Yah, Yah, Yah

     So I guess we blew up the Ayatollah, or maybe the Israelis did -- of course, he was like 86 and they were shopping for a new one already, and while many of the people of Iran may be delighted he's gone, his replacement is likely to be more of the same, or worse.

     Bear in mind that the West bears most of the responsibility for the hostile, inward-looking nature of the Iranian government: we'd stuck the Shah in place after U. S. and British oil interests had freaked out when the country shambled itself into a left-leaning government in the 1950s that wanted to nationalize their oil businesses.  The Shah dug in like a tick on an elephant and began to live large on oil money, with his very own secret police doing secret-police things, and the same Iranians who'd opted for that scary socialist government (at a time when the Soviet Union could still make a compelling case for rapid industrialization under a command economy -- they had excellent PR for a few decades, especially in the Third World) came to resent it, and their religious nationalists particularly resented it.  By the time things went bang, they were thoroughly pissed off at anyone who wasn't them, and it was in that mood the government of present-day Iran was formed.

     They don't like anybody, and the vast majority of the present-day population has grown up knowing most of their neighbors don't much like them.  If anyone's thinking there's going to be a rapid pro-Western realignment among the gen. pop. while the government folds...think again.  We might see some serious chaos; we might see the most hard-nosed hardliners claw their way to the top, or a floundering government of second- and third-rankers, but the good ol' days of the good ol' Shah aren't coming back and attempts to jam a new Shah into the socket are liable to backfire.

     You can't do any nation-building from bomb-dropping altitude, no matter how high you can make the rubble bounce.

So, Um--

     I picked the wrong Friday to skip posting.  The stuff I had in mind is largely moot, because as of middle-on-the-night thirty, we are at war, or as close as make no difference, especially if you live in Iran.  Or, in fact. Israel, or on or near a U. S. military base in the Middle East.  The Iranians haven't targeted embassies yet.  We didn't warn 'em to get non-combatants out of target zones -- or warn our own service spouses and families, for that matter. 

     But that's not the first teensy oversight.  Congress didn't get a chance to weigh in, either, and there are no indications they're planning to.  This is hinky, considering that the declaring of wars would be a power the United States Constitution (perhaps you have heard of it?) reserved exclusively to the actual legislators of the actual legislative branch.  Cynics will point out the Presidents have sounded the bugle and sent the troops marching off multiple times in the last century; from the Korean War onward, Presents have acted and Congress has scrambled to catch up, usually slapping a hasty authorization onto a fait accompli or some other Italian speed job.

     Nevertheless, 'tain't according to Hoyle or, in this case, all but one of the delegates to the Constutional Convention:
     "Pierce Butler of South Carolina was the only delegate to the Philadelphia Convention who suggested giving the executive the power to take offensive military action. He suggested that even if the President should be able to do so, he, in practice, would have the character not to do so without mass support. Elbridge Gerry, a delegate from Massachusetts, summed up the majority viewpoint saying he 'never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.' George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and other contemporaries voiced similar sentiments."
     That's how Wikipedia puts it, as of this writing.  If you want to argue with the guys who were there, knock yourself out -- but you're wrong.

     Then there's one other finicky detail--  The Iranian government are bad guys.  They executed a large number of protesters recently, as in thousands, almost certainly tens of thousands, most of who had done no more than ditch work or school to go wave signs and shout, and they're a known source of material support for Mideastern (and other) terror organizations.  They're not nice guys; the West helped make them that way, but they have stayed that way and give no sign of backing down.  However, they hadn't started a fight with the United States.*

     Jus ad bellum is the notion that nation-states cannot (well, should not) just start up wars for the hell of it.  It's why heads of state or legislative bodies issue justifications that are sometimes absolute smack, like Vladimir Putin's assertion that Ukraine ought to be part of Russia because, well, it always was, and therefore it is perfectly okay to send in the Russian military to kill 'em until they go along with his notion.  Defensive war is held to be inherently justified: when Ukraine fights back, they're acting by the rules, and in defense, a country can even war partisan war, using informal troops without clear lines of command.  But the aggressor has got to show cause, and a country's got to be behaving very badly indeed before it's okay under international laws and treaties to try to knock sense into them.

     There is an entire messy body of international agreement covering this stuff, one that boils down to "Nation-states don't get to start wars unless they can establish a broad consensus the state being warred against is extraordinarily bad, but nation-states can always defend themselves against wars someone else started against them."  We...didn't manage to fulfill either one of those conditions.

     Do I think the United States government is a better government than the government of Iran?  I sure do.  They kill far fewer of the people who protest against them.  On a per-capita basis, it's a stunning difference.  Do I think Iran's government is a threat to peace in the Middle East?  Unquestionably.  --But that doesn't justify an undeclared war, set in motion by the Executive Branch of the U.S. government without formal declaration (by Congress, whose responsibility it is) or even the merest fig leaf of justification.

     Putin's war on Ukraine is still worse than Trump's war on Iran but make no mistake, they're different intensities of the same bloody color.

     Time will tell how this will play out and in the meantime, your "peace President," the guy I was told would keep this nation out of foreign wars, has launched yet another military intervention into another country, and it's not a quick bombing run or an overnight "Mission: Impossible" leader kidnapping.

     And in the meantime, how about that economy?  How about those Epstein files?  How about cratering Presidential approval ratings?  ...Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain!  The Big Giant Head is talking, and what it's saying is, "War! War!War!"
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*In fact, we were in diplomatic talks, albeit "indirect" ones, which is perhaps the most grade school method of diplomacy, "Millicent won't let you sit with her at lunch until you stop chewing on pencils," one side says to an intermediary, and the other side replies to the go-between, "Well, Millicent chews on her braids and and it's gross, and besides, she farts all the time and you can tell her I said that," and then a spokesthing announces to the press that they had a productive discussion, while waving a toothmarked pencil to clear away a faint, lingering stench. 

Politics Potpourri

     State of the Union, Checked: CNN did the good kind of fact-check, long on facts, cites and links, short on emotions.  It turns out -- and I know you'll be surprised -- a lot of the President's speech was not true.  Or even close.

     What The Hell's The Matter With Kansas:  This one's not easy to write.  The thing about authoritarianism is the thing about bullies: they pick on the easy targets first.  The Federal government, in the form of ICE, CPB, etc. descends on LA or Minneapolis-St. Paul or wherever and rounds up people for the crime of being too brown and/or foreign in public, sorting them out afterward, slowly and with plenty of trouble, but if you're not brown and/or a foreigner, it's mostly just something on the news.  When Federal officers, mostly far from home and new to this kind of mass enforcement, face unexpectedly obstreperous opposition and pepper-spray protesters at close range or even shoot and kill them, if you're not minded to be out protesting, well, that's more stuff on the news, happening to someone else, and never to most people -- though in the Twin Cities, it did finally inconvenience enough people that there was some stepping back.*

     So here's some more people who are just faces on the screen, some of 'em kind of off-putting, but that doesn't rate what happened: the Kansas legislature recently decided the sex listed on Kansas driver's licenses has to match the holder's sex at birth, period, no exceptions, no do-overs, and passed a law to require it.  This is not a problem for at least 99.9 percent of Kansans, but that 0.1 percent is some 290,000 people, and if ten percent of them, 29,000, had changed their driver's license (previously allowed) so Bruce and Barbie had an M and and F on their license to match their haircut and wardrobe (if not more) despite having been born Bettie and Bill, they'd better set aside time to-- And here's the rugpull: They don't have time. As reported, the state sent out letters this week to everyone who had made such a change they could find, warning them their driver's licenses were invalid as of today.  Driving on an invalid license in Kansas is a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a $1000.00 fine and up to six months in jail.  If they're going to update their license, they'd better get a ride. And the papers are reporting they didn't all get notification.

     You don't have to like 'em.  You don't even have to disagree with the law about which letter goes in that part of their driver's licenses.†  But what's the point of making 'em criminals before they even get a chance to comply?

     Many readers are going to look at that and say, "Those people? Who cares," and I get it as only someone who lived in a cheap apartment downtown and worked late shifts can get it: street queens aren't any nicer than born-female streetwalkers and it's icky to have to dodge 'em to get to your car.  Lots of "those people" are scary; but having worked in media and met lots of interviewees, I know they're not all that way.

     And I know bullies may start with the easy targets, the weirdos, the foreign kids, the kids nobody likes; but they never stop there.  They'll work their way up, and eventually, we will all have to choose: be a victim, or an oppressor?  That's a bullshit choice.  Be a person, and let other people be people, too.  If they're not breaking the law, leave 'em alone.  And speak up when bullies go after them.  Stand up.
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* Just how much is in question, as enforcement efforts appear to have moved to suburbs, exurbs and county seats, and meanwhile the Federal government has imposed economic sanctions on Minnesota, the whole thing looking more and more like some kind of scaled-down war.
 
† Though I do have to ask, why is it there?  Photo, height, weight, hair and eye color are all on the license so Officer Friendly or the bank teller can tell if it's your license. Unless they're running genetic tests, the "sex" part of the ID makes more sense if it tracks what people look like.  If they get arrested, the police will strip-search them and if there are any lurid secrets to be found out, the police will do so then.  Me, I don't wanna know. 

History Rhymes

     I've been reading The Big Con, David W. Maurer's entertaining 1940 study of confidence men and confidence games.  All of the high-money cons, a thousand dollars and up (way, way up, even then) require a mark who's willing to get involved with what's presented as crooked deal -- a stock-market scam, a "fixed" athletic contest, illicitly-obtained inside or advance information on outcomes, and so on.  The genuinely honest won't be drawn in.

     Oh, it's cleverly presented, usually in a "cheating the cheaters" framework.  You don't have to be more than a little larcenous to be pulled in; but it's always a something-for-nothing deal, an opportunity for profit apparently far out of proportion with the necessary investment.

     A lot of con men started out in Indiana.  It even shows up in nicknames, like the Indiana Wonder and the Hoosier Kid.  An insideman for the Wonder mused, "At one time, you could go to almost any [Indiana] County Fair and some farmer would take you aside and show you some new kind of flat-joint [slang for a crooked gambling device] that he had invented."

     This springs to mind when the local TV news reports yet another heated city or county meeting over yet another data center being planned or built.  We've already got a lot of them here, thanks to cheap land and affordable power, and the AI boom is pushing the demand for more.  There's a lot less "there" there in AI than meets the eye* and I suspect a lot of the boom is a bubble.  When it pops, local governments that have made tax concessions, helped secure loans and spent on infrastructure may be left holding the bag -- or "the poke," a short-con in which what the mark thought was a securely-wrapped bundle of money in big bills he'd put a much smaller security deposit on turns out to be a stack of carefully-trimmed newsprint.

     It'll be a whole new kind of Indiana Wonder.
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* AI counts, in part, on "pathetic fallacy," the same thing that underpins animism or a child's play with plush toys, dolls or toy soldiers, imbuing an inanimate object with emotion and genuine agency.  We're strongly wired to do it -- but that doesn't mean there's really a ghost in even the most clever of our machines.  Confidence games also rely on our will to believe, our desire to play along, our need for wonder.  This is not a coincidence.

SOTU, Sorta

     It was a campaign speech.  I kept dozing off as he droned on and on, from distortion to misstatement to outright lie, with a few stops for non-partisan moments recognizing heroes and outstanding athletes that it would be petty to criticize.

     But it was a campaign speech, and not even one of his best, full of scorched-earth partisanship and moments for the base to applaud.  I was offended by his claims about the economy -- things might be looking up for the owner class, but down here where you punch a time clock, my bills haven't stopped going up and my paycheck is nowhere close to keeping pace.

     If you're a big ol' Donald Trump fan, it was probably a fine speech, despite the record-setting length, right up there with Cold War screeds from the leaders of the Soviet Union.  If you're not a fan, there was nothing in it to win you over.

     From where I stand, the President of the United States is living in a fantasy world, along with most of his party's office-holders and good many of the opposition's.  They're all clueless limo-riders who haven't had to buy groceries at the supermarket since they were in college, if then, and the venture capitalists who collect 'em like trading cards are more of the same.  These are not people to trust holding the future -- they don't care about breaking it because they think they've already bought it. 

     As for actual content, like the possibility of war against Iran, the looming shortage in farm workers, the steady increase in the price of almost everything?  Forget it.  He did assert unilateral authority to levee tariffs except in the way recently barred by the U. S. Supreme -- but he was careful to shake the hands of the Justices on his way in, because he can't afford another slap-down from them.

     We were screwed at sunrise on Tuesday.  We were still screwed at midnight last night.  The State of the Union speech didn't change anything.  No, wait, it changed one thing: leading stocks were headed down, down, down yesterday and this morning, they're slightly up.  That's got to be great news for anyone with a significant stock portfolio, like the president and board members of the corporation I work for.  I couldn't be happier for them!  --But it hasn't changed a thing for me, and it won't, same as it hasn't for the vast majority of Americans.

Rush, Rush, Rush

     This morning is off to an early start, at least for me.  There's a small project underway at work that has been put off and put off, thanks to bad weather, a lack of any local firm to do the parts we can't do for ourselves, and higher-priority stuff.

     Or it might be.  The bulk of the work will be outside and it's pretty cold this morning, colder than originally predicted.  That's all contracted out, and it's not my call; either it'll be warm enough, or it won't.

     Either way, I need to get a move on.

What Flavor Popcorn?

     The State of the Union speech is coming up, and not only do they cram the Senate into the House chamber (where you know the Senators check for gum stuck under the desks) along with its usual denizens (and they don't even get assigned seats), Cabinet members sit in the front row, alongside the Justices of the U. S. Supreme Court.  The President is currently furious at six of the nine Justices, and won't that make for an interesting evening?  The Joint Chiefs are in there, too, along with retired members of Congress.

     Looking it up, one of the news services points out that the President and First Lady also invite non-politicians to seats in the gallery, "to help put a human face to the President’s message for both policymakers and viewers at home." I'm not sure just what they think the various pols, judges and military officers are -- has anyone checked on David Icke recently?

     Me, I figure they're all entirely too human, even the ones I loathe most, and given the line-up and the times, my only real question is, what flavor popcorn should I make for watching it?  Hi-yo, Incitatus, away! 

Yeah, Nothing Saturday

      I was busy with the fiction critique group -- those folks are good writers and getting steadily better -- and the news has done nothing to disabuse me of the belief that we've gotten ourselves locked into the dumbest timeline.

     This morning (1:30 a.m., really the middle of the night), the Secret Service shot and killed a time traveler nutjob man who'd got inside the security perimeter at Mar-A-Lago carrying a shotgun and a gas can and didn't surrender when confronted.  The President has been rather publicly in Washington, DC this weekend, the club has Head-of-State level physical security layered atop the usual "private resort for the insanely wealthy" stuff and the U. S. Secret Service is known to be very good at what they do, which makes the entire thing fractally dumb.  (Unless, I suppose, he was targeting some other member of the exclusive club, in which case it's just ordinarily stupid, though on a grand scale.  But how likely is that?)

     Moral consistency and my own crazy notions both insist that heads of state (etc.) ought not be assassinated.  Oh, I think a lot of them are crooks, fools or villains; when it comes to U. S. Presidents and members of Congress alone, I've got lists and lists of them who should have been hauled up on various charges, tried and, if convicted, punished as the law requires.  A few of them were even run through parts of the process, though I think not nearly enough.

     Don't tell me those politicians should be above the law or immune from prosecution, "so they'll be free to make hard decisions;" that's let-George-do-it irresponsibility; it's lazy bullshit.  Presidents and Congress can equip young men (and women) with explosives and firearms and send them off in the middle of the night, singly or en masse, to breach defenses and do harm to people and property, and deciding to do so should not be undertaken lightly nor free from consequences.  If it's wrong to undertake such actions against a heavily defended Head of State, it's even more wrong when done to any more vulnerable target.  They ought to think it over and be answerable for it on multiple levels when they do wrong.

     But, hey, dumbest timeline: I don't expect things to get any better or make more sense any time soon.  We're stuck in this chair for the entire duration of the root canal and the only way to get through it is to go through it.  I hope it doesn't hurt too much.

Half A Vote

     There's a former friend who's annoyed at me.  You see, we didn't vote for the same person for President, and he thinks I stopped being his friend because he didn't vote for Kamela Harris.

     "You couldn't possibly have thought I'd vote for a Democrat!"

     You know what?  I didn't.  But I didn't think he'd vote for a thuggish authoritarian who had, at best, egged on an unsuccessful coup, either.  That's why we're not friends any more.  I don't hate him; he's not a bad guy himself, despite making such a bad choice; but I'm not friends with authoritarians, period.

     Too many people treat voting as a binary choice, and back themselves into a corner, trying to justify their pick.

     Even when there are only two choices on the ballet, you always have three choices.  Can't stand one of 'em and the other is someone who shouldn't have the job?  Then skip the contest!  Yeah, people keep saying, "Hold your nose and vote," and you really should take a look at all the candidates; could be the positives of one will outweigh their negatives, or you can be pretty sure one of the other branches of government will keep them in line.*  But if not, why not just pass?  A vote is a reward, and if neither one has earned it, withhold it.  Or go shopping for a third party candidate, because a vote is also a signal, and if the lunatic from the steam-clean-the-sewers party gets a big pile of votes, that part of the electorate is telling candidates they think it's time to get down there and flush out the pipes.

     Voting for the same party you always have and then retconning your choice no matter how big a stinker the person is?  That's a bad approach.  It's lazy and thoughtless.

     I get that in the 2024 election, a lot of voters decided they were okay with cult-of-personality neo-fascism, or whatever the historians are going to call it, and that's one problem; but another problem, maybe a worse one, is that big block of voters just went into the booth and pulled the lever for R (or D) because they always do, having already made up reasons why that was okay, or coming up with them afterwards, and for the Rs of that group, sunk-costs fallacy means many of them still are.  Telling them "you voted for this" only reinforces it, no matter how bad prices get or how many people Federal almost-police kill in the streets and detention camps.

     Vote smarter.
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* I admit it, I'm a big fan of divided government.  I think having an Executive from one party and a majority of the other in the legislature keeps them focused on two things: the tasks that actually need to get done, and harmless sparring with one another.  With both those branches under one party's thumb, they start servicing their base with frippery and bullshit instead of ghetting down to useful work, and if they've got the Judicial branch, too, look the hell out.

Not In The Job Parameters

     U.S forces, by Presidential directive, are stacking up within striking distance of Iran -- and look, he can do that, shuffle the U. S. military around on U.S. soil, the open sea and (by agreement) the territory of our allies.  The job includes "Commander in Chief," after all.

     What no President can do -- Republican, Democrat, Whig or George Washington standing clear of parties in disgust -- is start or declare a war.  That's up to Congress, the majority of whose members have to worry about re-election in the very near term, whose consensus contains the aggregate wisdom of 535 men and women (stop laughing).

     Of course you wouldn't know that from the way our current President is talking about it, as he opens the first meeting of his "Board of Peace."  Nope, he says we'll know his plans for using armed forces against Iran in a week or ten days.

     That ain't how it works.  I'm sure my comment filters will get a few "Nuh-unh, he can, too, and besides [other President] did it."  I don't care.  The ones who have pulled that kind of trick in the past were also in the wrong, and the incumbent has already broken the rules by kidnapping a foreign head of state in a military incursion.  It doesn't matter that the guy they grabbed was a bad guy; it doesn't matter if he was helping out drug smugglers, masterminding the whole drug-gang show or, despite being a bloody-handed autocrat busy running his country into the ground, had stood well clear of the whole dope thing: other countries still aren't supposed to send soldiers in and grab him.  Ya don't do it.  There is -- well, there was -- a rules-based international order; there are ways to line up a criminal leader for arrest and trial (and yes, they're pretty toothless as long as he or she is careful where they go visiting) but they do not include TV plots from Mission: Impossible or The A-Team.

     Russia, the smallest and weakest of what passes for a Great Power these days -- and they wouldn't even be one, without the nuke in their teeth and the mad gleam in their eye -- has been hacking away at the notion of having rules for the game ever since they grabbed the Crimean peninsula.  Red China would like to (little matter of Taiwan), but all their neighbors are watching.  Our President shouldn't be picking up an axe and joining in.

     But he has been and he still is.  In a better timeline, Congress would be straining at the reins, digging its heels like a mule.  This Congress is more like a Pomeranian purse-dog: yappy and occasionally it makes a smelly little mess in there, but mostly it's just riding along.

You Want The Truth?

     Me, I'd just as soon have my MGB fixed and get to wear a shiny hat.  The truth doesn't change anything. 

     But the truth about the Epstein files is, the people with the most power -- not necessarily in the files themselves and possibly entirely unconnected from that sort of wrongdoing (or maybe in the thick of it) -- are busy, in a kind of jostling and organic way, picking out patsys from the next ranks down, most of whom will have been up to some kind of Epstein-related lawbreaking anyway.  They'll throw 'em to the wolves, er, public (and courts) and those malefactors will get whatever they get, based mostly on how good their lawyers are.

     That's it.  That's what will happen.  No matter what's in there or how damning it is.  The highest and mightiest will not be felled, unless there is also some enormous national-security stuff involving the U.S. and/or the UK and Europe, or staggeringly huge sums of money.  Because none of these politicians -- not one! -- gives a single, solitary gosh-darn-it over what happened to a bunch of cute girls at the hands of creepy, wealthy men.  They all know in their grisliest viscera that's just the way of the world: girls and young women are a consumable commodity to the wealthiest people.

     I'd like to tell you different.  I'd like to, but I can't.

About Those Headlights

      Okay, I thought the normal beams were dim.  The lead guy at the oil-change place laughed when he checked them.  His trainee looked puzzled and said, "What?"

     "That lady's headlights are out."

     I've been driving with only the running lights working (unless I had the high beams on), which explains why they were so pitiful.  Oh, they're kind of white, and they do light the road some, which works okay if there are streetlights -- but it means oncoming headlights are dazzling in comparison.  And they live in the same twin-bulb fixture as the actual headlights, so if you look at them during the day, they do light up, they just look like lousy lights.

     They're okay now.  The drive home tonight was a lot better than any since it started getting dark early.

     Changing the bulbs was as dusty-dirty as I expected, and they had three men on the job.  It would have taken me four times as long, if not longer, so I'm resigned to the additional cost.  And I got the oil changed at the same time, so it counts as a win.

     Bonus, sort of: they slapped a battery analyzer on it, just in case, and my battery could be happier than it is.  They don't sell 'em but they suggested I might want to shop around before too long.