a jerk about it, nor do they about your choices.

     Otherwise, you're locked into an endless cycle of mutual retribution that will harm innocents every time the wheel turns.  "Oh," you may complain, "But look how it enrages those who disagree with me."  And with that, you have put yourself next to the Carthaginians as Roman historians described them, shoveling babies into the fire to ensure prosperity and victory.

     It's not worth so horrific a price.  It never is.

DEI Didn't Do It

     Elon Musk and others on the Right have decided to blame "DEI" for the California wildfires getting so out of control, or possibly for happening at all.

     That part of California has fires every winter.  They've got native plants that produce seeds that won't even germinate unless they're been through a fire, so you can't claim it's not normal.  And every so often, there's a winter there in which the Santa Ana winds aren't the usual 25 to 35 mph, but much higher.

     If there's any kind of white guy special knowledge and skill, or secret science, or for that matter magic, voodoo, prayers, incantations or handwavium that can counter fires being pushed through dry vegetation by winds of 80 mph and up, in a region of scarce water, I'm pretty sure California firefighters would like to hear about it.  But there is, in fact, no level of training, staffing or demographic adjustment that amounts to a hill of beans against what firefighters there are facing.  What they need is water, far more of it than any fire-hydrant system can deliver, and the way they usually get it is from airplanes and helicopters.  You can't fly 'em in 80+ mph winds; you can't scoop up water in winds that high and you can't drop it with any accuracy in winds that high.  Wind speeds have fallen a little and they are now dumping as much water on the fires as they can, as quickly as they can, and nobody is downchecking pilots for being too pale, too dark, too butch or too femme.  It's tricky flying and they'll take anyone who can do it.

     So some fire departments in LA County spent their downtime looking at demographics and trying to recruit firefighters from groups presently under-represented in the firefighting staff?  So what.  If they ended up with a few more who spoke the various languages spoken in their districts, or more familiar with the neighborhoods, great.  Fighting fires is hard work, and it doesn't pay all that well for the amount of risk and effort it involves.  If you're worried some nice white Christian boy is missing out on those sweet, sweet fireman jobs 'cos a dark-skinned pagan lesbian from across the sea edged him out, you're nuts.

Tragic Start To 2025

     Like you, I'm monitoring the reports from the truck-ramming attack in New Orleans that has killed at least ten people and injured over thirty.  The bare facts are about all that has been released to the public.  It is known to have been a deliberate act, not a drunk or incapacitated driver.  The FBI is on the scene and is investigating it as a probable act of terrorism.

     There are, in fact, a lot of State and Federal agencies at work on this in the French Quarter, and during the first news conference this morning, MayorLaToya Cantrell used an interestingly specific term, referring to the "unified command."

     That tells me that it's not chaos; it's from the Incident Command System, originally developed to coordinate public safety agencies fighting wildfires in California, but adopted and greatly expanded by FEMA, which had already learned the hard way what doesn't work.  ICS does work, and pretty much anyone in a position of command at a public safety agency has at least had the short course on how to work it.  I've taken the online version -- it was required in order to be certified to access the various sites where my employer has equipment, during an emergency situation.

     "Unified Command" comes right out of ICS, and lets me know that the highest-ranking members on the scene from every responding agency are metaphorically -- and probably literally -- sitting around the same table, pooling information, setting shared objectives and timetables, and sorting out who does what, within a framework they're all already familiar with.  It's a tool that prevents conflict and avoids wasted or duplicated effort, designed (perhaps uniquely, as things fed.gov go) to be flexible.  Internal chains of command are not disrupted: your boss is still your boss, but he (or his boss) is in steady contact with the bosses of every other department or agency working the incident.

     ICS command staff numbers expand and contract as the situation requires, task-oriented rather than position-oriented.  One person might wear many hats, or only one.  They may have a subsidiary staff or work solo.  And there are rules of thumb for figuring that out.  At its best, it's staggeringly effective; even when it's just clunking along, it ensures that the people out at the leading edge have ways to resolve conflict that run through their own communications and land in the laps of someone who can work it out with his or her opposite number(s).

     The system's working in New Orleans right now.  It's not magical, but it ensures FBI, the NOPD and the Louisiana State Police (etc.) are all on the same page.  There probably won't be a whole lot of details released to the Press until this evening; the next press conference* will be at noon and I don't expect to learn more from it than an update on the killed and injured, and perhaps early details on the perpetrator.  But the Mayor's use of one uncommon term has told me that the response is coordinated and organized, with clear goals.  They'll figure this crime out.
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* "Public Information Officer" is one of the defined jobs of the ICS Command Staff, and you may see a spokesperson or just a quiet coordinator in the background of the next news conference, but count on someone having the official details, probably an FBI agent; the rest of whoever will be there are only present because it is expected of them -- Mayor, probably the police chief and so on.

A Reminder

      It's "Move fast and break things," not "Move fast and break people."