It Wasn't A Dare

     Last night, I pointed to, and mocked, the increasing weirdness of the present administration and their Legislative counterparts (and let us not forget the nutjobs and partisan hacks they've ushered into the Federal Judiciary or who were already in place and happy to step up).

     Truth is, I was thinking it was just about Peak Strange.

     Guess again.

     The huge, ugly triumphal arch Mr. Trump would like to put up along the sightline from the Lincoln Monument to Arlington National Cemetery isn't something I've written about much.  While I think every bit demonstrates execrable taste, from the design and decoration to the location to the very idea of it,* it was a matter of taste, and paled next to barring press organizations from attending public events of the Chief Executive of the republic, or the markedly violent immigration enforcement dragnets that have wept up legal residents and naturalized citizens, and which have resulted in the deaths of non-citizens and citizens alike.  The arch seemed like a minor detail, more gold-dripping frippery going up while the price of everything skyrockets.

     Turns out I was wrong.  Here's the President of United States of America, on his social media platform last night:

     "At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, [...] at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. [...]."

     Nothing like it anywhere in the world?  Ain't that the truth -- though I have seen similar setups, usually in church belfries, while watching reruns of Combat!  They were occupied by German Army snipers or sometimes machinegunners.  Lest someone accuse me of hostile editing, you can read the original in its entirety at the source.  You can also read news stories about it, but yes, this is just what it appears to be, a sniper tower just off the Mall.  That'll deter the next poor sod who picks up a loose flap of pool coating!  What it reminds me of are the later scenes in the recent film Civil War, when opposition troops are converging on a fortified White House cowering behind high walls -- well, that and the kind of thing military-obsessed boys liked to draw in middle school during class when they should have been taking notes.

     I'm now unwilling to believe the unprecedented actions and events will stop at the present level.  Buckle up, kids, there's no predicting what's around the next corner.
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* Most Roman triumphal arches, and all of the surviving ones, were built by the Roman Empire, not during the Roman Republic.  And the United States federal government has never built any -- certainly not in the national capitol.  There's a message there, for those willing to heed it.

It Just Keeps Getting Weirder

      There's no end to the strange turns.  Let's see -- the President says he's banning some U. S. news organizations from the White House, which is not a specifically enumerated or implied power of the office and which previous Federal court cases have determined is, in fact, not a power Presidents have.  At present, the credentials of journalists employed by MSNOW, CNN and Politico have been revoked.  This is a bad notion and I hope the courts won't let it stand.  I want our elected officials to be scrutinized from every angle, so I can make up my own mind.

     Elsewhere, Congresspeople are getting themselves in trouble of the slept-with-the-wrong-person or took-money-they-shouldn't've type.  You can look up the various scandals, not all of which have been to court, for yourself.  It's too tawdry to list.  This is why you need every shade of reporter looking at them.

     At this point, there are plenty of trailer parks in the U.S. with fewer outrageous and/or or illegal activities going on than there are among the elected officials of the Federal government, and among the wildest offenders you will find many of the same people who have been presuming to lecture us Great Unwashed about our bad behavior.  Y'know, there's no honest path to the moral high ground from waking up in bed with an employee or someone else's spouse (or someone other than your own), dead drunk and violating the U. S. Constitution and I'm sick of the politicians, most of the Press and a whole lot of the rest of us acting as if there were.

     Politicians, appointees?  Fix you own hearts and whatever vestiges of a soul or conscience you've got before you come after the rest of us.

This Is...Unwanted

     I missed a couple of doses of my anti-inflammatory this past week, and maybe I did a little too much awkward lifting on Trash Night last night.  Whatever I did, this morning I woke up with an unhappy back, and gentle exercises and soaking in warm water didn't help.

     So I have taken a muscle relaxer and called in sick.  I'm not going to try to tough it out.  The last time I did that, it ended up costing me most of the summer.

A Staggering Own-Goal

     Through misadventure, misjudgement and incompetence, the United States has led the way to a global shortage of diesel fuel.  Prices have skyrocketed -- and there are service stations in the U. S. where you can't buy it at all: they're out.

     This is bad when you go to top up the VW Golf and approaches catastrophic when the Super Duty pickup has run nearly dry, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Every single item on the shelf at the grocery store and the five and dime, every drug in the pharmacy and most children in the schools got there by diesel.  The box and tractor-trailer trucks and farm machinery all run on it.  The trains run on it.  The river barges are moved by tugs burning it.  Most school buses burn it.  The electrical peaking plants that keep the grid up on especially hot or cold days?  Diesel.  And speaking of cold days, fuel oil still runs many furnaces, and it's the next thing to diesel; if refineries adjust to make more truck fuel now, there'll be less heating fuel as winter comes in.  Jet fuel's another cousin (though even closer to kerosene), so close that hospitals and TV stations that fly helicopters sometimes get the emergency generators set up to run on the same fuel, sharing their supply.  And there have already been rolling jet fuel shortages.

     Big ships still run on thick bunker oil, which is pretty much at the bottom of the stuff refineries distill, what's left after they pour the diesel off -- but wait, some of them switch to clean-burning diesel as they approach port.

     Bottom line?  Everything you buy is going to get more expensive, and will stay that way as long as diesel fuel remains scarce and costly (and probably long after, until inventories turn over).

     The problem here is not Orange Man Bad.  Sure, he is, but we've had absolute bastards in the Presidency before (Jackson, Wilson, Nixon...); it's not actually a disqualification.  Nope, the problem is Orange Man Dumb and Orange Man Have Poor Impulse Control. Not to mention Orange Man Not Listen To Qualified Experts, of which his administration has vanishingly few anyway.  We're all going to pay the price for it -- all of us who are not high-and-mighty Federal officials and politicians, anyway.  They're still tucking into nice steaks and rick, thick Senate Bean Soup,* the ingredients for which were carried to the Capitol by train and/or truck, and paid for with your and my tax dollars.

     They've shot themselves in the foot, but we're doing the bleeding for them.
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* Apparently, it's not all that great.  My own 15-bean soup is undoubtedly better, though I rarely have time to make it. It's based on the Hurst packaged beans but uses a different recipe and is served with raw chopped onions and celery for toppings, and generous amounts of fresh cornbread.  And you'd never guess what fuel brought all that wonderful stuff to the grocer's.

Running, Running

     These have been a busy two days. Both cats had early-morning vet appointments, Holden on general principles and to schedule teeth-cleaning, Huck other to check his blood pressure.  Yes, they use a tiny cuff and it's a real struggle to hear the change.  Sometimes they have to shave a spot for the electronic stethoscope microphone, but not this time.  Offer him a Churu treat and he's pretty tolerant of whatever they need to do.

This Timeline Is Deeply Wrong

     "Lay down with dogs, get up with a job at the FBI," shouldn't be a thing, but here we are.  2026 is the gift that keeps on taking.

Getting The Lead Out

     I bought a filtering water pitcher, and the reason is--

     City water tastes pretty lousy if it sits for more than a few minutes.  I drink bottled water and I'd been thinking about a filter carafe for a long time, but, well, what motivated me is that the LSLRP crew has been working two blocks over, and it worried me.  That's the Lead Service Line Replacement Program, our local water (and gas) utility's effort to replace lead pipe from the main to the "meter pit," which around here is more likely to have a shut-off valve in it while the actual meter lives in your basement and is connected to a wireless access port on the outside wall of your house.

     I hadn't been too worried; my house was built in 1924, the water line into the house is galvanized, and I was okay, right?

     Apparently not.  Between ordering the pitcher and receiving it, I got a letter advising me that what I keep thinking of as "L-Slurp" was in the neighborhood, swapping out the old lead pipes and yes, my house was on the list.

     Apparently, I've been running on leaded for twenty years.  Probably not much -- our various water utilities (the thing kept getting bought up and going bankrupt) have known for years and been careful about the chemicals they used, but, still.

     Like smoking, the best time to give up lead is before you start and the second-best time is right now. (And yes, the filtering widget I bought, a well-known name brand, promises it really does remove the lead, honest, cross their heart.)

That Whole Charlie Kirk Anniversary Thing

     Not the terrible thing that was done to him.  I wrote at the time and I'll say it again: nobody has that coming.  Certainly not a guy whose shtick was showing college students that if you go arguing with a man in a venue he controls, where he sets the ground rules and picks the issues, you're going to lose.  It may even be a valuable lesson or two: the grown-up world does not play fair.  You cannot reason someone out of a position he holds on faith.

     I disagreed with most and maybe even all of his positions.  Nevertheless, the violence that was committed against him was absolutely inexcusable and should be condemned by every decent person.

     But I don't quite get why all the media outlets made a point of noting the anniversary of his murder.  What are they after?  They've been covering the trial of the man accused of killing him, and that's appropriate, but this is someone who didn't hold public office, and whose fame was based on employing his rhetorical gifts in remarkably uneven debates.  Big fun if you agreed with him, I suppose, but he wasn't otherwise notable.  The organizations he founded have faltered as cultural forces without him, and many people on the far Right have drifted towards even more extreme figures.  That's not great -- but it's likely those individuals were already headed in that direction.  He wasn't a moderating influence.  I'm sorry for the loss to his family and friends.

     We've got too damn much political violence in this country, and we're too easily chivvied into "Us vs. Them" conflicts that pit working people...against other working people.  Meanwhile, the rich get richer, no matter what their politics happen to be -- and their politics have often been shown to be remarkably flexible, depending on which party is in power and what they they think it can do for them.  Against that, making killers famous, marking the date of their crimes and shedding performative tears over their victims is an utterly cynical sideshow.

Forward-Looking Perspective

     Data centers are the abandoned Kmarts and dead malls of tomorrow -- and tomorrow is right around the corner.

It's 9/11

     Politicians and media will be pulling out out their hair shirts and weeping hankies, and look, it was  a terrible day, an unexpected blow, a mass murder of innocents, a nasty piece of asymmetrical warfare.

     So was Pearl Harbor, and we still mark the day.  But December 7, 1966 was not a day-long commemoration.  My Dad didn't blink when I bought a Toyota in 1977.

     Remember -- by all means, remember.  But don't be consumed by it.  Understand the changes it, and our reaction, wrought in our country. 

He's A Biter

      Holden still can't grasp that his adoptive mommies are relatively fragile.  He sits on the typewriter shelf of my desk, and if he thinks he's not getting enough attention, he'll bite me.

     Flinching doesn't help.  Scolding doesn't register with him.  So I've started crying, as soon as I feel the little cat teeth.  I pull away before he can get a good nip. put my head down and sob, in as heartfelt a way as I can.

     And that works.  He'll either start smoothing on me or go into clown mode, rolling and grabbing at small items on the desk, very much, "I'm playing!  See?  See how amusing I am?  Please stop crying!"

     I just started a few days ago.  We'll see if the lesson sticks.

It's A Kind Of Genius

     Oh, it's crude.  And it's not possible, not to mention illegal.  But it's absolutely an example of how the man works: the President of the United States has promised to pay each and every American* a middling-large sum of money if his party retains control of Congress.  He's made similar payoff promises before, which somehow never materialize.

     It's the same appeal as a one-armed bandit, only with far less chance of a payoff: pull lever, get money.  And there's a group of voters, ranging from low-information to so deep in the fantasy they'll take it on faith, who will be moved by it.  Is the size of that group decisively large?  Is greed a stronger motivation than high prices for everything and stagnant wages?  Stronger than the reaction to an increasingly authoritarian Federal government whose masked secret-police thugs act with impunity?

     I don't know.

     The truth is, the money's not his to spend; it's Congress's.  And Congress doesn't have it; the payout would run to more than 1.3 trillion dollars and they're already deeply in the red funding his don't-call-it-a-war with Iran, the same one that's driving up the price of oil, fuel, and everything that relies on oil-derived stuff to be made or grown and transported.  I suppose they could just have the Mint print it -- that's what the Left calls "Modern Monetary Theory" and the Right mocks (so does the center); it's inherently inflationary, meaning by the time you get your money, it'll buy fast-food dinner for two and a daily newspaper as long as it's not the Sunday edition.  And it's illegal in the U.S. to pay people for votes, not that illegality is much of a deterrent.  (And it's the actual paying for votes part that is illegal -- candidates and everyone else can talk about it all they like.)

     It's money no American will ever receive, no matter who they vote for.

     Politicians have been selling pie in the sky for years; Mencken called elections a kind of advance auction of stolen goods, but the modern, jet-propelled GOP version auctions off the stolen goods -- and then keeps them.

     I beg people to choose a better class of crook.  I have no faith left that they will.

     Update: The "dividend" headlined every TV and radio newscast I saw or heard today.  It'll never be paid -- but using it as a lure is indeed a kind of genius.  Flim-flam genius we should be ashamed of falling for, and yet....
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* Citizens, presumably, given his party's positions, not resident non-citizens.