I Suppose I Should Comment

     It's appropriate to make some comment about the disruption at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

     It was something of a fiasco long before it started; the famously touchy President Trump has -- unusually for a sitting President -- never attended while in office until last night.  The event is often something of a mutual roast, it's always been a little too cozy, and mostly it's a rare fancy dinner for the White House Press corps, many of whom will who wallow in it while affecting disdain.  The entertainment this year was going to be a mentalist instead of the typical comedian, a transparent shying away from discord.  It was widely anticipated that Mr. Trump was going to go hard on the assembled reporters.

     And--  Most of it never happened.  Someone with a gun tried to crash the party, and failed.

     Security at events featuring high-ranking Federal politicians is always pretty tight, and the professionals do their best to manage every rational threat they can think of.  This means an irrational assailant has an advantage, and indeed, every known attempt on the lives of Presidents since John Wilkes Booth, successful or not, has been made by someone who was, in some way or another, not rational; they appear to have acted alone* in every case.  Add someone else to that kind of a plan, and it leaks -- and should.

     There's generally some distance in well-controlled space between the security gate(s) with metal detectors, suspicious Secret Service types, etc. and the room itself, and that's on purpose.  (I've had to pass though that exact kind of gantlet† on a couple of occasions.  It's serious business.)  It buys some time.  It worked just as it should last night; the would-be attacker -- whose precise target(s) remain unknown, but there's only one way to bet -- was stopped before he got through the last set of doors.

     And I'm glad he was.  I happen to think Donald Trump is a loathsome human being, and his inner circle are no better.  They are doing immense harm to the proper functioning of the Federal government, to American society in general, and to both our country's stranding in the world and to world peace in general.  But nobody -- nobody -- not presenting an imminent mortal threat rates extrajudicial killing by some random guy with a grudge and/or a screw loose (or by anyone else, for that matter).  Impeachment, criminal trials, 25th Amendment, losing big at the ballot box?  I wish all of it on him.  But not what was successfully headed off last night.

     Of course, I have also been hearing claims it was all faked, or "allowed to happen."  I wouldn't count on it.  Everything about the sequence of even suggests very strongly one more Lone Gunman, getting as far as he got because he started out well askew.  And I think Trump and company are enormously more reactive than proactive.  They'll make hay with this; they already started to within the first hour.  But they didn't set it up.

     In a time of chaos, this is just more damnable chaos, and the worst people will proceed to turn it to their own ends as much as they can.
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* The Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists are welcome to debate that among themselves, but as far as can be proven, it is true.  (IIRC, there has been one attempt by a pair of desperate and borderline men working together, which failed.)
 
† Although the words are so widely misused that most dictionaries have given up, a gauntlet is a kind of glove, one that once upon a time was occasionally flung down in challenge.  A gantlet is a double row of your nominal peers, or perhaps Native Americans, who are going to whale the tar out of you as you run between them.  This does not sound like a good time, and heavy gloves aren't going to be much help.

LARPing His Faith

     It's been three days and I almost forgot -- or perhaps I should say that it is so preposterous that I nearly dismissed it out of hand.  But it's true: Indiana's delusional nutjob Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith continues to behave as if he's a supporting character in a Left Behind prequel film.

     The latest installment was prompted by his outrage that the Virginia legislature and voters had the temerity to redistrict the state's Congressional districts to favor Democratic candidates -- this in response to--  It's kind of a long checkers game.  I'd better review it.

     In late 2025, Donald Trump, frustrated by his party's bare majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, called on Republican-led states  ("About four," per the President) to gerrymander themselves.  The effort began with Texas, despite worries by some of that state's GOP politicians that it might dilute solidly-red districts.
     In August 2025, the Texas legislature approved a map that gave the state five more Republican-leaning districts than it previously had.  This was promptly challenged in court and worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, who let the new maps stand in December of this year.
     Meanwhile, California's Governor Gavin Newsom called on their legislature to counter the move.  That's not so easy as in Texas: California has an Independent Redistricting Commission that draws their U.S. House maps.  So the legislature had to put a referendum before voters in a tearing hurry: would they approve bypassing the Commission for the next set of maps?  The referendum was successful.  California's new maps moves five districts into the safely-Democrat column.
     Over in Missouri, Republicans planned to split up a Democrat-held district centered on Kansas City.  That's still in process, having cleared the legislature, been challenged in court and upheld, and challenged by petition, which might result in a referendum to overturn the new maps.  Or it might not; that's still up in the air.
     The North Carolina legislature successfully redrew their maps and will probably replace a Democratic Congressperson with a Republican.
     Utah's been going back and forth.  Anti-gerrymandering provisions of state law limit the amount of juggling either party can do, and attempts to carve up Salt Lake City into four districts that combine with the surrounding areas to create safe spaces for GOP candidates have failed after a court challenge.  SLC is likely to continue to be represented in the House by a Democrat.
     Indiana, four-square Republican, MAGA as can be, lacking any kind of independent board or commission to decide House districts and having no anti-gerrymandering laws, should have been a shoo-in.  But Hoosiers are muleish -- and cautious.  Redistricting can water down "safe" districts.  Confronted with an informal directive from Washington, DC, the State Senate mustered enough votes to stand pat: Indiana districts remain unchanged, and the dissenting Republicans who kept it that way are being primaried.
     Maryland has tried to redraw their maps to favor Democrats, an effort which appears stalled.   New York has had the same general result.
     Florida has changes in the works; their intent is to give Republicans an edge.  It's a multistep process with commissions, committees and a special legislative session, and it has only just begun.
     And that brings me, at least, to Virginia.  Remember Virginia?  That state has also cot an independent commission to draw up their House maps; the legislature managed to pass a proposed amendment to bypass it, and put the notion before the state's voters to decide: partisan maps for 2026, or not?  They voted to redistrict.

     And that effort in Virginia, that result at the end of all the preceding back-and-forth, is what drew Micah Beckwith's ire: "Democrats aren't necessarily all dark, but they are being led by the minions and the voices of darkness—they're going to win. They're playing to win. And so we have to wake up and guys step up. If we go on the battlefield, we will win. The question is, will we enter the battlefield?"

     Got it?  In a fight they didn't start, on a "battlefield" where the Democrats had to get voter approval to redraw maps while the Republicans can just let the various state legislatures rip,* he's still worried about the "voices of darkness," and warns Republicans, "Evil will find you."

     Better yet?  Ignoring polls showing increasing voter unhappiness with Republicans, all of this shifting around is pretty much a wash.  The balance lies in the few remaining competitive districts -- and in public sentiment.  I wouldn't advise either party to count those chickens before they have all come home to roost, no matter how much they want to believe someone's goose is cooked.  I know which side I'd like to see lose, but the results remain to be seen.
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* It is nevertheless not a bug but a feature that states decide how to draw their own maps.  Nor is it Federally prohibited to draw 'em up to favor one party or another.  "Fifty experiments in democracy" doesn't promise they'll all be noble, fair-minded efforts at uplift, or even especially wise.  Don't like it?  Vote in a new set of crooks!  

Friday, Trash Day

     Hooray, hooray, Friday's here -- and the trash isn't.  In fact, it just left.  Or at least the contents of the city-supplied bin did.  They switched 'em out a month or two back, after nearly a decade of big yellow and blue plastic containers.  It was the result of a new contract, but the old ones were starting to get pretty battered.

     The new ones are gray -- and (for a fee) there's still recycling, with its own green bins.  But something interesting happened: with the old bins, you got one for free, and paid a nominal recurring charge for a second one if needed.  There weren't enough new bins to replace all the "extra" ones and as a result, as a stopgap, you can use whatever you've got, as long as it's got the right tapered-rectangle shape the collection apparatus* can pick up and dump.  And they're not checking too closely.

     After a couple of weeks of noticing the neighbors set out various trash cans, I wheeled out the one we'd been collecting cardboard in, and lo, it was emptied.  The morning, the other one is out there, full of bagged yard waste.  It's almost impossible to throw way a trash can, and we have been stuck with these ever since the city started issuing Official Bins, back when the century was still dewy-fresh.  It's about time they got back to work!

     I expect the honeymoon will be over sooner or later, but for now, it's a time for disposal.
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* You should see it!  --If you live in a city of any size, you probably already have, or something like it: a set of hydraulically-operated forks off to the left right side of the truck on a fancy "arm" that can be quickly steered (by a skilled operator) to pick up the bin, gripping just tightly enough to secure it but not break it, and dump it into a big steel box on the front of the truck.  When the box fills up, the driver pushes a button and the big box arcs up and is emptied into the far larger container on the back of the truck, which has a cover that retracts out of the way as the box swings toward it.  Rube Goldberg would be green with envy!  I'm sure watching it delights small children all over Indianapolis.  And, since they added trucks when they stopped carrying a helper to manually empty trash cans into the truck, collection is faster.  I hope the helpers got first crack at the new driver jobs, but the inner workings of trash collection in Indianapolis are as opaque as any large city's.  They've done a good job of it all along, at least. 

The Blanding

      I eat semi-healthily.  My weaknesses are a sweet tooth and a fondness for ham, sausge and beef.  Oh, and pasta.

     Salads are great -- they're better with a good vinaigrette, which includes, oh dear, salt, fat and often sugar.

     Oatmeal?  Yum -- if it's sweetened.

     And so on.  I've cut the amount of sugar in my coffee (again) to half a teaspoon, and all but given up Reese's Cups.  Salty crunchy snacks are harder to give up -- unsalted and half-salted mixed nuts help.  Bacon's got to be more of an occasional treat than it has been.

     Backing away from refined white flour is not a problem for me, other than pasta (and, okay, saltines -- oh, with a little peanut butter on them, is there a better treat?); I grew up with good rye bread and Roman Meal whole wheat, and have always preferred them to squishy, tasteless white bread.  (Our national preference for what amounts to brioche will never cease to amaze me.)

     I'm trying.  The last doctor lecture was just short of scathing; I'd not been eating as well as I should have been, and it showed.  I got worse about it during the pandemic, especially because I was keeping canned meat on the shelf and rotating through it to maintain a consistently dependable supply: Spam and corned beef hash are delicious, but....

     There are ways in which I'll never get out from under pandemic habits; I keep paper goods and hygiene supplies stocked in depth, and canned foods, too.  But I can and will eat better, and I have been doing my best for the last few months.

     I've got a lot of spices, and I'm always looking for something new.  A little more herbs and seeds, a little less salt; a little more pepper, a bit less sugar.  It's got to help!

Okay, I Did It

     I'm not thrilled about it, but there is so little good information available for older people trying to navigate the governmental and financial bureaucracy that I gave in and joined AARP.  I still think they're kind of manipulative, but probably less so than the fast-talking insurance hucksters and pettifogging bureaucrats, and I'm tired of it taking me two hours to figure out if I can rollover my work 401(k) into my personal (and embarrassingly thin) conventional IRA without taking a bath on income taxes.

     (Apparently, no, though the IRS presents the information in a confusing enough manner that it it might mean no taxes.  I'm still not entirely sure -- but me needing to pay them is probably the way to bet.  But if it was a Roth...?  I don't know, especially since I get taxed if pull money out of the existing IRA, so doesn;t that make it a Roth?  I may have to go ask the bank, though the last time I did that, they tried to refinance my house and rope me into some high-risk/high yield investment scheme and it took a rather tense meeting with a couple of suits in nice offices to convince them that I do not like gambling, I do not want all my financial stuff in the same bank, and what I wanted was an account that going to still have some money in it even if Wall Street decided October, 1929 might be fun to replay.  The number of people I knew who had their retirement plans wiped out in the dotcom bust has me convinced it's better to plan poor and be able to collect on it.  Think of it as choosing known mild disappointment over lasting regret.)

     This is going to at least double my junk mail, mostly "retirement planners" and great deals on funeral services.  Since I plan to be cremated as cheaply as possible and have most of the dust dumped out at radio towers (some are really easy to get to -- just sneak in and pour it out!), and my "retirement planning" doesn't include enough surplus to pay a planner, it's all just more trash.

Monday? There Was A Monday?

     There was a Monday, and I didn't post anything.  Sunday was a fairly busy day, once I got moving, but action has consequences:  grilling and doing a tiny bit of yard work left my knees sore, stiff and aching.

     Add in migraines and allergy symptoms despite taking the OTC pills, and I maxed out on acetaminophen and had added aspirin by Monday evening.  I have long known I was headed for arthritis in my knees; childhood rheumatic fever did a little damage, my 2006 motorscooter wreck did more (a lot more) to my right knee, and falling hard on my left knee over a year ago added to it.  The bill is coming due and all I can do is take my pills and try to move more.  Might have to go back to physical therapy.

     It was a distraction yesterday.  Who is this old person I'm riding around in, and why is she having so much difficulty standing and walking?  Oh, right.  Still me.  She's gonna have to keep at it.

     Current events keep on currenting.  I note with interest but without much comment that the President's "Liquor Cabinet" has shed another member.  All women so far -- but remember, "Women and children first," leaves plenty of leeway for SecDef, the FBI director and possibly the Secretary of State to hit the lifeboats in the first round.  There's probably a betting pool -- but don't you have better things to do with your money?

Fancy Pork Roast

     The thing about pork is, it's cheap -- and it's good, especially if you can cook it low and slow.  The grocer had Boston Butt, a nice size for roasting, and I had ideas.  I bought one and when Sunday turned out partly sunny and cold, I put my plans into action.

     I almost didn't.  It's a nice skill to start a charcoal fire with a single match.  It's a lot more difficult on a windy day and it took me six matches before I got one to burn long enough to catch the kindling.  That may be a record for me.

     The meat got marinated (not long) in about a half-cup of cider vinegar with a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce and Worcestershire, a couple tablespoons of hot dog relish and a couple of tablespoons of spicy brown mustard, plus a little black pepper, Bragg's herb mixture, dash of curry powder and smoked paprika and some parsley.  That's not a lot of marinade -- a large ziplock freezer bag with air squeezed out makes the most of it, and I poured the marinade into the pan when I set the meat on the rack.

     Once the coals were smoldering, I spared them into two piles along the sides of the grill and loaded the meat onto a rack in my oval roasting pan, with a box of chicken-mushroom broth almost up to the rack level.  I covered it with foil (the lid is too high to fit the grill) and let it get started while I peeled a turnip and a Cosmic Crisp apple and cut them into thick slices and quartered them, with a little more paprika and oregano on the turnips and garam masala on the apple (it smells like apple-pie spice, but has a little more zing on the palate).  The meat was going to get an hour per pound, about three hours and twenty minutes.

     I added the turnip and apple after the roast had been cooking for about a half-hour; you want the apple to cook right down and turnips are slow-cooking.  Next up, about an hour and a half in, was a layer of sliced spring onions, parsnips, carrots and fennel bulb.  The parsnips need a light peeling and are cut into good-size sections; the carrots I buy are peeled and cut into sections an inch and a half long, ready to go.  I washed, sliced and cut up the fennel bulb, adding a few of the feathery fronds.  The stalks are woody, better cooked in a mesh bag to add flavor and removed, but I didn't mess with that.  I added the vegetables and covered the pan back up.  By then it was bubbling and starting to smell pretty good.

     Tam had picked up a basket of assorted exotic mushrooms -- a big King, clusters of gray oyster and hen-of-the-woods or maitake.  I washed and cut them up, and added them to the pan with a little over an hour of cooking time left.

     The end result was moist pork that was falling-apart tender with lots of flavor, and the vegetables were wonderful -- Tam went back for seconds of the veggies.  It didn't need any seasoning except for the least pinch of salt, and that wasn't really necessary.  Savory, earthy and with just a hint of apple-sweetness, I think it turned out as good as any of my pork roasts.

     Most of the cooking consists of just letting the grill do the work.  I ran a weed-trimmer along part of the back yard fence between prepping and adding vegetables, a chance to spend a little outdoor time while staying active enough to keep warm.

Sneaky Ragù

      Last week, I tried a dehydrated "Lazy Food" one dish dinner, a Sicilian ragù with chickpea-flour rotini and vegetable-protein "meat" in a thick tomato sauce with peas.  I added a dab of real Italian sausage and a couple of sliced fresh mushrooms, which is an easy cheat to liven up this kind of thing.

     It wasn't bad, not at all, filling and a little spicy.  The chickpea rotini were surprisingly good; the dried peas...well, they never quite recover the original texture; they were a weak point.

     But as I ate, I thought about how I'd make a richer version.  The wheatless pasta worked, so I figured I'd keep that.  A little spiced tomato sauce with garden vegetables, a little ground beef and/or Italian sausage, canned or frozen peas.  But the sauce?  That was tricky.

     Ideally, such sauces are best made from scratch and simmered for hours.  I rarely have hours.  It was thicker than canned spaghetti sauce, and spicier, with a different flavor profile from Arrabbiata.  Elements of it were familiar....  There had to be some way to fake it!

     You can buy Moroccan Shakshuka sauce in little bottles; it's typically used to poach eggs* for a dish of the same name.  It's like a thicker version of the full-vegetable Italian tomato gravy, with a North African spice profile.  A bottle of that and a like-sized (small) bottle of Michael's of Brooklyn combine like someone hoped they'd get together, and when simmered with meat, mushrooms and peas, it's pretty much the same flavor as the dehydrated stuff, only better, and thick enough to stand a spoon in.

     Alas, the brand of chickpea rotini I bought took awhile to cook up in the sauce, and never had quite the right texture (there are a lot of different kinds).  But the end result was good nonetheless.

     I served it for dinner tonight.  Tam's not a big fan of peas, and wondered if zucchini might not be a good replacement for the peas and noodles.  I'm pretty sure it would work just fine, since zucchini is used in many closely related dishes.  So we'll try that next time.  It's still a low-prep, quickly-cooked meal, and a change from the usual.
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* There's an Andalusian version that adds both chorizo and serrano ham to the spicy tomato sauce and eggs, which sounds like an amazing breakfast to me.  The Moroccan tomato sauce is less expensive than the brands of Italian-style sauces I like, and can be thinned down to the same consistency with a little added plain tomato sauce.  I keep small cans of the plain stuff on hand all the time -- it's useful and stores well.

Critique Group

     The critique group I chair met this morning, and I continue to enjoy the level of talent the members have, both natural gifts and a willingness to put in the hard work of turning a string of interesting ideas into an engaging story.  There's a fair amount of skull sweat involved, and like the lovely swan gliding across the smooth surface of a pond, there's considerably more thrashing around taking place under the surface than you'd ever expect.

     The members of the group are putting in the effort and their stories and chapters show it.  Going over their manuscripts with an eye open for what works and what needs work is an education in and of itself.

Kerosene Burners

     The war between the United States, Israel and Iran has bumped up fuel unavailability and prices.  Some of it it is easy to understand: crude oil is traded globally, and tends to flow to where the dollars are.  Gasoline works the same way, and a lot of that crude oil input comes out the other end of the refinery as gas for your car.  We expect diesel to work the same way, and mostly it does, but there's a catch.

     See, diesel's down at the heavy end, with jet fuel, kerosene and home-heating oil (and past that to bunker oil, the tarry stuff they burn in big ships and old steam locomotives that didn't run on wood or coal).  And much of that gets "pre-bought" in bulk.  Airlines especially prefer to hedge their bets by buying months and months of jet fuel in advance (it's rarely a bad bet that fuel prices will go up over the long term), and a lot of it gets refined not too far from the source -- which for a lot of Europe, is in the Middle East, and you'd never, ever guess where those refineries are.... No, I'm kidding.  Of course they're located around or near the Strait of Hormuz.  There's not a lot of jet fuel refining capacity within the EU itself.  Why should they bother when Middle Eastern countries are happy to host those big, smelly, polluting refineries?  The answer to that question is coming home to roost.

     Jet fuel is a knotty problem.  The airlines have already bought it; it just can't be delivered.  And the refineries away from the conflict zone that are set up to make jet fuel are well able to make diesel -- which is not a clunky bulk-sold-in-advance market, and where the free flow of fuel to where prices are highest* leaves companies chasing after a distribution network and customers who are, however unhappily, already set up for and accepting of highly variable prices.

     Meanwhile, the economics of airlines are screwy.  Outside the U.S., many of the largest carriers are subsidized by their governments, instruments of national prestige as well as effective transportation.  By some measures, the U.S. airline industry as a whole never makes a profit: there are few losers every year, often cannibalized by their peers or propped up by past earnings, a handful of winners, and the rest break even.  Disruption in fuel supplies throws a wrench into this tipsy balance -- and prolonged disruption tosses in a stick of dynamite after it, the fuse fizzing.

     You will note an absence of hand-wringing assignment of blame.  Sure, Donald Trump's a bull in a china shop on his best days, his Secretary of Defense is a bloodthirsty pinhead with a weird take on religion, and the majority of Congress is a craven bunch of spineless losers being led around by the nose (not to mention the pompous ambition and negative charisma of the Vice President, which I won't) -- but the Middle East is a powder keg with a load of lit candles on top.  If it wasn't Mr. Trump's "splendid little war," it would be some other war in the region, and if it wasn't right now, it would happen next week, or next month, or next year.  It's going to happen, and it's going to keep on happening, as long as a politically unstable region produces such a large amount of the crude oil and its refined products that our entire civilization runs on.  The network of global trade in oil cannot be disassembled by any amount of domestic production: oil will always flow towards money.  Smart politicians would be working to reduce dependence on oil, especially as a primary energy source; this is the only controllable variable.  And guess what?  Our politicians are no smarter than the rest of us -- and our business leaders may be even less so.

     Get ready to ante up.  Again.  And if you were planning to fly anywhere soon, better count pennies.

     Update: The Strait of Hormuz is now, according to the Trump administration Iranian government, "completely open."  We'll see if everyone with a practical veto agrees -- but don't expect the worst parts of the mess to magically clear up overnight even if it's olly-olly-oxen-free.

     Further Update: No, it's a day later and the Strait is closed again.  And apparently the U. S. blockade -- as opposed to the Iranian closure -- never stopped.  They can keep this up all year folks, and they might.  This doesn't bode well for the price of pretty much everything.
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* This simplistic formulation ignores that it's a gradient, with high prices but excellent supply at one end and lower prices but low supply at the other.  The U.S. is (on average) rich, and if you've got the bucks, fueling up the Benz is no problem no matter what it burns.  A Third-World farmer might not even be able to find any to buy.  In between, countries are rationing fuel, requesting or requiring people work from home, asking "Is this trip really necessary?" and taking other economizing measures.  And airlines?  If things go on, some of 'em are going to get grounded, or go under altogether.
 
† Still the name of it.  Congress named it and only Congress can rename it, which they have not.

He Said What?

     It would have been inconceivable to my parents: a Republican Vice-President, speaking at a conservative group's event and addressing in passing a war in Europe started by and serving the cause of Russian territorial expansion said, "... a Ukrainian American [...] person got really agitated at me because I was saying we should stop funding the Ukraine war. And I still believe that, obviously, and it’s one of the things I’m proudest that we’ve done as an administration, is we’ve told Europe if you want to buy weapons you can, but the United States is not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine any more."

     The war in Ukraine slogs on, with Ukrainian innovation and yes, great heaps of weapons made in the West turning the dogged Russian advance into a meatgrinder, holding it and sometimes even turning it back.  It's one of the most impressive defenses ever mounted by a smaller country against a larger one in conventional warfare since the Winter War between Finland and, well, what do you know? -- Russia.  And that one only lasted three months.  Like every war they've been involved in, the Russian strategy consisted of throwing soldiers into the volcano, which is what they're still doing in Ukraine.  I guess it works until you run out of soldiers.

     Whatever one's opinion of the war in Ukraine, stopping Russian aggression seems like it would serve the best interest of the West.  And the war is very much a territorial war, a war of chess or of Go.  We know what both sides want and we know what counts as victory.

     Elsewhere, the VP has signed on, however reluctantly, to a war with much murkier objectives.  The last I knew, the U. S. and Iran were still running different blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and both declaring some form of victory.  Iran wants to keep on being a thorn in the side of the Middle East; the U.S. government wants....  It varies, depending on who you ask, and when.  I don't think anyone outside Iran wants them building nuclear weapons, though there's not broad agreement on the best way to prevent it.  The President might want regime change, but so far all he has managed to do is trade one collection of hardliners at the top for another collection of them, with less experience and more reason to despise us.  All anyone can be sure of is that fossil fuel prices are going up,* the stuff is getting scarce in places that relied on the LNG, crude oil and fuel that was carried through the Strait, and fertilizer and diesel fuel are in short supply and more expensive just as farms in the Northern Hemisphere enter planting season.

     If this is winning, then how much worse is losing?  I don't know; I do know the (small) crowd at the Turning Point, USA gathering the Vice President came to address were booing him over it, which is kind of like going to watch your hometown baseball team and throwing tomatoes at them.  On the domestic front, that's nowhere even close to winning.
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* Although there's starting to be some reduction in demand, for reasons that are mostly unsettling.

Deserts Of News

      At one time, it was easy to be awash in news: pretty good newspapers, five-minute radio newscasts -- even the screamin' Top 40 stations on AM and blissed-out album rock on FM had two-minute news capsules once an hour, while their pointy-boots country and suit'n'tie middle of the road peers handed out five whole minutes of network news that covered the world, often alongside another five of state and local material from their own newsroom.  (The "elevator music" stations might or might not have much news -- often very little, since it got in the way of being radio wallpaper.)

     It wasn't in-depth detail and analysis, and you rarely got hard-hitting exposés unless a politician got caught in the wrong bed and/or with a finger in the till, but it was useful, solid stuff, wars and plane crashes, sports scores and election results.  Opinion was clearly labeled and set apart from news coverage -- the editorial page of the paper, or the station owner or general manager gruffly complaining what a terrible idea the new bypass highway was, avoiding car-dealer row.*

     You could glance over the paper as you ate your cornflakes or Cream of Wheat; you could let the radio play while you washed up and got ready for work.

     Our local paper went to the dogs a long while back.  I held on as long as I could -- the catboxes need lining! -- but it kept getting thinner (especially of local news) and subscription rates kept going up, and by the time it was ten times the price of the same amount of blank newsprint, I dropped it.  Radio news -- well, there's NPR.  Their hard-news coverage is a lot more balanced than claimed by their detractors† and you can get 'em via podcast.  That "podcast" part is important, because while over-the-air NPR morning shows have more news content than commercial network TV, there's still a lot of feature fluff and it can get annoying: "The world is at the brink of war and/or recession -- but first, twenty minutes with the woman reintroducing stoats to London." Look, it's lovely but it doesn't affect the price of gas, okay?  I can call up the podcast and let it play actual news while I do dishes.

     On opinion stuff, I balance NPR with The Bulwark, mostly staffed by ex-Republicans repulsed by Mr. Trump's remaking of their party.  The downside -- and why that's not a live link -- is that their content is hosted by Substack, which is still "neutral" on things like Nazis, neo-Nazis and Andrew Tate.  You don't stop evil by closing your eyes and pretending it's just as good as anybody else's honest opinion.

     And that's the other thing about those old newspapers and local radio stations: they stuck to a narrow line, a consensus about decent behavior.  They might lean Right or Left (mostly Right, with those Democrats and hippies at the album rock station and the afternoon paper as exceptions), but they all agreed Nazis were bad, the Soviet Union was bad, abusing women was bad, elections were honest and politicians bore watching.  It wasn't much (and sometimes it was more talk than action), but more and more, it looks like The Good Old Days.
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*The symbiotic relationship between small-to-medium market radio stations and their local car dealers was deep and profound.  You could tell the #2 or #3 station in town, because the GM drove a Lincoln instead of a Cadillac. None of 'em drove Chryslers except for the sales guy who had that account.
 
† Ad Fontes rates NPR News Now almost dead center, a little to the right of conservative-leaning The Hill, and they provide examples.