Labor Day

      Here's to everyone doing physical work for a living, which includes me at least half the time.  I have done it all day, every day, not digging ditches but up and down ladders, in and out of trenches, stringing coaxial cable and smiling at the customers no matter what, and that kind of work is almost always underpaid.  But it's got to be done.

     I worked for myself, last night and today.  The fan bearing in the fridge got worse last night and the hot side was very hot indeed.  Rather than hope all the protective measures held while the fan screamed out its last and I tried to sleep, I pitched everything that was sensitive -- a couple of bouts of food poisoning have made me timid about food safety -- and put the fridge in icebox mode.  It held up okay overnight with the cold packs I had stockpiled in the freezer (keep your freezer full, with paths for airflow; it's more efficient and the gelpacks come in handy) and I added ice today.  More ice tomorrow, and that should get it to delivery of the new one, with cold soft drinks for Tam and cold UHT milk and Reese's Cups for me along the way.

     A fair part of the day, I spent clearing away books in the library/dining room so there will be a wide path from the front door to the kitchen.  It was overdue work, and there's still more to do.

N. B.

     Looks like it's time to explain again:

     I don't care if you're the raddest, reddest pro-Trump Republican in the country or a mealy-mouthed, lukewarm, "He's not my guy, but..." anti-anti-Trumper: if you're not against Mr. Trump* and his regime, you're helping enable fascism in the United States of America, and you should stop that.  It's unAmerican.  I am not going to be nice to you, I'm not going to consider your tender, wounded feelings and you will not get the benefit of the doubt.

     There's an administration in Washington, DC right now that is using normalcy bias, entrenched respect for institutions and a tradition of civility as weapons to destroy our freedoms, to trash the separation of powers, to exploit the law for their own benefit and to ride roughshod over the civil rights of all Americans.  I refuse to play along.

     You shouldn't play along either.  Some of you, lifelong conservatives, are going to have to vote for better GOP primary candidates, and when they lose, if you want to keep on having elections you're going to have to bite your tongue and vote for Democrats in the general election, saving arguments about social and monetary policy for later.  Yes, it sucks to be you, oh the pain of having to vote for a woman of color who won't sit down and shut up, but your party leaders and politicians had the chance to stop Donald Trump and they chose to fail, thinking they could ride his coattails to glory.  That's not the direction he's headed and it'll be a damned close thing if he doesn't drag the country down to ruin with him. 

     No commenter gets to lecture me on how to behave.  In her old age, my maternal grandmother became very outspoken.  This was in the 1960s; elderly women were supposed to be demure if not downright invisible.  She was neither.  Her five daughters were horrified, but she told them, "If I cannot speak my mind now, when will I be be able to do so?"  I'm old; I'm past my planned retirement age and the way things are going, I'm not going to be able to retire until I'm too worn out to work.  If I can't speak my mind now, just when the hell will I?

     If you don't like it, don't read my blog.  I'm not going to miss you.  I do this for me, not you.
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* On my blog, I do not use cute or disparaging names for politicians.  They get full names and/or titles and salutations, just the same as if they were decent folks.  A few of them -- notably, the odiously racist Woodrow Wilson -- have left such a stink that I will add that description when they are mentioned, but Mr. Nixon isn't "Tricky" here nor is Mr. Clinton "Slick."  Presidents and Congressthings are Just Some Guy, exactly the same before the law and their fellow citizens as the dude down the block, and I don't call him asinine nicknames, either. 

Appliances At The Edge

     The refrigerator started screaming Friday.  Oh, it'd made noise before, an occasional annoyed yowl like an unhappy orc, but this was unceasing.

     There are only a few possibilities.  Compressors in a modern fridge tend to hum and chuckle, and die without a sound.  But there are fans flowing air over the coils that cool the freezer and refrigerated compartment, and often another one moving air over the hot-side coils as well.

     The inside of the main compartment and freezer weren't especially noisier than outside.  The sound was coming out the back.  I ignored it Saturday; there were other things to do and the icebox was plenty chilly, with good airflow out the cold-air vents into the compartments.

     This morning, it wasn't very cold.  I'd put a couple of bags of leftover roast pork with vegetables in the freezer and they were squishy-cold but not frozen.  The meat drawer of the fridge read 47°F -- too warm.  (And there goes a pound of applewood-smoked bacon, two weeks supply.  And most of a five-buck carton of eggs, and probably three tubs of Irish butter, dammit.) (Update: with a longer time in the fridge, my thermometer reports 37°F.  Better news for the perishables, though not great, and the freezer still doesn't freeze.  A replacement is on the way, though it would seem they're making many of them a little taller now -- and the ones I like best are a couple of inches too tall for the space.  So, freezer on top, like some kind of savage.)

     At the very bottom of my little fridge (narrow, cabinet-depth, bottom freezer, a perfect fit for my galley-style kitchen), the lowest drawer of the freezer is only half the depth of the other two, leaving an open space at the back of the device.  The compressor and hot coil live down there and I have never taken a look, other than to vacuum the vent slots at too-infrequent intervals.  Time to change that.

     With the cover off, a fat little compressor lurks at the left, dollhouse-scale tubing connecting to a ridiculously-tiny serpentine coil at the right, and at far right, a shaded-pole motor with oversized bearing spins a little nylon fan.  If not for the big bearings, it would look just like an old phonograph motor.  It comes on whenever the compressor runs, which means the compressor's running all the time.  There was surprisingly little cat hair, and vacuuming it out and cleaning the fan blades didn't help.  A sharp tap will quiet the fan motor briefly, but the Oilite-style bearings quickly return to their noisy grooves.

     My fridge, an LG LRBP 1031, is over eighteen years old and no longer made.  The fan motor, along with nearly other part, is obsolete and unavailable.  So it looks like I'm in the refrigerator-shopping business.  In the U.S., there aren't a lot of options for these British-scale* fridges, midway between a tiny dorm refrigerator adequate for a six-pack of beer and a couple of frozen dinners, and a giant deluxe French-door marvel that seats six and holds enough to feed a family of ten for a month.

     Today's brunch is canned sausage hash with some added seasoning over toasted rye breadcrumbs: always have a Plan B!

     In the meanwhile, the fridge is in the kitchen, screaming.  Sooner or later, I'm going to have to put it out of its misery.  Other than Tam's soda pop, three chocolate bars, a bag of Reese's Cups and a half-jar of peanut butter (sensing a theme...), there's nothing left in it fit to consume.  Oh, wait, I'm keeping UHT milk singles in there, too: it's shelf-stable, but it's better cold.
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* That's where I first saw them, anyway, in home-improvement shows and dramas produced in the UK.  When I moved to Roseholme Cottage, there was a huge refrigerator looming in the kitchen, making a narrow spot and blocking the entire width of the long, skinny room when the door was open.  I spent about a week thinking I'd seen something that would work better, and finally just plugged the requirements into a search engine.  Back then, there were three choices in the right size, and I had to have it drop-shipped from the East Coast.  But if I had to buy a new refrigerator, I wasn't going to settle for anything other than an exact match; I'd been coping with big, awkward fridges all my life.  About the only one I'd really liked was a round-top Philco-Ford made in the late 1940s or early '50s, in place at the transmitter site since before they went on the air, almost the same size as the flat-top LG that's hollering right now.

About Our Lack Of A National Religion

     Some awful things have happened over the past week, and I'll get into them, but first --

     A commenter took offense at my pointing out, despite the strange and unfounded claims of Indiana Lieutenant Micah Beckwith,* the United States of America is a secular democracy that, by Constitution and law, does not promote or privilege any particular religion but protects the free exercise of all religions. 

     I grew up taking that for granted; it was a bland axiom, as uncontroversial as the sun rising in the east.  "Was" is apparently the operational word there, so let's review, starting with the relevant parts of First Amendment:
     "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]."
     Seems simple enough.  The first part says the Federal government can't make any religion special and the second part says the Feds don't get to stop 'em, either.  Congress has a website with a lot of explanation of the history, intent and application of those few words, with extensive reference footnotes, but there isn't any secret hidden codicil or exemption for some sort or generic Christianity or the slightly wider handwaving of Judeo-Christian belief.†  "No law respecting...or prohibiting" is sweeping.

     With that as background, you've got to wonder what the first generation of Feds thought about it.  After all, they'd lived through it, and could be expected to have a firm grasp of where the Bill of Rights left the relationship between religion and the Federal government.  Oh, if only they'd left us some official word, and not just letters to Danbury Baptists...!

     Thing is, they did.  But first, a digression to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which says:
     "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding."
     Got that?  Treaties have the force of Federal law.  Presidents and Senators may safely be assumed to know this.

     In 1796, President John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, after the U.S. Senate had approved a resolution of ratification.‡  Adams had been Vice-President when the Bill of Rights was passed and the proposed Amendments were sent to the states; he had taken the VP's job of presiding over the Senate very seriously.  We can expect him to have followed the debate.  Not a few of the original group of U.S. Senators were still on the job, too.

     Article 11 of the version of the Treaty of Tripoli that the Senate approved and President Adams signed begins, "As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; [....]" and goes on to assure the Pasha that the Feds hold no religious enmity towards him or his country.

     Our President and Senators knew what it said, and they were okay with it; they knew that treaties, once ratified, become part of the "supreme Law of the Land" in the U.S. and they were clearly okay with that.

     The Federal government of the United States of America is a secular government, under which all residents are free to follow their own religious faith, and (if they wish) to look to it for guidance.  Individual members of the three branches of government, elected and appointed, may of course do so -- but the Constitution is the foundation of our law, not religion.

     So when I get comments like this, I know it's nonsensical blather:

     "Wrong. No Established Church does not mean an anti religion nation. That is the alternative. Another  'church' takes it place. Marxism, climate change, LBGTQ+ET.EL. You are anti Christianity and that is a loser in America."

     I invite readers to scrutinize the blog post to which that comment was directed, "Ipse Dixie," for any evidence that I am "anti Christianity" or that I think our country -- in which the Feds are barred from prohibiting the free exercise of religion -- is or ought to be "anti religion."

     As for the commenter's proposed alternatives to Christianity, the only one of them that has claimed to be§ would be Marxism, and you can find folks with conventionally religious -- even Christian -- versions of it.  As an economic and political theory, no version of it has worked out, but people do keep on trying, often with guns.  You can find lots and lots of sincerely churchgoing LGBTQ+ people, climate activists and climate scientists, and -- this being the United States of America, with our Bill of Rights still, so far, intact -- you are welcome to form your own opinions about them, but those other things do not constitute or replace religions. 
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* Recent reporting has revealed his utterly brazen use of State funds and facilities to promote a partisan political agenda.
 
† This is essentially the polite way to say, "Monotheism, but only the right kinds of monotheism," leaving Sikhs and Muslims and several others out in the cold.  Of course, once you've thrown all but two faiths under the bus, there's always the guy who argues that adding just one more won't hardly matter....
 
‡ The Senate doesn't actually ratify a treaty; that happens after all parties have signed it.  What the Senate does (or does not), by a two-thirds majority, is agree that the President ought to sign it.
 
§ Well, kind of.  Classical Marxism calls religion "the opiate of the people," claims it is used as a means of control and aims to suppress it.  Countering this, multiple examples of religiously-based opposition to exploitive or oppressive governments, as well as examples from thousands of years of history, across multiple faiths, demonstrating that telling someone their religion is a lie doesn't stop them from continuing to follow it, often even under threat of force.

Ipse Dixie

     Indiana's daft Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith is at it again, this time proclaiming on "X" that the First Amendment doesn't say what it clearly says:

     Separation of Church and State is and always has been a lie—a dangerous falsehood weaponized to dismantle our Republic. From its very inception, this phrase was twisted to marginalize Christian values and strip away the moral foundation that has held America together. They want you to believe that faith and patriotism are separate—that you must choose between God and country. That is unacceptable. Don’t fall for it.
     We are a Judeo-Christian nation. Our Founders did not intend to erect a secular barrier between God and government—they understood that faith and freedom are inseparable. We must reclaim that truth and not let secular agendas undermine what it means to be American.

     He's lying.  And he's lying in a particularly bad-faith manner: there has never been a need to choose between one's deity and one's country, not in the United States -- and the secular barrier between religion and government exists precisely so that none of us ever has to.

     The Founders represented a very wide cross-section of religious beliefs and attitudes, from Ethan Allen's aggressive Deism and Thomas Paine's agnosticism, to devout Congregationalist Samuel Adams (who broke with cousin John Adams, at least for a time, over the latter's conversion to Unitarianism).  All of them had some experience with a state church, and they didn't want it.  Their consensus appears to have been that religious belief and practice was a deeply personal matter, which should not be compelled -- or restricted! -- by government.  They had no problem with individuals looking to their faith for moral guidance, but they wanted government kept firmly out of it.  And as early as 1765, James Madison expressed the thought that a state-established religion was detrimental not only to freedom of religion but also encouraged excessive deference to any authority that might be asserted by an established church.  Thomas Jefferson, in the 1779 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom wrote: 

[N]o man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

     Your religion is your religion, which you share with the fellow members of that faith; our government is our government, a secular matter.  If your faith guides your political choices, that's fine; if your faith compels the political choices of others, or restricts the free expression of their faith, that's wrong.  The United States of America is not a "Judeo-Christian nation," it's a nation with strong protection of religious freedom -- and a government open to men and women of all beliefs.

     Indiana's Lieutenant governor is peddling disingenuous, deceptive crap.  He's shoving men like Paine and Jefferson out of history in favor of nonsensical fairytales about the Founders, in a transparent attempt to justify theocracy.

And You Still Think He's Great?

     After the disturbing spectacle of a Cabinet meeting -- a Cabinet meeting! -- that was mostly an over-the top buttering up the boss session, I would like to think few people still entertain the notion that Mr. Trump is benign or especially competent.  I'd like to, but people keep surprising me.

     I'm no fan of overblown rhetoric on the part of or directed toward Presidents of any party or personal inclination.  The President of the United States is Just Some Guy, named George or Bill, Barack or Joe, Don or Dick.  They're not magic -- and  they don't deserve fulsome praise for getting out of bed in the morning, stuffing themselves into a suit and tie, and shuffling downstairs to the office and claiming to have ended wars.

     Presidents are not kings.  Their Cabinet members ought not suck up to them in public, especially not in a fawning, obsequious manner, and if they are obliged to do so, it's a sure sign something is wrong.

     Judging from that Cabinet meeting, our country is in the middle of a six-alarm helmet fire.

An Interesting Article

     Former Reason editor and Cato Institute analyst Radley Balko has posted an interesting article about these unprecedented times.

The Ancient Art Of Bear-Poking

     The thing about pushing limits is that it provokes reactions -- especially if the limit is a historic norm that is poorly-defined in law or courts don't protect: expectations are askew from the legal reality.

     Push too hard, expect people to push back.  I think the Trump administration is hoping for it, hoping sending Federalized National Guard troops into big cities will create an incident leading to riots that will justify even harsher measures.  And yes, big cities are crime-ridden; they always have been -- but the rate has been falling dramatically over the last decade in every one of the cities the President has sent or is talking about sending troops into: a lot of people in close proximity is always going to be a hunting ground for the criminally inclined and as a society, the U.S. has been doing an amazing job of getting it under control, using everything from community policing to outreach programs, mandatory sentencing laws and getting the lead out of gasoline.

     This reality, which you can go look up for yourself, doesn't serve an agenda based on urbaphobia and anecdote; it doesn't serve the desire to test limits -- and cause reaction.  Remember the chaos of the first Trump administration?  He loved it, or at least the opportunities it provided, and he's going to get himself more of it, one way or another.  Count on it.

     Chicago, Illinois seems to be his next target.  That city and state has a pretty good chance of litigating the effort to a standstill, but it won't stop there.

---

     Press coverage of the redistricting conflict, with Texas and California at the fore, keeps turning up an interesting tidbit:  Blue states are having a much harder time gerrymandering, because a lot more of them have nonpartisan boards or commissions to draw U.S. House districts, or rules that serve similar ends.  Red states have made no bones about drawing lines to reach partisan goals, even when the result is wildly skewed from voting patterns, pointing out that it's allowed.  This disparity should tell us something, that the Dems are, at least, concerned about the appearance of fairness, while the GOP can't be arsed.  The latter is not a good look; it's not the way our system of government is supposed to work, at least not based on what I was taught about the root causes of the American Revolution.  The English Crown got a reaction there, too.

Chuck Roast

     The grocery had a decent price on chuck roast, so....

     I put it on a rack in a covered pan on the grill, salt, pepper, a little Worcestershire sauce and topped with orange slices (no, really).  I let it cook over a slow fire for a half hour before adding potato chunks (with some paprika and pepper) and turnip chunks (with curry powder).  After a half-hour, I added beef stock just below the level of the rack.  Bay leaves, carrots and wedges of red onion followed, then red bell pepper and oyster mushrooms, plus fresh basil leaves from the garden.

     It took three hours for a three-pound chuck roast.  Tam and I liked it, and there are leftovers (defatted and grease separated from the broth) for at least two more meals.  I might just simmer one batch down with diced tomato and some seasoning.

Off On A Sidelobe

     It took professional help.  I was trying to realign a satellite dish -- a big one, 6.1 meters in diameter -- on a satellite it should have still been pointing at.  The signal was there, but it wouldn't quite lock.

     These days, there's an outfit we hire when this kind of thing gets weird.  The best gadgets for the job have gotten smaller -- but way more expensive.  When we used uplinks all the time, and had guys on the staff who ran 'em often, it made sense to keep the latest, best stuff.  Now we might need that gear once every year or two.

     So I called in the experts, and they showed up, got it a little better and got stuck until another team member showed up to help.  The receiver kept trying to lock on the signal, but it wouldn't stay

     A really big satellite dish has "sidelobes," kind of extra focus points, where the signal strength peaks -- but not by much.  And it's small compared to the main lobe.  But with a good receiver on a big dish?  It'll work, or almost.  We were on a nice fat sidelobe, diagonally off, and it was tricky fumbling back to the main lobe.  But we -- which is to say the guys who do that kind of thing all day every day -- got it.

     The receiver still wouldn't lock.

     This dish is a legacy.  It shows up on the software that runs all of my employer's dishes, but nobody's supposed to use it.  Someone, probably quite some time back, had been looking to aim one of the general-purpose dishes at the main campus, got on this one by mistake, realized it too late and tried to set it back.  It almost got pointed in the right place, so that's one thing.

     But it appears the receiver got a command, too (oops!), and ended up with a very wrong configuration.  Untangling that had us deep in menus I'd never seen before, but a mere fifteen minutes later, it locked -- and held.

     I kinda somehow left power to the dish motors turned off.  It's supposed to be left looking at one specific satellite.  Maybe this time it will stay.

Whew!

     The writer of The Lazarus Project managed to wrap it up in a satisfying way despite multiple time loops -- and still left a cliffhanger ending!  No spoilers, but I'll recommend the series.  There's handwavium and a few moments where you just have to let young Jim Hawkins pilot a pirate ship without questioning how he has that skill, but it's worth the effort.

Current Events

     I have not commented on immediately current events; two in particular have been all over the news, international talks with an eye to ending the war Russia initiated against Ukraine and President Trump's push to have Republican states redraw U. S. House districts ahead of the midterms.

     As for the peace effort, good luck to honest principals -- Ukraine, Europe, the UK and yes, even our President, who wants a Nobel Prize so badly that he may even be standing up to his good friend Mr. Putin to try for it.  The problem is, Russia -- and Vladimir Putin in particular -- started the war with the express purpose of absorbing Ukraine.  He went so far as to write (possibly with help) and publish a paper arguing at some length that Ukraine has no independent historical existence and is wholly a modern creation; actual historians do not agree.  His position does not augur well for even a "freeze the battle lines and draw the new border there" outcome (unacceptable to Ukraine and international law): Mr. Putin's Russia wants to take all of Ukraine and Ukrainians want to keep it.  So I'm not hopeful -- but I'm happily willing to be surprised.

     On mid-decade House redistricting to grab more seats for one party or another, it's cheating.  It's not the done thing; states redraw those districts every ten years, with the new census results in hand.  States have considerable latitude in where the lines are drawn and there's no black-letter law that says they can't do so in a partisan manner, though by long custom, the end result is not supposed to be too lopsided when compared to the state's proportion of votes for the main parties.  (And there's a whole Voting Rights Act thing in which districts should be arranged in such a way that racial minorities have a shot at proportional representation, but let's leave that for later: it's in the courts again, last I heard.)

     The Constitution puts it this way: 

     Clause 1, Composition:
     The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
     [...]
     Clause 3, Seats:
     Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

     Yeah, the Framers didn't leave us a paint-by-numbers.  They left the details for Congress, and Congress has tended to let the courts work it out (and the courts, in turn, have demurred on some of it).  Clause 1 comes in for some serious work.  Clause 3 does, too -- but the notion of only changing district maps in response to new decennial census data has been taken as axiomatic since the first time it was done.  In that light, it may be of some interest to note that the Supreme Court, when ruling that asking demographic questions above and beyond a simple count was a permissible action, said, "...that our interpretation of the Constitution is guided by a Government practice that 'has been open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Republic.'"  Thus, too, the time and timing of redistricting.  So if it feels kinda cheat-y, that would be because it is; it's not the way it's been done in the past, nor the way most people expected it to continue to be done.

     Nevertheless, Texas seems to be bound and determined to do it; my home state of Indiana is considering doing the same, to yank the rug out from under our two blue House districts (in Indianapolis and Chicagoland, about as blue as Indiana ever gets).  And the Trump administration is asking other red states to do so, too.

     Elsewhere, the latest Pew poll shows the President is underwater on approval ratings and especially on tariffs, the economy, peace talks and his administration's handling of the Epstein files.  Results run near 60% disapprove/40% approve on most items.  Being underwater by 20% is not the kind of thing that makes a party's ticket appeal to voters.  Why, it might almost tempt a political party to try giving the old pinball machine a good slam.

The Lazarus Project

     Tam and I have been watching a British science-fiction series, The Lazarus Project.  It arrived in the U.S. already canceled, and I think that's a pity: it may be the best treatment of time travel in science fiction film and television.

     The story is heavily character-driven, echoing some of the themes and concepts in Fritz Lieber's "Change Wars" stories and even Johanna Russ's "Trans-Temporal Authority" that figures in several of her stories and novels.*  (Poul Anderson and John Varley wrote stories in this vein as well.)  The series doesn't bother to explain much, which is for the best: the "science" hardware in SF time travel is inherently handwavium that can't stand close examination.  Instead, the episodes and overall arc are as tightly plotted as a murder mystery.  There is no shortage of car chases and gunfights -- but they're in service of a convoluted story with plenty of "ah-ha!" moments.

     It may have been a little too hip for the room, too good as SF to hold a mass audience.  You have to be ready to buy in to the central conceit, that (to a greater or lesser extent) past events can be undone and redone.  But it got two seasons, and even if the series doesn't stick the landing (I don't know yet), it's a heck of a ride, at times as shades-of-gray as the best film noir. 
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* There might even be touches of Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and the film Looper.  Another Heinlein story, "--All You Zombies--" was filmed as Predestination, which is probably the second-best time live-action time-travel story.

Filtering History

     It's best to let historians do their own fighting; they'll do so at the drop of a hat, and discuss the hat's provenance, origins and cultural connections on the way down.  We're best off when we have a lot of them and they're all under some sort of "publish or perish" pressure: they'll fight their way to accuracy, by the jealous pointing of the mistakes of their predecessors and peers if nothing else.

     You know what's not a good idea?  Rewriting history to suit an agenda.  From the Soviets airbrushing purged Party members out of photographs and twisting history books around to suit their own ends to Parson Weems' well-intentioned fable about a young George Washington ruining a cherry tree (but not his untrammeled honesty) or the White House and the Press concealing President Roosevelt's inability to walk unaided, distorting history is harmful.  If you don't have a clear idea where you've been, you're not going to understand where you're going.  Meddling with the presentation of history is literally Orwellian: it's Winston Smith's job in 1984.

     So when the President of the United States tells the Smithsonian Institution -- he is not their boss, by the way -- they're to start combing through their museums and culling any commentary and exhibits that don't jibe with his notion of a positive portrayal of American history, historians are right to object.  The venerable Organization of American Historians is looking out for the rest of us.

Apparently, They Don't Know Beans

     Stopping by the other foodie-mart on my commute yesterday, I bought a "southwest hash" mix that looked interesting -- diced russet potatoes, sweet potatoes, red and green peppers...and black beans.  This morning, I squeezed a chorizo sausage out of its casing, browned it, set it to one side and cooked the southwest hash in the grease with a dash of chili powder and some dried onion flakes.  When it was done, I stirred the sausage in, pushed it to the sides of the pan and scrambled three medium eggs in the center.

     I mixed it all together, added some cilantro and parsley, and served it for breakfast.  Tam was dubious and only had a little -- those beans, you know.  I feel much the same way about sweet potatoes, but I gave it a try.

     It's pretty good, with one exception: about half of the beans are still middlin' hard.  Maybe I didn't give it long enough under the lid.  The directions call for "8 to 12 minutes," and I went for ten, plus the uncovered cooking time for the eggs.  Maybe the beans didn't get soaked long enough before packing.*  It was a change from the usual stuff, and if there's a next time, I'll know what to try. 
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* There are lots of reasons why most of the canned and frozen legumes you buy are rehydrated dried beans.  Ease of storage and transport is the main one.

And Now, Threats

     It's hilarious.  The barbarians, having breached the gates (and claiming to be "defenders of culture," which is apparently how they spell racism) are now making threats.  I have, apparently, hurted their dearly tender feelings through the use of facts, history and logic, and they are a-comin' to get me.  Or maybe it's just karma.  Most of them are not exactly clear.

     I've seen 'em at the range.  They're not exactly credible there, either. 

     Update: Another nitwit has chimed in to tell me that the problem is I'm too mean to Trumpist Republicans and their fellow-travelers.  OMG!  How could I not have known?  Oh, that's right, I did.  I meant to be rude to them.  I've already said so.  But I am not threatening them; I am not promising retribution or gloating that I believe it is coming for them.  Honestly, I don't know.  The American Experiment may be doomed, and if it is, I expect to be harmed by what comes after.  But until it falls, I intend to keep pushing back, because the real ideals of this country are worth fighting for: that all people are created equal, that we've got a right to be represented in the government, that what we say and write and read should not be censored, that no religion should have the power to dictate our beliefs nor be suppressed by the government, that everyone here is entitled to due process of law and so on as spelled out in our Constitution as amended.

     That blood-and-soil bullshit isn't Americanism.  This country is a set of ideas, and if you're opposed to them, you're opposed to this nation.

     When I get threats, I will mention it on this blog.  I won't publish them.  If anything happens to me -- and that's unlikely, most of these people are cowards, who impotently wish I would stop reminding them of how far short they have fallen -- then there are people who can get at the unpublished comments and will know where to start looking.

Night Shift Spider

      There was no sign of a spiderweb when I got home from work yesterday but -- Thursday being trash night -- I went outside with a bag of office trash well after sunset and she had a full web up, this time all under the eaves, the usual plane of the web carefully bent into a kind of saddle shape to fit neatly around the corner, well out of human reach.

     The spider scuttled smartly into hiding behind the downspout as I approached.  She's not taking any chances!  The web showed signs of a few big catches, holes in the mesh where something big had been trapped and secured (and consumed) or cut loose.  In deference to Tamara's concerns, I moved the big trash can out from the wall so it wouldn't be under the web.  (Tam used to live in a house with big, hairy wolf spiders haunting the entryway.  They had either poor timing or lousy eyesight, since they tended to rappel down on her to the mutual discomfort of both parties, and she's been suspicious of all spiders ever since.)

     The web near our back door is a good spot for a spider; there's a farmyard-type light high on the kitchen extension that lights the back yard and around the corner from it, a small sconce illuminates the back door.  The web is right between them, with a good influx of flying insects.

     Early this morning, most of the web had been taken down; the spider was motionless on the few remaining strands, legs pulled in, apparently asleep.  An hour later, she'd removed the last of the web and (presumably) hidden for the day.

     We've got a night shift spider, at least for a few days.

Exceptionally Self-Deluded

     The United States of America is in the midst of a Viktor Orbán-style takeover of the institutions of our republic -- including many that have long existed outside of the government, either by independent formation (like universities) or via structures intended to distance them from direct government control, like the United States Institute for Peace or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

     In particular, the Executive Branch is arrogating to itself powers that had either not previously been deemed to exist or are Constitutionally granted to the Legislative Branch -- and a supinely complicit Congress along with a compliant Supreme Court are letting it happen, in some cases even empowering it.  It out-Jacksons Andrew Jackson, and puts forward a Wilsonian "Unitary Executive" without the odious Woodrow Wilson's academic rigor and commitment to an international deliberative body.  What it does share with both Presidencies is an overt dedication to furthering so-called "white supremacy," with the added frill of pushing women back to the powerlessness they suffered under Jackson and Wilson.  It's broadly authoritarian; I'm not going to get into any nitwitted discussion of how it couldn't possibly be fascism because they don't have spiffy uniforms or the underlying ideas don't come from the fascistae region of Italy.  The incumbent Administration means to rule, and they are completely comfortable laying a heavy thumb on any measure that will further that end, like partisan mid-decade Congressional redistricting.

     There's still a lot of talk of "overreaction," as though the sweeping changes were inconsequential follies, to be washed away or changed after the next election.  Oh, some of them may be, depending on how that election goes, and barring yet another Trumped-up "emergency" getting in the way of voting.  Others will not; many parts of the Federal edifice, like USAID, have been broken beyond recovery.  There might some day be another "soft power" effort along the same lines, but the institution, with all of its values and specialized knowledge, is gone.  And the accretion of power to the Executive may be as irreversible as the accretion of power to the Imperial throne of Rome.  Maybe not; the men who wrote the Constitution knew Classical history and tried to build a stronger bulwark against despotic power than the Roman Senate proved to be.  But so far, our Congress is failing the same test.

     So don't try to jolly me along, and understand that my rudeness to Trumpist Republicans is deliberate; unlike the conservative Republicans who preceded them, they have nothing of value to contribute to our society or system of government, only destruction and barbarism.  When they speak, hear the shouts of the mob and the howling of wolves in the background.  They seek only power and personal wealth; they smash institutions and sow only ruin.  What comes after them, unless we are very lucky in rolling it back, is darkness.

     American exceptionalism long held that our country was immune from the kinds of chaos that swept through the governments of other nations, leaving death and despotism in its wake.  Turns out that's not the case.

A Philosophical Approach

     "Aim high; adapt to difficulties; do your work; clean up after yourself."

     Last night, an ambitious spider the size of a fat cicada -- or an average thumb -- built a web outside the back door of my house, where the back part of the kitchen extends about six feet and overhanging eaves offer a little shelter.  The center was nine feet above the ground.

     The spider's shape resembled the Spiny Micrathena that visited a few years ago, but much larger and no spines.  She had gold bands on her legs, and was most probably an orb-weaver, a very large family of spiders.  Her web had four main anchor points: one up under the eaves, one on the crook of a downspout, one out of sight from the door, probably the sill of the west kitchen window -- and the last one ran all the way to a small pile of sticks on my patio!  Or so I inferred.  By the time I noticed her, it was too dark to see any of the web unless the sunset sky was behind it.  The spider would swoop down like a trapeze artist, apparently floating, tie a new strand to the anchor and head back up towards the center of the web.

     It was fascinating.  The spider's concentration was total, spinning and weaving.  I checked in several times though the evening and by the time I went to bed, she had completed the radials and was running a spiral of cross-strands.  I was considering the best path around the web to the garage for the next morning, since I would much rather have one spider than a surplus of flies and mosquitos.

     I woke in the night and it was raining.  A quick look out the back door found the grumpy-looking spider rerigging her web; the long ground-level anchor line had given way, and the web was flapping gently in the breeze.  While I watched, she got it well-secured at three points and went to work on repairs.  I went back to bed, thinking the problem of how to get by the spider without disturbing the web had been solved, leaving the problem of Tam's aversion to spiders overhead (and plotting, she says, to drop down on her) for later.

     This morning, the spider had solved it for me: there's not a trace of the web to be found!  The Spiny Micrathena had similar habits; she would make a new web every day, having taken the old one down at the end of her work.  Maybe this spider's on second shift.

     That's a pretty good tenant to have, one who works diligently and doesn't leave a mess.  My shy little indoor ghost spiders, who leave gossamer, dust-collecting traces in the ceiling corners week after week, would do well to follow her example.

Behold, the spider. Also, a cloud formation that looks like an enormous eye, watching the spider and me.

The Mutally-Invisible Debating Society

     There's a pretty lively discussion in my comments section, kind of.  None of you are getting published.  As of this posting, I'm not even publishing comments I think are wonderful on those posts.

     Anecdotes are not data.

     Speculation is not fact.  (And buddy, your speculation about what Uncle Sam is up to is wildly off the mark, and insanely optimistic.)

     We're wired up to extrapolate from what we personally see, hear and feel.  We're wired up to trust members of our in-group and we're remarkably flexible creatures when it comes to forming families, trust circles and tribes.  Those are great attributes for a clever, tool-using hunter-gatherer that tends to function in small groups.

     It sucks out loud when we try to apply that set of inclinations to understanding the wider world, to deeper understanding.  It misleads when we mistake second-hand information for direct experience or infer too much from our immediate surroundings.  We can go wildly wrong; we can be right and not know it.  We have devised a great many structures and hacks and clever approaches to get around these limitations, and a lot of them work pretty well, but damn-all of them suffice if we start with an internet connection and an opinion we want to keep.

     I have a lot of opinions and I am not shy about sharing them here.  You have probably got opinions of your own, and I invite you to share them on your own blog.

     And I invite you to share links to solid statistical data and actual expert analysis, if you want to address things of greater scope than your own work, your own family, your own curtilage.  I spent the entire pandemic looking for the most impartial sources of data, looking for places that had large sample sizes or worked from mass collections.  There were lots of heart-rending stories, especially early on, but that's just a general alarm bell; the big numbers pointed to where things were worse or better and suggested trends.  The year-to-year "excess deaths" data showed how things were going compared to previous years, with a large pool of non-pandemic years as the standard of comparison.  Those large pools of data showed the vaccines working.  Regionalized graphs of vaccination rates and infection rates showed the vaccines working.  And they showed vaccine safety, too, especially as the death rates returned to within pre-pandemic levels.

     Nothing is a hundred percent.  Not a hundred percent effective, not a hundred percent safe.  But it was hugely safer to get vaccinated than to contract the illness, and you were better off even if you did have the misfortune to catch it after being vaccinated, far less likely to have a bad outcome.  These things are facts.

     You don't have to like facts.  You can have opinions about facts.  You may even disagree with facts.  But by and large, you'll be wanting your own blog for that purpose.

How Safe Is Safe Enough?

     An unpublished commenter, while noting that pulling the plug on research stymies getting answers, said he wasn't convinced of the long-term effectiveness and safety of the MRNA vaccines that got the COVID pandemic under control.

     What's it going to take?  It's been over four years, and people are not dying of being vaccinated.  They're not suffering harm.  Not even the worst medical grifters (cough, RF, Jr. and most of his appointees at the forefront, cough) have been able to point to any widespread ill effects.  To date, it's one of the safest vaccines ever deployed.  It's still fertile ground for the peddlers of misinformation and woo, but they'll sell you flying saucers and chemtrails, too, and surely you're not falling for that?

     Everything you do can kill you.  Traveling on the roads is remarkably dangerous, one of the worst risks most people will face.  And every hot dog you eat, I'm told, robs the average person of 37 minutes of life.  (Might as well go for the chopped onion and fancy mustard, then.)

     In 2021, I wrote, 
      "You see, the U. S. is at something around two-thirds vaccinated by now.  If the vaccines were doing horrible, horrible things to people, or if they do so in the future, that's over two hundred million Americans and the number is steadily increasing.  Two hundred million pissed-off people is plenty more than you'd need to find enough ready to string up drug company executives and researchers along the side of the road, one per lamp post."

     Ain't happened yet.  Ain't gonna happen, either -- oh, it's not a hundred percent certain; nothing is.  But it's one of the most solid bets you could make.

Reality Check

     I'm linking to a fact- and link-heavy newsletter from The Bulwark, which addresses in detail how Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s HHS has screwed the future by yanking Federal funding for MRNA vaccine research.

     Those vaccines are our best hope to fight future pandemics, as well as go after illnesses that have no good preventative, treatment or cure.  And now -- well, here's hoping the drug companies see them as potentially lucrative, or other governments with deep pockets want to pursue them, because the Feds are out of the game.  EU, I'm looking at you; Red China's not real big on sharing unless the price is right, and used low-tech methods as their first-line response to the COVID pandemic.

     Political disagreements are one thing, issues for debate.  Hamstringing medical research on something we already know works well against deadly illness is not a matter of opinion: it's the eventual mass murder of people by the dozens, thousands or millions.  How many is too many?  How many, do you suppose, does it take before the total becomes what the USSR's Stalin called "just a statistic?"

     Government by unbridled fantasy isn't a good idea.  The lesson will, in time, hammer itself home.  I fear we'll have to be hit very hard indeed before enough of us take it to heart.

Oh, The Geeky Temptation

     There has been a very old, vacuum-tube portable audio mixer for sale on eBay for quite some time now.  None of the usual buyers want to touch it: it's been modified.  The price reflects that, too; it's offered for about two-thirds to half the price that model usually commands.

     Here's the thing: as it happens, I know that model pretty well.  The first radio station I worked for had one.  It's built like a tank -- and with one exception, the mods to the eBay one consist of added parts that need to be removed or non-original replacement parts that I have the correct parts for.

     I could buy it, get it back to almost-original condition, keep or sell the handful of expensive microphone transformers someone crammed into it and probably double my money if I sold the thing.

     The problem is, I want one.  I've been looking at them online for years, watching the prices get higher and higher.  And if I buy it, it's one more project that will languish while I put in forty hours a week working and spending the rest of my non-sleeping time cooking, cleaning, reading or writing.  Realistically, the thing to do if I just gotta have one is buy one of the nice examples at a blood-curdling price and enjoy it.

     But the thought of turning this poor, abused clunker back into a keeper is so very tempting.

The Great Crash, 1929

      I finished John Kenneth Galbreath's book about the stock market crash and, almost in passing, its connection to the Great Depression that followed.

     He closes with some interesting observations, listing major contributing factors.  At the top of the list, extreme income inequality.  The problem as he sees it is that the whims of a few major players can make an impression that the chaotic urges of thousands of lesser lights cannot -- unless they're following the lead of the big guys.  There'd been booms and busts during the era of the "robber barons" a few decades earlier and the phenomenon of extreme wealth for a very few came back even harder in the 1920s.  Look around: we've got that again.

     He follows that with "bad corporate structure," the kind of trusts and holding companies that concatenated during the boom years before the Crash, companies that existed only to own the stock of companies that also existed only to own stock and so on: while they amplified gains, they also amplified losses, so that when things went bad, they kept getting worse.  While that kind of thing is a lot less likely today -- and you can thank New Deal reforms and regulations for the reduced risk -- any novel financial instrument carries similar risk, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis awhile back revealed.

     "Bad banking structure" comes in for censure, and that got a post-Crash restructure, too.  Some of it has been rolled back.  Good, bad?  I don't know; ask an economist.  Ask three of 'em, and you'll get four different opinions. 

     Next, "the dubious state of the foreign balance," and Galbreath credits high tariffs with helping to create the problem.  They were not nearly as high then as they have become in the last few months.  Ouch.

     The stock market has "circuit breakers" these days: if prices start plunging, trading is suspended.  While that may sound like a cheat, one of the main reasons for it (past putting brokers in time out to ponder their actions) is to let the record-keeping catch up.  On multiple occasions during the 1929 crash, the decline and subsequent trading, sell-outs, bankruptcies, etc. got so far ahead of the data coming out of the stock market that nobody knew what was going on until hours after the close of trading; some people "lost everything" not once but multiple times.  They ended up in holes too deep to claw their way out of.  These days, the market can still crush you -- but it's a lot less likely to keep trying to wring out more afterward.

     We're certain to see abrupt dips in the stock market -- if not today (seems to be mildly up so far), then eventually; we're unlikely to have another Great Crash.  Unlikely does not mean impossible, and no matter how carefully a thing has been made foolproof, new and more ingenious fools arrive every day.  Have they once again become too clever for their -- and our -- own good?  Time will tell.

It's Too Nuts

     So, I'm online this morning and President has climbed onto the (flat and railed) roof of the White House Briefing Room because...well, nobody's sure.

     You can't make this stuff up, and multiple press outlets are undoubtedly busy sanewashing it because they don't dare call it crazy.  Or as the WaPo likes to say these days, "Lights out!"

Parade Of Clowns

     The most disconcerting element of the Sunday morning political talk shows was the persistent sound of sirens and shouting in the background of NBC's Meet The Press; I kept expecting police or soldiers or rioters to burst into the room, push Kristen Welker aside, make a hurried, largely incoherent announcement and fall back under fire.  Didn't happen; moderator, guests and panelists alike all ignored it with the determination of the prospective heirs of a wealthy, elderly great-aunt pretending her dire flatulence isn't happening.  I still don't know what the noise was about, though if I had to bet, I'd split my money between starvation in Gaza and general Presidential protests.

     Kevin Hassett continues to toady and smirk; he behaves like a tween-age boy passing a set of silent-but-deadly farts and letting his rich great-aunt take the blame.  Today, he thought he'd put one over by pointing at the normal review process for employment data as "evidence" of some sort of skullduggery.  Nope, sorry, won't wash; it's routine, and the numbers come from scads of scribbling statisticians, not one (now-fired) appointee.  It'll be interesting to see if they can find someone who can both understand the math and sugarcoat it for Presidential consumption.  Hassett's glee is in part motivated by his sure and certain knowledge that he's playing to an audience of one, and he thinks he'll always be able to play that one like a cheap harmonica.  ...It'll work until he blows it wrong.

     Over on CBS, Doctor Oz showed up, trying to add a spoonful of sugar to the Medicaid cuts.  It didn't go over nearly as well as any segment of his old TV show, and we know about the snake oil it peddled.

     All of these people -- and many more, throughout the Trump administration -- got their jobs by coming across well on TV.  Look, being on TV and not looking like a fool is a lot harder than it appears, but the only skill it proves is the skill of giving good television.  A narcissist who can't find the off button for his TV -- and would not use it if he could -- in charge of Executive branch is filling it with people who have two main skills: A) Being on TV and B) Flattering the boss. And he's steadily dumping people who bring him inconvenient truths, especially if they're not telegenic.  In the process, he's ascending a pyramid of fantasies, building it as he goes, a process that never ends well.

It's Not Easy

     There's a three-ring circus going on in Washington, D.C., and it is echoed in many state capitols.  It's hard to ignore it, but I can't take every morning to point out the latest crazy thing thing the nitwits -- and especially the Nitwit-in-Chief -- did.  He loves the attention, after all, and like wresting a pig, all it does is splash mud around.

     It's a big wonderful world out there, and even the best efforts of the worst people probably won't break it forever -- but it's sure going to leave a mess. 

Rain!

     Summer in Indiana means rain.  It's normal.  The recent heat wave is unusual, but today we had a lot of rain in the morning (and there's more predicted for this afternoon) and it's cooler.

     We're also under an "areal flood warning," which I consistently hear as an "aerial flood warning," meaning the floodwaters will be higher than people's TV aerials.  Nope.  Nor is it "a real flood warning" but they forgot to hit the space bar.  The entire forecast area is at some risk of flooding.  Sure enough, my basement took on a little water, enough to make a puddle draining away to the floor drain.

     At least it's not so beastly hot.

Watching TV, Reading The News

     I could point out that the intersection between "I unfriended the notorious pedo for being a perv" and "I unfriended the notorious pedo for poaching two employees from my spa (one of whom is known to have later been one of his victims)" is not exactly exonerative.  I could, but you either already knew the guy was scum or you're still waving the Hooray For Him flag and will never drop it.  So what's the point?*

     Instead, I will report that Tam and I watched the entire first season of Ballard, and if you enjoyed Bosch and the follow-on, you'll probably like it.  Same city, different setting, same old grimy, imperfect LAPD.  This one's more of an ensemble effort, though the title character is certainly front and center.  She's no Harry Bosch; she's very much her own person.

     Michael Connelly is one of the all time great storytellers.  He is not a knock-your-socks-off prose stylist, but a skilled inventor of personalities, situations, and plots filled with unexpected twists and reverses.  His fiction translates exceptionally well to the screen and the film and TV writers and directors (and actors and set designers and so on) have done justice to the material.
_________________________
* I will admit that I'm curious as to what form the defensive comments will take -- will it be "Nobody's perfect," "It's totally not creepy that a rich guy employs extremely young female masseuses in his club's spa," or the non sequitur, "You just hate the Great Man?"  The latter is half true; I do loathe him, but he's not great.  Look, I'm sorry you chose to hitch your wagon to a pile of manure, but you can always get unhitched and it's high time you did.  The smell lingers. 

One More Time

     Exporters do not pay tariffs.
     Exporting countries do not pay tariffs.
     Importers pay tariffs, and pass the added cost along to wholesalers.
     Wholesalers pass the added cost on to retailers.
     Retailers pass the extra cost on to you and me.

     There are a lot of links in that chain, but that's how it works.  Oh, importers, wholesalers or retailers may eat part of the cost, but not for long; profit margins are slim.  It'll take time, but the prices of imported goods -- and things made here that use imported parts -- are going up.  If it came from Europe, the price will go up at least fifteen percent, by and by.

     Inflation is coming.  Yell at me all you like, but it will still happen and tariffs will be the cause.  Tariffs imposed by one man's whim.

Some Weekend

     Once again, I chaired the monthly writer's "critique group," where we analyze one another's work, everything from grammar and word use to plot development and character behavior: "Your protagonist is an underweight ten-year-old -- do you really think she could fight off a tiger bare-handed?"

     It's fun but exhausting; I'm markedly not an extrovert, and I find a pleasant morning talking shop with a half-dozen friends exhausting.  I napped in the afternoon (instead of doing laundry) and grilled moderately-priced steaks for dinner as a treat, with baked potatoes and salad.  That left Sunday for laundry and housework; blogging had to wait.

     On politics, the merchants of balloon-filling (get it while it's hot!) were busy all weekend, especially on the Sunday politics shows.  These days, it's like going to a silent movie, and if you cared to watch, you booed at the villains and cheered for the heroes, and Little Nell got tied to the train tracks same as always.  The locomotive is just out of sight around the bend, smoke trailing upward from the stack, bell ringing, whistle hooting, and yet everyone is acting like it will never arrive.  Going to be an interesting day when it does.

     On the topic of imminent doom, I've been reading John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929, an analysis of the factors that led up to the event that marks the start of the Great Depression.  There's plenty to debate in Galbraith's politics -- though he did correctly identify the Vietnam War as a quagmire best avoided, well before U. S. involvement -- but his lively, snarky approach to a subject that could be a dull slog (and has often been, in other hands) is well worth reading.  The book, written in 1955, accurately identifies one of the clever tricks that led to 2007's sub-prime mortgage crisis and remains a red flag to look out for; the dismal science is much better at looking backward than warning of danger ahead, so props to him for that.

Worst Soap Opera Ever

     Every day, I look at the news and think, "You can't make this stuff up.  If you put it in a novel, it would be rejected as implausible hack writing, too ludicrous for the worst pulp."

     And yet here we are.

Another Angle On "Artificial Intelligence"

     Investing is essentially a more-or-less honest confidence game: you convince investors your enterprise will succeed while not guaranteeing it and show 'em (a subset of) the books.  It either succeeds or fails and the investors either get their money back, ideally with some kind of profit or they don't.  But the investors have to convince themselves it's worth the risk and the firm they invest in has to do the work, not take the money and run.

     Tech firms are usually selling smoke, mirrors and a cunning plan.  That's what all forms of artificial intelligence boil to: a cunning plan and some impressive-looking hardware.  Good AI, bad AI -- either way, it's a massive server farm, building algorithms on algorithms to crunch through massive amounts of data in the hope of emergent patterns.  Chatbots are very, very sophisticated, context-dependent word-prediction machines; imagebots do the same thing with pictures.  The process between input data plus user prompts and output is opaque, and it was slow going for a long, long time.  (How long?  Marvin Minsky never did get a robot to build an analog Heathkit TV set, despite the very clear instructions that come with the kit.  Heathkit as a major kit company has been gone since 1992, analog TV since 2009, Dr. Minsky since 2016.  He bought that TV kit before I graduated high school, back when Gerald Ford was in the White House.)

     Then in 2022 (as recently as that!), a Google AI engineer convinced himself that a chatbot called LaMDA was self-aware.  He tried to hire a lawyer for it and went to the press.  Google fired him: that work was a trade secret.

     But mark what happened carefully: a person who interacted with AI in depth convinced himself it was alive, and that was the dawn of our current AI boom.  It didn't build a Heathkit,* or take over the world,† or help mastermind a political revolution.‡  It managed to seem real enough for someone to believe there was a ghost in the machine.  It got his confidence.

     "AI" is a con game, and it gets better at the con every day.  Does it get better at "intelligence?"  Probably not, but it certainly gets better at convincing people, especially those with money and a will to believe, that it is either intelligent, sentient, or on the verge of one or the other or both.  And it may not be an "honest con" in the way investing in general is: there may be zero chance of the actual payoff, or as close to zero as makes no difference: there will probably never be a ghost in the machine.  And that matters.

     The bottom is liable to fall out once it hits its peak, in something akin to the dotcom boom and crash, leaving fortunes for the promoters and ashes for the investors.
____________________
* Minsky, op. cit.
 
† Colossus: The Forbin Project, both the book and the film.
 
‡ The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Heinlein, Robert A.

Shares In Futility Up Sharply In Early Trading...

     Listening to a steady drumbeat of news this morning, the local TV stuff that wakes me up, NBC, NPR, BBC, and it strikes me that "Alas" is a damn poor motto to live by.  People are starving and it's become an opportunity for online grifters and self-serving propaganda vids from the nations causing the starving, or at most throwing pennies at the problem while looking the other way and hoping it will end soon.

     "Alas."  Guess it'll make a nice epitaph.

U.S. Out Of UNESCO; RADAR Out Of Their Minds

     UNESCO is a UN agency that encourages peace through cultural exchange; they also list and track sites of exceptional interest and, yeah, they're pretty much longhaired idealists.

     They're apparently not racist enough for the Trump administration and, just like the last time Mr. Trump* had the gig, the U.S. has withdrawn from participation and funding; the Federal government was picking up about eight percent of UNESCO's tab.

     While it's not up to the level of abandoning international soft-power efforts that fed starving people and built good will towards the United States (cough, USAID, cough), it's another self-destructive move.  But it's also not the second but the third time the Feds have walked away from the table.  Like most UN organizations, UNESCO is kinda slapdash, prone to politicization, sketchy finances and a wavering focus; in 1984, the U.S. bailed for the first time.  Here's what U. S. Congressman Jim Leach (R - Iowa) had to say about it a few years later:

"The reasons for the withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO in 1984 are well-known; my view is that we overreacted to the calls of some who wanted to radicalize UNESCO, and the calls of others who wanted the United States to lead in emasculating the UN system. The fact is UNESCO is one of the least dangerous international institutions ever created. While some member countries within UNESCO attempted to push journalistic views antithetical to the values of the west, and engage in Israel bashing, UNESCO itself never adopted such radical postures. The United States opted for empty-chair diplomacy, after winning, not losing, the battles we engaged in... It was nuts to get out, and would be nuttier not to rejoin."

     You can't fix 'em if you don't have a seat at the table.

*  *  *

     Tam showed me a meme this morning that is circulating among the conspiracy-minded Right, claiming "NexRad," the next-generation weather radar system, actually means "Death Radiation"† in Latin.  At least one lunatic has already tried to blow up a radar tower recently.

     I have long railed against people who want us to live in mud huts, no matter if they were Green types who wanted to give up technology to save the planet (as opposed to, oh, building out wind, solar and efficient power storage) or RETVRN ideologues who figure they'll get to live in the big house while the rest of us till the fields (don't count on it, kiddo).  Threatening a highly-effective weather radar system as storms and similar events are getting worse (go argue causes over there in the corner where you won't annoy the grownups; it's happening no matter why) is another mud-hut move, right up there with eschewing vaccinations.  If you want you and yours to die early and often, go for it, but you don't get to inflict that stuff on the rest of us. 
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* Note that I do not make up or borrow amusing or dismissive nicknames for politicians, even the ones I heartily loathe.  Using silly monikers is foolish habit; you end up engaging with the caricature and not the person.  It's also symptomatic of a grade-school-level intellect, like chasing squeamish kids around with a booger stuck to the end of your finger.
 
† I have been through this before.  In fact, the peak power levels and operating frequencies of radar systems are scary -- but the reality is that they transmit in extremely short bursts, and the average power, roughly the heating power, is very low and falls off as the inverse square of distance.  Add in that the dish is moving and systems are interlocked such that when the dish stops, the transmitter is locked off, and.... Nope.  Radar is not now and has never been a death ray.  It won't even warm up your coffee unless you defeat the interlocks, stick the cup right in front of the dish and risk melting the transmitter.  The Brits would have liked to have a death ray, but when Watson-Watt went looking for one, all he found was a way to spot airplanes -- and clouds.  And all that did was help win the Battle of Britain for them.

Try Harder

     Commenting, it would be nice if some of you'd look up how paying tariffs actually works, and if you want to ring in Marxists in connection with them (for pity's sake, why?), you might want to look up what Marx et al had to say about tariffs (not much; he wasn't even sure if he was for 'em, against them, or neutral.)  Don't take anyone's word for this, and if you slept though the part of History class where they talked about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, don't try to BS your way through; you can look it up, too, and get the gist in about ten minutes.  (tl;dr: it didn't do what it was intended to do.  Surprise!  But go see.)

     Likewise, if you want to talk about public media, you might want to be sure you know the difference and relationship between CPB, PBS and NPR.  CPB doesn't produce programming or run a network; claiming "their stuff" is "biased" is nonsensical.

     I keep buying ducks and buying ducks, and some people insist on eating the feathers and then complaining about the taste.

Unrealistic

      - A few comments have come in that are obviously based on having read the headline and lede of my blog post and then changing channels to one of the far-Right opinion networks.  Hey, consume whatever media you like; an awful lot of it is junk food for your mind whatever the source.  But read my entire article: I'm a big fan of narrative twists, especially ones based on little-known or often-misunderstood facts.
     Do your homework.  Bring an understanding of what I wrote and actual facts to the table, or at least try for clever and amusing ridicule (I'll admit to a weakness for good writing), if you want to get your comment published.  Don't pretend it's fed.gov, western.civ as usual these days, because it's not. 

     - I am once again being accused of "TDS."  Nope, sorry, not the case; while I have openly acknowledged my distaste for the man since he first made a serious play for the Presidency, I was entirely willing to let him be just one more asshole President; we've had lots of those, several within my lifetime, and in the usual course of things, so what?  It's just one branch, it's just one term or at worst two.
     The insurrection of January 6, 2021 changed that; Donald Trump and his loose network of accomplices, patsies, fellow-travelers and enablers and the mob of thugs he raised revealed themselves as a genuine danger to the people and government of the United States of America on that day, and they have only become more of a danger since.
     I dislike Mr. Trump; he's the distilled essence of bad managers, comprised of ignorant self-importance, lies, probable grift and graft, bad faith and so on, but he's just one man.  The problem is Trumpism, which is an authoritarian, pseudo-populist movement with clear fascist tendencies; it is harmful to our system of ordered liberties and civil government, undermining the separation of powers between the three branches of the Federal government and abusing the rule of law.  The damage is severe, grave and ongoing.  One day, everyone will have always been against it, but coming back from Trumpism will be a long and painful process.

     - U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was on CBS's Face the Nation this morning, gleefully selling used cars with only slightly cracked engine blocks.  The worst clunker on the lot was a lie he repeated often, that when the U.S. levies a tariff, the exporting country pays it.  That's not how tariffs work and only a blink of thought reveals why: the U. S. government has no authority over exporters in other countries, or over the governments of those countries.
     Tariffs are collected from importers: U. S. companies, who will then raise prices, a process that rolls all the way downhill to you and me.  There is no magic source of tariff money; it comes out of our pockets.  The CBS News moderator did not push back on this; increasingly, news outlets accept the Administration's assertion that tariffs are somehow levied on other countries.  They are not.  They are a form of indirect sales tax, paid by consumers either at the checkout counter or in the form of lower wages from jobs at importing companies or firms downstream of them.

     I can't keep you from living in fantasyland, but I will point out when you are.  If that makes you itchy, write back -- but maybe lay off the lotus-eating for awhile when you do, because I'm not grading on the curve.

Bottom Line

     Events of the past week have made it clear: If you're still supporting Republican politicians at this point, you're in favor of authoritarianism and opposed to democracy.  There isn't any nuance left, and it's GOP politicians that have given it the old heave-ho.

     I'm not saying you've got to love Democrat politicians.  They're maintaining a very big tent, and depending on how you lean, you may find a few or many espousing policies you don't agree with.  But don't be running with the Republicans unless you think only one side should get a vote.

AI Seeps In

     My boss recently had occasion to use a packaged microcontroller; I leapfrogged from BASIC Stamps (nice little widgets, as long as what you're doing is amenable to BASIC and you don't mind being looked on as a tricycle rider in a world of road bikes) to Raspberry Pi pocket-sized computers and he started with them, but this project needed the step in between: an Arduino.*

     Natively, you write stuff for Arduinos using a C-like language and I never learned C.  There are serious syntax differences between that family and BASIC, something like code-switching between German and Japanese: lots of people are fluent in both but knowing one isn't much help in learning the other.  The boss didn't know the Arduino version but he's got a little C.

     So he used AI.  I don't know which one, probably Microsoft's, which is all over at work these days.  And what the hell: it wrote his code.  But it was A) full of cruft† and B) kept leaving stuff out, which he had to ask it to fix, an iterative process that would probably have had me flipping the table over.  When the code did what it needed to do, he went back and cleaned it up, finding the process remarkably instructive in the ways in which the language differed from the similar ones he knew.

     On one level, that's okay.  It got the job done, and he came away knowing more than he had.

     On another, he lost out: he didn't solve the main problems with his own skull sweat; he didn't have to mentally crunch through the code before sticking it in the machine and waiting for it to crash or get stuck in a loop.  He hasn't internalized that language the way you'd do actually writing in it.

     Good enough is, in fact, plenty good enough; you can be "jack of all trades and master of none," and as long as you keep it all working, it counts.  But a lack of mastery means the next job that uses those specific skills will be a little harder, and the temptation to let AI do the heavy lifting will still be there.  What's the harm?  --The harm is, the critical skills needed to clean up the result require a degree of mastery and it's an ephemeral skill: the less you use it, the worse you'll be at it.  It worries me.

     Engineers of the late 1960s and 70s in my business had a tendency to commit "combat engineering:" hack it together, tape it up, make it good enough to get through the next day or the next hour, and leave it until the next time it failed.  The previous generation had tended to "build for the ages," putting stuff in on the assumption that it would be in place for the next twenty years, and the solid-state revolution had blown that model up like a hand grenade in a watch factory.  Now technical plants kept getting smaller and simpler, and you were either buried in generations of older junk or putting in shiny new all-in-one devices, and they'd slop it together and keep moving, because next week, something else would be replacing that stuff anyway.

     We darned near lost the ability to do good work.  Who cared?  What did it matter?  --And then things slowed down.  Budgets shrank.  Equipment became software-based, and the same physical platform might persist through a decade of upgrades.  Staffs got small, the business lost its luster, and--  Suddenly, those mountains of messiness and poor documentation weren't how you kept forward momentum, they were in the way.  We had to start over; we had to rethink how we did things.  Documentation started to matter again; you were going to be stuck with the stuff for quite some time, and have less people to repair or replace it when it went wrong.

     We're still digging out from under the legacy of what worked in the past.  AI promises to be a source of equally clumsy messes, if we're not very, very careful how we use it -- and an equal atrophy of skills that will be needed again later.
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* I did the physical side of the project.  The Arduino and its various "shields," piggyback boards for specialized functions, are mounted and held together using 2 mm nuts and bolts, about the diameter of a pencil lead.  It's annoying stuff to work with and I ended up buying a couple of little "grabbers," after realizing my old fingers weren't up to the task and needle-nose pliers had a disconcerting tendency to send nuts, bolts and washers flying across the room. It seems unnecessarily small.
 
† A surprisingly subtle term, somewhat context-dependent, but it alludes to unnecessarily complex or convoluted programming; or to code that's been heavily edited and modified and tinkered with; or to the accumulation of unneeded, leftover junk in hardware or software; or to going about a software task in an awkward, old-fashioned way; or to some combination of this.  Think "baroque" or "rococo," but with endless lines of arcane commands.

Rabbit Hole

      This morning, Tam was looking at a Mars-lander parachute with a message encoded in the panels.  Over her shoulder, I thought it was a Russian Soyuz parachute, which have patterns used to check orientation and spin.

     That led me to look up Gray code, which is a binary code that only flips one bit per increment.  Unclear?  Look at it this way: real binary numbers, the way a guy with two fingers counts, run like this:
0000
0001
0010
0011
0100
0101
0110
0111
     The step from 0 to 1 and from 10 to 11 (or 2 to 3, as you and I count) only flip one bit; but going from 1 to 10 and from 11 to 100, two or more bits change state.

     Who cares, right? That's just how robots count anyway.  But if they count wrong, it makes trouble for us, and if the robot is counting how far we're turning a knob (or a steering wheel!), the encoder is a physical device, maybe a light source and a disc with digital numbers encoded as clear or opaque spots read by a phototransistor array -- and no matter how carefully the blame thing was made, the bits aren't going to change at the exact same time: the robot might miscount on the steps from 1 to 10, 11 to 100, and every one of them (a lot, as the count continues) that flips more than one bit at once. 

     We're smarter than robots; let's help 'em out -- and that's what Frank Gray did, putting the numbers in a different order:
0000
0001
0011
0010
0110
0111
0101
     Now only one bit changes for each step; the robot can't be confused when the count increments.  It's only got to track the single change.

     If you chart this Gray code order on a conventional-order number line, it turns into a funny set of hops of greater and smaller distances (see the Wikipedia page) -- and looking at it, I was struck by how closely it resembled one representation of output from the high-speed data encoding behind digital television.  Scrolling down, I discovered that's not a coincidence: because it results in more robust data transmission under noisy conditions, Gray coding works with forward error correction in digital modulation schemes, of which U.S. 8-VSB digital TV is one (albeit something of an ugly stepchild; the next-generation ATSC 3.0 uses a better method, called OFDM).

     And that's this morning's rabbit hole.  Frank Gray, who died in 1969, worked for Bell Labs, where he made many contributions to early television.  He's the father of the flying-spot scanner, which is the backwards of a TV camera: scan the thing you want to televise with a single bright dot of light, picking up up the reflected intensity with a single cheap photocell: the output is the same as the raw output of a TV camera tube. Slide scanners once used this, with a tiny TV picture tube as the moving light source, much cheaper than a video camera tube.  Gray was a graduate of Indiana's own Purdue University, with a degree in physics.

     (If you'd like to sink even deeper into the geekery, try Trellis encoded modulation, the trick that lets us push the Shannon limit for communications speeds over a noisy link -- and it turns out they're all noisy in the real world.  Digital TV uses Trellis encoding, too -- look, that's a whole lot of bits to pack into not very much space on the dial, static and all, and if they didn't mash it down very compactly, all the basketballs and footballs and hockey pucks would be jerkily-moving little squares, and the numbers on the players would barely be readable.  Oh, Claude Shannon?  That's a whole other bundle of brilliance, father of modern digital telecommunications and a first-rate juggler, too.  If you haven't seen The Bit Player, perhaps you should.)

A Mighty Own Goal

     As I write this, the U. S. Senate is poised to pull the rug out from under funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the next couple of years.  CPB gets less than 0.01% of the Federal budget.  Oh, it's big money for you, me or your local factories, but it's still a rounding error compared to military expenditures, highways or servicing the Federal debt.  The House has already approved this recission, and the Senate just had a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Vance (wearing his President of the Senate hat, and I do wish the Framers had come up with a different title for the job) to keep the legislation moving.

     CPB is a Federally-funded private non-profit corporation that in turn funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) -- largely indirectly.  By law, they're only allowed to spend five percent of their budget on themselves -- salaries, staplers, coffee machines.  65% of their budget goes directly to public radio and TV stations, everything from tiny, one-man stations deep in the Alaskan wilds to massive operations like the WGBH stations in Boston.  About 25% goes to production companies, which make programs for public radio and TV.

     The big public stations have multiple income streams -- those annoying pledge drives, strings of grants, endowments and "underwriting" sponsorships.  NPR has been a political football for decades, and set out some time ago to ease off the Federal spigot; around one percent (1%) their funding comes directly from CPB.  PBS has taken similar steps, but -- television's spendy -- are more reliant on CPB.  There's a catch, though; I'll get back to that.

     The Trump administration doesn't think NPR and PBS are being fair to them, and that's why they want to defund CPB.  I have not noticed this in actual NPR news segments, those five-minute blocks at the top and/or bottom of the hour; they're radio newscasts, strictly limited for time and focused on things that are, in fact, newsworthy.  While they're a little more relaxed than the ABC "Contemporary" news of my youth and more buttoned-down than NBC's hipper "The Source" a decade later, NPR matches any of the old classic top-of-the-hour radio news, CBS, NBC, Mutual or what ABC branded as "The American Information Network."*  The long-form stuff has a much greater proportion of opinion to information, and both NPR and PBS have had controversies.  While CPB's rules have some sober language about balance and perspective, the Fairness Doctrine is long gone, and nobody benefited more from the ending of it than the political Right.

     But NPR and PBS are not living off CPB dollars.  NPR outright sells ads on their streaming services (it's legal), albeit delivered in the same subdued manner as their over-the-air underwriting announcements.  Nope, the CPB cuts hit local stations.  This does loop back around, and there's the catch: in the indirect way networks operate in the U. S., member stations pay the networks, and between a quarter and a third of the funding for NPR and PBS comes from membership and programming fees those stations pay.  The big stations will tighten their belts, lay off janitors and newspeople, and keep on keeping on; they'll probably drop some programs, too.  But those tiny little stations, in Alaska or Montana or wherever, in backwater towns where the commercial AM station went dark and the FM got moved to the nearest sizable city?  Their local NPR station, over at the State School of Cow Mining (etc.), is the only source of local news and weather warnings, and it's got a staff of three, or two, or one: they don't have any janitors to lay off.  Those stations rely on CPB money to meet payroll, rent tower space and pay the power bill, and when it goes away--  Hey, maybe the Cow-Mining College or the Town Board will kick in a few more bucks, for old time's sake -- if they can afford it.  And if not?  Well, gee.  Better buy a NOAA weather radio, if you can pick up one of their low-power stations. (Kinda thin in some states.)

     Those small towns, those rural spaces, they're not generally hotbeds of big-city liberalism, and neither are their radio stations.  They're red spots on red maps -- and they'll be hardest hit. 

     The CPB cuts are an own goal.  NPR and PBS stations -- the survivors -- will have less reason to toe the Federal government's line, and more reason to be fractious.  
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* Speaking of money and news -- post WW II, U.S. radio networks were, by law, singular.  NBC had previously operated multiple networks, with NBC Red and NBC Blue at the forefront; they had to spin off Blue, which became ABC.  ABC started out in fourth place, behind NBC, CBS and Mutual -- Blue network had always been something of a "second string" network for NBC.  By the late 1960s, with radio losing badly to television, ABC came up with a way around the law, becoming not one but four radio news services over the same physical network: they offered different newscasts around the hour, each one suited to a different radio format; Information at the top of the hour, very conventional radio news suitable for middle-of-the road and all-news formats; FM and Entertainment at :15 (or :45, it's been awhile) and half-past the hour, both more relaxed and quiet, and Contemporary, available as a fast-paced two-minute newscast at ten til the hour and a five-minute newscast that ran from :55 to the top of the hour.  If it sounds a little crazy, it was -- but it meant ABC could have as many as four stations in a given town all carrying an ABC newscast, with lovely, paid ABC commercials in each one; and it meant ABC offered specialized news products the other three networks did not.  To my larger point, the actual content of these newscasts was almost identical: news is news, war, famine and natural disaster, and you got largely the same on-the-scene soundbites from all four versions.  The style of delivery differed; the focus varied slightly, especially when it came to celebrity items.