Nutty Times

     The problem with nutty times is that nutjobs flourish -- every flavor of 'em.  Most people just want to get to work, to the grocery, to wherever, and get back home unscathed afterward, but there are always a few fools who only want to pull things down.

     Keep your eyes open and your temper calm.  The worst of us want chaos, and no group has an absolute lock on "worst."   Don't help 'em.

Overreach?

     It has become a feature -- well, a bug -- of American politics: the party in power convinces themselves they are the eternal darlings of the voting public and, staring at their reflection like wistful Narcissus, manage to lose their majority.

     But the oscillation just keeps getting bigger, and of late the worst excursions have been based not on political philosophy but personal magnetism.  It's not really self-correcting, or at least it hasn't been so far.

     Every so often, we have bent our system so far that it rebounds -- or breaks.  I'm not sure which we're headed for this time, but make no mistake, we're not on the straight and level.

"Ripped From The Headlines"

     Recent ICE shootings (or is it CBP?  There are a lot of armed TLAs under DHS and they're not making it easy to keep track) are all over the news, and statements and counter-statements fly back and forth, accompanied by at least three authentic videos of events in Minneapolis.

     I'm not going to rehash it.  You can get all of that you can stand elsewhere, free for nothing and often worth the price.

     Nope.  I'm going to give you another incident, one in which Americans, trouble-makers and sincerely concerned citizens alike, taunted and challenged armed agents of the government, and things went horribly wrong.

     Draw your own lessons from it -- about who we are, and what we have become; about governments and the use of force; about law, order and morality.

This Cold

     Colds don't get easier as you get older.  This one keeps sneaking up on me.  Yesterday, I felt a lot better in the morning, got some things done -- and despite good cough syrup, kept coughing more and more, and running out of air when I did.

     I ended up back in bed before noon and slept most of the day; Tam woke me for dinner and I helped a little with the trash (it gets picked up Friday morning) before going back to bed and sleeping heavily.

     This morning, I feel closer to normal -- and from where I've been, an ordinary day would be a big step up.

     Update:  Yeah, didn't happen.  Managed to take care of one scheduled commitment and then had to go lay down while I coughed up -- you don't want to know.

Lots Of Heat, Little Light

     There's a war of words between the federal government on one hand and Minnesota state and Minneapolis local officials on the other hand over the shooting of a middle-aged white woman by a masked, middle-aged white man.  He is an ICE (or other DHS) agent.  She was apparently some kind of volunteer monitor.  Everyone's description of the events and individuals is highly politicized, and you can go look at the video from multiple angles before making up your own mind.  (I will note that pictures claiming to show the agent's face are AI fakes.)

     It's screwed-up all around, a literal example of why it is dangerous to get crossways with law enforcement.  Nevertheless, in such conflicts, it is not unreasonable to expect the officers to behave in an adult and responsible manner.  I get complaints when I point this out, but multiple LEOs with radios and guns and qualified immunity against one or two non-LEO individuals is not an even contest.  Shouting conflicting commands means compliance is impossible -- and makes tragedy all but inevitable.

     "She shouldn't have been there," yeah, maybe not; but there she was, on a public street.  Should we all have to get urban-combat training before we leave the driveway?  Intentional or accidental, you can find yourself in the middle of a law enforcement action before you know what's going on -- even if you thought you knew what was going on.

     Government agents shouldn't be killing random people.  Not even inconvenient or annoying random people.

     This is the stuff of bad Cold War fiction set in the repressive dictatorships of the Warsaw Pact.  We shouldn't have Feds LARPing it on American streets.

On The...Mend?

     I feel better until I start to cough, at which point my temperature spikes, I get dizzy and I start to black out.

     Haven't managed to yet and I'm hoping that will continue, but....sheesh.

Meanwhile, I Have Been Dragged Through A Knothole

      Or maybe it just feels that way.  I've had bad cold symptoms since the weekend, which seemed to be a former cold returning.  Maybe it's a new one, quick on the heels of the previous minor affliction.

     I was taking cold medicine, getting lots of tea and broth (and some coffee because, look, I'm not giving it up), sleeping plenty, eating balanced meals and Tuesday, I felt good enough to go into work.  Through it all, I could not stop coughing for long.

     After managing an hour with a prospective contractor for a tricky and highly specialized task, I had to go find desk work for a spell.  Finally broke to get some genuine cough syrup, but since I was still on a 12-hour slow-release nostrum, it had to wait and meanwhile, I was coughing worse than ever.

     Yesterday still feels like it was a week long.  This morning, I started to cough and discovered I had coughed myself sore, the muscles of my back and diaphragm aching in unpleasant and unfamiliar ways.  I have got about enough energy to cuddle a kitten, if the little cat was very sleepy.  Our two adult tomcats are too much for me -- or they would be, if they weren't well-behaved and more obedient than cats usually are.*

     So I went back to bed this morning.  I'm up for a little while now -- more cough syrup, a refill on tea, who knows, maybe even more acetaminophen if it's time -- and then back to bed.
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* In the morning and evening, the cats must be separated when fed, since they're on different diets.  Mr. Holden is reluctant to comply unless we flatter him: "Gentlemen! Sort yourselves out -- Holden, stay; Huck, come along," and Holden charges through the doorway along with Huck, "You know the rule! Tigers in the front of the house, floof lions to the back!"  He preens at bit at being called a "floof lion," and trots off to the back of the house.  With the hallway door shut, he stands up to the door and dances back and forth, anticipating food.  If they made fancy lions, far more fluffy and deluxe than the standard issue, he would certainly be one.

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.

"Somehow, Head Cold Returned"

     If you were one of the people who muttered when the evil Emperor got back onstage at a plot-convenient time,* you'll know exactly how I feel at the return of my cold.  Same progression as last time: one-sided throat irritation, growing sinus congestion/overproduction, coughing, sneezing, fatigue and muscle aches.  Maybe it's the flu.  Maybe it's not.  It isn't COVID-19; I checked, though mostly just so I could tick that box.

     This is Day Three, or maybe Day Two-and-half, and it can damn well get wrapped up by by tomorrow morning.  I'm going back to bed.
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* At a certain point, some time before Jar-Jar Fetchit shucked and jived into the cast, I had decided that trying to make the storylines of any part of Star Wars add up was a fool's errand and the best approach was to sit back, enjoy the blinking lights, and let the sword fights and faster-than-light videocalls just play out; either you're happy with a universe where few controls are labelled and hyperspace navigation is like pulling into a parking space at the 7-11, or you're not.  Hey, look, it's Hero's Journey!

I Tried

     I really tried to ignore it all day.  But will someone please explain to the bulging brains of the Executive Branch that real life does not work like chess or king of the hill?  You don't win just by grabbing the other side's top dude -- and if you just pull a quick forcible exfiltration, the next in line isn't obliged to dance to your tune.

     They may yet turn up the heat if they don't get what they want, but don't be surprised if "running Venezuela" proves to be a lot more difficult than it has been made to sound. 

Squandering

     I'm watching the Trump administration press conference about their special military operation, and the lies and distortions have come thick and fast.  So has the power-worship, military might praised for its own sake.

     Someone will do a full fact-check on it.  I'm just going to note that the United States has positioned itself as an unpredictable bully, a rogue state that has promised to act however it will, without regard to international law -- over a bog-standard South American autocrat.  If he'd been a right-winger doing much the same as he can be proven to have done, he'd still be doing it, and counted as a U.S. ally.

     We now live in a changed world, and not for the better aside from the removal of cheap dictator, to be replaced by an as-yet unknown government, of an unknown nature other than they're liable to comply with whatever our current government decides are our interests.

     These men are villains.  That they took out another villain, smaller in scope and more overtly villainous, does not excuse their own crimes, the stain they have put on our national honor, and the credence they have given to similar acts committed by other governments elsewhere on the globe.  And they are promising to do more of the same.

     They have turned Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill into a pyre for civilization.

No, Look Over Here

     Every day, a new distraction.  Unless you live under a rock, by now you know about Mr. Trump's special military operation:  U.S. forces bombarded and invaded the capital of Venezuela early this morning, taking Nicolás Maduro and his wife into custody,  They're facing criminal charges in a U. S. court over narcoterrorism and unlawful possession of firearms.

     It's a hard effort to find anyone who thinks the South American autocrat is a good guy -- but neither are many of the world's leaders.  It's still not generally the done thing to go roust them, like a county sheriff cleaning out a meth lab.  The last one I remember was Panama's Manuel Noriega, under somewhat different circumstances -- and even that was pretty questionable.

      Whatever: a new day, a new sideshow, a few more corpses on Donald Trump's mountain of dead and, oh, boy, the headlines and airtime!

     Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, after all, and surely any mere domestic issues must pale to irrelevance next to these events of vast moment: arresting tinpot dictators and encouraging chaos among impoverished brown people in the Third World.

     I've been wrong -- it's as much a firehose of blood as it is a firehose of bullshit.  How long are we going to pretend it's normal?