Expectations Vary

     Growing up, my family took to the board game Trivial Pursuit shortly after it came out, and played it seriously.  Not grimly; we had a lot of fun.  But it was a game with definite answers to clear questions and that's how we approached it.

     I dated a guy for several years, and his family played board games too -- Yahtzee among them, which I'd never played, but they approached with brisk precision.  So imagine my surprise the evening they got out Trivial Pursuit game and proceeded to play it very lightly, a game so hard no one could be expected to know most of the answers, an occasion for bluffing and swapping hints where the points didn't really matter.  And they had a nice time with it, too.

     Even when we're playing the same games, we don't all play them the same way.  And it doesn't mean the people playing it differently are necessarily doing it wrong, either.

Social Media: Basicially Turbocharged Junior High School

     An utterly scurrilous rumor made the rounds on social media recently before being thoroughly and easily debunked.  Rest assured that no current candidate for President or Vice-President has ever described their personal experience of having sex (of sorts) with a couch in a memoir.

     Never happened, should have been immediately obvious as a falsehood intended to tarnish an individual's reputation and was dispelled via the kind of text search that modern technology makes quick and simple.  But the lie was all the way around the world before the truth had even put its glasses on, and there we have politics in 2024, a game that any amateur with a knack for it can play.

Quaint?

     Today is the anniversary of the "Kitchen Debate" between Richard M. Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev in 1959.

     Say what you will about the two men -- or their attitudes toward women and housework -- it's a better time when the struggle between capitalism and communism comes down to addressing the immediate and long-term personal and societal merits of dishwashers and lemon squeezers.  I'd rather see countries and political philosophies compete in terms of home appliances and the average person's standard of living than who can build the biggest bomb or wage the most effective proxy war.

     Of course the politicians didn't see it that way.  But just once, for a little while, they did.

In Search Of Excellence

     Digging into history, I sometimes take odd turns.  Recently, it was "When did we stop calling the President of the United States 'Excellency,' and why did we ever start?"

     The last part is the easiest to answer: "Excellency" was (and is) the honorific or style for a representative of a government as a whole, especially if they had no other title.  Ambassadors were (and are) "Excellency."  This was extended by analogy to the head of government of a republic and was already in use when the United States was formed.  As an honorific, it was often "sticky:" if you'd held a post that carried it, by courtesy you were allowed to keep it when you moved on.

     Another use of "Excellency" is to refer to the Commander in Chief of armed forces.  So when George Washington was first elected President, he'd already been an Excellency and arguably still was.

     Washington is sometimes decried as an "Imperial President," pompous and high-handed.  He did enjoy a degree of formality that can look excessive to us, but was it far less so than British practices of his time, shockingly abbreviated and brusque.  He is known to have complained about the necessity of issuing Executive Orders to fill in where Congress had, in his opinion, skimped on their work and gone out of session.  Over two terms of office, he backed away from "Excellency" in favor of "Mr. President."  Nevertheless, John Adams continued to be addressed that way; Thomas Jefferson was as well but doesn't appear to have liked it much.  He tried to use other titles, but in formal correspondence, he was still "Excellency."

     While the term has faded away in everyday speech, and even internally in the Federal government, it still shows up in letters and documents from foreign governments.  In many countries, the head of state is still called "Excellency" if they don't hold some inherited title and it spills over onto our Chief Executive.  Unofficially at least, the U. S. President is still "Excellency."

     But to give the 18th-Century revolutionaries their due, it sure does sit oddly in the ear, doesn't it?  In our heart of hearts, we all know the President of the U. S. is Just Another Citizen, stuck with the worst job on the planet: under constant hostile scrutiny, on call 24/7 with no real vacations and they have to live over the store.  No matter what happens on their watch, no matter how much or how little they had to do with it, they'll get all the blame and small credit if any. 

Switcheroo

     Oh, no!  A Presidential candidate from one of the major political parties, who had already won that party's primary, has stepped down!  It's a crisis!

     At least that's what leading lights of the other party are saying, along with a few of his own.  But is it true?

     You can't look to the U. S. Constitution for answers.  The men who drafted that document weren't thinking much about political parties and it doesn't address primaries.  When they did get around to mentioning factionalism in the Federalist Papers, they didn't like the idea. (Some history here, a little here.)

     By the time the new government was in place and George Washington was stuck with the top job, the first Senators and Representatives were well on the way to inventing a party system, centralizing Federalists against the free-trade yeoman farmers of the Democratic-Republican party.  Washington warned against it, but in that effort, he was more Cassandra than Cincinnatus.  But there weren't any primaries; Congressmen from each of the parties caucused to pick who'd they'd chivvy into trying for the hot seat.  That system held up for not quite a lifetime before state-level parties agitated to have more of a voice against Washington, D.C.'s insider's club; a third party who didn't have any Congressmen held the first nominating convention in 1831 and the idea caught on.  For the next eighty years, a mix of conventions and colluding elected officials picked candidates with conventions gradually dominating: the "smoke-filled rooms" of each party got bigger.

     That system had some merits, but transparency wasn't one of them.  Just ahead of the First World War, primary elections began to emerge as a way to advise and even direct the choices of delegates to political conventions.  It took sixty years for that movement to grow, but by 1972, the "binding primary" had taken root in all fifty states, fueled in part by the dramatic mess of the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.

     Notice anything?  I haven't mentioned the Constitution.  It still doesn't have anything to say about political parties or how those parties ought to go about choosing candidates for Federal office.  Even a binding primary only holds convention delegates to obey the results per their party's convention rules --  usually for a round or two of voting, after which, it's a free-for-all.

     We still have, as Benjamin Franklin observed, a republic, and both of the major political parties are determined to keep it that way at their conventions: the delegates represent voters and are expected to use their best judgment, not simply carry the results.  Parties set their own rules at their own conventions.

     So there's your "crisis:" a tempest in a teacup, intended to stir public opinion and get eyes on screens while keeping emotions riled up.  The Democats will sort their candidates out at their upcoming convention and presumably the Republicans will gird up to campaign against them, same as has happened every four years since the first party system emerged.  We're not on the same two parties, not even close; we're on the sixth or seventh party system and it's still running ad hoc, improvised outside the terms and definitions of the United States Constitution.  So don't be buffaloed; it's all as legal as church, and (finances aside) slightly less Federally regulated than religion.

FYI

     For those of you hankering for the lost Roman Empire -- or even the Republic -- it's 2777, ab urbe condita.  Do you know where your lares and penates are?  The literal ones or the figurative ones?  Have you checked your impluvium lately?

Of Course It Wasn't Worth Getting Out The Crayons

     I didn't expect it would do much good.  If you're deep into the Trumpian Cinematic Universe, you've left objective reality behind.

     In response to pointing out that attempting a crime counts as committing the crime, even if the attempt does not succeed, I got a tortured hypothetical situation with only the slightest connection to the counting of votes in the 2020 election and disputes about the count.  Yeah, no, and not even the point; and easily dispelled by using a parallel:* the downballot Dems didn't do all that well in 2020, with narrow majorities in the Senate and House (the latter flipped the other way, barely, in 2022, and how'd that happen if the fix is in?): if they'd had a fat enough thumb on the scales to change the Presidential vote, they could have handed themselves comfortable majorities in both bodies and legislated to their heart's content.  They didn't.  Congress has been remarkably unproductive.  One commenter claimed the Democrats want a "tyranny of the majority," but given the number of times in the last forty years they've held the House, Senate and Presidency, if they were after it they'd have got it by now, with bells and ribbons and parades on May Day.  Hasn't happened and it wasn't for lack of opportunity.

     Commenters have accused me of being "ignorant," while supplying no facts or history to counter mine.  If you won't do the homework, you don't get to call other people ignorant and expect any response aside from derisive laughter.  I was able to watch January 6 in real time and there's no retconning actual events, no matter how much you may wish to or how many glittering lies your Great Leaders may spin.  (Of note, live/near-live TV coverage that day was often forced to rely on wide shots, showing the literal "big picture," the true extent of the crowd and the broad sweeps of movement, the lulls and pauses as they happened, the cries of "Hang Mike Pence" after his decision was announced.)

     They have also accused me of being a Democrat.  Nope.  I'm a Democrat voter these days, but I'm still not a registered member of any political party; Indiana doesn't require it to vote in general elections and in party primaries, they only ask which ballot you want.  I'm a small-d democrat and small-r republican, and a small-l libertarian, too.  I think it's too bad Republicans decided Christian Nationalism (with a wide streak of White Nationalism) and a cult of personality was their way forward.  All my life, I have counted on having two big mostly-sane parties running in elections that are mostly "Coke vs. Pepsi" and "Crest vs. Colgate," and keeping one another between the rails, despite the occasional John Bircher or would-be socialist in their ranks, and that they maintain internal Party discipline by pitching out the genuine nuts, crooks and extremists that sneaked in.  I can't count on the Republicans to clean up their own party any more, and they're immune to any shame when their worst ideas and politicians are revealed.  At best, the GOP are the Whigs and Know-Nothings of our time, riding a ticking clock to irrelevance; at worst--  Well, extreme parties have ruined nations and instigated wars plenty of times in the past, and the price is always paid in blood and ignominy.
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* One of the better examples of this way of reality-testing is physicist Richard Feynman's work investigating the Challenger disaster: he looked into the history, engineering and production management of the Space Shuttle's liquid-fueled engines, and found the same pattern of each successive level minimizing the risk analysis of the preceding level that had doomed the solid-fuel boosters: if the engineers determined there was a one-on-ten risk of failure, their bosses, not wanting to look bad and knowing how cautious the engineers were, reported it as one in a hundred, and this happened over and over, all the way up: there were design problems, but there was a problem with management culture that kept them from being recognized and fixed until we lost a Shuttle.  And even then, we lost another one....

Is It Worth Getting Out The Crayons?

     I was going to refute in extensive detail a commenter who loftily informed me that "January 6 was not an insurrection" because there weren't stacks of dead bodies and no buildings got burned to ground.  But it's simpler than that:

     Sorry, old boy, there is no ineptitude exception for insurrectionists.  The mob that stormed the capitol was seriously lacking in command, control and communications -- not to mention intelligence -- but they did have a clear aim: to interfere with the certification of Electoral Collage votes and to apprehend or hang one or more elected official (the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House),  They didn't succeed.  They were poorly organized, despite the presence of members of a few militia-type organizations.  Too much would-be brass, too many undrilled troops, zero sergeants -- and you won't go too far without noncoms.

     You know what we call unsuccessful bank robbers?  Bank robbers.  You know what we call the perpetrators of unsuccessful robberies, like the guys who broke into a local gun store and found all the guns in the store's vault or armored display cases?  Burglars.  If a man runs up to you on the sidewalk, sticks a gun in your face and demands your pocketbook, he's an attempted robber even if a car comes around the corner and he panics and runs away.  (That happened to me, and while I was sure glad to not be shot and to keep the $2.75 in cash money that I had at the time, the perp had nevertheless committed a crime.)

     You don't get a pass for being lousy at it.  People were injured and killed.  Historical properties were damaged.  I watched real-time video, handheld stuff, security cameras, some professional coverage, whatever the networks could lay hands on.  It was a mob assault with the intent of overthrowing the normal functioning of the Federal government and installing a different President than the one who had been duly elected.  And not just duly elected, but repeatedly challenged in court and every challenge found meritless.  Every recount -- even the ones most suspicious of the results and set up to be well outside normal channels -- found the same winners and losers as the original counts.

     The candidate the mob tried to put in office had lost the election.  That makes their actions an attempted coup -- an insurrection.

     How sad for your bloodlust that it wasn't as productive of carnage and otherwise terrible as it could have been, I guess, though at the time, I thought the country had a very narrow escape from a truly dire outcome, and I still do.

     I am stunned that the instigator of that insurrection has been given another chance at the office.  Win or lose, his party will come to regret it.  History shows that autocratic usurpation never comes to a good end; the only question is how long it will take and how many people will be maimed and killed before the sickness has run its course.

     I'm telling you now, you don't escape a wood-chipper by jumping into the maw and hoping to ride it out, and you sure don't avoid the guilt by volunteering to gas the thing up and push the starter button.

They've Told Me Who They're Voting For

     It doesn't change how I plan to vote.  A few of my commenters are true-red Trumpists, and have told me how the former President "really loves this country." to which I can only point out that he loves it so much that this man who swore an oath to protect and defend our Constitution attempted by multiple mean to overturn an election which he lost, including inciting an insurrection that interrupted Congressional certification of the results and resulted in multiple deaths, and when out of office, hewing to his unsupportable Big Lie of a stolen election,* he called for the Constitution to to be suspended.  The man swore an oath to protect and defend it, and that oath -- and the U. S. Constitution! -- means no more to him than an empty pop bottle, to be tossed out if it gets in his way.

     His running mate is hardly better; Senator Vance first swore an oath to our Constitution in 2003 and again when sworn in as a Senator a few years back, but he has called for Jacksonian defiance of the separation of powers and muses that the United States is "...in a late republican period," referring to Rome right before Caesar ended their Republic.

      I don't have any x-ray vision into their hearts, nor do I into President Biden's, but he's been swearing the same oath to the Constitution (without picking away at it afterward) and taking Uncle Sam's paycheck for half a century now, and if he didn't love this country, he surely would have gone into a different line of work.

     It is unlikely any of these people -- or Vice-President Harris, who has been swearing the same or similar oaths since at least 2011 -- do not love our country.  My concern is that they will play by the rules.  Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he will not.  Sen. Vance has implied he will will not.  By my lights, that's disqualifying, right there.

     That leaves whoever the Democrats end up running.  It could be Joe Biden in a coma -- I can at least count on them to get us to the next election with a functioning American republic.  The GOP's picks are far too willing to pull it down.
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* He has a long history of claiming any contest he does not win has been "rigged."  The Emmy awards, for example.  So his veracity in making that claim is questionable, at best -- as is his sincerity.

An Ancient Mystery

     The Lapis Niger -- "Black Rock" -- in Rome was kind of a mystery to the Romans and it's even more so today.  It was widely considered to be an unlucky spot.  Supposedly the place in the Forum where Romulus was supposed to be buried, but wasn't; or possibly the tomb of his adopted father, or of a pre-Republic king or the king's grandfather, the location had a stubby column, a horseshoe-shaped altar with some guardian lion statues (think library lions) and a stelae with an inscription in a very old form of Latin.  It's almost impossible to read now and for most of their history, it wouldn't have been much easier for literate Romans to puzzle out.  Later on, the area was given black marble paving to mark it.

     There were ritual artifacts (possibly associated with kingly rule) buried in a layer of gravel under all this, and a sarcophagus that modern non-invasive methods have determined is empty.

     So, what's that stelae say?  It's a puzzle, and scholars have been picking away at it for decades.  The best read we've got is incomplete, but updated to modern language, it comes out to:

NO DUMPING OR LITTERING IN THIS GROVE. VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED [one?] COW, PAYABLE TO THE KING.

     You can go read it on Wikipedia (scroll down to the end of the section), but it looks like Ancient Rome was walking wide and careful of an unreadable "No Littering" sign that people knew was bad luck, even though nobody remembered why.

I Don't Get It

     Caesar did nothing good for the Romans and left chaos in his wake.  Oh, they sorted it out, painfully, bloodily -- but the Republic was gone, never to return.

     We've kind of got King Log -- if you can call President Biden that, considering that he's managed to get a lot done despite a nearly deadlocked Congress.  Replacing him with King Stork is not an improvement.  Sure, the stork makes more noise and flaps around a lot, but perhaps the eager should review the fable.  You and I are, like the rest of the 99%, small and tasty.

Unexpected

     Sure, he was on the short list, but most pundits put him near the bottom of it.  J. D. Vance will be running for Vice President on the Republican ticket, beard, suspected eyeliner, literary ambitions and all.

     His book received mixed reviews -- no one said it wasn't well-written, but critics were divided on his self-appointment as the interpreter for a whole region of the country and one he had not, in fact, grown up in.  If you want a take on transplanted Appalachian culture, his is as good as any; but there are a lot of transplants who headed to the manpower-hungry industries of what would become the Rust Belt, and a lot of takes on how that worked out.

     Senator Vance has issued mixed reviews of his new boss over time, and you can take them as a record of how his thinking has changed; he has moved in an ever more authoritarian direction, following his party's lead, and is very much the darling of the Federalist Society, and of the Heritage Foundation, the latter responsible for the "Project 2025" blueprint for, well, you can go read the thing yourself.  It changes the nature of government meddling and nudging, but not the amount of it.  And it throws open the door for the types of prejudicial treatment of people that would gladden the heart of the odious Woodrow Wilson.  It's not a good look.  Polls give Sen. Vance's party a 50/50 chance at implementing it, which is certain to provoke a strong reaction.  Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has promised a "bloodbath" if he fails to take the Presidency.

     Interesting times, either way.

     I hate interesting times.

"Hot Enough For You?"

     I may have to get the HVAC techs out again.  The air-conditioning isn't keeping up.  At least it's controlling humidity okay so far.  And it's not freezing up, which is a big improvement.  If I leave it at, say, 75 , what happens is it runs all of the time while the indoor temperature slowly creeps up, reaching as high as 78 when it's 95 outside.

     With a new coil, a clean filter and the vents and return unobstructed, the only handle left is velocity.  That's got an upper limit; the air's got to be in contact with the coil long enough to cool down, and, even worse, if it's going too fast, it will blow condensed water off the coil and right back into the air.  Some systems have range for adjustment but many don't; I know my system has at least a two-speed blower because the heat has a high-speed, higher-heat function that occasionally kicks in during the coldest weather. But does the cooling mode have access to it?  I don't know.

     It's been a long time since I cleaned the blower fan, so I'll try that first.  Even a little loss in airflow can make a big difference.  This is really a First World Problem; it's not as if I was particularly uncomfortable, even when the heat and humidity outdoors is wretched.  I'm just not as comfortable as I'd like to be.

Repair, Recycle -- Reuse

     Both of my parents were Depression babies.  I grew up conserving, re-using, repairing, and when "recycling" came along, it fit right in: don't trash what can become raw material all over again!  Use that stuff  'til it wears out, and then see what it can become next.

     In practice, it can be a little tricky, and while I sort and save fastening hardware at home, my work can't afford to be paying me to sift through old nuts and bolts (and so on) when there's actual stuff that needs to get done.  (I do maintain a semi-sorted "junk pile" at the transmitter, in as good order as can be managed in a hurry.  Old habits die hard, and it's been useful many times.)

     One of the more difficult items to dispose of properly are well-used TV microwave trucks.  By the time we're done with them, they're full of holes (mostly specialized access hatches), with generators too big for an RV and a distinct lack of beds and kitchens.  They're also high-mileage; okay for knocking around town, maybe not so great for traveling across the continent.

     But thanks to a blog-reader, I've found one group that can use them: volunteer ham radio emergency communications organizations.  In addition to the generator, the trucks have a pneumatic mast, and old ones become a maintenance issue that most TV stations no longer have the staff or spare time to mess with.  But hams do -- and many of them like to tinker.  One such organization in Colorado is making good use of old TV vans. 

It's Christmas For Conspiracy Theorists

     If you don't know someone took a shot a former President Donald Trump yesterday, doing only minor damage to him, killing an innocent bystander and injuring at least two others, then you have been living under a rock well past the last trolleycar stop.

     The TV and online talking heads were on it nonstop after it happened, mostly reporting the basic facts listed above and admitting they didn't know anything more.  The shots came from an apparently unsecured rooftop overlooking the venue, and that -- as so far reported -- is a significant failure.

     I have worked engineering support for TV reporting from a Presidential candidate appearance, though with smaller crowds.  I'm not going to get into any detail, but the U. S. Secret Service doesn't kid around.  They identify the sources of risk and they get them under control.  There are locations where they've asked utilities to weld down manhole covers along the route of a motorcade.  Their normal, known way to deal with vantage points is to put their own person with a gun up there, or get a cooperating agency to do so.  Did they miss this one?  Did the individual(s) assigned to it get sneaked past, taken out, distracted?  I don't know.  We may not ever know.

     What we do know is the dizzy-minded of every stripe are fabulating; online, I have heard everything from accusations of a "Reichstag fire moment" to "a Leftist plot foiled."  It's nonsense.  Not that knowing so will stop the firehose of BS, but it's all wind.

     The first claim is easy to disprove: nobody's that good a shot, not with a bobbing, weaving, gesticulating target.  At the reported distance, under the known circumstances, no one could pull off a near-miss of that nature on purpose, period.  And without a Number Two already in place, ready to step up and wave the bloody shirt, no even semi-sane conspiracy would take that risk.

     The other extreme is harder to debunk, but the historical examples (with one or two possible exceptions*) show that it takes a lunatic to get by the security around Presidents and Presidential candidates.  From Richard Lawrence's attempt on President Andrew Jackson in 1835 through the assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, the attempts on former President Theodore Roosevelt, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt and president Truman,* the assassination of President John Kennedy and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy to attempts on Presidents Ford (two) and Reagan, only people adrift from reality have been unpredictable enough to bring the means of doing harm within range of Presidents and Presidential candidates, at least within U. S. boundaries.  Nearly all of them have acted as "lone gunmen."  Plotters plot and all plots leak, without exception.  It only takes one Smedley Butler, only one cinematographer with a longer lens and better microphone† than plotters realize, one disaffected member of the group, one misdirected message, one nosy reporter.  And both FBI and the Secret Service are listening; researching for this post, I was impressed by the number of attempts they have foiled.  There's zero likelihood of a plot.

     It is, I am almost sorry to tell you, "the usual noise in here." Having sown political violence -- and our history shows it is always lurking -- the harvest followed.  Keeping the civility in civil society requires constant effort from each of us, and we haven't been doing a very good job of it in recent years.  My sympathies are with the victims, as are the sympathies of any decent person.
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* John Wilkes Booth was (arguably) sane and part of a wider plot; the Puerto Rico nationalists who murdered their way to within shooting distance of President Truman may have been fanatical but had no history of insanity.
 
† Perhaps I shouldn't point this out, but the power switches on many wireless microphone transmitters are lousy and, worse, talent has a habit of turning them off and then forgetting to turn them back on, so the switches are very often bypassed. 

Dipping A Toe In

     The headline was interesting, combining two facts: more than forty percent of the U. S. population lives in coastal counties, and sea level rise is accelerating.

     People have differing opinions about climate change.  That's normal for our species -- in an age of space travel, people have differing opinions about the Earth being a sphere or flat, after all.  But while only twenty-four people have ever been far enough into space to get a really clear look at the big blue marble we live on, well more than a third of Americans can ride a bicycle to the sea shore and have a look for themselves, year after year.  Far fewer will find themselves under water in the near term -- in many places, the land rises quite steeply from the shore, after all.  Storm surges will be more of a problem, from the southernmost tip of Texas all the way around to New York City once in a great while, depending on the whims of hurricanes, themselves getting stronger and more frequent.

     Call it climate; call it weather.  Either way, the graph of water level over time says it's coming.  Does the name matter when your beaches become scuba sites or you're sloshing around the ground floor of your house in gumboots, salvaging what you can from the storm?

     It's certainly going to have an effect on the discussion.

     Of course, we said that when men went to the Moon, and we're not out of flat-Earthers yet.  Still, it's a lot harder to breathe water than to pretend geosynchronous communications satellites or the GPS and Starlink constellations are fake.

I'm Going Back To Bed

     Wake me up right before civilization ends, please?  I want to see the big fireworks show at the grand finale.

I Know The Face, But The Character...?

     Last night, Tam and I watched the Pete Gunn episode, "A Slight Touch of Homicide," with the remarkable Howard McNear as the bad guy.

     You probably know him as Floyd the barber from Andy Griffith, a vague, odd, garrulous character, and you may have wondered why Floyd can seem almost menacing at times.  Without giving too much away, his role in the noir PI series shows that darker side to wonderful effect.  It's well worth watching, thirty minutes of tightly-scripted drama.  And you'll never feel quite the same way about Floyd again.

Back To Conditioning Air

      The techs stopped by this morning and swapped out the coil and expansion valve, a not-inexpensive process (though it could have been much worse).  After a week of managing the system while it was supercooling, "set and forget" will make a nice change.

Oh, Of Course

     Every once in a while, I'm reminded of the extent to which we are still all wandering around in the broken remains of Roman civilization.  I was looking at some interesting engineering that included a few very old dams in Spain -- really old: the Romans built them.  Several are in what is now the Zaragoza region -- which (according to a machine translation) the builders knew as the settlement of Ceasaraugusta.

     Put that way, it's pretty obvious where the modern name came from -- as obvious as the remains of an ancient dam.

The Big Science Fiction Convention

     Inconjunction was this weekend.  I didn't go.  I'm still getting used to being around people again.  I nerved myself up and went to a nearby antique shop Saturday, and then to dinner at Half Liter with Tam and one of her friends.  A lot of walking and a little bit of bike-riding: I slept like a log.

     Between the pandemic, the crazy reactions to the pandemic, and the chaos leading up to and following the 2020 election, I have become deeply leery of anything but the simplest. arms-length, surface-level interactions with other people.  Don't know 'em, don't wanna know 'em; smile, nod, "How about this weather?" and be on my way.  I'm sure many of them are fine people but I've been disappointed too many times and fooled more than once.  So how about I just don't get to know them well enough to find out?  Seems like a fine basis for coexistence.  Maybe they're a saint.  Maybe they're an asshole.  Why should I know?

     Today, I did another load of laundry, cleaned out the gutter on the south side of the house, repaired a broken wire in the feedline of my ham radio antenna that I found while cleaning the gutter and made a nice chuck roast with mixed vegetables (apple, turnip, potato, carrot, celery, onion and a couple of little cherry tomatoes, seasoned with coarse salt, mixed fresh-ground peppercorns, curry powder, garam masala and some datil pepper sauce -- no, it wasn't especially spicy, since I used that stuff in moderation) and mushrooms in parsley butter on the side.  You can hardly beat apples and turnips in something like this, though people don't believe that until they try it.  After all that, I'm worn out.  I may not even do dishes tonight.

Both-Sideserism (Thumb On The Scales Edition)

     New York Times: "Joseph Biden may be too old to serve second term, should drop out of election now."

     Also New York Times: "Donald Trump may be too great a threat to the republic to serve second term, voters must decide."

     But, hey, apparently neither one of them has eaten barbecued dog like RFK Jr., who absolutely swears that he would never, ever eat human flesh and never has, and that's the honest truth as far as he remembers.

UK Elections

     I suppose this is where I'm supposed to say something insightful about the 4 July elections in the UK,* but I don't have anything specific.  I will point out that an American 10-32 bolt and a UK 2BA bolt are so close in dimensions that that you can usually use one in place of the other with no special effort, one of the great coincidental convergences of engineering. 

     How that might apply to elections is up to the observer.
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* While the United Kingdom held 2024 elections on our Independence Day, we're going to be pulling the lever on 5 November, their Guy Fawkes Day.  "Remember, remember the fifth of November," and maybe check the more important basements for anything unexpected.

Happy Birthday, America!

     Today's the day we told the British Crown we were leaving.  The King wasn't happy about that, resulting in eight years of spirited disagreement, death, injury, disease and various treaties.  But we persisted, and won, something George Washington, who was in a position to know, described as "little short of a standing miracle."

     We kept a few things from the mother country, like notions of jurisprudence that included the presumption of innocence.  In the 1760s, the English jurist William Blackstone wrote, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

     While this can mean that a man who can afford very good lawyers is especially likely to escape being found guilty, the broad principle is aimed at preventing harm to the innocent -- and any malefactors who squeak by are likely to either mend their ways or commit further crimes, for which they will be arrested and face the possibility of punishment in due course.

     There's a guy running for President right now -- he'd love for me to mention his name -- who's been preloading public expectations if he wins and begins the mass deportations he has promised.  He's saying the media will single out the one lovely, otherwise-innocent mother who gets deported while ignoring the ten or a hundred presumed horrible, awful criminals swept up in the same dragnet and removed from the U.S., literally inverting Blackstone's ratio.  Meanwhile, he is benefiting from the presumption of innocence in criminal trials while availing himself of some of the best attorneys money and power can afford.

     You can listen to Founder and Framer Benjamin Franklin, or you can listen to that other guy.  One of them was there at the beginning, and knew the score.  The other?  He's mostly riffing, with no real thought of tomorrow.

By Kazvorpal - Photoshop CS5. This file was derived from: Benjamin Franklin 1767.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23104980

Not Too Cool

     In the first few days of the Spring heat wave, the air-conditioner coil in the furnace here at Roseholme Cottage froze up.  (I've been calling it an A-coil, but it's got one more section, so it's really an N-coil.)

     That wasn't too great. I managed to catch it early: air was still flowing but the cold side of the coolant line was frosted up nice and white where it's exposed as it goes into the box where the N-coil lives.  I turned the thermostat up several degrees, left the fan running and added a floor fan over the register in the dining room -- that one's only six feet away from the return dust grill, and the system works better if I can loft the cold air up and displace warm air into the floor-level return.

     Tam had out-of-town stuff to do over the next week and a half after I found it and I had several projects at work, so service had to wait.  I figured the system was just low on coolant, which (for abstruse reasons I have neither the time nor the crayons to share my limited understanding of) can make the N-coil tend to get much colder than it it should and freeze up.  In the meantime, I could probably manage it by not cooling the house any more than the bare minimum needed to control humidity.  You have to pay attention to the outside temperature and if the ducts in the basement are sweating, but if the system's not too messed up, it works.  I fired up booster fans in the bedrooms and it worked through a couple of weeks of bad heat.

     Then we had the flea explosion.  I had scheduled service by then, but Tam had to go out of town again and the house was a mess with bags of to-be-de-flea-ed stuff all over, so I cancelled it -- I thought.

     A few days later, the tech knocked while I was in the shower and we had a short, unhappy conversation.  That was early last week.

     After rescheduling and apologies all around, he showed up yesterday morning and worked his magic.  Yes, the system was low on coolant -- but after topping it up, it was still acting funny.  I'd drawn the newest tech; he spent some time on the phone with his more-experienced peers and came back to tell me that either the high-tech self-regulating expansion valve was shot -- or the coil was.  The latter was going to be costly and even the valve would be painful because it's labor-intensive (or time-intensive, at least: they have to empty the system, but refrigerant's too expensive to waste, so it gets pumped down and saved, and that's not a quick process.)

     He left and I called his office for an official quote.  They reminded me that the bill would be less if the system happened to be under warranty.  I asked them to hold that thought, I'd call right back after checking.  Turns out I had registered it back in 2017, and yes, it was a ten-year warranty if you bothered to register.  I called back, and now the service outfit wanted to send another tech out to make sure the problem was as diagnosed.  (I can't blame them for that.  The parts markup on a coil is a nice chunk of change and some or all of that is now off the table.) 

     Early this morning, the previous tech returned, skeptical senior in tow, and they did another round of measurements.  The original guy was vindicated (and happy about it.  It sucks to be the new kid -- BT, DT), and I'm waiting to hear back on scheduling the replacement.

     Meanwhile, we're in another hot streak and I'm managing the thermostat.

Marooned In Space?

     Oh, no!  Sunita Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore are stranded (according to headlines) or not stranded (according to NASA) aboard ISS!  What'll they do?

     Ride the Boeing Starliner back down, once the engineers are happy; or hitch a spare pair of seats on a SpaceX Dragon capsule, if the engineers get a lot less happy than they are now.  They're not stranded.  If the price was right, the Russians would probably taxi them home, and gloat about it all the way.  

     The worst problem for the pair right now is ensuring a sufficient supply of underwear (etc.).  There's no laundromat on ISS; they can't even take dirty clothes outside and let the vacuum sterilize them: the resultant particulate matter would stay in orbit and after a few years, ISS and all the scientific instruments it carries would be orbiting in a thin cloud of schmutz. Astronauts, cosmonauts, tourists and whoever else on ISS bring up a suitcase of employer-issued attire, stuff their dirty laundry into the trash, and it gets packed into a disposable cargo vehicle (From Russia, ESA or JAXA, though the latter two may not be flying at present) and burns up on reentry, raining schmutz-laden ashes down on the oceans and great cities of the world.

     The biggest risk they're facing is a shortage of skivvies.  NASA has done detailed studies on just how long you can wear the same set of clothes (ickily long), and resupply flights arrive at regular intervals, so not to worry.

     But what about those thrusters?  The delay seems to stem from some wonky thrusters in the Starliner's Service Module, and the issue there is, that part is not coming home.  It gets discarded along the way and burns up, just like a bag of space laundry.  If there's any chance to figure out what went wrong, it's got to be before the spacecraft heads home.

     And why is there a problem?  Can't NASA just pull out their engineering samples here on Earth and start fooling with them?  Um, about that....  Even when NASA was building their own spacecraft, they weren't building their own spacecraft.  Mostly they were managing the design process, subcontracting construction to a whole flock of companies (Chrysler made big chunks of Saturn V that took us to the Moon!) and managing (and occasionally performing) system integration.  It was all done on cost-plus contracts: do the job, whatever it takes, and send Uncle Sam the bill.  For the commercial crew system that has produced SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's Starliner,* NASA has stepped back from micromanaging and final assembly; they described the mission and put it up for bid -- at a fixed price.

     SpaceX got in early, using the prototype Dragon capsule and Falcon boosters for the unscrewed resupply contracts and learning as they went.  Boeing -- who had absorbed a lot of other aerospace companies and had immense institutional experience building spacecraft -- went straight into building manned vehicles.  And, as they had always done, they subcontracted a lot of it.  Including the thrusters; those were made by Aerojet Rocketdyne (Owned by L3Harris, itself a child of defense contractor Litton Industries and Harris Intertype, who once made printing presses, broadcast equipment and military communications gear).  This was bigtime commercial spaceship stuff, and Boeing asked for -- and got -- a fixed-price contract from their subcontractors.

     Space is hard.  Rockets break, and they break in many new and unusual ways.  Make a change to an existing system, and it may surprise you; design a new system from the ground up and it will surprise you.  If the engineers are very talented and very experienced, they can anticipate many of the ways things will fail, but not all of the ways.  No one can.  SpaceX uses a "move fast and break things" approach, and it works -- but they suffer occasional dramatic failures and have, so far, been very good at knowing how much risk is acceptable for any given flight.  NASA, in the wake of the Apollo "plugs-out" ground test tragedy, was obsessed with hand-tightening every bolt, having all the contractors follow every step of every part of the work and materials in extreme detail, and it resulted in successful Lunar missions -- at very great cost.  Boeing threw their efforts into engineering and ground-testing -- and in writing careful specifications for the subcontracted subsystems.  When things break, it's a matter for figuring out where, why and how -- and if the failure was due to improper assembly, improper design, or flawed specifications.  Money is riding on the answer -- money and whose pocket it comes out of.  This is not just rocket-geekery; it's attorneys and accountants and managers; it's people's best educated guess on how much it's going to cost to make each widget and how much the prime contractor will pay for it.  Get those numbers wrong and you can eat up a year's profit; get them too wrong, and people die.

     Starliner's woes do not appear to be at the "people die" point.  They have, however, been teetering on the brink of "goodby, profits" for both already-ailing Boeing and some of their subcontractors, and that spaceship its going to to stay up there, docked with ISS, until they have sorted out every valve, bolt, screw, engineering specification, contractual clause and the wounded feelings of the second vice-president in change of making rocketships for money.  It's not very pretty or especially pure; it's not as spectacular as a fully-fueled Falcon blowing up on the launchpad because somebody screwed up the temperature limits of a carbon-fiber-reinforced propellant tank. But it's how big old companies like Boeing do things, and I'm confident they will eventually get it all sorted out.

     Meanwhile, Suni and Butch are rationing their clean socks very carefully.  Because, you see, it only counts as a successful test flight if they come back in the Starliner that carried them up -- and the second V. P. in charge of flying rockets for money will be in a heap of trouble if this doesn't work as planned.
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* And, kind of indirectly, Sierra Space's Dream Chaser. But it's not competing to carry people at present. 

SCOTUS Says So

     I held off posting this morning, waiting to see if the U.S. Supreme Court would release their decision about Presidential immunity, figuring they would thread that needle with great care.

     Based on recent past decisions, it seemed likely the decision was going to work in Mr. Trump's favor, but narrowly.  The Justices are all clever lawyers, I thought, and mindful of theire responsibilities, they'd take care to not leave a mess.

     Was I ever wrong.  Their decision is problematic on many level. Ignore for now the legal troubles of former President Donald J. Trump, and consider the wider angles:

     If you believe President Biden committed crimes, as President or during his terms as Vice-President, well, that's tough; he's almost certainly immune from prosecution for them.

     There's a moral problem with the underlying notion that a President might have to commit crimes in the course of his or her duties: if it's immoral for you or me to do something, it's immoral for a President to do the same thing.  We expect our country's military to fight wars without committing atrocities, war crimes, grave injustices -- and we prosecute them when they fail to abide by these civilized norms, even in battle.  We must ask no less of our Presidents.

     No man should be above the law. Not Donald Trump or Joe Biden or any of their predecessors.  I don't know what the conservative majority on the Court was thinking, but it wasn't very clear thought, and it certainly wasn't with any kind of an eye to Framers or their original intent.

     The United States of America is in trouble now.  I don't know if the damage can be repaired.

I Grilled What?

     Today, I grilled a couple of inexpensive steaks, corn on the cob slightly steamed and wrapped in foil with a little "Mexican Street Corn" seasoning, and a mushroom pilaf in parsley butter with red onion, carrots and celery.  It was a tasty supper, but that's more or less the kind of thing everyone grills.

     Yesterday, I grilled...meatloaf.  Yes, meatloaf.  I like the stuff and with a wonky oven, I haven't made it in years.  Our corner grocery sells fresh meatloaf ready for the oven, at a price not much more than the ingredients, and without the investment in time and effort.

     Meatloaf gets baked at 325° to 350°F.  A charcoal grill will do 450°F with a little effort.  300° to 350° is typical for a covered grill.  So I tried it: built up a nice layer of coals, raked them to the sides for indirect heat, set the store-bought meatloaf in its little foil pan on a grill pan and let it bake for an hour.  I did add a strip of catsup (Heinz Chili Sauce -- try it!) down the middle; it's not really meat loaf to me without it.  I set an oven thermometer next to the pan and looked in at fifteen and thirty minutes.  The grill was making 325°.  After an hour, I used the digital thermometer to check for done-ness in the middle, and it was well past the 165° minimum.

     Off the fire, drained and sat for ten minutes, it was ready to slice and was as good as any meatloaf I have had.  I had a warmed-up slice for lunch today and I may have more for breakfast tomorrow.

     I'm working my way around to trying to bake bread in the grill, just to see if it can be done.

Nope

     I'm still getting comments irrationally claiming that the worst thing that could happen in a second Trump term would be "mean tweets," while re-electing Biden is a sure ticket to "nuclear war over a wheatfield half a world away."

     Yeah, no.  Putin will keep on going if he gets Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has all but promised to let him have that country.  At that point, an expansionist Russia is right up against NATO and feeling stroppy, a sure promise of war in Europe even if Mr. Trump tries to play the "too proud to fight" card just as the odious Mr. Wilson attempted.  America stepping back to let Europe burn hasn't worked in the last two European wars that went global and it won't work a third time, either.  We can help put this fire out while it is small or wait until it threatens to burn the entire world before pitching in.  It was a close call last time and we'd be fools to roll the dice once more.

     With Mr. Biden, Russia's ugly little war is safely off NATO turf and it's highly probable the West can outlast Gospodin Putin's ambitions.  Russia's industry still falters; their supply chains are strained and production lags demand.  If you want to limit the scope of this war, the battlefield has got to be kept away from NATO member nations.

     Do you want a mumbler or a loose cannon?  "Mean tweets" are a tea candle to the book-burning bonfire promised by "Project 2025" from Mr. Trump's GOP.  He mishandled the pandemic and trashed the transition last time; this time, he and his allies are promising to do enormously more damage and they've set it out for anyone to read.

So, That Debate?

     Two old guys, both inclined to ramble and go off on their own tack.  They got into a beef over their golf handicaps.  It wasn't impressive.  Hoping for Nixon vs. Kennedy, we got a Hudson & Landry bit instead and not one of their best. 

     One of them is a lifelong politician; the other one whipped up a gang of thugs to assault the U. S. Capitol while Congress was counting electoral votes and has never admitted he lost that election fair and square.  One of them has had a fairly quiet term of office, despite conflict between other countries; the other inspired violence from Left and Right, and fanned the flames when it happened.

     I've got points of disagreement with the incumbent but he's not a disaster, and he bids fair to remain acceptable.  The challenger and previous President was big trouble last time and promises more of the same if he gets in again, only stronger and better-organized.

     Two old guys.  That's what's on offer.  Pick one or the other.  They're old.  They're not great speakers.  But they're not the same.  Mr. Trump will create chaos.  Mr. Biden will not.  Maybe it's not an ideal set of choices but they couldn't be more clear.

Another One Gone

     At closing time today, long-time surplus electronics dealer Fair Radio Sales of Lima, Ohio will be gone.  They've scheduled an auction for mid-August to clear out the final items and then that's it.  Finished.

     I knew water ran downhill.  I never dreamed it would run out.  There are a few places left, but Fair was one of the last left to deal mostly in military surplus electronics.  RF Parts and Surplus Sales of Nebraska are still around, still selling odds and ends of old stuff, but it's increasingly scarce and prices reflect that.

     A lot of my better test equipment came from Fair Radio and thanks to them, I'm still set up to be an outstanding 1970s-80s radio station Chief Engineer.  There's not a lot of call for that these days.

Debate Night

     It looks as if it will happen tonight: the big Presidential debate, Mr. Trump vs. Mr. Biden.  Polls say sixty percent of us will tune in.

     Both men claim to be raring to go.  My expectations are low; one man is 78 and the other is 81.  One struggles with a lifelong stammer and the other tends to ramble.  Having their microphones muted while the other candidate is speaking is widely pointed out as likely to frustrate Donald Trump more than Joe Biden but they're both used to people having to listen whenever they speak.

     The debate still might not happen.  If it does, it could be a huge mess.  One candidate might come off as more alert and focused than the other -- but these are not young men and neither is an especially polished speaker.  I suspect, barring anything really glaring, people will see whatever they expect to see and tomorrow will bring both sides claiming victory.

     It's more like an announcement of new car models in a year where no major changes are being made: we all know who we think these men are; they're going to step onstage in their best debate suits, and they're both going to try to show off their best angles.  If you're a Ford* fan, you're going to like the Ford; if you're a Chevy fan, you're going to like the Chevy.  And even without anything startlingly new, you're going to want to watch.
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* The car company, not the President between Nixon and Carter.

Frame By Frame

     Nostalgia over-the-air broadcaster MeTV, which rose to prominence by distributing a pitch-perfect simulation of an independent TV station from the late 1960s - 70s* as one of the extra "dot channels" on digital TV, has introduced MeTV Toons, an over-the-air, 24/7 channel of nothing but animation, everything from Bugs Bunny to Scooby-doo.

     I may never leave the house.

     Over-the-air TV has reached the point where in a lot of the country, it offers slightly more variety than most cable TV systems did in the 1970s.  Throw in streaming for TV and movies on demand, sports and some "premium" shows and you've got more entertainment than would have been conceivable back then, most of it free or inexpensive.
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* The reason they do that so well is because they are one; owner Weigel Broadcasting became the last independent TV station in Chicago in the mid-1990s after having been a hardscrabble UHF station picking up scraps from the big guys (WGN and WPWR) since 1964.  Along the way, they branched out into early low-power TV and needed separate programming to feed those stations.  When TV stations started filling up their leftover bandwidth after the digital conversion in 2009, Weigel was able to get in on the ground floor.

Saturday Supper

     Through this heat wave, Tamara and I have started having lighter suppers -- fruits and cheese, olives, maybe a little crusty bread.  It's tasty, easy, doesn't heat up the kitchen and is capable of great variation.

     Still, sometimes you want a change.  I had seen Alessi pasta and sauce mixes at the grocery, and purchased one to try for supper on Saturday, their Cacio E Pepe: noodles in cheese, seasoned with black pepper.  Not expensive, and when you open the bag, it's the familiar powdered sauce with dry noodles.  A couple of cups of water and four minutes on the stovetop or eight in the microwave -- I chose the latter -- and what you get will make you turn your back on mac & cheese.

     Of course, I customized it a little, crumbling in a couple of strips of cooked bacon; prepared "bacon bits," even the vegan kind, should work okay; it's just a grace note.  Or you could use pancetta, which can be purchased in tiny cubes.  I added a shake of parsley and some grated Parmesan (or "Italian mix") cheese when serving.  It was still quick and easy to make.  

     An interesting variation to try would be to stir in a well-beaten egg while the mix was piping hot (but off the burner), to make a kind of Carbonara.  You want enough heat to soft-poach the egg but not make it cross-link (harden).  It's tricky but not that tricky, and the end result would be quite a treat.

     The mix is as shelf-storable as the old familiar macaroni and cheese, but the taste and texture is a cut above.  (They're not paying me; it's good stuff, at a time when a lot of storable quick mixes aren't.)

Propositioned

     One evening a few days ago, I went out the back door and nearly ran into a firefly hovering at face  level.  He turned toward me -- and flashed his little light!

     I won't kid you, it was flattering.  At my age, you take positive attention where you can find it.  But it wasn't to be.  I told him he was kind, and gently wafted him away from the back stoop and sidewalk so he'd hover over the grass and have better odds of finding his match.

Never Left The House

     It's too miserable out there.  I've got enough food and household goods to last through Monday, so why go out into the heat?

The Same Old Future

     The run of too-hot-to-stay-outside weather -- along with current trends -- has reminded me of LA 2017, a brilliant (at the time) science-fictional episode of the TV series The Name of the Game.  From the stifling orange smog that has forced survivors underground to inept corporatized government to advanced technology delivered in barely-useful crappified forms, the broad outlines are a little too familiar even as the details are hopelessly dated.

     Our modern times may have more in common with the world of John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar, in which an overheated, over-hyped media environment makes reality a thing only distantly glimpsed and despair an epidemic.  His world, another late '60s - early '70s look at the future, had too many people in too little space; ours still has room to stretch out but too often, we're standing knee-deep in bullshit and being told it smells like roses.

     It doesn't.  It never did -- you've got to manure the roses to make 'em grow, but that's not the scent anyone pursues.

     Those were lousy futures.  We should stop trying quite so hard to make them real.

I Don't Know

     And here's the thing: you probably don't know, either.

     Let's all just try to get along with the other talking primates today, okay?  We're much too good at not getting along already.

He Loathes Travel

     Poor Holden Wu!  His yearly vet visit was this morning and despite getting the relaxed-kitty drug, he does not relax.  He went into the carrier without much trouble, but began to complain on the way to my car and through most of the short ride.  He had more to say, all of it sad-sounding, when we arrived at the vet.

     Once in the exam room -- and they get you right in -- he wasn't interested in leaving the carrier and had to be lifted out.  Once out, he couldn't decide at first between hiding in the little shelter they provide and huddling at my side, between me and the carrier.  Eventually, being next to someone familiar won out, and he stayed put until it came time to be carried to the exam table.

     The vet had brought along a spare towel for him to hide under and it helped.  He got through the exam without panicking, had his shots and was headed for the carrier again when she decided to take a closer look at some of the parts cats are embarrassed to have inspected.  But he got through that just fine, and climbed inside the carrier with visible relief, only to cry again when I left him for several minutes to pay the bill and sort out upcoming appointments.  It turns out he hasn't been brushing his teeth, so he's probably going to get dental work next month.

     He rode back home, not without complaint, and became impatient when I carried him through the garage and into the house, rushing back and forth inside.  Home at last!  safe on the kitchen floor, he emerged from the carrier with a happy burble and followed it with a longer sentence when he was sure he was really home. He was sprawled on the floor in the library surveying his kingdom when I went to the office to write this.

It's Raining!

     It's not much of a rain, but it is raining, listless from the heat like everything else right now.  I'll take it; it will cool things down a degree or two, and every bit helps.

     The air-conditioning here at Roseholme Cottage is keeping up, barely; we have to chase the outside temperature up and down a couple of degrees at a time so the cooling doesn't freeze up, but it's doing the job so far, controlling humidity and keeping us from melting.  It will run better after service, but that'll be awhile.

     Having grown up without air-conditioning, it continues to be something of a miracle to me.  Summer nights used to be a dark and sweaty misery haunted by the roaring of fans, laying awake on top of the covers until you conked out from sheer exhaustion.  Having cool, dry air pumped out of the floor vents is amazing.

Lies Sprint, Truth Plods

      A few comments have come in, pushing back against my blog post about U. S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

     I've got no problem with the man having strong religious beliefs, or looking to them as the foundation for his personal morality.  My issue is that his recent remarks imply that he thinks the government ought to be imposing such beliefs on citizens and residents of the United States.

     Commenters have taken me to task because after all, weren't most of the Founding Fathers inclined to religiosity, Christianity in particular?  Yeah, well, about that -- scratch the surface and you'll discover they followed a polyglot assortment of beliefs, roughly centered around the Christian faith.  This is not how that faith was practiced in, say, England, with an official Protestant state church, the Church of England; a lot of Europe at the time was under governments officially Catholic (and a few Protestant); further East, the Orthodox church filled a similar role, intertwined with the State.  This system was weaker in the American colonies but not non-existent; Congregationalists in Massachusetts are the most outstanding example, supported by state taxes and being an assumed-default faith well into the 19th Century.

     "Religious tolerance" at the time meant the government wasn't going to go after you for being, say, a Baptist -- or a Unitarian.  John Adams and John Quincy Adams were Unitarians, at a time when that meant a very Christian-looking church and service, with one crucial difference: they didn't believe in the Trinity.  It's a difference men have been burnt at the stake over; it is, in fact, heretical according to every mainstream Christian church.

     There's a lovely story about George Washington, a little better attested than most stories about the man, in which he adds a new chaplain to the Continental army and the other chaplains complain to him, because the new guy's a Universalist, a faith that had decided a truly loving God must surely give fallible humans one more chance to repent -- after death.  Heresy again, and Washington's chaplains wanted none of it; how could the Army support such an outrage?  Washington, who would later write of religion as "a public utility," offered no philosophy or politics in response; he pointed out that Universalism was a very common faith among his troops, and did they not deserve to have their own chaplain?

     Deism was common among the Founding Fathers, who appear to have considered it as compatible with conventional religion as Freemasonry -- and there was no shortage of Freemasons among their numbers.

     Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists isn't law or a legal opinion, but it's insight into how a Founder viewed the issue.  You can read it in its entirety (along with the letter that prompted it), but here's a highlight: "religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship...."

     In addressing this issue, I'm up against some very slick and persistent liars.  Foremost among them is David Barton, preacher and amateur historian, a man known to edit quotes heavily and even make up his own "facts" when the reality is inconvenient to his ends.  He peddles Christian nationalism and he's a persuasive writer -- until you check his source material.  Most people don't. The lies get told and retold, and grow in the telling, and next thing I know, they show up in my unpublished comments or Facebook timeline.  There are entire podcasts, by actual historians, devoted to debunking his fables, but it's difficult to push back a well-greased lie told to the willingly credulous.

     The Federal government of the United States was not formed on the basis of religion, or to promulgate religious ideas.  It exists, in part, so you can practice your own religion free of interference; and if that prompts you towards moral behavior, then it, as George Washington wrote, is indeed of public utility: it serves society as a whole.  But the Fed.gov is not there to chivvy you into church, and there is no "return to a place of Godliness" (as Justice Alito would have it) for a secular government that was, by design, never Godly to begin with.

"You maniacs! You blew it up!"

     So I'm online looking* for a Bourns Knobpot™, which was a precision multi-turn potentiometer fully integrated with a precise-readout knob that had a little clock-like dial, only with ten major divisions instead of twelve.  They had a big hand and a little hand, and the little hand incremented one minor division for every full rotation of the big hand (and knob).  They were about three-quarters of an inch in diameter.

     Simple to install, easy to read, relatively inexpensive.

     Not simple enough.  The clever little clock face is gone, replaced in current versions by a three-digit mechanical digital readout, like a tiny version of an old-fashioned odometer.  I suppose it is simpler, using existing parts.  Fancy versions of this type (often as a stand-alone knob to be installed on any multi-turn control) have been available for over fifty years.

     I'm still a bit sad to find the clock-face version gone.
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*Not looking too seriously.  I'd like to use one to replace a twenty-turn control in a thing at work, a control that requires lining up a very small screwdriver through an off-center hole to adjust.  But I won't.  It would be too big a modification and would be too easy for curious knob-twiddlers to adjust, which would be quite bad indeed.  I'm going to take a reamer to that off-center hole if I get a chance.

Breakfast And Supper

     Today was a good day.  I watched cartoons, did a heap of laundry and little yard work -- and made a couple of tasty meals.

     Breakfast was four strips of bacon, fried and set aside (and the rendered fat reserved), followed by a large Idaho potato, diced into small cubes, soaked in cold water and rinsed a few times, and then fried in a tablespoon of bacon grease with some Bragg's spice mixture and a little Cajun seasoning.  When it was about done, I snipped a pickled Piparra pepper into the pan, followed by three pitted Kalamata olives sliced.  I pushed it to the sides of the skillet and scrambled four eggs in the middle, crumbling the bacon in and adding a sprinkle of parsley once the eggs were done.  Served with a little shredded cheese and hot sauce, it was just what I needed to fuel the day.

     We had supper about seven, and it was a rare treat: I had some holiday pay from working Memorial Day, and the grocery had nice New York strip steaks, their second-tier quality, at a price I could justify.  I seasoned them with coarse salt left to sit for fifteen minutes and a little pepper, then grilled them over hardwood lump charcoal, very rare for Tam and medium-well for me.  Using the good charcoal and starting it with nothing but paper, kindling and a match helps get the most from even less-expensive meat.  Add in a couple of baked potatoes* and microwave butter-steamed mixed vegetables (zucchini, pea pods, carrots, bell peppers, cauliflower and broccoli), and it was quite a repast.
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* Honest, I almost never have potatoes twice a day.  Well, hardly ever.

And Another Thing

     You may believe American are insufficiently Godly.  Or you may believe they are sufficiently Godly, or that they are far too much so.  It's a range of opinions that may be held by any resident of this country -- and not just held, but expressed.

     You might even be of the opinion that our governments -- Federal, state, local, whatever -- ought to be involved in that.  You can think it, you can say it, you can write to the newspaper about it.  It happens to be wrong; we've got a First Amendment that covers the precise issue and a pack of clamoring, competing religions, secular organizations, sects and denominations who want to make sure Uncle Sam doesn't back the other guy's horse.  Nevertheless, you can have your own opinion.

     If you happen to be a U. S. Supreme Court Justice, you get to have your own opinions, too -- but you're expected to be mindful that your every word potentially carries the weight and might of the Federal government behind it; you're expected to be circumspect; you're expected to have thought the whole thing through.

     So when I hear of a Justice being a-okay with the idea that "We've got to return the nation to a place of Godliness," I'm gobsmacked.  Our government is a secular affair, and they're not supposed to be putting a thumb on those scales.

     It's ugly when the Justices are found hobnobbing with wealthy pals who have axes to grind and. occasionally, cases that come before the Court; they can be dazzled.  The black-robed Nine are making about $300,000.00 a year,* which would delight me, but is modest by Washington-attorney standards or compared to a gazillionaire oligarch's lifestyle.  It's worse when they appear to be committed to ideologies they hold higher than the Constitution of the United States of America.

     I used to have faith that even when I disagreed with the ruling, the Justices would have carefully considered their positions, and would support them with honest reasoning based on foundational documents and sound jurisprudence.  I'm not so confident now.
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* A little more for the Chief Justice and a little less for the others, and it looks like they even have buy their own lunch at the cafeteria in the Court building if they didn't bring a sandwich from home.  If we could better secure the independence of their thought by paying them far more, it would be cheap at the price; but it's extremely unlikely to help.

501(c)(3)

     Your church -- and many other organizations -- probably doesn't pay any Federal taxes.  And any donations you make to it are likely tax-deductible.  It's a 501(c)(3) organization to the IRS; they had to file some paperwork and prove they really were a church in order to get that status.

     The history is murky.  26 U.S.C. § 501(c) has been around as long as the IRS but the detailed test IRS uses to help figure out if an applicant is a church or not only dates to 1980.  I'm not finding any quick and easy history of the sixty-seven years between 1913 and '80.

     501(c)(3) status comes with a caveat: the church (or other organization) can't get involved in partisan politics, which IRS reads to mean they can't be for or against any particular candidate or party.  If your church wants to open up for even-handed debate, or make sure people know where their polling places are and what the ballot or voting machine will look like?  Great, go for it!  They just can't tell people who to vote for.  They can't hold rallies against or in support of a party or candidate.  If Pastor Smith wants to hold forth on the evils of being intolerant, or of being too tolerant?  Fine; IRS can't say boo.  But he can't extol the virtues of one candidate or lament the failings of another.

     So I was interested to note recent news that a mega-church in Arizona had hosted a town hall sponsored by a partisan political organization and featuring a candidate for President.  There was some shocked -- shocked, I say -- commentary that the candidate had said a bad word, and the crowd had chanted it back in response, but that's nobody's business but his, the crowd's and the venue's; maybe they're wide open to the wildest of free speech.  Maybe they think it's fun to cuss in church.  On the other hand, while IRS doesn't go hunting around for 501(c)(3) violations, this one is on video and is getting attention.

     Here's how they put it: "The IRS may begin a church tax inquiry only if an appropriate high-level Treasury official reasonably believes, on the basis of facts and circumstances recorded in writing, that an organization claiming to be a church or convention or association of churches may not qualify for exemption[...]."

     Anyone who has been seriously crosswise with our Federal tax officials can tell you: it's no fun.  Why any group would want to wave a red cape at a Federal bull is beyond me, especially when there are plenty of halls to hire that don't have that particular eagle-with-an olive-branch-and-a-balance hanging over them.  Might as well toss an illegally-possessed handgun in the trash and call the cops.

In The Interest Of Fairness

     Since I did write a single piece on former President Trump's recent trial and conviction, I'd better give the trial and conviction of Hunter Biden (not a former or current President and has never held elected office) the same.

     He lied on a BATFE 4473 form and got caught; it went to trial, the prosecution presented the facts and he was held guilty.  Simple as that.  The surprising thing that he was found out and prosecuted; skylined by having a President for a father and addicted to a particularly stigmatizing drug, his odds of skating by were worse than most.  In a country where 38 of 50 states have legalized a Federally illegal drug (marijuana), 24 of them for recreational use, there must be stacks and stacks of 4473s with entries constituting a felony, just ticking away -- something it would be reasonable for a jury to expect a man with a law degree like, oh, Hunter Biden, to understand.  It's not as if BATFE made it a trick question:
     "21. f. Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?
Warning: The use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where you reside."

     While the Feds periodically update the form (it now includes a tickbox for "Non-Binary" in the answers for question 14, which makes sense given that they want ethnicity, race, height, weight, hair and eye color, too, all so they can pick you out of a crowd) they've wanted to know if you were breaking Federal drug laws for as long as I've been filling out those forms, and they ask because Uncle Sam has decided drug users shouldn't be owning guns.  You don't even have to be an addict to get the downcheck.

     So the bottom line is, if you're smoking the Devil's cabbage (et illegal cetera), don't go buying guns.  It's a Federal crime to lie on the 4473 form and it's a Federal crime to possess the firearm.  If they can do it to Hunter Biden -- and they most certainly did -- they can do it to you, too, and you're probably not an attorney nor especially rich, and it's a cinch your Dad isn't President.*  Sure, maybe they'll overlook you (it usually takes an arrest for something else first), but I wouldn't count on it.
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* Even if he was, he'd probably do the same thing Joe Biden has done, and refuse to pardon you.  Call it a strong moral stance or call it a cynical ploy, the result is the same.

So Much Stuff

     I didn't post yesterday.  My first day back at work after a week off, after dealing with the flea mess (relief is underway, but I have bags and bags of pillows and quilts to wash, most of them marinating in a spray of cedarwood oil flea destroyer) was too much distraction, especially with Tam out dog sitting for most of last week.  She's back today.

     The flea issue prompted me to replace the curtains and Roman blinds on the windows the cats enjoy sitting in, and what a change it has made!  I didn't expect it would be so striking.  I wanted more opaque blinds in the library and wow, did the place end up darker.  And the complicated, Victorianesque triple curtains (light floral-pattern sheers facing out with heavy green-brown Arts & Crafts-pattern tapestry curtains on the room side and a matching valence) in the living room have been replaced by simple Roman blinds with a striped pattern; I was sorry to take them down and the cats loved them, but they were a flea circus -- a Dry Clean Only flea circus, at that.  The old curtains kind of pooled on a couple of windowsill-high cabinets; I added a pair of washable cat beds on the cabinets instead and that's working out.

     It's been a lot of work and expense I wasn't expecting.  I haven't been quite able to zero out my credit card since the pandemic began, and it's not going to happen this month, either.  Clearly, I need to finish and sell a novel.

     Of course, I also need to keep working on bookshelves.  That's what I had planned to do last week.  It didn't happen.  Bookshelves and other types of shelves -- I have ambitious plans and have gathered prices at the lumberyard.  I've got wood for a small bookshelf for one end of the window seat and the other projects all need to be budgeted.  I have found that drawing software is a huge help; Visio and LiberOffice Draw let you work at scale and I can figure out raw materials and minimize left-over pieces right on the screen, creating a shopping list as a part of the process.  (I have mentioned the book Nomadic Furniture in the past, James Hennessey and Victor Papanek's 1970s book on DIY furniture; the ideas and especially the principles they wrote about have been a huge influence on how I think about and build furniture.  It's still in print -- use Tam's Amazon link for brownie points -- and has aged far better than bellbottoms.  My first copy, forty-plus years ago when the book was between printings, was a bootleg photocopy.  I have since made that up by buying the genuine article.)

N. B.

     "You're just as sweet as paint chips," might not be a compliment.

Worrisome

     When I go to the home-improvement store and I am looking around in the lumber section, the last thing I want to be smelling is woodsmoke.

Knocked Out

     Oh, not literally, but dealing with the flea infestation is really taking it out of me.  This week was supposed to be a relaxing vacation.  Tam is away most of the time dog-sitting, and all I had to do was sleep, eat, and breathe (etc.)

     Instead, I'm not getting good sleep, I've got laundry running most of the time, and I need to hang multiple new curtains -- after I take down and bag up the old ones.  Which will happen after I have stripped the bed, bagged the bedding and pillows and treated the mattress.  I've bought curtains, a pillow, and various flea treatments.

     I've been through worse; when Tommy the cat and his sisters were little, well over thirty years ago, my well-carpeted duplex was swarmed with fleas; my next-door neighbor was just short of being an animal hoarder and the little black cat who was Tommy's mother had been feral (and ran away to that life as soon as the kittens were weaned).  Back then, I slept with flea collars on my ankles for a month (don't do this now, they've changed the chemicals), while cycling everything washable through the laundromat at least twice.  But it's no fun to deal with, even with my very own washer and dryer and no next-door source of replacement fleas.

D-Day

     It was on this date in 1944 that the Allies began to take back Europe from Nazi Germany -- and it probably wouldn't have been possible even then if the USSR hadn't been pushing back, hard, for a year and a half in the east.*

     The successful invasion of Europe came at a terrible cost in human life, and it took nearly three months of fighting to cover what is now a three hour drive from the landing sites to Paris.  Victory in Europe took eleven months from D-Day, and left smoking ruins.

     There is war in Europe again today, with an authoritarian regime invading a smaller, weaker neighbor.  The United States is beset by "America First " isolationists and a small, vocal contingent of outright fascists, just as we were in 1939 - 41.  Along with our European allies, we're providing materiel support to the invaded nation, while trying to stay clear of the fight.

     Will echoes of the events of WW II -- which themselves echoed the Great War only a generation earlier -- ring across Europe again?  The price of inaction is paid in blood, in labor and goods lost in the flames of war, and it is always high.  Civilization won last time and the time before, but victory is never certain.

     Remember the past.  Understand the present.
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* A source of tension between Russia and the rest of the WW II Allies that persists to this day is that the USSR lost around eleven million soldiers and seven million civilians, and Russians don't think the other Allies ever fully recognized the extent of their losses.  It's a resentment Vladimir Putin exploits now, when he demonizes NATO.

Fleas!

     I knew the cats were itchy.  I was a little itchy, too, and for two days, I thought it was allergies.  Huck was especially miserable, scratching and grooming almost all the time, and I ran a lint roller over him, just in case.

     It collected a fine crop of fleas, some still twitching.

     After consultation with the vet, last night they got the approved treatment, and as of this morning, everyone is doing better, even me.  There's rather a lot of vacuuming and laundry in my immediate future, though. I don't know where they came from; Tam and I both take long walks; many of mine in the open fields of the North Campus at work. We've both done yard work and since she likes to take a long lunch and write at nearby eateries, she meets a lot of people's dogs. And both of us have been keeping screened windows slightly cracked on cool days and nights, where long-haired Holden Wu likes to nap. Any of those things could have let fleas get in.

Step Forward!

     It looks as if we've once again got volunteer tomatoes in the backyard garden patch here at Roseholme Cottage.  They're probably the small, fast-ripening cherry tomatoes that came back last year.

     This is a pretty good trick.  Tomatoes are not a perennial; they're not even close.  Originally a jungle plant, tomatoes are not a natural fit to most climates in North America.  The little cherry tomatoes have a couple of tricks: they are very dense, so it's easy to miss the little tomatoes until they are too ripe -- and they go from ready to eat to overripe in a twinkling.  I tend to bury the too-ripe ones where they fall, or chuck them along the fence, where I'm hoping another patch will take root.  So far, the fence weeds have defeated my efforts, but the roughly circular garden patch, dominated by a sprawling and overly aromatic sage plant, has paid off.  I let the autumn leaves pile up on it and try not to disturb it until late Spring.  (We're in that three-week interregnum, after the beginning of meteorological summer but with astronomical spring lingering until the solstice.)

     The sawtooth-edged tomato leaves are distinctive, as is the tiny-tree structure of the new plants.  There may be some lookalike weeds fooling me -- nightshade is a close cousin* and the young plants look similar -- but I didn't have any in the patch around the sage last year, so my hopes are high.
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* But not that close, at least around here.  It has a less-dense structure with purple flowers and fewer of them, compared to the bushy leaves and yellow flowers of the tomatoes.  The fruit is mostly empty, too, with prominent segments.

Speaking Of Outraged Screeching...

     I can't wait* to see what our far and loony Right makes of the outcome of Mexico's Presidential election.  No doubt they'll be hopping mad, hopped up on conspiracy theories, and ready to leap into war -- though somehow the pundits and politicians manage to never have to hump a rifle and full pack into battle personally (PDF).
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* By which I mean it will be boringly predictable and I certainly can wait.  The annoyingness of, "Let's you and him fight," is only increased by stirring in desperate blood-and-soil blather.

Trials And Tribulations

     I'm not going to dwell on the latest twists and turns in the long, convoluted story of Donald Trump, former President of the U. S. and current candidate for that same office.

     My attention is not on the trial so much as the necessity of the trial.  People seeking the highest elected office in the country should refrain from the kinds of behavior that necessitate paying hush money -- or at least, having done so, they'd better play it straight and not try to hide that they've handed over a large sum of money that could be counted as a campaign expense.

     Just as the discovery of a large trove of classified documents in Mr. Trump's possession appears to have prompted President Biden and former Vice President Pence to check their garages and attics for similar papers -- and they found a few, and turned them over without fuss -- I would like to hope the current crop of candidates are pondering their dalliances (or sighing in relief at the lack thereof) and whatever they may have done to try to keep them out of the public eye.

     But I would prefer that the vast majority of office-holders and candidates have conducted their lives with no more than the usual set of speeding tickets, overlooked items, and no genuinely lurid fooling around.  My biggest objection to the present set of circumstances is not the trial or its outcome, or the other pending litigation; it's that people running for the job ought to have refrained from the kinds of behavior that would land them in criminal court (or civil court, for that matter, and it might be interesting to review the personal legal histories of past Presidents as a standard of comparison).  I don't care if the person running for office is a suit-wearing combination of Jesus, Gandhi and Thomas Jefferson: if they can't keep their nose clean, they shouldn't be running for office, period -- and their political parties shouldn't let them.

     Outrageous, you say?  Too high a standard?  And yet you have managed it.  The majority of my readers will have never faced any criminal charges greater than a misdemeanor; personally, I even managed to get crosswise with the IRS and clear it up without being charged with an offense.  Avoiding criminal activity isn't that much to ask, especially of any citizen above the poverty line.  If a candidate for office stole bread to feed his starving children, we'd all have to parse the situation -- but it hasn't happened yet and it is unlikely to in the future.

     Mr. Trump's last two trials have hinged on tawdry behavior, stuff you wouldn't tolerate from a family member or a guy running for dogcatcher.  Having millions or billions of dollars and loads of cheering followers shouldn't excuse it.  "Oh, "They're out to get him?"  Then he shouldn't have done the kinds of things he could be "got" for.  Not banging porn stars and having to hide that you're paying them to keep shut up about it, not sexually assaulting women: this isn't the kind of thing that a guy getting an office tower or casino built could just fall into over a misplaced decimal or comma.

     And that's my opinion.  I expect the usual screeching, emotional nonsense and thinly-veiled threats in response.