On "Obstructionism"

     People -- in the media and everyday types online -- decry "obstructionism" in politics, as though a failure to march shoulder-to-shoulder was some kind of failing in Federal, State or local government.

     It's not.  It's baked right in to the way our system of government is set up, and not by accident.  This country was created by and for a large group of people with disparate -- indeed, divergent -- ideas.  It's why the Bill of Rights lists things the government is supposed to keep its hands off -- including some vague, sweeping language about how if it's not mentioned, Uncle Sam can't fiddle with it.  The three branches of the Federal government are each set up to thwart, stymie, slow and trip up one another.  None of this is an accident or an oversight; it's done to keep us from riding roughshod over one another.

     It's not perfect.  It's not even all that successful at limiting government, though it does a better job of that than any other approach.  It's definitely not efficient.  It wasn't meant to be.  The fed.gov is not stamping out blivets or growing cotton; our elected and appointed pols aren't foremen (forepeople?) or overseers, and thank whatever big thanking-thing you like for that!  --And thank the clever, flawed men who drew up the Constitution and the men and women who amended it.

     Yeah, you didn't get everything you hoped from the Feds, and you got lots of stuff you didn't want.  So does everyone else.  The problem isn't that it's not efficient or united enough -- the problem is they didn't spend enough time and effort fighting one another and whittling their work down to the least-invasive and most widely-supportable version.  "Obstructive?"  They're not nearly obstructionist enough!

Garage Door: Fail And Fix

     The automatic garage door has been acting...odd.  It was stopping randomly during the closing cycle -- it would stop, the lights would go out, and it would do nothing for a few seconds.  I thought it was either bad contacts on a relay or the motor was stalling, and planned to check it out this coming weekend. 

     Yesterday, it failed badly on Tam; she got it to shut but when I left, later, it balked opening and closing.  So I called in the experts and they showed up this morning.

     It's not a relay.  It's not a mechanical issue cause the electric motor to flake out on excessive torque.  Nope it's a tiny, designed-in flaw, one that took the overhead door tech about five seconds to find: the power transformer is soldered to a circuit board, and hangs from it in one corner.  Over time, the solder joint and foil in the very corner breaks, and you've got an intermittent board.  Often, the substrate cracks as well: heavy transformer, inexpensive circuit-board material.  Repair is iffy, since the thing's already stressed and you're just slopping on more solder.  Not usually stocked, since it's an older board, and about two weeks lead time.  I resoldered the bad joint (it was sure-enough broken) but it was pretty ugly, and by the time I was back up from the basement, the tech had found a new replacement board on his truck. 

     Not cheap, in the way repair at the whole-board level usually is costly, but it's working and perhaps I'll get another ten years or more from it.

Identity Politics Applied To Outer Space

     Sure, why not?  Ever since the film Elysium made the heavy-handed point that the rich were going to head off to clean, well-planned sybaritic lives Innnnn Spaaace and leave the rest of us losers starving on this polluted, used-up ball of mud, it's been taken as a given in some circles.

     Here's why not: there's no air, water,* bacon, broccoli, caviar, bread, carpet, chairs, iPads, condoms, Sansabelt slacks, and so on and on and on.  There are no functioning ecosystems in space and to date, nobody's built one.  ISS recycles quite a lot of water and processes some air, but everything that's up there was brought up there.  Figuring out how to establish an even minimally-closed environment will be a long, slow process and people will die learning.  I doubt any of them will be millionaires.

     What's the use of being the richest man in the Solar system in a space suit at the end of a long supply chain?  Sitting on the Moon, twiddling one's silent-film-villain mustache and sneering down at the planet all your stuff has to be shipped up from?

     Not gonna happen.  About the time you can transport a Caribbean island paradise to the Moon, intact and with a good big hunk of the surrounding sea and all its life, maybe you'll start to see a plutocrat or two in space.  Maybe.

     It's not a refuge for the rich.  It might keep the human race from getting stomped flat by planetary disaster -- but we're going to need viable off-Earth settlements, and that's at least a century away.  It'll be even longer before the livin' is at all easy.
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* There's ice.  Given ice, sunlight and a whole lot of money and time, you can get most anything else -- eventually.  But it takes hands.  Working hands.  With all due respect to the accomplishments of Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, it's not going to be their hands, it's going to be a bunch of people working for wages.

Another Socilaist Success Story

     Venezuela through the eyes of the BBC.  "Auntie" is in no way a hardline critic of socialism, but they can't overlook this mess.  Venezuela used to be obnoxiously rich; many Venezuelans used to be.  Not all of them were rich and the middle class wasn't all that big a group; there was a sharp divide between rich and poor and not many paths up from poverty.  As oil prices rose and fell, so did the national economy, with the poor and middle class affected the most. Socialism promised to fix that!

     You could say it did: now just about everyone is grindingly poor, living hand to mouth when there's anything to eat, short on everything that makes modern civilization.  --Well, everything but gasoline, heavily subsidized by the government.  But gas smugglers are a problem thanks to the cheap gas and the socialist wizard running the place is talking about letting gasoline prices seek their level.

     It was a rich country.  Now it's not.  They've still got enormous oil reserves, but it turns out of you break the economy, if you shake down everyone who's got more than his neighbors, instead of leveling out, the money....drains away.

     That's what's at stake with the current crop of "Democratic Socialists" here in the U.S.  I don't think they mean ill, just as I'd be surprised if Hugo Chavez had thought of himself as a villain.  Nor would the U.S. fall apart as rapidly as Venezeula's single-commodity economy.  But the end would be the same: a border-to-border slum, the equality of the starving, the kind of paradise a fool creates.

     One of the things that worries me about the wild flip-flops at the Executive level and the deep divide in Congress is positive feedback: every swing goes farther than the preceding one and roughly half the electorate eggs it on each time.  We're in a barely-controlled bus careening down a mountain road, hard rock on one side, a sheer drop-off on the other, and the passengers are cheering every swerve.  How long 'til it goes smash?

  

Jacksonville Shooting

     When it popped up in my newsfeed, I thought, "Oh, no, here we go again."  A mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida -- was it going to be political?  Was the shooter a deranged loner?  A hardened criminal?

     ...I didn't expect an outraged chump with a sense of entitlement.  A sore loser, writ too large.  What can anyone say about that?  It's not really a mental health issue, at least based on what has been reported so far.  It's not about poverty or asymmetrical warfare.  It's just...wrong.

     Police were on the scene rapidly, within two minutes according to some accounts.  Despite that, two people were killed and nine more injured.  There's a lesson there, but it's mostly that low-probability events can kill you.

    Expect the usual political aftermath.  One punk shoots up a gamer championship and everyone else gets chided.

Skipping Another Gun Show

     Tam and I were going to go to the big Indy 1500 Gun Show today but I find that I just can't.  I was ill all day Friday and worked anyway; I felt pretty lousy Saturday.  I'm better today but my knee had started throbbing Saturday night, up and down the basement stairs doing laundry, and as I was getting ready today, well behind my planned schedule, I realized I wasn't looking forward to the show, I was dreading it.

     The years take their toll.  2018 was probably my last year for the Dayton Hamvention, what with the months of knee problems that followed.  The new venue takes a miserably long drive, the weather's been terrible and for me, it's no longer the same event it was at Hara Arena.. 

     Shuffling through the 1500, jammed elbow-to-elbow with everybody, has always been difficult for me and anymore, if my right knee gets irritated, it could take weeks to get things back to normal.  That's too much to risk.

     Tam's just as annoyed as you might expect, and with good reason -- my avocation is her work.  We'd been going to the show together less and less -- her local friends who spend more time shooting usually take her -- but she'd hoped to this time.

The Only Thing The Media Loves More

     The current news cycle has reminded me that the news media's second great love -- after young, lively Democrat politicians -- is an elderly, dead Republican politician, especially when he can be contrasted with living ones in a way that makes them look bad.

     It's odd.  They told me John McCain was a scary, dangerous warhawk when he was alive; now that he can no longer cast a vote in the Senate or run for President, he's a distinguished elder statesman. 

There's a Storm Rolling In

     It's giving me a headache.  I didn't feel too great anyway -- something I ate yesterday morning spent most of the day disagreeing with me -- and the storm, which has turned the sky greenish-white and has been rumbling with nearly continuous, distant thunder for an hour now, has pretty much decided me: I'm not going anywhere today.

Remember When...

     Gosh, remember when the possibility of more embarrassingly tawdry bedroom antics was an additional reason not to elect another Clinton?

     Back in 2016, I saw the main choices as being between a petty, a vindictive person who had a good handle on how Washington works and a petty, vindictive person who didn't.  While I voted for a third choice, the electorate went with the outsider and here we are.  There was going to be a lot of clashing no matter who won and it is interesting when Presidential Derangement Syndrome flips sides.

     I thought there was no really good answer in 2016; the judiciary's getting an influx of Federalist Society-approved judges, at least, and as for the rest--  Time will tell.  Outside of appointed offices, I'm of the opinion that the scope and power of the Presidency is overrated, especially by Presidents and the The Press that covers them; the real action is in Congress, swarming like a busy anthill, complex and difficult to parse.  People don't like that; reporter or Average Citizen, they like to hear about Caesar: one man, easy to follow, noble or venal, Nero, Augustus or Caligula, hate them or love them, it doesn't matter, because it's easier to feel than to think.

     It's a lot more difficult to be fooled if you think rather than feel, though.  Why be anyone's fool? 

The Cicadas Are Getting Quieter

     The weather has turned a little cooler for a few days, but the cicadas began singing less before it changed.  They must be pairing off -- and alas, once cicadas have wooed and won, the clock is ticking; they've only got a month for their entire adult lives and once the females have laid eggs in little grooves they scratch into tree branches, they're not going to be around for much longer.

     Eggs in the branches, for a creature that spends most of its life underground?  Yep.  You thought kangaroos had it tough?  Newly-hatched cicadas, tiny white insects, plummet to the ground and dig, searching for roots to tap for the sap they live on.  Depending on the breed, they'll be at that for anything from one year to seventeen.  That is, the survivors will; the mortality rate is as high as 98 percent.  So, if you think you've got a lot of them in peak years, bear in mind it could be far more.

     One more odd fact: cicadas sweat!  When it's too hot, they drink heavily and let the excess moisture evaporate through their skin.  If you're thinking most insects don't do that, you'd be right.

     Last night, it sounded like there was one (1) cicada still singing in my neighborhood, and he was slow and mournful -- a bit like this.

Kevin Baker Needs Your Help

     Kevin Baker, long-time blogger at The Smallest Minority, is facing some daunting medical issues and needs your help.  Go here to pitch in.

It's Raining Again

     We had a moderately dry summer...until recently.  A bit late for the garden but the lawn likes it.