Oh, I Get Letters

     Yesterday's blog post about self-made cipher, Vice-Presidential candidate (and nearly-invisible U. S. Senator) J. D. Vance and his running mate and opponents got some comments.

     For instance: "good to know about you. goodbye."

     I have not made my opinion of Mr. Trump, and of Trumpism in general, a secret: I'd rather have almost anyone else as President.  As someone whose politics lean fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I accept that I'm usually only going to get one or the other -- but he managed to deliver the precise opposite, adding enormously to the deficit while turning the clock back on civil rights.  I never thought he was especially competent, but I thought the elders of his party would step up and keep him coloring inside the lines.  Instead, they knuckled under.  He still looked merely bad, a sore winner when he won and and an ever sorer loser when he didn't.  Then came January 6, 2021, and after that, I didn't think he should ever be President again.  His party disagreed, and here we are, with the Presidential election neck and neck.

     That's a fact: Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are in a dead heat.  Here's another fact: most people have made up their mind who they're going to vote for.  This late in the race, the candidates are courting a corporal's guard of undecided voters in a handful of states -- and they're trying to motivate voters who support them to get out and vote.  On November 6, we're all still going to be here together: Harris voters, Trump voters, Stein voters, Kennedy voters* and the great big block of non-voters.†  Maybe things will get spicy, but if 2022's any guide, probably not.

     I have spent my adult voting career trying to figure out which candidate had the skills to do the job, which of them had absolutely unacceptable policies or irredeemable personal flaws, if I could safely make a protest vote (sorry, kids, but in most races, that's all an LP vote does) and so on.  My vote is not a pledge of total agreement or undying devotion; I'm just trying to hire someone to mow the lawn and supervise the military who won't skimp on the work or steal the good silver.  And that's the thing you should know about me.
* * *
     On Mr. Trump: Aside from alcoholism, he has all the traits of every bad boss I have ever had.  I disliked him before he ran for President, I disliked much more him when his comments about grabbing women by their private parts came out, I disliked him while he was President, and I came to loathe him on January 6.  Some time that day between his weasel-worded encouragement of violence and letting Vice-President Pence swing in the breeze -- very nearly literally -- I grasped the recklessness of his disregard for the norms of decent behavior and of political campaigns.  (I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Pence but he's honest and rule-abiding, as politicians go, and he was unstintingly loyal to the then-President within legal limits.  Stirring up a mob and shrugging when they threatened the VP was staggeringly amoral.)
*  *  *
     Another commenter wrote, "I disagree with you on the ability of the Democratic canidate [sic]" and that's a real puzzler, since I did not address the ability of Governor Walz or Vice-President Harris.  In terms of government experience, both of them have more than Senator Vance (a bit under two years, vs. a little under 17 for Walz) or former President Trump (four years, against over 20 years for Ms. Harris): they've done the job longer.

     Senator Vance's book shows him to be a man without a strong identity, engaged in a search for a person to become.  A temporarily faithful son to his mother's succession of boyfriends and husbands, U. S. Marine, diligent student, devoted grandson, political centrist, venture capitalist, atheist, writer, pundit, conservative Catholic, hard-Right Republican.  He writes well and he's an intelligent man, but there's no telling who he may decide to be tomorrow.  He's a palimpsest, restlessly written, rewritten, erased and written over.  Inexperience aside, I do not think this is a personality who should be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.  His performance in interviews has shown a mealy-mouthed arrogance I find appalling.

     Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris are far steadier.  For me, the decision is matter of "compared to what," and when the GOP runs an incompetent and declining Presidential candidate with a prospective VP who I think is a toady only too happy to reflect even the worst qualities of the top of the ticket, the list of people I'd rather see in the job is very long, and given that the Democratic candidates are experienced, willing to compromise and actually on the ballot, they're at the top of it.

     Your mileage may vary.  I've been wrong before -- at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I predicted "we'd all pull together" and get the thing under control quickly.  I was wrong.  We made a mess of it.  People I had thought of as friends were insulting and inconsiderate to others, often to people who had no choice, berating store cashiers over their employer's mask requirements and so on.  But I'm not wrong about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Vance's manifest unfitness to serve as President and Vice-President.  They may win the election, but they'll still be the wrong people for the job.
________________________
* He didn't manage to scamper off the ballot in every state.  If the official Indiana ballot guide is accurate, he's still on ours.
 
† "Oh, whatever" remains the largest single voting bloc in U. S. elections.  We had record turnout in 2020 -- which still meant a third of the eligible voters sat it out.  Typically, less than half of the people who could vote bother to make the effort.

A World Of No

     A few times recently, I have encountered people suggesting -- with hope -- that given Donald Trump's age, a vote for him is really a vote for J. D. Vance, and they thought Senator Vance was a much more appealing prospect than Vice-President Harris or the former President.

     Based on exactly what?  His political record consists of service in the U. S. Senate from January, 2023 until whenever he started cutting class to campaign for the number-two job.  His book is self-pitying auto-hagiography and he has the steadfast moral compass of a blade of tall grass in a shifting breeze.  In interviews and debates, he's shown a firm grasp of Gish gallop and an aversion to straightforward answers.  He can't even manage to consistently mirror his running mate's positions.  He's demonstrably intolerant of persons different from himself; if you're not married with children and gainfully employed, he thinks you don't count.  He courts Christian Nationalist extremists and coyly turns away any criticism of it.

     Mr. Trump has the same man-on-horseback appeal as the authoritarians he idolizes, from Orbán and Putin to Perón and Franco. I don't like it but it exists.  In contrast, the Senator from Ohio has the charisma of the night-shift manager of a tire outlet announcing your credit card's been denied.  Having him one heartbeat away from the Presidency is way too close.

     Better Tim Walz than him; better Kamala Harris than the top of his ticket.

These Modern Times

     Found out early this afternoon that my few peers and I will be adding IT support to our regular tech-ing duties.  There are only so many seats available in our game of musical chairs and we're full up.  We may get another genuine IT person the next time someone steps down.  In the meantime, we have the head IT honcho to guide us and I plan to take detailed notes whenever possible.

     And so the wheel turns.  Over 25 years ago, when it started to be impossible to run any kind of an office without a computer network, my department was doing IT support by default.  Our employer brought in an IT specialist and firmly told us to go back to our soldering irons, videotape machines and high-power vacuum tubes.  These days we're out of the tube business, all but out of the tape business, still doing a little soldering and as of today, we're back to explaining to people that the computer probably didn't eat their missing file and no amount of force will fix a broken mouse.  Oh, and "Password123" might not be the best choice for security.

     This means I will have to face one of my recurring terrors: talking to people I have never really met, about things I'm only kinda sure about but that they don't know at all.  It does no good at all to be honest in such circumstances; you've got smile and radiate confidence, or they won't listen to a word you say.  I don't like doing it and I have a terrible memory for names, but this snake oil won't sell itself.

Oh, They Could, Could They?

     A recent article in The Atlantic about the lies politicians assert, and how futile fact-checking can be, included an interesting statement: "Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers."  The article also suggests another way to discourage untruths: lying during a debate could cost candidates airtime.

     Many platforms could, but I'll tell you one that can't: broadcast stations. Take the idea of cutting time for fibbers.  Uncle Sam says it's a no-no.
     "FCC rules seek to ensure that no legally qualified candidate for office is unfairly given less access to the airwaves – outside of bona fide news exemptions – than their opponent. Equal opportunities generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates; it does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate."
     Trim a liar's time, face an FCC fine.

     You can look on it as self-serving.  Politicians set up the FCC, and they're not going to clip their own wings.  Or you can look on it as preventing a station owner from playing favorites.  Either way, the proposed fix is out.  (Cable and online services still can -- airtime and broadcast frequencies are a limited resource but those cable TV and telcom fibers are a data pipe fatter than a sewer main.)

     When it comes to charging liars more, that's out, too.  The FCC language is fussy:
     "The FCC rules require that broadcast stations and cable systems can only charge legally qualified candidates the 'Lowest Unit Charges' and 'Comparable Rates' for their advertisements."
     Translation is easy: whatever the car dealers or other big clients who run a lot of ads pay for time is what candidates will be charged, and not a cent more.  This, too, can be read as cynical manipulation, pols demanding they all get the best rates.  Or you can take it as a way to ensure the station can't charge the candidate they dislike ruinous rates while giving time away to the one they favor.*

     So, sorry, there's no coercing honesty from politicians, at least not via over-the-air, free TV and radio.  We're back to the eternal question: how do you keep 'em honest?  How do you even ensure that, once bought, they stay bought?  We'd have as much luck trying to breed honest politicians as we'd have trying to create honest preschoolers -- and if you can find one that won't at least occasionally try to feed their Brussels sprouts to the dog so they can enjoy a favorite dessert or fib about doing something they know they shouldn't, you've found one in a million.  Politicians likewise, and they really don't like Brussels sprouts. 
_______________________
* It's been known to happen anyway.  One Indianapolis FM frequency was vacant for years after the owner of the station that used to be there gave airtime away to U. S. Senator, got caught (c'mon, it's not like the other guy isn't checking) and lost the license.  A multi-way legal fight among would-be owners followed and took nearly a decade to resolve.

N. B.

     For whatever it is worth, the most likely source of the phrase "roll down the (car's) window" dates back to when automobiles had canvas tops, and flexible isinglass side windows were an option.  Stored rolled up, you would roll them down to keep rainwater from splashing in while retaining some visibility.

     Hardtops and glass side windows came along with cheaper, mass-produced cars, and the crank mechanism to raise and lower side windows wasn't far behind.  You might crank your window down, but the older phrase was already there, and you were turning a thing, after all, so you rolled them down.

     I buy older cars but technology keeps on cranking, and I have been using a switch to "roll" my car windows up or down since my first Lexus small SUV, the same way most people already had for several years.

     Inspired by tab-clearing here and a blog post here.

They Did It

     SpaceX launched Starship this morning, and brought the booster back to land gently in the arms of the launch tower.  It's a big deal -- and a big gamble.  If it went wrong, they could have been out a launch tower and infrastructure.  But it worked.  (It doesn't take a keen eye to spot the second launch tower, some distance away, a backup I heartily approve.)

     They use a "move fast and break things" development model, one that, consciously or not, mirrors the early days of NASA, when explosive failures were more common than success.  It is quick and effective; it was inadvertent at NASA, where the national-prestige exigencies of the Cold War meant that visible success was more important than figuring out what doesn't work.  And it's impossible to apply to human-crewed spaceflight, at least in the West.  (The Soviet Union took the simpler approach of not announcing any mission until success was assured and Red China carefully avoids releasing damming detail even now.)  It takes a team of outstanding engineers and technicians working long hours to even reach the point where the thing lifts off and fails in flight.  Meeting all of the announced objectives is stunning.

     There's a tendency to give Elon Musk all of the credit for SpaceX's successes, but he never turns a wrench or frowns over a hot CAD schematic; he's a money guy, more owner than hands-on manager, running the big picture while being (per rumor) "managed from below" by President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and her corps of administrators and engineers.*  I am occasionally taken to task for pointing this out, as if it were some diminishment of Mr. Musk's role; but he is verifiably not Tony Stark or Thomas Edison, and there's no Buck Rogers without bucks, nor do you get Buzz Aldrin if there's no buzz.  He courts controversy and engages in partisan politics to a degree surprising for a government contractor and the owner of a social media platform, and maybe you don't get the kind of drive a spaceflight effort takes without that kind of personality.  Certainly Wernher von Braun, another big-picture planner (and able manager of large projects in the manner of Ms. Shotwell) had controversies of his own, and calculatingly convinced two very different governments to support his rocketry efforts.  Sergi Korolev navigated the backstabbing politics of Soviet aviation engineering, was very nearly crushed by infighting, and ruthlessly pursued his goals once he got back into a position of authority.  I've only met one of the three, von Braun, and he was quite charming, but none of them were or are people to turn your back on, especially if you are between them and their intended outcome.  The evidence so far is that you have to be something of an asshole to run a successful space program, and if the PRC's "person(s) behind the curtain" ever step far enough into the light to reveal details, I predict their biography will be similar.

     SpaceX has made a big step in turning their enormous rocket into a practical vehicle.  It is a giant leap in space travel, one likely to outlive all issues of personality and politics.
______________________
* There's an inverse correlation between the success of his enterprises and the degree to which the people doing the day-to-day grunt work are able to lure him away from tinkering.  SpaceX does very well; Tesla, less so, and Twitter, I mean X, is still losing users and becoming a one-sided echo chamber instead of the bastion of free speech he had promised.  Being very, very good at promotion, securing funding and getting an enterprise off the ground is no guarantee of skill in any other area.  No one is without feet of clay or the occasional bout of wooden-headedness.

I Don't Enjoy Tenterhooks

     Who does?  --Okay, presumably there's some perv out there who's into the metaphor, and loves being in suspense over serious issues that are likely to effect the rest of their life.  But that person's a statistical blip.  When it comes to our lives (as opposed to a mystery book or a spy movie), everyone wants to know what's around the next turn, or at least that whatever it is, it won't be too awful.

     Of course, we don't all have the same notions of "awful."  We don't even agree on what's going right and wrong at present, so the future and what to do about it is even more contentious.

     As I write, the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election is up in the air, with the two major candidates within a few points of one another and the critical swing states hanging in the balance.  It's a good bet that it's going to stay a mystery down to the morning after Election Day, if not longer.

     I don't like it.  The main thing on offer right now is fear: Mr. Trump wants me to be afraid of "illegals," a category that apparently includes a lot of people who are in this country legally, but don't look like him or speak much English.*  He's also worried about Marxists, "transgenders" and a few other bugbears, all of whom constitute powerless (and often oddball) minorities with scary reputations.  It's a simple formula: wave around a few ooga-booga bogeyman pictures of Leon Trotsky, way-out drag queens, Stalin (not, strictly speaking, a Marxist) or the Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- or, better yet, of some actual criminals whose appearance makes them proxies for ethnic fearmongering.  It appeals strongly to his base, which encourages him to do more of the same, an iterative process that most recently resulted in a "few minutes hate" at rallies out West that would have been cartoonish were it not so unnerving.  I'd say this kind of thing is unAmerican, but our history is not without  low points, from the 1921 Tulsa race riots to 1954's "Operation Wetback" and its Depression-era predecessor that swept up and deported hundreds of thousands of U. S. citizens who happened to have the wrong accent or skin color, along with the undocumented workers and residents the programs were aimed at.

     The Democrats point to the Republicans in justifiable fear of precisely this kind of officially-supported xenophobia, and go on to relatively sober policy offerings: heartfelt, but Vice-President Harris and Tim Walz lack the lurid sideshow appeal of their opposition.

     Mr. Trump keeps finding new kinds of chickens to toss into the pot, promising skyrocketing wages, low prices and a whole slew of things no President or Congress can deliver; Ms. Harris offers a less flashy government of lower deficits, wider attention to human rights and less sloganeering.

     I don't know if that's enough.  I doubt fear is a really great way to get people into voting booths, and I worry that a chance to have some other poor schmuck pushed around is at least as strong a draw.

     So I'm stuck on tenterhooks, at least until the election results are in, and maybe after that, because recent history has shown me that I didn't know my fellow citizens nearly as well as I thought; those gleefully smiling faces in lynching postcards from the first part of the 20th Century were not so long ago as I had let myself be led to believe.  Our worst nature is barely suppressed and, once released, difficult to bottle up again.
_____________________
* They'll learn, or if they manage to dodge learning, their kids will pick it up.  For a country without an official language, the U.S. is difficult to navigate without speaking the lingo.

It's The Little Things

     After that lovely breakfast yesterday, I slipped and fell while standing up from the bathtub.  Not very far; I'm careful these days.  But far enough: I came down with most of my weight on my injured left knee.

     Something gave way. It was painful.  Once that had faded. I pressed on -- much to do, after all, and so few hours in the day.  But I was limping worse than usual and gradually ran out of steam.  Denial only goes so far.  My knee had swollen back up in new and disturbing ways.  It was throbbing, too.  Eventually, I had to admit the day was not going to happen.

     I took to my bed still in work clothes, a gel-filled ice pack on my knee and a pillow under it.  I was asleep in minutes and woke only to swap the pack for a fresh one from the freezer.  Hours later, I helped out for trash night and watched a TV game show, then back to bed with ice.

     Today is better, so far.  I slept later than usual and I am hoping to get to work.  It's going to have to be mostly sedentary.

Cornbread Omelet

      The omelets I make probably don't fit everyone's definition.  I reinforce the egg with some cooked starch and water -- often breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs, or even cornmeal.  Frustrated by omelets that break when you fold them?  Try adding some strength.  (I'd love to tell you how much, but it varies.  Start with three or four saltines for a three-egg omelet in a 10" pan.  Mash 'em up and add enough water to form a paste, then beat or stir in the eggs. The gentler you are, the less air in the finished product, and this is a matter of personal preference.)

     Last night, I heated up "leftover stew" using the tri-tip pot roast from Sunday, and made microwave cornbread to go along with it, a box mix jazzed up with an extra egg, a little more milk, some arepa meal and a little pepper and chili powder on top.  It was good; a little denser than I would have liked, even after five minute's rest, but a tasty side to mop up the stew broth.

     This morning, there was cornbread left, so I crumbled a wedge of it into a small mixing bowl, added water and seasoning ("Italian blend" and Bragg's mix), let it set a spell and beat three medium eggs into it.  I'd fried a strip of bacon while the batter was waiting, and snipped it in, with some Fontina cheese and black olives as filling.  The end result was as good as any omelet I've made.  It ends up fairly thick, with an airy texture, and the cornbread notes blend nicely with the egg. 

A Nonlinear Process

     Healing up from the kind of fall I took is not a simple, smooth curve.  There are good days and bad ones.  My left knee had swollen to not quite twice normal size.  As the swelling drops, it uncovers new frontiers of pain and discomfort; likewise, as the bruises fade.  Today has not been one of the good ones.

     My kneecap was already kind of damaged (there appears to be a hole in it) and I'm not looking forward to what coming days may reveal.  But it's already done.  My job is to deal with it.

About Weapons

     In the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, Captain James T. Kirk has to fight Spock with a Vulcan "lirpa," a spear-sized weapon with a heavy weight at one end and a fan-shaped blade on the other.  It's a nasty-looking thing, but consider: the weapons used by most cultures are hunting and farming tools, adapted for war.

     What good is a gadget with a hammer or bludgeon at one and and a slicer at the other?  Clearly, it's for a creature like a mussel or an oyster, but much larger: Spock's ancestors would hunt the dry and dusty bottoms of the dead seas of Vulcan until they found the buried lair of the Giant Vulcan Clam, dig down to it, give the beast a sharp rap on the shell with the heavy end and it either cracks or opens up to see what all the fuss is, at which point the hunter's helper pours in a bucket of salt and hot sauce (or possibly Worcestershire) while the hunter reverses the lirpa and scoops the thing out with the sharp end: dee-lish!

     Of course, Star Trek's Vulcans are vegetarians, and per the fictional future history, they have been for thousands of years.  The huge molluscs the lirpa was invented to hunt are probably extinct.  But once upon a time, long ago...!

Update: The Calutron

     My -- admittedly cursory -- reading had left me with the impression that nobody bothered with mass spectrometry to produce fissionables these days.  The process was still good for turning out research-level amounts of obscure isotopes, and maybe some medical ones, and that was it.  Real baddies went in for centrifugal separation, since it was relatively simple* and produced the greatest volume for a given amount of hardware and energy to run the system.

     Yeah, guess what?  Wrong.  At least one rogue state would-be member of the nuke club picked up bargain-priced calutrons, apparently of Chinese origin, and used them to crank out some measurable quantity of hot stuff.

     So there's still a degree of "security through obscurity" for these tricky widgets, and my curiosity will have to go unsatisfied.  Any ill intentioned start-up is going to have to work that stuff out the hard way, which takes time and leaves traces.
_____________________
* None of this is "Khyber Pass gunsmith" simple, thank heavens, requiring specialized, high-precision technology and skilled technicians working with chemical and radiological hazards that would curdle your hair -- in some cases, literally.  Even at that level, there are degrees of difficulty, and some processes are more efficient than others.  But they're all insanely inefficient.  The Manhattan Project tried every method they could manage (you'd never guess which one they couldn't make work) and ended up running them in sequence, gaseous and thermal diffusion plants feeding (via chemical processes of hair-raising danger) the calutrons, a system of vast industrial works employing tens of thousands of people that had, by the end of the war, produced slightly more than enough material for four bombs; they'd used three and didn't have the fourth ready to go.  This would be an amount of fissionable material that a moderately-good weightlifter could raise overhead.  It's a wheelbarrow load.