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?

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?

It's A New Year's Miracle!

     Okay, it's a "miracle" in the Adam Smith sense, anyway.

     I was looking around for blackeyed peas starting last week, and coming up short.  In my one trip to the vast Multi-Mart, I...well, I forgot.  Tam strove to bring some home from the grocery last weekend and they had no version of blackeyed peas.

     This morning, I needed to go gas up my car and on the way home, I stopped at the other foodie grocer to check.  Nope.  "They ran us right out," one of the clerks told me.  Tam had offered to make another swing by our closer grocery store today in case they'd restocked, but I cautioned her we shouldn't get our hopes too high.

     Surprise!  They had set out the remaining stock.  And so, thanks to the relentless pursuit of sales, we've got one of the great miracles of modern civilization: the stuff we wanted to buy, when we wanted to buy it. 

Cognitive Dissonator

     Jack Smith sat down with a House committee concerned about his prosecution of Donald Trump.  It wasn't public testimony, but they've released a transcript, which you can read for yourself.

     Here's a quote: "There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election.  He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and use knowing — knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function."

     Pretending the Trump administration is normal, that they care about about our Constitution as amended, or about the laws, norms and traditions of the United States, is simply lying.  Lying to others and lying to yourself.

     At this point, from the not-very-covert DHS tweets about "America after 100 million deportations"* and lily-white 19th-century memes to punitive Presidential vetoes and withholding of funds, from a supine Congress to a pliant Supreme Court, we are way off the map and I don't know if we're going to get back to normal any time soon.

     Pretending otherwise won't fix it.
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* This is invidious. There aren't a hundred million illegal immigrants in the U.S.  Even if you throw in everyone who has been granted any kind of asylum or temporary protected status, it's not close.  The number is, however, a close approximation to the total non-white population of the United States.  Whoever's running the DHS social media accounts is doing a good imitation of Leave It To Beaver's Eddie Haskell as a white supremacist.

Nearly Through Another One

     One more trip around the Sun, almost complete.  Hang in there!

Christmas Dinner

     Here are Tamara Keel's photos of the huge ham I baked for Christmas dinner  First on a plate:

     And in the pan, piled with vegetables.

     It was good.

Good Riddance, 2025

     There is no evidence the next year will be any better -- and it could be a great deal worse -- but the past year has, I think finished undermining my faith in the essential goodness of my fellow human beings.

     Those old postcard photos of lynch mobs, grinning and unkempt, posed around the bodies of their victims, aren't an outlier.  It's who an awful lot of people are.  I no longer trust them.

     When the COVID pandemic came along, the amount of denial and misinformation surprised me.  I thought we had fewer fools than that; I thought we had fewer demagogues and fewer people who didn't understand or believe in modern medicine.  Still, we muddled through: not great, not terrible. 

        The January 6, 2021 attack on Congress and the U.S. Capitol shook me, especially with the clear evidence of the violence having been egged on by Donald Trump and his allies, and allowed to proceed for hours without effective intervention; but it did fail, and Mike Pence and Congress stepped up to complete certifying the vote, and I thought the worst was over.  Then the reframing and retconning began, and way too many people were happy to go along with it.  The impeachment effort failed, stymied by weak-kneed Republicans.

     Joe Biden came in, and I continue to think he did an okay job.  We've had some colossally bad Presidents, and he wasn't that; the pandemic response continued effectively, the economy got a little screwed up, but the United States had a faster, stronger recovery than most nations.

     The January 6 Committee got off to a slow start but finally picked up steam -- and the GOP officially refused to join in, aside from a few Congresspeople who defied their party leadership.  That's not the act of a party confident their guys did nothing wrong.  The Committee came through with facts and figures -- and the same denial and retconning kicked in, with nothing to support it but vibes and bullshit.

     Still, it seemed for a little while as if the Republican party's experiment in personality cult was over, and they were going to deny it ever amounted to anything.  --And then their demagogue came roaring back, Biden's age caught up with him, and 2025 loomed.  But how bad could it be?

     It's been bad.  The dismantling of Federal agencies, the ongoing, pernicious erosion of database firewalls that have protected our freedom from government meddling into the private lives of Americans, the demonization, harassment and persecution of disfavored groups -- it's Autocratic Rule 101, and the sole saving grace has been that much of it is being done in an inept, half-assed way, with many of the worst actors focused on lining their own pockets or pursuing individual ends without overall coordination.

     This has been an awful year.  Polling suggests the voting public, having Fucked Around disastrously, may now be Finding Out.  The tide may be turning -- slowly and far too late.  The once-useful conservative party -- the third to inherit that mantle, after the Federalists and then the Whigs -- may have done their reputation irreparable harm.  The often feckless and ineffectual liberal party (historically not consistently liberal; the split between parties has had a lot of regional and economic variation) had shied away from New Deal-era anti-fascism and support for broad democracy and it remains to be seen if they can claw their way back; they're got a long history of reinvention and it might come through again.

     2026 could be worse.  I hope it won't.  I hope the broad sweep of elected politicians will manage to find their spines and replace doing whatever they can get away doing with being upright and moral, and looking to the long-established ideals of our country and the dignity of humanity.  But I've given up on optimism.  It will be what it turns out to be, and I'll do my best to get through it.

     We were supposed to have settlements on the Moon and Mars by now!  Electricity was going to be (almost) too cheap to meter! We were cleaning up the air and the water, managing the land wisely....  The future isn't what it used to be.  I just hope it won't be too calamitously bad.

Visiting Outer Space

      I'm in the middle of another catch-as-can rewatch of The Expanse, and it annoys me that I've somehow gotten stuck in the ignorant nitwit future with the flat-Earthers and antivaxers.  This timeline isn't looking good for a glorious future in space.

     On the other hand, a recent episode pointed out what timeline The Expanse might be in: Amos Burton is in transit from Ilus/Medina Station/The Ring/The Belt to Earth, and he has a short stopover on the Moon.  While there, he walks past a poster advertising tours of "Jamestown Base" in an old-fashioned-looking font -- and Jamestown Base is the name of the 1970s U. S. Moon Base in the Apple TV alternate-history series For All Mankind.  I've commented before that they line up pretty nicely, with Mars in the early days of being settled in For All Mankind, and a Lunar establishment well underway.

     I'm glad they cleared that up, I guess, but yeah, not our timeline.  We get to visit outer space on TV but the odds keep looking worse for an affordable tourist ticket.