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 is 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.

Successfully Marketed To

     I have been chairing an online writing-critique group for over a year now, and while the microphone in my laptop is more than adequate to the task -- it's a MacBook Air, bought during the pandemic specially for online meetings -- I've been wanting to try something else.

     Vintage microphones appeal to me and I own a few; but they're fragile for such everyday use, and interfacing them to a computer calls for extra hardware.  I'm especially fond of the classic RCA ribbon microphones, like the Type 44, a ribbon mike nearly as big as your head, with an instantly-recognizable angular case.  RCA also made a "Junior" velocity microphone, the 74-B, about half the size.  I used to own one of the big ones, but sold it when I was between jobs.  Even forty years ago, the price of one of those would buy a lot of meals.

     These days, you can hardly look at an original Model 44 for under $4000, and don't expect nice plating.  Modern exact-copy versions from AEA sell for that much and more; there's at least one other near-match model that goes for less but it's still four figures.

     The little 74-B is scarce, and prices are equally stratospheric.  Electro-Voice made a similar-looking line of mikes about the same size that commands less on the used market, and I own one that's still got the original ribbon pickup or "motor." The problem with those is they're a dice roll: the factory "repair" was a rough replacement of the fragile ribbon with the innards of a rugged dynamic microphone, and any E-V ribbon mike you find has about a two to one chance of having been "repaired" that way.

     A company called Behringer makes audio gear.  Much of it is popular with podcasters and not too many years ago, they started making old-timey-looking mikes with modern condenser elements.  One of them is the BV-44, which despite the name is just about the same size as an RCA 74-B.  It's got a USB output, so it plugs right into a computer.  And it sells for the cost of a fancy dinner, if you don't go too wild with the sides and skip dessert.  I've been looking at them for several years and I finally bought one.  It's not a ribbon mike, but even inexpensive condenser mics sound pretty good these days. 

     There's an amusing sidenote to this.  If you look at the working microphones of this style, they've all got a metal grille with an offset pattern of round holes, staggered like brickwork.  This provides the most open area, so the sound can get in.  (There's thin cloth inside the grille, too, and the whole thing is supposed to cut down on wind noise and the impact of plosive sounds on the mike element.)  In the old days, rather than risk an expensive mike as a photo prop, radio networks used wooden models, cut and painted to match the microphones, for publicity shots and advertising photos -- but the holes in the "grille" of the prop version were drilled into the wood block in a grid pattern.  About half of Behringer's advertising art shows a grid pattern of holes in the BV-44 grille, too -- but the real thing has an offset pattern, just like the big boys and for the same reason.  I suspect the art department got out a little ahead of the engineering and production side.

Our Fog

      Every once in awhile, Indianapolis remembers it started out as a swamp, and throws out a pea-soup fog of impressive thickness.

     Oh, there's fog all over central Indiana this morning, tapering off into Illinois, but the heart of the city holds it cupped, like someone with an unexpected handful of overcooked oatmeal and nowhere to put it down.  From the front windows of Roseholme Cottage, the houses across the street are mist-wrapped mysteries, hazy shapes bulking from the gray that might conceal anything (but probably only nurses, retired dog-walkers and a guy who deals in used vehicles of questionable provenance).

     My car has gone somewhat foggy, too.  A week ago Sunday, I worked a late shift and on the way home,  noticed the normal-beam headlights were unaccountably dim.  Most of my night driving is on well-lit city streets, but there's a stretch along a nicely-wooded road, and thinking back, I realized I'd been having more and more trouble there with the headlights of oncoming cars.  I'd been blaming bright HID and LED bulbs, but those didn't suddenly appear on the market last November.

     It's time to replace the headlight bulbs of my car,* a task that carmakers have been making more and more awkward all my life.  It looks like the passenger-side change requires removing a large plastic cover (held with snap-in plastic rivets), unbolting the windshield-washer reservoir and setting it aside, popping out a twist-to-remove weatherproof cover (with wires through it) and reaching into the back of the light housing, where the socket comes out, bulb and all, in another quarter-turn-twist assembly.  At that point, you can finally unlatch the bulb from its socket and reverse the whole process.  The driver's side requires a similar procedure, minus the big plastic cover and bottle of windshield goop.

     Or I could just go to the oil-change place and have them do it while getting fresh oil and filters, which is what I will probably do.  It's filthy work, outdoors, and well, I'd as soon not.
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* My previous string of Hyundai Accents were successively named The Hot Needle of Inquiry, The Hotter Needle of Inquiry and either The Hottest Needle of Inquiry or The Needle of Inquiry So Hot You Would Just Plotz.  The Lexuses (Lexii?) have been much nicer, and I have never been sure if they should be The Pride of Chanur, The Solar Queen, or Unexpected Expense, but in either case, the present one rates a II after it.  (I tried The Skylark of Space for the first one, but it didn't stick.)  And bonus points to anyone who recognizes where all of the ship names comes from -- or all except the last, which was my own invention but is unlikely to be unique.