When An "Idiot Plot" Isn't, Maybe

     Writing -- and chairing the critique group -- has me in the habit of taking a critical look "under the hood" of books and TV/movies/radio shows.  One of the gotchas is what SF writer (and critic) Damon Knight called an "idiot plot," though he gave credit to James Blish for originating the term

     Simplest form, it means a plot that only works if one or more of the characters ignores something that is obvious to the audience.  Now, that's one thing if the plot is just an excuse for razzle-dazzle (the Ginger Rogers - Fred Astaire film Top Hat is often cited, but nobody cares: you're there for the dancing), and something entirely different in a serious work.

     No spoilers, but-- The most recent season of For All Mankind has a crucial plot development that only works if a very smart character misses a point that should be entirely clear to the audience and perhaps the other characters involved, based on past behavior.  They miss it, and keep on missing it, several times.

     Now, the individual involved has been set up as a deeply focused and somewhat neurotic person, probably neuroatypical* and everyone else in a position to work out what happened has a vested interest in staying mum -- so is it really an "idiot plot," or were the writers playing a deeper game?

     Flip a coin.  Much as I love the big, rich story, I've got to admit I'm there for the sets and the characters, for the broad sweep of an alternative history, one in which the Space Race went on and on.

     Moral?  You can get away with it -- if you're as quick on your feet as Fred and Ginger, if you're that gifted at choreography (in the broadest sense), if you're willing to subtly lampshade it, if you've got the sets and costumes and skilled photographers and editors (and/or literary chops) to pull it off.  I think For All Mankind managed the trick, but it's there if you look for it.
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* It's not original with me, but inclinations and skill sets that make for good scientists have a lot of overlap with some autism-spectrum behavior patterns, so much so that it has often been pointed out that while there's zero evidence that vaccines cause autism, there's a pretty good case to be made that autism causes vaccines.

In Other News

     Odds are pretty good that I'm in a recurrence of rheumatic fever.  It's an autoimmune ailment, triggered by strep, and sure enough, I had a sore throat a few weeks back.  The sore throat ran its course and went away, as such things do, and....

     And I've had creeping fatigue, and aching knees, and figured I needed to move more, so I did.  And I kept on being tired and started to have eyelid twitches around my left eye, and sore knuckles, and wow, was I tiring easy, getting other aches and pains here and there, and oh, gosh, did my knees ever hurt, and...

     This morning, I went back to sleep for an hour after I fed that cats.  When I got up again, I was moving slower and slower.  It hurt like the dickens to go down the basement stairs and hurt worse to head back up.  Those darned knees!  Because I can (eventually) take a hint, I loaded up on aspirin* and kept moving, but things did not get better and I ended up back in bed by and by.  I managed to do my part in the Trash Day festivities (cleaning out the refrigerator and changing two catboxes, in that order) but it was slow going and left me worn out.

     Is it or isn't it?  This collection of symptoms lines up pretty well; if I was twitchier or had a bit of a rash, it'd be more likely.  But even physicians differ on diagnosing  mild cases, so darned if I know, but it sure feels like the last couple of bouts I have had with the stuff.

     Tam and I did watch the last episode of this season of For All Mankind tonight, and I would happily watch more if there was any more.  So far, they have done nothing to shake my theory that the series can be taken as a prequel to The Expanse.
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* If the underlying strep infection is gone, aspirin is still the hot ticket for treatment: it's one of the best anti-inflammatories around.  I usually use it as my backup pain relief, since it's a bit harsh on the stomach and acetaminophen in milder, but until this either settles down or drives me to the doctor, I'll do steady aspirin and take the other as-needed.

Gearless Ratchet

     Multitool maker Leatherman sells a gearless ratchet about the size of a fountain pen, and nobody told me.  There was apparently a lot of hype when they first showed up, probably driven by scarcity -- it was a few years back, when supply chains were still shaky, and availability was variable on the manufacturer's website and elsewhere.  Not so much now; you can find 'em anywhere that stocks a good assortment of the maker's tools. 

     What the thing has going for it is that A, it's a ratchet, which makes the slightly awkward Leatherman bit-driver less so; B, it's an extension, which is often less awkward; C, it's also a bit adapter.

     For those who don't know, a very long time back, Leatherman started including a double-ended "precision bit" on most of their multi-tools, a flat, double-ended straight/Phillips gadget that is held in a receptacle by a flat spring.  It's a mixed blessing -- the bits are considerably better than the usual multitool fodder, and you can swap 'em out, but it's one more item to lose and small enough to fumble when you're changing it.  Critically, though the bits are very flat, the shape is a subset of a standard quarter-inch hex drive: the short sides are "pointy" and fit into the widest part of the hexagon recess!  (A downside is that the amount of torque you can apply with the modified drive is lower.  In practice, it has never been a problem for me.) 

     The specialized shape means a plain Leatherman extension -- and this ratchet -- has a flattish end that plugs into the driver receptacle, but the bit end is standard hex.  They'll fit any bit, and it works with any driver.*

     I wanted one of those ratchets on sight, and wouldn't you know it, Tam and I tend to give one another gift certificates on our birthdays.  So that's what she got me for my birthday.  It arrived this morning and I'm very happy with it.
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* Or almost any.  There was an outfit in New England, the Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company, who made one of the neatest and most compact sets of bits and drivers imaginable, with a straight-knurl quarter-inch drive that formed part of a 3-degree ratchet.  Their ratchet drive system was deliberately compatible with quarter-inch hex -- but that ratchet won't work with Leatherman's "slice-of-hex" bits.  The company appears to be fading or gone now, and more's the pity.  There are alternatives but nobody makes 'em as small. 

Happy Birthday, I'm Old

     Oh, I'm not as old as old, but I'm really quite an age, and I had thought I would be spending more time at my own keyboard and less time punching someone else's clock by now.

     That's not how it has worked out.  Bad knees and bad luck have me hanging on, looking at Wall Street and Washington, wondering when the bubble will pop.  (Probably first in my knees, though it feels more like rust and grit.)

     Having grown up in an unacknowledged but overwhelmingly real tradition in which birthdays were far more for painful reappraisal and remorse than celebration, I have to wonder if I missed my stop.  Most of my friends at work already stepped off, and the four techs who remain, we're all bouncing around like peas in a bucket and are about as effective.  But here I am, no matter where I go.

     I'd like to thank everyone who has shared birthday wishes, especially my friend from the 8th call district who sent a card!  They really are nice to receive.

     Be well, all of you.

Seen In A Glass, Darkly....

     There's no darker glass, at least in metaphor, than a monitor or TV screen.  I had occasion to rewatch the film Civil War recently and, juxtaposed with radio and video coverage of the current mess in the Middle East, especially Israel's ongoing invasion of Lebanon, it makes for sobering viewing.  And the movie's deliberately incoherent conflict (it's about war correspondents, after all, not war) looks less and less so as time goes by.  Even the alliance between Texas and California as the "Western Forces:" if you had told an American or Russian in 1932 that they were going to end up fighting on the same side of a major war within a decade, they would have laughed at you.  A separatist California and a Texas "taking back its Lone Star" might find themselves with as much in common as Churchhill and FDR did with Stalin.

     The United States of Civil War aren't united. Some regions are in denial; a vast sweep of states are, apparently, largely untouched.  Others are less fortunate, crowded by internal refugees or wracked by war, buildings bombed, populations decimated, civil government gone or powerless.

     The second Trump administration has shown a marked propensity to route FEMA disaster relief (and similar aid) to GOP-supporting states and cites, and not to Democrat areas.  This is entirely aside from any overall reductions in aid: whatever there is to be had, you're a lot less likely to receive it if you live in a blue region than if you live in a red one, no matter how you chose to vote.

     ICE and CBP enforcement has shown a similar pattern, leaning more heavily on cities and states with Democrats in power and far less where the Republicans hold a majority of elected offices.

     Depending on where you live, it's life as usual, and what's all the fuss about -- or it's anything but usual.

     Civil War?  You're already soaking in it, in the slow, nightmare preliminary steps.

     There's still time; we may yet wake up, get a sip of water or take a trip down the hall, and return to blissful rest.  Or the nightmare could turn for the worse.

     None of us can be sure how this movie, these very American dreams, will play out.

     The 2026 and 2028 elections are crucial.  Choose wisely.

Memorial Day

     It's Memorial Day -- and like pretty much every Memorial Day of my entire life, U. S. troops are in danger.  Soldiers and sailors, Marines, aircrew and Guardians.  Fifteen serving military personnel have been killed in the last few months in our ongoing conflict with Iran: undeclared wars are no less deadly than declared ones, and it doesn't matter to the dead or their survivors if it was a war of choice or an unavoidable clash.

     They served and died.  Remember them, not as faceless statistics but as individuals no different from you, your family and your friends.  It's all you can do.  It's little enough to ask.

Oh, Hey

     I forgot to post today. Distracted by the race -- the Sunday morning political shows are usually a rich source of fodder, but pre-Indy 500 coverage preempted all of them except CBS, and it was apparently guest-hosted by "Flo" from the insurance-company commercials 

A Capsule Illustration

      Here's how ostensibly neutral journalism goes wrong -- though this example isn't journalism nearly so much as it is stenography: The Hill covered Secretary of Defense "Pete" Hegseth's commencement address at West Point this morning.

     One the face of it, it's straightforward reporting: who, what, where, when.  His remarks are quoted extensively -- with zero historical context.  In the Secretary's opinion, West Point was adrift in a sea of horrific wokery until he came along and freed officers from having to worry their decisions might be second-guessed by higher-ups, that there might be consequences to bad decisions, and -- oh, hurrah -- he's returned the painting of Robert E. Lee in full Confederate uniform to the academy's library.*

     There is passing mention of the coalition of Democratic federal legislators who spoke out to remind military officers of their duty to refuse illegal orders -- but even that leans heavily into the President declaring such a statement "treason" (it isn't) and the Department of Justice's attempt to have them indicted, which was refused by the grand jury -- and remember, "a halfway decent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."

     The Secretary's wild notions and wilder orders and rearrangements at the Department of Defense are not normal, and trying to normalize them with reporting that parrots his talking points without showing their imaginary basis won't make them okay.  
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* Complete, it should be noted, with a slave holding his horse.  Not that readers of The Hill got any of that context.  Nope, all they read was Secretary Hegseth's celebratory quote, "...you've seen...statues taken down, paintings placed in the basement."  Statues and paintings of whom, Mr. Secretary?  And what could they possibly have done to deserve such ignominy?

Tulsi Gabbard Out...

     Tulsi Gabbard is out, and what are the odds that her old job will become one more hat for Marco Rubio to wear?

     I don't agree with Mr. Rubio's positions on, well, anything, but he's one of the few competent people they've got.  One of these days, he's going to wake up to the way in which he's the smart kid being strongarmed into doing the difficult homework for the jocks and sons of privilege and connection.  Or maybe he already knows, and figures it's the price he has to pay for a seat at that table.

     That only plays out one way, and it's not him being invited in as an equal.

A Government Of Smart-Assed Punks

      The current collection of ne'er-do-wells, failsons, solipsistic opportunists, toadies, religious extremists and other vile nutjobs and crooks -- see the list from Blazing Saddles -- running things in Washington D.C. and throughout the Federal government includes a great many men and women of a familiar type, one that comes tagging along no matter what party is in power: arrogant punks, secure in their access to authority and/or knowledge of how to manipulate the law.  They sneer and wink their way through Congressional hears and press conferences, not just lacking in humility but contemptuous of it.

     Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced they have issued an indictment against six Cubans allegedly involved in shooting down two unarmed U. S. private airplanes in 1996.  The planes were operated by Brothers To The Rescue, an effort to help people fleeing Cuba by sea.  There are genuine questions of fact -- Cuba says the planes were in their airspace, the U.S. says they were over international waters.*  There are genuine issues of the Cuban government being repressive and generally awful, of the need to help people who got to sea in inadequate vessels; there's a lot of go work out in court, and plenty of room to argue over what court it should be, or if diplomacy is a better way to sort things out; or even if thirty years is too long to wait.

     But one of the Cubans is Raúl Castro.  He was in charge of their defense department at the time, and later served at President and leader of the Cuban Communist party, positions from which he has since stepped down.  He's 94 now.  Age is no shield from criminal prosecution (though you do have to wonder what the courts could do to him that Time has not already done or is about to do).  He's charged in the U.S.; we don't have an extradition agreement with Cuba, naturally enough, and there the matter sits.

     Or does it?  Acting U. S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking at the press conference announcing the indictment yesterday, said this to reporters: "There was a warrant issued for his arrest. So we expect that he will show up here, by his own will or by another way."  Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

     Cuba's government is far from admirable.  Raul Castro is no teddy bear.  The incident in question was tragic at best.  But the acting AG is hinting and shrugging his way through the kidnapping of a former foreign head of state, in his own country.  That's fine for the movies, but in the real world?  It's not.  Oh, we've probably all got lists of leaders and former leaders we'd like to see nabbed and hauled before a court (if not worse), but that's not how it works.  It's how wars start, and there are plenty enough of them simmering already.  Regular, ordinary Cubans are already suffering and the kind of military intervention it would take will only make things worse for them.

     But to the smart-assed punks of the world, the "little people" don't matter.  They're up there parading on the world stage, all suits and uniforms, legal writs and jet planes, bombs falling clean, high above the dust and blood and tears.  People getting killed are just a handy prop to them, to be pulled out and put to use decades after the fact.
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* All things being equal, I'm a lot more inclined to trust the accuracy of U.S. radar than Cuba's; but unless you were staring at those screens at the time, it's a matter of opinion.

Crazy Pills? Voters Eat Them Like Candy

      Apparently, crazy wins.  At least in some elections.

     This post could have been called, "Why I'm no longer a Libertarian," except I never was a big-L Libertarian.  The state party was always too welcoming to people whose ideas skirted racism, eugenics and/or religious extremism.  It might have been called "Why I stopped being a default Republican voter," since it used to be that most of Indiana's GOP politicians were safe choices: they didn't support change.  Cautious to the point of stodginess, when the state did manage to change the laws and regulations, they stayed changed.  Progress was slow but it didn't go backwards.

     The problem was, some voters wanted something different -- and it wasn't classical libertarianism.  It wasn't steady-on conservatism.  It wasn't New Deal progressivism, either; it wasn't even old-time machine politics, with cigars (and and more substantial rewards) for party workers and the well-connected and damn-all for individuals, groups and organizations on the outs.  No, what voters wanted was--

     But why should I try to formulate it, when Kentucky's Thomas Massie put it so well in 2017?

     "All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."*

     So far, what voting for crazy has got us is gas over $4.00 a gallon -- over $5.00 in seven states, fueled by a simmering war of choice with Iran; ballooning measles cases in the U.S., a hantavirus outbreak that officials assure us is bottled up, a rare strain of ebola without any vaccine or specific treatment erupting in Africa not far from overcrowded and under-sanitized refugee camps, and a President who just got immunity from federal income tax enforcement, while building himself a combination bunker/ballroom and declaring, "I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me."

     I'm not too keen on a nuclear-armed Iran† -- who, other than some Iranians, is? -- but bombing their nuclear program flat whenever it got too busy seemed to be working.  Not as well as the enforced treaty they were under for a few years, but it worked.  At present, they've got more incentive than ever to be building a Bomb, and I think only the fact that they can shut down the Strait of Hormuz and dare the world to do anything about it has distracted them from whatever remains of their nuke effort.  Naval mines are cheaper than Manhattan Projects, and there's less to worry about downwind if one goes off unexpectedly.

     The thing about leaving out big bowls of crazy pills is that eventually everyone either freaks out or passes out.‡  I don't know if we've reached that point yet, and I'm worried about just what form it will take if we do.

     After World War Two, the United States took on, however imperfectly, the role of the world's designated driver.  We've now given up on it and joined the partying.  It's fun, fun fun -- until we wrap the T-Bird around a tree.
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* Massie tried to keep up, but as of this morning, he's no longer the craziest S.O.B running for U. S. House in Kentucky, having lost his primary to Ed Gallrein.
 
† I'm not especially happy with a nuclear-armed anybody.  We're stuck with the countries that already are, but expanding membership in that club is a very bad idea.
 
‡ Or, in fact, leaves.

Do Your Homework, Politicians

      I usually run radio news in the morning as I clean up the kitchen and make breakfast, and this morning, they were interviewing a U. S. Congressman on a recent mass shooting in his district.

     Not knowing the man, not even knowing his party when I heard the interview, I was struck by how much he sounded like a schoolkid called on to deliver a book report when they had not read the book, right down to desperately riffing on the title.

     "Congressperson" is essentially an impossible job if you make an honest effort at it.  A good staff can help, knowing or at least looking up the things the officeholder needs to know and feeding them just enough information, right before they need to know it.  It's not even dishonest: it's effective staff command.  Nobody can know everything that job requires 'em to know; the best we can hope for is that they dig in and learn the most salient stuff, and get good support for the rest.

     But this morning's guy?  At a guess, he'd seen news reports; he had some idea of the location, might have shaken hands or given a campaign speech there, but he hadn't even hit Wikipedia for more information.

     I'd have to know more about him before I made my mind up, but if I lived in his district, I'd sure be finding out.  House and Senate seats are not sinecures.  They're not supposed to phone it in.  Do the darn homework!  Is it a hard job?  Yes, it's extraordinarily hard, and if they do it right, the paycheck-to-effort ratio is lousy.

     I'm sick and tired of Senators and Representatives who won't do the work.  I dislike 'em more than the few whose politics I dislike who actually show up to interviews and events -- and their Chamber -- with a good grasp of what's going on (or even the mere appearance of understanding): at least they put in the effort.  Even if it's glib, facile and based on a quick sheet of talking points a staffer handed 'em at the last minute, better that than trying to get by on BS and blather.