Voiceless America?

     As I write this, President Trump has recently issued an Executive Order* defunding the Voice of America to the greatest extent possible within the power of the Executive Branch, along with Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.  (All under the United States Agency for Global Media.)

     He appears to bear some personal animus toward VOA, as may be seen in this clip from a few days ago, prior to the EO.  A White House Press release cites a number of complaints about VOA, all but one in the period between 2016 to 2022, mostly from partisan sources, alleging bias.

     It's an interesting quirk of VOA that while it is somewhat isolated from being told what to cover by the Federal government, it is quite firmly required to be accurate and objective, -- and can be held to account when it is not.  VOA is America's face to the rest of the world, and while they can at times be a little bland and overly upbeat, they take their mission seriously.  You can go to their website and judge for yourself -- for instance, this explainer covering the circumstances under which Permanent Resident status can be revoked.  Or at least you could do so at the time I wrote this.  There's little reason to believe the VOA website will still be around next week.

     The Voice of America dates back to the Second World War -- and yes, it's propaganda, but it's honest propaganda, demonstrating the workings of a free press and a representative democracy to the entire planet, delivering truth to people who were often being lied to.  Shutting it down is hiding our light under a bushel.  It has been an inexpensive effort, measured on the scale of Federal projects, and has paid off over and over.  If the President thinks they're slanting the news, he's got the power (via their overseeing agency) to get them back on track.  If he doesn't like how they cover him, he can restrict their access to White House events.  Pulling the plug instead sends the wrong message to the world -- and while VOA directly operates only a few transmitting facilities these days, once you walk away from a high-power shortwave transmitter and antenna installation, it can be tricky bringing it back up again.
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* The same order yanks the rug out from under the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a big source of funding for public libraries, especially in areas where the population is too thin to support much of a library.  Plus several other Federal organizations, none of which amounts to much more than a rounding error in a budget dominated by defense spending, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. It all seems more mean-spirited than frugal, more culture war than penny-pinching.

And Then Friday...

     Friday, I spent a lot of the day working on some low bookshelves, in poplar instead of pine.  Poplar is not my friend.  I managed to get the basic assembly done, went out this morning to move it and broke the glue joints between the top shelf and the sides.

     It has been reglued, and once the glue has set, it's going to get some dowels to help pin everything together, and perhaps the last few small pieces will be installed.  But I'm not in a hurry to do it; it will probably be too cold to glue anything tomorrow and I'm not going to move the shelves indoors until they are fully assembled, sanded, linseed oiled and waxed.

     I have been avoiding political comment recently.  It's not like you can miss what's happening, and you're either appalled, as you should be, or you think it's a great idea and everything will work out fine.  Just fine.

     Don't count on it.  But there are people far more well-informed than I am already beating that drum, and I'm tired of being Cassandra.

Coffee

     I like coffee.  I'm not a connoisseur; I can't go on about the "spicy, earthy, chocolatey notes" of various kinds (taking it with cream and sugar is a downcheck for coffee snobbery!), but I know good from bad, and I know what I like.  Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee smells wonderful, tastes just like it smells, and if it didn't sell for thirty dollars a pound or more,* I'd probably drink it every day.

     Our corner grocer sold a "Blue Mountain Blend" in their bulk coffees that was solid stuff.  Not as rich as the real thing, but smooth and flavorful.  Awhile back, their supplier changed the composition and it has become hollow.  The aroma's fine, but the flavor lacks something.  The mouthfeel isn't the same.  I'd guess they changed the source of the less-expensive beans in the blend.

     They used to sell Tanzanian Peaberry, which is sorted to produce singleton beans, at least partially by hand (!).  The nearly spherical beans roast a little differently, and between that, the extra attention and the usual varieties grown, it's good stuff.  It vanished from the store during the pandemic and has never returned.

     They stock other stuff -- Columbian (almost the generic American coffee), dark roasts, various flavored types, and Brazilian.  The latter has whatever their Blue Mountain blend lacks these days.  It's good by itself, or mixed 50/50 with the blend before grinding.  --And I am not the only customer to notice: they run out of it first and fastest, which is why I end up mixing other kinds to stretch it out.

     But that's not the only option.  Today, I'm enjoying another reliable option: Ethiopian!  That's where coffee-drinking began, after all.  They grow a wide array of coffees and (with competent roasting) all of them I have tried have been good. Yirgacheffe and Sidamo both show up here.  I brewed a pot of Sidamo this morning,and it's a strong contender to become my first choice.
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* However, depending on how strong you brew your coffee, this works out to a per-cup price less than 25% of what you will pay for the cheapest cup at a chain coffee shop. So yes, it's expensive, but you'll pay four times as much to drink low-end stuff from a cardboard cup with a name-brand logo printed on it.  Sixty-eight cents for smooth or three dollars for burnt, you decide.

I May Have Created A Monster

     I like ham salad sandwiches.  Since the Marsh supermarket chain went bankrupt, dependable ham salad has not been easy to find.  Our neighborhood grocery only has it in their deli case occasionally; tuna salad is their daily staple, with egg salad (and I like it, too) as a frequent backup.

     The Meijer store has a decent grocery section, especially for a super-giant everything-under-one-roof place.  And they nearly always have their own brand of ham salad.  It's been a long time since I bought any, but I picked up a tub of it a couple of days ago and made sandwiches on toasted rye bread last night.  Tam polished hers off and went for seconds.

     Tonight, there was just enough left to make a couple more sandwiches, and why not use it up before it turns?  I added a bagged salad,* and there's a decent supper.

     Tam had all of hers and then allowed as how she would not pass up another sandwich.

     "Those two were the last of it," I admitted.

     "What?  No more?"

     "Nope."

     She sighed.

     "You know where the Meijer is," I said, "And you ran your car just a couple of days ago, so the battery's charged."

     "I'm thinking about it."

     She decided it could wait until tomorrow morning.  But she's right -- there's something about the simple pleasure of cool ham salad on rye bread, the crisp crunch of the celery bits, the umami of the ham....

     Y'know, I could run over to the store tonight, myself.
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* Those things are an utter indulgence.  There are dozens of varieties, with everything you need and not too much excess -- and some olives and fresh tomato will elevate most of them.  They're even making single-serving sizes.

I'm Just Watching

     The more I pay attention to the news, the weirder it all gets.  I'm just watching, waiting to see what's next.

     If you put the events in U. S. politics of the past few months in a novel, you'd be accused of hackwork, melodrama, stuff that wouldn't pass muster in a penny dreadful.

It's Grill Time

     The temperature has been warming up and this past weekend, the weather suited running the grill.  Friday, our neighborhood grocery had nice corned beef brisket* at prices that were not dire and I bought the largest one my checking account and oval grill pan would support.

     Saturday, it went in the covered pan, fat side up on the roasting rack with a turnip cut into large chunks (and another one would not have been remiss) at an hour per pan, to be joined an hour into the process by potato sections, a cut-up white onion, celery and carrots.  I put the seasoning that comes with corned beef on it, smoked paprika on the turnip and some rosemary-and-friends on the potato.  Without any added liquid, it ends up with a cup and a half of broth, the turnip mushy and loaded with salt -- a little bit on the potato chunks is better than butter.

     There was enough left over to save some corned beef back for homemade hash Sunday morning (mine with scrambled egg, Tam's the plain meat and potatoes) and freeze a bag of fat-separated broth, meat and vegetables for soup later.

     That would have been the weekend's adventures, except--  Our corner store also stocks some imported South American beef.  It's pre-packaged, and more affordable than their fancy butcher-cut meat.  Tam was celebrating the arrival of a check† when she noticed nice picanha steaks in that case.  Nice, and huge; she bought one and it was plenty.  Sunday was even warmer than Saturday, and the beef got seared and slow-grilled, rare for her, medium for me.  The fat cap renders as it cooks and melts into the meat -- and, very briefly, onto the coals and flares up, when I turned my half sideways to brown the cut end!  That's when a covered grill comes in handy: close the vents until the flames stop, lift the lid, turn the meat and open the vents back up, smooth as silk.  It came out fine.  Add a bagged salad and some 1-minute nuked bone broth rice, and it was about as simple a fancy meal as could be had.
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* Presumably for Saint Patrick's day, despite the fact that the actual Irish are more likely to be eating ham.  Oh, they won't stock corned beef for New Year's, but the incorrect pinkish meat for a religious holiday turned cultural and now an informal and widely-observed secular holiday, suddenly they can't get enough.  Oh well, corned beef is corned beef.  I won't pass it up.
 
† While the average income for writers is decent money (a tad under $50K for fiction novelists), they get that figure by throwing Steven King, Dan Brown, Suzanne Collins and so on in with the regular working stiffs making three cents a word: a few dozen millionaires skews the number way up. Most writers get paid on publication -- or months later, once the check has creaked through the Byzantine financial operations the typical publisher applies to any sap whose name doesn't guarantee best-sellers. So the arrival of a check is indeed cause for celebration, and if two show up in any given week, well, it's a Jubilee.

I Can't Spend Every Day On It

     "OMG, look what the current Administration did!"  Yeah, just take it as given: every day is a new spectacle of some sort, Federal workers abruptly fired and rehired, Constitutional or customary limits tested and retested, allies insulted, bombastic statements made and so on and so forth.  It's management by chaos, government as reality TV.

     And it is exhausting.  That's a feature for authoritarians, not a bug: they want critics burnt out, worn down, going bug-eyed over an unending succession of small excursions and occasional large violations of norms.  It's good theater: "Lookit 'em run!"  "Guess they were 'triggered!'" "Cry harder!"

     I'm not crying.  I'm not triggered.  I'm annoyed.  This kind of behavior is the ruination of republics and the genesis of autocracies, and we have damned few politicians who will stand up to it.  The ones on the inside are glorying in it (and suppressing the occasional wash of nausea) while many on the outside appear to be more envious than concerned.

     There are signs the Administration may be going a little too far; there are signs that they're ignoring the warnings in those tea leaves.  But that's a flimsy hope and naked, cynical opportunism is the dominant paradigm on both sides of the aisle.

     I could poke fun at Indiana's Attorney General for attempting to language-police local news media* after his party has been telling us that scolding people for not using pronouns of choice is overbearing interference with freedom of speech.  But hypocrisy's a widespread hobby these days and what's sauce for the goose is apparently no longer sauce for gander -- and vice versa.
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* A TV news station tweeted that Indiana's Governor had issued an Executive Order "banning trans women from women's sports at Indiana schools," and were promptly reproved by the AG, "Not correct. The order banned biological males...." I guess he wanted to make sure the Governor's preferred pronouns were honored, First Amendment bedamned?

Europe Crunches Towards War

     By my figuring, the planet's been in WW III since Putin's Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukraine called for -- and got -- international help.

     It was a small and proxy war; the West was prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian, the last Russian or peace, whichever came first.  Awful, cynical, heartbreaking -- but not atypical.

     Now that the U.S. has put assistance to Ukraine on hold, Europe is moving to a war footing.  Welcome to 1937!

     Being the world's policeman is a thankless and not-inexpensive task.  The only thing it beats are all of the alternatives.  As we may soon discover.

An Hour And A Half Of Fun?

     I watched a few minutes of last night's big Presidential speech and picked up the box scores and highlights this morning: it mostly covered what he's already done. Republicans cheered wildly and offered standing ovations; Democrats sat, jeered a little and held up small, polite signs with simple messages like "FALSE," "MUSK STEALS" and "SAVE MEDICAID."*

     In short, nothing unexpected, right down to cantankerous Representative Al Green getting ejected for heckling the President, saying, "You don't have a mandate to cut Medicare."  (A power Presidents, as a matter of law, do not have -- which may or may not carry much weight at present.)

     Either you welcome chaos or you don't, and if you do, consider your fellow citizens -- veterans relying on benefits, the elderly and disabled relying on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  What did they ever do to you?

     But I guess we're finding out now what you will do to them -- and possibly to your own tax return, et Federal cetera.

     Tam and I watched an episode of Resident Alien instead, a refreshing, cheerful comedy about an alien sent to destroy the world who crash-lands in Colorado.  Gotta tell ya, in context he seems benign.
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* As an opposition party, their current motto is something along the lines of, "You wouldn't hit somebody who wears glasses, would you?"  Guess what?  That never did work and it's not working now.  This is no way for adults of any political stripe to behave, on either side of the equation.

The Bulwark Says It

     In 1933, Jews constituted one percent or slightly less of the German population, a tiny minority.  Tiny, visible and increasingly despised.

     In 2025, there's a tiny, visible, and increasingly despised minority in America -- and they are canaries in the coal mine.  I have no idea how to write about it effectively, but over at The Bulwark, someone does.

Grim Statistics

     Spent part of the weekend and this morning looking up some very grim statistics, but I'll spare you for now and just share the gist:

     The United States is a big, sprawling polyglot country, filled with people who came here from all over, for all sorts of reasons -- misfits and high achievers, people with a checkered past hoping to start over, people with a fancy pedigree in search of the next big thing, religious (and antireligious) nuts of every kind, people with big dreams and people with low ambitions.

     Politicians want to slice us and dice us and hammer us into molds -- "woke," "conservative," "liberal," "moderate," sort us by skin color, natal language, religion and so on and on and on, but we're all here.  Red state or blue state, red city or blue city -- it's really all shades of purple and we're side by side, like it or not, fixing one another's cars, cutting each other's hair, punching a timeclock at the factory or cattle on the open range, writing poems, building houses, spraying graffiti on walls or painting it over.

     A few of us -- a tiny minority -- have billions of dollars.  A sizeable minority of us are barely getting by.  Most people living in the U.S. are somewhere in the middle, a little worried over bills but on average, not missing any meals.  We're all a tiny bit special and we're all pretty ordinary.

     And they're all the same as you: they have dreams and hopes, sore spots and gripes.  Try to give 'em the benefit of the doubt.  Even the oddballs and weirdos.  You look pretty strange to someone yourself, right now, just as you are.

On Sunday

     It was cold outside.  I went outside anyway.  I touched some grass -- well, mostly in the process of cleaning the soles of a pair of tennis shoes, or whatever we're calling them now.  I have four pairs, one of which is about due for retirement, but they're all washable and they all got washed today.

     They still wear out at the balls of my feet and down the outside to the heel, same as always -- I leave question mark-shaped footprints, thanks to having very high arches.  It's rough on the soles.

     But I got outside.  In Nature.  With the birds and the squirrels and the plants that are, even in the cold, longing to be green again.  (That last part is just the plants.  As far as I know, the birds and squirrels are okay with being reddish or gray or whatever they got handed.)