Sometimes, Silence

     Occasionally, I'll look at a current issue, dig a little deeper -- and decide not to say anything about it.  I had an idea for this morning, but it's just not worth it; I'd be adding more heat than light about something both contentious and impossible to resolve, a matter of opinion and taste rather than fact.

     People are entitled to their own opinions.  Even when I think they're wrong.  Even when their notions are morally suspect.

Remember WENN

     It's back!  The TV series Remember WENN ran on AMC for four seasons starting in 1996 and then vanished.  A mostly-gentle comedy, it follows the career of a plucky young woman from Elkhart, Indiana who arrives at a radio station in Pittsburgh in the late 1930s to work as a radio scriptwriter.  The sets and costumes are first rate, the dialog is period-snappy, and while the technology isn't one hundred percent consistent, it's generally so close you'll never notice.  (I will, especially using carbon and ribbon mics together in the studios, but here's the thing: they're all real microphones, and it's not that far off.)

     It's on AMC and another streaming channel now.  I watched the first episode again tonight.  It's just as charming as I remember.

Peace In Gaza

     As I write this, a long day of speeches and congratulations is underway.  Smiling politicians in nice suits (or the local equivalent) are applauding one another.  That's fine, and I'm not going to say anything snippy about the political figures involved because, hey, they did it.

     All peace in the Middle East is temporary -- but that's true of all peace, everywhere, and of all wars, too.  What's important right now is the last of the living hostages have been freed, prisoners are being released, and people in Gaza aren't being bombed or shot at as they begin, however tentatively, to return to their homes or to the rubble where their homes once stood.  Reports say food and other aid is moving   Maybe it will last a week, a month, a year or only a day; but every day that passes without war in the region is a better day.

     I hope everyone involved -- even the individuals I don't like -- has many better days to come.

Dinner With What's On Hand

      Sunday night, I was a little tired from yard work (and had made scant progress on a wild area of maple saplings and some tree-like weeds).  I didn't want to reheat leftovers, but what did I have?

     Let's see, the tail end of a batch of Canadian bacon, a couple of slices; part of a bag of fresh Shishito peppers; eggs; part of a jar of chunky salsa; a little can of green chilies and, in a corner of the cupboard, a microwave-in-bag of Puerto Rican Rice & Gandules Sofrito.  Gandules are pigeon peas, a delightful legume with a distinctive flavor.

     I heated up the rice and beans per the package while lightly frying the ham.  Then I added the rice to the skillet and cooked it a bit before pouring in the can of chilies (with a healthy sprinkle of dried onion flakes; chopped green onions would have been better, but I didn't have any) and snipping in three large Shishitos.  I gave that a stir, pushed it to the sides and scrambled a couple of eggs in the center.  When the eggs were cooked, I mixed it all back together and gave it just a little more time.  Served in a bowl with a large dollop of chunky salsa on top, it was warm and filling.

     While it was cooking, I remembered I had fresh mushrooms, too, but it was too late.  I had some of them in an omelet this morning, along with bacon, another Shishito pepper, Swiss cheese, a little feta cheese and an olive.

     Some people look down on beans and rice as "poverty food."  You're missing out.  There are remarkably many distinct combinations and most of them are delicious.  Your fellow humans are a clever bunch and you should probably go try what they're having for dinner, if you have the chance.

Metaphorical Floodwaters

     Friends and neighbors, does it seem lately that your zone has been flooded?  Is disinformation, misinformation, arrant BS and rumor crowding out accurate information?  Has it become far more difficult to distinguish between the true metal and mere dross?

     You may be suffering from The Russian Model of Propaganda!  Sometimes known as the "Firehose of Falsehood," if what you're seeing is:
A. High-volume and multichannel
B. Rapid, continuous, and repetitive
C. Lacking in commitment to objective reality
D. Lacking in commitment to consistency
     Then you may need to adjust your social media and news consumption to slow or dilute it.  RAND Corporation wrote a nice paper about it.

     In other news, I noticed our Vice President made the circuit of the Sunday morning politics shows, pressing hard on blaming the Democrats for the government shutdown* and Gish-galloping through questions that didn't fit his goal.  At one point, when an interviewer kept asking about things she wanted to cover, he scolded her, "You're talking to the Vice President, and you've spent five minutes on [unwanted topic.]"  Yes, dear boy, that's how it works: the person conducting the interview asks the questions, and you can answer them however you like or refuse to address them.  You don't get to set the agenda; that's what press conferences are for. 

     The Vice President, the President, members of Congress, judges, journalists, Cabinet members, police: they're all Just Some Guy.  This is the United States of America and none of them are more special than the others.  And if any of them decide to "flood the zone," know it for what it is, and judge it accordingly.
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* As I have noted before, this is nonsense.  Either party could break the impasse by giving the other one exactly what they want; neither of them have made a secret of what it will take.  Or they could sit down together and work out something they'd all dislike equally.  This last option is extremely not happening.  The GOP only needs a few votes in the Senate but they have so far been unwilling to unbend enough to get even a handful of Democrat Senators to come over.  The Dems have made an opening bid, and it's pretty high -- but the counteroffer is bupkis and an empty promise to talk later.  Meanwhile, if you bought your health insurance through the Feds, it's gonna cost a lot more; if you're counting on food stamps or other aid, those coffers are running dry. 

Ladder Diagram?

     It's incredibly geeky, and (at least in part) out of date: what's a "ladder diagram" or a "control ladder," anyway?

     To make matters worse, in the ones I know best, they laid the "ladder" on its side.

     But it's not intentionally arcane: in the days when all the control and logic in electronic devices was done with relays, a convention arose of drawing the schematic diagram of it with the power supply (AC or DC, one side grounded or not) as a pair of lines at the right and left, with all the "stuff" in between: switches, relay coils, relay contacts, lights and buzzers, electrical motors or controlled equipment, looking something like strange rungs of a ladder, with the power supply lines as the rails.*  The order of operations generally ran from top to bottom, and left to right for each "rung."

     It makes for simple, clear diagrams, or as simple and clear as they get for that sort of thing, and over time, it evolved its own specialized set of symbols, which came to be used interchangeably with the more usual set in some applications.†  RCA tended to rotate the diagrams, so the rails were at the top and bottom of a long blueprint and the order of the "rungs" ran from left to right -- this is a better fit to a long drawing table.  By the 1970s, it was starting to run up against advances in technology: the fifteen foot drawing I mentioned yesterday had a gap in it, with dotted lines leading to a box marked "Solid State Logic."  A card cage tucked behind a meter panel held eight or ten plug-in cards, loaded with early optical isolators, solid-state relays, and logic gates built with discrete resistors, diodes and transistors‡ (2N4401 and 2N4402, if memory serves, an NPN/PNP pair) -- and those circuits were not at all friendly to ladder-type diagrams.  They had their own set of drawings.  It was the beginning of the end -- and the start of twisty, hard-to-follow multi-page schematics that were drawn as a guide to manufacturing and passed along to the techs who had to service the equipment with little thought given to clarity. 

     You'll still find ladder logic in industrial controls, and ladder-type diagrams are used as a kind of programming language to set up the workflow for programmable logic controllers; but in my line of work, it's a lost art, as dusty as Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.    
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* One of several convergent uses of the term "rail" in connection with power supply.  The primary source of this is probably the live third rail of an electric train -- but any power bus in electrical or electronic applications can be casually referred to as a "rail," and the people who work with it will know the meaning.
 
† This, in turn, eventually resulted in a change to the general set of electronic symbols: prior to WW II, capacitors were represented by a pair of parallel lines with connections coming off the sides, -||-.  Ladder logic used a similar symbol for normally-open relay contacts: -| |-.   Context was usually sufficient to tell them apart -- until wartime needs meant a huge number of workers and techs had to learn in a hurry!  After the war, capacitors were given a curved line for one side: -|(-.  Since many of them are round in one dimension or another, it made sense.  And just to make things interesting, there's an entirely different set of symbols for relay contacts in general electronics, which have been used all along.
 
‡ Troubleshooting in the solid state logic was difficult -- a clamp-on card extender would let you move one card at a time to an easier-to-reach position, but it was awkward and didn't always make good electrical contact.  I started adding "state monitor" LEDs to the cards as I worked on them and eventually, opening up the cover and looking at the little red lights would localize problems to one card -- or eliminate them as the cause and point to any of the several dozen relays in the control ladder.

Two Days, And Longer

     I have spent the past two days closely focused on the replacement for a highly configurable widget that doesn't work.  The replacement doesn't work, either, in the very same way.

     It is literally configured by the book and confirmed by factory technicians, looking at photographs and talking me through it.  The manufacturer's installation crew, hired contractors who have worked for them before and who I found clueful, did the initial setup and testing, and pronounced themselves stumped.  But they were confident the factory techs would sort it out. 

     This has not happened.

     One complication: I admit that I have been lazy.  This particular company -- we've bought major items from them for years -- has some of the worst habits I have ever encountered when it comes to drawing schematic diagrams.  They rarely manage to get all of one function on one page, and their continued-on-page-n jumps are hard to follow and often fragmentary; most of something happens on one page, the circuit goes to another page and wends through a series of connectors and jumpers, splits, does minor things on two other pages, and dead-ends.  You backtrack and find a tiny note that directs you elsewhere, and so on.  And on and on. 

     RCA was plagued by this, back when RCA was a big company that made every single item in the path from, say, the camera and microphone on a TV reporter in the studio to the TV set in your living room, and they (eventually!) came up with two answers: absolutely enormous blueprints for complex subsystems (one showing the "control ladder" for a 1970s TV transmitter was a yard high and over fifteen feet long!) and summaries or "one-line diagrams" that identified and followed critical functions.  Between the two, you could get from Point A to Point Z and have a good understanding of every intermediate step.  But the giant drawings relied on long-gone technology (not to mention workspace with a lot of open floor area!) and the one-lines took the careful attention of engineers who knew the whole system, inside and out.  Degreed-engineer time is too expensive for that these days, and by the time the product is in the hands of low-level people like me, they're six projects further on, and probably working for a different company.

     All of my older drawing-package books for this company's products have a Bobbi-added extensive array of color-coded tabs with drawing numbers and titles, careful highlighting and plenty of on-page notations (they're inconsistent about telling you where to look for continuations).  I haven't done that with these yet, and I need to.  I'm going to have to grit my teeth and trace this thing out fully, and try to understand why one of the most common configurations of this gadget is not working for us.  It's probably something simple, some detail that may be known to a few field techs by word-of-mouth but hasn't been written down.

     It's happened before.  The cause of an ugly and expensive fire at my work almost exactly thirty years ago came down to not relocating three large components that run very hot from an enclosed cabinet to an open-air mounting.  I'd seen it done at a different installation of a similar device, and no one there ever said why; they might not have known.*  The factory field-installation techs started doing it after the product had been on the market a few years, but they apparently never told the factory engineers.  No factory change notice was ever issued, no memo or bulletin, and the factory support engineers don't appear to have known it was being done.  But it was -- only it wasn't done in ours, and one Fall evening, at least one of them caught fire and cost my employer a small fortune.  Or small for them; I could have retired on what it cost, and lived in luxury.  The equipment was over twenty years old at the time.

     I don't think this is quite as bad an oversight but there's a piece missing from this puzzle, and someone knows what it is.  But so far, I don't know, and neither does the factory tech trying to help me troubleshoot it from hundreds of miles away. 
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* Sola constant-voltage transformers, for readers who know what those things are.  They run hot and often loud; this gadget had three of them, each slightly smaller than a footlocker.  The place where I saw them mounted on a wall even had fans blowing air across them.

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.

Three Kinds Of Chaos In A Trenchcoat

     The thing about Americans -- the people of the United States, at least -- is that we're essentially ungovernable.  Left, Right and Center, "You're not the boss of me!" has many fans in this country.

     Nevertheless, the Founders and Framers managed to cobble together a framework that forms a country, a federation of states under a -- hey! -- Federal government, the states themselves composed of counties, parishes, boroughs, townships, cities, towns: lots of little government, to argue over, protest, vote out, vote in and complain about.  We write letters to the Editor, go on local cable or global podcasts, call in to radio shows and generally raise hell, and for most of us -- for the overwhelming majority -- it's enough.

     We're not good at getting into line en masse behind a leader or a specific party line; the Bill of Rights has long been as close to a shared ideal as we have, and it's a list of things government is supposed to not mess with or is obliged to protect -- and we argue over the meaning and enforcement of even it.

     Two massive World Wars brought us about as close as we've come to unity, and there was plenty of pushback, both personal and in groups.

     That's our national character: taken as a whole, we're a disorganized rabble.  The results of our most recent national elections bear that out: the House and Senate are within a sneeze of being evenly divided; a bad flu season might tip the majority back and forth, depending who's been hanging out together and if they got their shots.  The popular vote for the Presidency was even closer, with a margin of  victory less than 1.5 percent.

     We don't march in step.  We've got a Constitution and a body of law that protects our chaotic nature.  So the Trump administration's present efforts to quell dissent, going after critics of the President and prominent Democrat-supporting people and institutions, is not only unlawful but a huge mistake.  Rolling Stone's got a great article about it, but the article is at least partially paywalled.

     Attempts to beat this country into line with any single set of narrow notions are doomed.  Usually, such efforts fizzle out.  Sometimes they fester, explode into violence, and then fade away.  And once -- just once! -- we had widespread conventional war.

     Mr. Trump, and especially his inner circle, appear to long for war; they've targeted Portland (the one in Oregon) and Chicago (the one in Illinois, if you were wondering) for the deployment of Federalized National Guard troops and the President is toying with involving the Insurrection Act.  Portland, OR is pretty reliably Left-leaning and had a long run of telegenic violence (arguably in reaction) during the first Trump administration; Chicago is the dominant city of Illinois, a state under popular Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, a prominent Administration critic and likely 2028 Presidential candidate.  They're likely places to start trouble, and sending in the National Guard appears to be intended as provocation: neither city is in a particular crisis at this time.

     I'm not seeing any serving generals lining up to wage war on this nation's cities, even after the President's speech to them calling for just that.

     Americans thrive on chaos.  As a group, we don't like to pushed around.  We don't like being told what to do, what to think, what to believe, how to worship or even if we ought to be religious at all.  Tell us it's a crime to burn the flag (it's not) and you've guaranteed the appearance of public flag-burners.  Oh, most people won't approve of it -- but most people will also disapprove of arresting and charging the flag-burners, as well.

     This kind of thing will be the downfall of the incumbent Republicans.  The only question is how long it will take, and how big a mess it will make.  --And the end result won't be Democrat dominance, but a return to our normal level of chaos and disagreement.  We're a fractious lot, but that's how it works here. 

It's Here

     It's here, it's in -- and I had not realized that "Normal" really is a setting on a washing machine, all by itself.  This one has a weird array of settings, including "Delicates," "Casuals," "Quick Wash," "Normal," "Whites," "Colors" and "Spin and Drain." There's another setting for water temperature, which does not include separate wash and rinse temps.  But it's got two different cold settings, plus "Cool."

     The installers and I had about fifty percent of a language in common.  We got by.  I guess I'm supposed to be all up in arms about that, but I'm not.  They did a good job, didn't faff around, and cleaned up what little mess they made.  The lead guy had a very strong accent, but he was patient and willing to slow way down.  They took the old washer out and brought the new one in using a wide two-man lifting strap, rearranging it for the stairs and level walking.  It's effective and gets through narrow spaces -- but you need a couple of men built about like Li'l Abner to make it work.

Uh-Oh, Marco

     There's a chance that a breakfast plate hit the wall in the White House this morning.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio is making the rounds of the Sunday morning political shows* to flog the tentative peace agreement for Gaza.  It's a good thing, though years and lives late in coming, and who knows if it'll actually go through, but it's as close as we've seen so far.

     On ABC's This Week, Secretary Rubio praised President Trump for arranging the agreement -- and then went on to give equal or nearly equal credit to a long list of Muslim-majority countries which have been pressing Hamas, facilitating talks, and providing insight and locations.  He looked a little furtive in the doing; he knows it's not what his boss wants to hear, not with a Nobel almost within scent, but I suppose there's a vestige of spine that prompts him to give credit where it's due.  Look for some kind of ritual humiliation from above to follow.
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* He's scheduled for This Week, Meet the Press and Face the Nation.  Sure hope he ate his Wheaties this morning!