Antisemitism

     It has a long history in Western culture.  Antisemitism is the worst sort of xenophobic nonsense and it brings out the worst in people.  It has no basis in fact.

     Pre-Revolutionary America was a better place for Jews than Europe -- and even here, they were not allowed to participate in elections (community councils and the like) until the founding of the United States.

     The Pittsburgh killer explicitly stated antisemitism was his motive.  This is entirely unAmerican, counter to the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights, and should be repugnant to all decent people.

     There's a gun show in town this weekend and I was thinking about going.  I still might -- but there are a couple of vendors who show up from time to time* that I would have a very difficult time not calling out.  They always have significantly fewer browsers than the other tables -- unfortunately, it's still a non-zero number.

     This pernicious notion is the precise opposite to the American ideal of tolerance and freedom.  It should be opposed vigorously whenever it shows up.

     If you're thinking about making a "Yes, but..." comment or worse to this post, do us both a favor and ban yourself now.  I won't have it.  I'm not obliged to tolerate poison and I won't.
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* Neither of them sell guns; each specializes in an only slightly firearm-related thing, different to the other.  At least the guy selling bath towels and coffee mugs with pictures of Nazi leaders on them stopped showing up.

The Thing About Kings

     The thing about kings is, traditionally, historically, they're both cause and blame.  A good harvest?  The king  -- or the pharaoh -- must have done all the right things; a bad harvest must mean he has done wrong.  Sometimes things got bad and stayed that way, and kings were sacrificed (or just killed) to placate the gods.

     Culturally, we've got kings -- and perhaps a few of the old gods -- lurking in the background.  These days, Presidents fill much of that role.  If the economy is doing well or poorly, it must be the President's doing!  ...It usually isn't.

     Do the times make the man, or does the man make the times?  President Trump has condemned the recent violence -- mail bombs, what appears to be a racially motivated double murder, the horrific killings in Pittsburgh -- and one of the reactions I'm seeing is that "he has encouraged it."  I'm not so sure; I think his speech (and Twitter messaging) is often rash; he's got a personal battle with the Press going, the likes of which hasn't been seen since Richard Nixon and he's been all in favor of roughing-up hecklers -- but that doesn't constitute approval of hate-motivated crimes.

     He's very easy to blame; he's a polarizing figure, whose personality is not terribly endearing even to many of his supporters, who campaigned to enthusiastic crowds on a strongly "America first" agenda; he's pretty blind to the historical usage of many of the terms he employs, deliberately or otherwise.

     But he didn't conjure up the outrage-fueled crowds; and for their part, actual mob violence has been rare.  This country's crop of crazed loners is always present; it has been for lifetimes.  A roster of successful and would-be presidential assassins alone turns up mostly men and women who had a very shaky relationship with reality.

     The manner in which the Trump administration and Mr. Sessions' Justice Department in particular handles this recent spate of crimes will have a great deal of effect on public perception.  Mr. Trump's habit of sniping at the press -- whether it is justified or not -- will be an impediment.  It will likely have an effect on the mid-term elections.

Box Of Purses

     I think it's a sign of something.  Age, probably.  Sunday, I started in straightening up my bedroom and I kept finding purses and bags and the occasional laptop case.  Eventually I had a big storage tub full of them even after throwing out the worn-out ones.

     Once I finish, I guess I'll go through them one more time, sort out a few useful ones, and take the rest to Goodwill.  Didn't expect to find so many!

"Destroy This Mad Brute"

     The title is from a WW I Allied enlistment poster featuring a slavering subhuman in a pickelhaube, bloody club in one hand and a fair maiden representing Liberty or Justice* or Democracy in peril clutched in his other arm.

     Real life isn't that easy.  It wasn't even that simple then.  Today's monster lives just down the street -- or in a Pittsburgh apartment block.  There aren't any sure ways to stop such people ahead of time; we can work to build a society where the kind of sentiments he is reported to have expressed are unacceptable among decent people, but there will always be be people who express them anyway.  You can say, "Shoot back," but though it's a satisfying thought, it's not always a practical solution for the average person (or even the average concealed carrier) -- and may be unacceptable to some groups.

     The murderous outrage in Pittsburgh is the most recent example.   In response, police agencies across the country have stepped up patrols near synagogues or even stationed patrol cars at them during religious services.  Religious freedom is a foundational element of the United States and the overwhelming majority of citizens and residents will not tolerate attacks on worshipers.

     The usual partisan hue and cry has been raised; the President has spoken out against this crime, as he did against the mailbomber, and has been blamed for both nevertheless.  Me, I'll blame the people who commit the crimes; I don't think individual decent, sane people are lured to commit such acts by mainstream political figures.  While the "average guy" may indeed be capable of atrocity,† he does so by "going along to get along," as humans have done since time immemorial.  These  lone killers are something else -- dangerous lunatics, uncontrolled by moral concerns or societal norms.  The Internet makes it possible for them to find like-minded others, just as innocent quilters and cat-lovers congregate.  If there's a way to sieve the truly dangerous from the general mass of noisy Internet creeps and nutters, neither Facebook nor the NSA has figured it out yet.

     Be careful out there.  Practice being nice to others -- and keep a wary eye out for deranged violence.
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* That would explain her off-the-bosom dress.

† See the book Ordinary Men, if you have a strong stomach.

Sleepy

     Two cups of coffee and I'm still sleepy.  I didn't get a lot of sleep last week.  Maybe I'll have a nap.

Punditry

     I could offer up my commentary and insight on current events, but it's just too depressing.  Hey, you know what?  Be respectful and polite to those around you.  Don't go out of your way to "push people's buttons."  Don't be a jerk.  And oh, yeah, don't send mail-bombs to people.

     I'm hearing a lot of claims of "Extremist Trump supporter!" from liberals and "False flag!" from conservatives about the mail-bomber.  Yeah, about that--  Probably None Of The Above.  Mail bombs are notoriously unreliable, in both activation and target selection.  Who believes ex-Presidents and Congressthings open their own mail?  --Lunatics, that's who.  This will turn out to be the work of some kind of a nutjob.  Left, Right or Center, what they won't be is an "operative" or a regular member of one party or another.  Come on, think this through -- you don't do this sort of thing, I don't do this sort of thing and neither does the schoolteacher who lives down the street and went off to march in Washington in a pink knit hat in 2016.

     Normal people don't send explosive packages to other people, even those they loathe; normal people don't send fake explosive packages to people to "game the media," especially when most of the media are their friends anyway.   Even most crazed would-be assassins tend to opt for more accurate methods and professionals just plant repugnant pornography on their target's computer or fly in a drone, depending on the desired degree of subtlety. 

     Paranoia is addictive.  Don't smoke that stuff, kids.  It's not good for you.

Footnote

     Picking up the asterisk from yesterday's post:

     * Yes, "rack room," or occasionally "rack compartment," looking not very much different from a modern-day server farm.  I was Chief on the freighter Billy How before things were quite so digital, though even then, the early '90s, it was well begun and any fool could see the trend was only going to grow.  Still, the end is the same; then it was mostly screwdriver adjustments with oscilloscopes and meters to see the result; now it's all keyboards and screens for the same job. 

     "Rack" is an overused word.  Small to medium sized equipment gets installed in racks nineteen inches wide and standardized to a pattern that goes back to late 19th-Century telephone equipment; when we had computer and audio tapes aboard starships, they got "racked" on the machines instead of "mounted" and "re-racked" instead of rewound.  You even sleep in a rack -- well, you do if you're a regular grew member; as Chief Engineer I rated a compartment of my own, much too handy to Engineering and nearly large enough to turn around in.  Somehow the meaning is clear in context -- and the galley never serves rack of lamb. 

The Problem With Captains

     It was the problems with the data-loggers on the old Billy How that clued me in that the ship's new owners were going to be difficult to work for.  Cincinnati Group was something well beyond frugal and had installed a Captain and XO who came aboard determined to show us a thing or two about how starships should be run.

     See -- or maybe you don't; it's been decades and all of the technology has changed -- back then just as now, everything having to do with maneuvering the starship was recorded.  Intercom chatter, control inputs, telemetry, inertial navs, all of it was saved and at that time,, that meant magnetic tape.  Some tracks were digital, some analog; one track was nothing but a clock.  The idea was that if anything went wrong, you'd have a record of it and with any luck, enough information to put things right.

     They were fiddly beasts.  Billy How had six of them in two groups of three, one set in the rack room* just off the Command deck and another down in Engineering/Power, the combined space for the Jump exciter, reactor controls, and suchlike. The two-inch wide tapes spooled slowly, each one holding twenty-four hours of recording on one big reel, and we "bicycled" ten reels of tape thor each set of recorders.

     They were supposed to spool slowly, that is.  The set up on Command had gotten squirrely, racing through a tape in a few hours during the Jump in the Kansas II system.  Once we were back in normal space, I dug into them,  running the setup procedure from the manual, and they weren't behaving as they should; the speed control, a lovely complex setup with tachometers on the drive and reel motors and a triple phase-locked servo, wouldn't stay locked.  The signals from the tachs were ragged, and when I went to look for replacements, all I found were a few empty boxes with a note from three years before: "Order more ASAP."  Before my time as Chief but I should've checked already.

     By the time I'd got that far, we were close enough to get a reply back from Kansas II in a few hours, so I messaged the chandler Cincinnati Group preferred to deal with and had a price back on replacement parts by the start of my next watch.  They weren't cheap.  Between all six units, we needed eighteen of them; not all the tachs were bad, but at least half had failed the rest probably weren't far behind.

     The new Captain was in his quarters just off the Command bridge.  "Cap'n Wheat?  About the loggers, I'm going to need some parts."

     Gregory Wheat was a young man as starship captains go, only a few years older than I was at the time.  He looked up from the papers on his desk and frowned, "And what parts would those be, young lady?"

     I kept smiling.  Captains get a lot of leeway.  "Tachs for the speed control.  About half ours are worn out and I'd like to stock replacements for the remainder.  So eighteen, at just over seven hundred dollars per deck."

     His eyebrows went up.  "You want...over four thousand dollars worth of parts?"

     "Didn't have any replacements in stock, sir.  That's on me; I missed the empties on the shelf."

     "Why don't you have another look at those recorders, see what you can do.  I'll get back to you."

     I kept on smiling.  "Yessir."

     I took the old tachs apart and cleaned them up again -- they're optical, and any grime on the moving disc will mess them up -- but it didn't do much good.

     Shortly after chow, the Captain called me up to the bridge.  "I'm going to get you some help.  The Kessler is at Kansas II.  It's a Cincy-Group freighter a bit larger than us.  I was XO there and they've got a real sharp Chief.  He'll come aboard after we reach K-two and help you with those loggers."

     I was thinking he wasn't going to be much help if he didn't bring any tachs with him, but you don't say that kind of thing to the guy in the worry seat, so I nodded and replied, "I'll look forward to that."

*  *  *

     The trip in was uneventful.  Once we were parked in orbit around Kansas II, Kessler sent a squirt-booster over and I met their Chief at the airlock -- a dapper young man, who was not, in fact, carrying any replacement tachs.  We shook hands and exchanged names -- Jim MacAlheny, he was and I asked if he had any luggage.

     He laughed.  "No, just me and a green tweaker."  The ubiquitous pocket screwdriver -- we all carried one back then; it was practically a badge of office.  "I'd better check in with the Old Man."

     I told him, "Okay; then we can see about the tachs on those loggers."

     The Captain was in his quarters; I waved the Kessler's Chief in ahead of me, and Capain Wheat stood up, his hand out.  "Jim!  It's been too long.  How're you doing?"

     "Greg, you've come up in the world!"

     "Yes, well -- close the door.  We've got some catching up to do."

     With that, he shut the hatch in my face.  I went back to Engineering; there was plenty to do.

*  *  *

     Jim didn't  show up again for several hours.   I kept myself busy checking the replacement parts stock; finding one set of empty boxes had me worried there were others.  I didn't realize the next watch had come on until my number two stuck his head in the storage compartment.

     "Chief Bobbi?  Cap'n Wheat's on the 'com for you.  Says he wants you up on Command."

     I gave him a smile.  "Always good to be wanted, right?"  I wiped my hands and got moving.

     The Captain was at his desk and Jim was in the visitor's chair.  I squeezed in and Captain Wheat told me to close the door.  He gave me a look I couldn't quite read. "Jim tells me those tachs are shot."

     "Yessir."

     "Well, why is that?"

     "Age, sir?  Those loggers run all the time.  It's a wear part."

     That got a frown.  Beside me, Jim said nothing, his expression neutral.  "Well, why didn't you say so?"

     "Sir?"

     "That we needed tachs."

     "But sir--"

     "I had to fly Jim over here at great expense to the company, because you didn't know how to fix those loggers!"

     "Sir, I said--"

     "I really hope this does not set a pattern, Roberta.  It does not bode well."

     Jim still said nothing.  I gave him a closer look, silent appeal.  Nothing.

     "Yes, sir.  It will not set a pattern."

     "Indeed.  Jim has ordered the parts we need.  I trust you will be up to installing them?"

     I was boiling mad.  But you don't get mad at starship captains.  You can't.  "I believe so, sir."

     "You believe?"

     This was well past tolerable.  Nevertheless, it's a long walk home and there's not much to breathe along the way.  "I can and I will.  Sir."

     "See that you do.  Thank you."  Captain Wheat waved a hand in dismissal.

     "Sir."  I opened the hatch and got out, shaking mad.

     And that was when I realized working for Cincinnati Group might not be a long-term career for me.

       

Limerick!

     As we approach Halloween, a verse for the season:

Arch-wizard Worthington Wells
Was entirely too careless with spells
He used them to play
In a most perilous way
Now he's stuck in his own private Hells.

Read The Previous Post

     Follow the link.  Read it.

So How Bad Is The World?

     These are parlous times, right? I keep hearing people saying everything's falling apart, it's all getting worse--

      Wrong. Things are getting better, and they have been getting better for years. Decades, even. But that's not just the opinion of a Midwestern, libertarian spinster. Vox Media is way to the left of me, in part the brainchild of Ezra Klein, and they've got the facts in charts and graphs. Doom and gloom is easy to sell and there's enormous room for improvement; but fewer people are starving, more people can read, and people are, by golly, actually climbing out of the worst kinds of poverty.

     The world isn't perfect.  But it's not as bad as it once was and it's getting better.

"And Will You Be Having A Virus With That...?"

     There's some kind of head cold making the rounds at work.  We've all been trying to be careful, lots of handwashing and disinfectant spray and all that.  But when I came home last night, I realized my throat was feeling a bit tender.

     Took an extra multivitamin and had a couple of cups of strong tea on the theory that it couldn't hurt.  Woke up this morning no worse than before, after a night of what I am assured is "not terribly bad snoring from the other end of the house."*

     So I guess we'll see.
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* From time to time, it wakes me up.  And now I know what words without vowels sound like.