The Crazy Never Stops

     The Federal lunacy and cruelty is too much to keep up with, from yanking funding from a program to vaccinate children to intramural fights over the actual impact of bomb raids on Iranian nuclear facilities.  It's an ongoing "shock and awe" campaign of fucknettery, grift, Social Darwinism and junk science, ultimately self-defeating.  The question is not if it will fall apart under its own disconnection from reality and ramshackle improvisation but -- and how hard it will hit.

     Who it will hit is a certainty, or rather, who it won't hit: the rich are safe; inside-dealing Congresspersons are safe.  And I'm not talking about the guy in your town who owns a string of fast-food franchises and buys a new Benz every year; as far as the top one or two or even five percent are concerned, he's exactly the same as clock-punchers like you and me.  And we'll be left carrying the weight when things go off the rails, our retirement and Social Security looted (five years and counting until it starts to ramp down, and not gently), Medicare hacked down to whatever minimum, health research stymied, stunted and strangled a-borning.  The "beautiful people" will float secure in beauty; the rest of us are left picking up their mess.

     Right now, it's like watching the fall of a basket of eggs dropped from a great height: it will hit; they will break.  The only question is precisely when and how far the raw egg will splash -- and how badly they've rotted on the way down.

Under The Heat Dome

     Call it climate, call it weather: either way, there's broad agreement that this extremely hot weather is unpleasant.  So far, the central air-conditioning at Roseholme Cottage has kept up; I keep the dehumidifier going in the basement and manage the temperature setting on the main floor by how much condensation appears on the longest and most convoluted duct in the basement.  73° to 75°F keeps everything manageable and comfortable.

     My car's climate control barely copes.  The system is low on working fluid and I should get it into the shop, but it's not too bad, yet.

     The kicker is the building at what I call the North Campus.  The equipment up there is happiest between 60° and 65°F and it moves a lot of air.  A zip-up hoodie over a T-shirt is barely enough, and by the time my day ends, the oppressive heat outside is something of a relief for at least the first half-hour.  Going from one extreme to the other plays merry hell with my sinuses, and while it's definitely a "first world problem," it's a problem nevertheless.

     By the weekend, the prediction is that the worst will have passed, for now.  But if it's getting this hot in June, what's August going to be like?

     Call it weather; call it climate.  Either way, it's as real as a sledge hammer.  And there's no dodging the blow.

Cease Fi-- Incoming!

     In the wake of the U.S. bombing of several nuclear-work sites in Iran, there was supposed to be a cease-fire between Iran and Israel.  The President of the U.S. said so.

     Their militaries don't appear to have gotten the message.  I don't know if their governments have.  Each is accusing the other of going back on the agreement.

     I'm not chortling at Mr. Trump's disappointment (he was chiding the Israelis on social media not long ago).  I'm certainly not cheering on the conflict; it is messy, with missiles, bombs and drones striking civilians along with their (presumed) military targets, in a region already filled with tragedy.

     Who ever calmed a hornet's nest by shaking it?

It's Alan Turing's Birthday

     It's Turing's birthday, a day to remember that the brilliant mathematician and computer theorist was an enormous part of the UK's early lead in developing computers -- until he ran afoul of laws criminalizing private sexual behavior.  Turing was gay, at a time when same-sex acts were illegal, and after arrest, trial and conviction, he lost his security clearance and was effectively unemployable in cutting-edge work.  Subjected to harsh and unusual treatment that sidelined his solo efforts, he is believed to have committed suicide.

     Approve, disapprove or ignore his affectional leanings as you wish, but bear in mind the cost to free individuals and to society in general when prejudice is made law.

"Don't Put It In The Paper That I Got Us Into A War"

      The United States of America both is and is not presently at war with Iran.  If you ask the Administration, someone like, oh, Vice-President James David Vance,* you'll hear that of course the U.S. isn't at war with Iran, only with Iran's nuclear-bomb program.

     The thing about war is that the other side gets a vote.  Flip it around; say the Royal Theocratic People's Republic of X†, no, Z‡, er, Y decided that American nuclear weapons were a clear and present danger and by dint of either remarkable aerospace engineering or a sabotage organization that leaves SOE in the dust, levels Pantex.  Downwind of that event, would you suppose our government might consider the act tantamount to a declaration of war?

     It's likely that the Trump Administration's avoidance of calling it an actual war is an effort to dodge having to go to Congress for retroactive permission, hat in hand and bearing a "What I Did With The Military This Summer" essay as called for in §1543 of the War Powers Resolution (U. S. Code Title 50, Chapter 33) -- and the problem with that is, despite the title, the Resolution doesn't give a damn if it's called a war or not; Congress gets involved "in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced— (1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances; (2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, [...] the President shall submit within 48 hours to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President pro tempore of the Senate a report, in writing, setting forth— (A) the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces; (B) the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and (C) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement."

     Only Congress has the power to declare war, and as far as Congress is concerned, only they get to decide to wage warlike activities.  They've been in the habit of passing legislation that amounts to an advance pass for the Executive Branch to get into specific fights, but even then, they want to have just enough engagement to claim credit if it works out okay -- and the Constitution gave them the responsibility.

     It's a tissue-paper barrier, one that only holds up as long as everyone plays by the rules.  "Playing by the rules" has not been a hallmark of the Trump Administration.  Nevertheless, it is there and Congress isn't liking the taste of it.

     Governments in general have a fondness for short, victorious wars.  Armed conflicts are real morale-boosters.  Governments also have a well-established history of misjudging the duration of such wars and the likelihood of success, and governments that put the decision-making for wars in the hands of one man have been especially bad at this.  Mr. Trump has got his war, however much reluctance his Executive Branch has to call it one, and we'll be finding out how that goes.  Congress has issues of its own to figure out, having to do with Separation of Powers and being treated with caviler disregard -- and we'll be finding out about that right along with them, too.

     The issue is a splitter, hawks and "Christian Nationalists" on the pro-war side (the latter are thrilled by the prospect of "war in the Holy Land"), "America First" isolationists opposed, proceduralists (sincere and opportunistic alike) among the Democrats and Republicans appalled at the manner in which the action was initiated. 

     Interesting times.  I loathe living in interesting times.  Couldn't we have a few decades of dull muddling-though instead?
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* His present chosen name, changed first from James Donald Bowman as assigned at birth and most recently, informally, styled as "JD Vance."
 
† A little bird twittered No.
 
‡ And likewise, a bear.

Fascists, Begone!

     A recent news story neatly encapsulates the present moment: a student at the University of Florida's law school wrote a paper for one of his classes arguing the U. S. Constitution was intended by the framers to apply only to white people, and only they should be allowed to vote -- and the Trump-nominated judge who taught the class awarded him top marks for it.

     The student had expressed similar views in the past, writing that non-white people should be given a decade to leave the country and that naturalized aliens were never supposed to be more than second-class citizens.  The University stood on viewpoint neutrality and free-speech rights, correctly pointing out that people have a right to speak their minds.  What finally got him in trouble was a posting on the former Twitter, saying Jews must be abolished "by any means necessary."  That resulted in his being suspended and barred from the campus, and increased police patrols in the area; the student sued and the case will work its way through the courts.  (One key issue is the difference between an abstract "should" and a concrete "must."  Holding outrageous opinions is one thing; advocating criminal action is very much another.)

     That's Trumpism in a nutshell: push to the limits, reward prejudice, and then see how much farther they can go.  This is just one example but the pattern is repeated over and over, and the people pushing the hardest often embrace the idea of violence even if they do not take action themselves --  the Florida law student wrote that if U.S. courts failed to create white rule, the matter would be resolved "not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword." Whatever a society rewards, it gets more of. This is what Trumpism rewards.

     This not what American society should reward.  That's not a matter for polite debate over tea and cookies, it's a core value.

A What, Now?

     A local radio newsperson just told me over the air that the storms that knocked out my electricity the day before yesterday -- and that of hundreds of thousands of other people along their track -- also spawned "Eee Eff Oh" tornadoes.

     Tell me you're reading copy in a "book" font like Times New Roman without telling me you're reading Times New Roman.  Old-time paper wirecopy from an Extel dot-matrix printer or an older Teletype Model 15* had a dot in the center of the zero or a slash through it, preventing confusion between "0" and "o" in the all-capital-letter output.  So, too, did some computer fonts.  Local newspeople, if they were leaving a story for someone else to read, were careful about making the distinction when they typed it up.  "Orator" was a popular typewriter font (especially in television), simple and clear.

     But it's 2025.  Nobody (well, hardly anyone) prints this stuff out and the "wire machine" is not consuming several reams of fanfold paper a day: there's no reason not to spell it out.  Those E F zero tornadoes can be just that.

     A person reading news copy has enough to do.  (Try it sometimes.  Don't go too fast!  And remember, you've got to make the sentences make linear sense using only intonation and pacing.)  These days, they're scrolling through their script with a hand or foot controller, reading it a line or more ahead if they've been in the business longer than a few weeks; in TV, they're taking it from the camera-front prompter while a producer talks in their ear and in radio, they're running their own levels, watching the clock so they don't get steamrollered by the next ad or program and making sure all the sound bites are ready.  Scoping out a "0" from an "o" (even if you typed it yourself) doesn't need to be among the tasks.
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* Mechanical teletypes made the most wonderful rumbling clatter, a sound that meant "news" to several generations; stations used to hang a microphone in the wire-machine closet and run the sound at low level under newscasts, or to at least under the opening.  Those mics were still there when the cheaper, simpler dot-matrix printers replaced the Model 15 -- and made a sound like tiny robot farts as they printed.  Somehow that noise never caught on.  

Juneteenth

     Today is Juneteenth, the day the last group of enslaved Americans of African descent learned they were slaves no more.

     Our country fought a bloody war over a matter that most major countries had already ended through legislation.  The UK ran well ahead of us in this effort, and while many people celebrate this day -- and it should indeed be celebrated -- it's also a good day to remember that doing the right thing is not always easy, quick or painless, and we're not always in the lead.  History is not a perfect, smooth upward curve. 

In The Dark

      A string of bad thunderstorms rolled across Indiana late yesterday afternoon, catching me on a break at a bookstore near work.  About five o'clock, the power went out.

     Work has a generator and an automatic transfer switch.  The bookstore, not so much.  The traffic lights, not so much.

     I was near the North Campus, where various street projects have snarled the already-busy traffic.  From the bookstore, I could see the intersection I'd need to cross to get back, a six-crossing-six (counting left turn lanes) with a two-block backup in at least two directions.  The intersection kept jamming up, minor fender-benders and gridlocks as drivers tried to sort out how to accommodate the left-turn lanes when a dead stoplight defaults for a four-way stop.  In theory, right-of-way precesses around the intersection counterclockwise, a system the works well enough when a pair of two-lane roads meet.  If no one is turning left, it often devolves into taking turns, alternating the north-south and east-west (etc.) streets.  The multi-lane version with left-turn lanes can work that way, too, but it's complicated and all it takes is one driver getting out of sync or in a hurry to bollix the whole thing.

     So I waited, texting Tam at home, nearly seven miles away: "STAYING SAFE?"
Tam: "OK.  POWER IS OUT HERE."  That was about 5:15.  I checked the power and light company's outage map, and they showed small outages everywhere, with a few bigger ones indicated.

     By six o'clock, power was still out and the bookstore decided to close.  They let the remaining customers put our selections on hold and gently shooed us out.  The big intersection was still a mess.  The store is in a large strip center and I scouted around the parking lot in my car: the way to the south, where the street narrows to a lane each direction, was moving pretty well, so I took it, aiming home.  A mile down the road, the traffic light was out, and churning through it was slow.  Two miles on, the light was working, and I was able to turn.  Next stoplight was out, but with lighter traffic, going smoothly.  From there on, including crossing Meridian Street, a major north-south artery, all the traffic lights were okay, businesses open, houses lit up -- until I got to my neighborhood.

     I drove down in front of my house.  The porch light was out: no power.  That meant the garage door opener would be out, so I parked in front and went in.  I had leftovers in the freezer, and with a gas range, that meant it was time to use them up.  Not too long after I arrived, there was an ugly gazonking noise from the direction of the substation a few block away, surely a sign of progress.  I made dinner and Tam and I watched the little battery TV in the kitchen while we ate, thinking the lights would come back on at any moment.  Nope.

     We cleared away the TV trays and dishes as best we could; by then it was getting dark enough we broke out flashlights.  I plugged my phone into the fat backup battery I keep charged up just in case, and went to bed with a book on my iPad.

     It wasn't a good night for sleep.  I kept waking up in the dark, wondering where I was and remembering, lighting the iPad back up and reading until I dozed off.  Eleven p.m., midnight, two a.m., three....  At four-thirty, I was startled awake by eye-searing brightness through closed eyelids!  I'd apparently flipped the switch for the overhead light at some point, and, the power being out, left it on.  That sixty-Watt light might as well have been a flashbulb.  I got up, turned it off, wandered out to the kitchen in time to see the light in the garage go out, went out and checked that the garage door was down, and went back to bed.

     Almost twelve hours without power.  Everything in the fridge is inedible except for Tam's soft drinks. my peanut butter cups, the UHT milk I keep in there because it's better cold and maybe the oranges.  I don't know about the contents of the freezer but I don't feel like trusting to luck.  Trash day is tomorrow and it's all going.

     We have had worse.  I think the power was out for nearly three days after the flooding Spring storms shortly after I moved in, but it hasn't been that bad since.

How Not To Get Published

     Unlike many blogs, this one has a comments section -- but it's not automatic.  I screen comments.

     From time to time, one of my perennially-unpublishable commenters accuses me of "censorship."  Nope, sorry, that's not what it is.  Censorship is when a government (or, occasionally, another powerful entity) suppresses your expression by law or force.  All I'm doing is exercising editorial discretion.  You can say whatever you like on your own blog, or in a comments section that I don't control, or paint your opinions on your own wall.  But this is my blog, and I decide what gets published.  If you want a soapbox, there are plenty available elsewhere.  This one is mine.  I am not obliged to provide equal time for differing opinions.  Just as you are not allowed to daub your slogans on my fence, you don't get to use my comments section as your megaphone. 

     What doesn't get published includes (but is not limited to) comments I deem to be inflammatory or excessively partisan, statements of opinion presented as fact, any unusual claim unsupported by evidence, and anything I suspect of being a cute attempt to smuggle in signals (if your screen name is "Horst1488," your comments are never going to be approved).  If I think your comment is too far off-topic, it's probably not going to get through screening.

     These decisions are a judgement on the comment itself or, in the case of "Horst," on the commenter's lack of taste.  They are not a judgment of the commenter themselves, nor do they represent an endorsement of the opinions expressed in the comments that do get published.

Still Making Them Famous

     It is with resignation that I note news media are still making killers famous, just as long as their victims are numerous and/or famous.  It doesn't make any difference where you look -- Fox News, over-the-air TV networks, NPR: Coverage of the attacks on Minnesota politicians gives the attacker's name over and over, mentioning the names of his victims only once or twice.

     Credible reports put that killer firmly on the political/religious Right, but that doesn't matter, either; an insurance executive was shot down on the street by a guy from the Left or the muddled middle (he hasn't been as easy to figure out) and you're ten times more likely to know his name than the name of the man he killed.

     This kind of killer appears to succeed more often when they're mentally askew.  Perhaps more motivated; perhaps they're more likely to take an unusual approach.  But we know that many of them are attracted by the idea of recognition: their crime will make them famous.  It's not a sane evaluation, but as long as we continue to put the names of these killers in banner headlines and treat their lunacies as worthy of recognition, the incentive remains.

Late Posting

     It was an overwhelming weekend, filled with the kind of stuff that ends up in history books -- footnotes, if we're lucky, but I'm not liking our luck just now.

     I have avoided the news this evening and for all I know, we're at war right now.  Or maybe just in the middle of a Tweet, Truth and Skeet storm from the Commander-in-Chief and all the assorted pundits.  Don't know.  Surely it will either wait, or hit too hard and fast to matter.

It's Father's Day

      My Dad has been gone for eighteen years now.  I still miss him.  In some ways, he left a few years earlier; his memory failed him and his last few years were spent as a relatively pleasant stranger among other strangers; but I believe he knew he was loved.

     If your father is still around, take a few minutes to spend with him, even if you don't get along.  He won't be here forever.

A Ditty For The Day

      We used to get it.

A Member Of Congress Steps Up -- And Gets Stepped On

     Arguably, he was grandstanding: U. S. Senator Alex Padilla showed up at a press conference in LA held by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and started to ask a question, giving his name and title in the process.  Three men shoved him out into the hall, where he was handcuffed by men wearing vests marked "FBI," briefly detained and then released, having not been formally arrested or charged.

     But here's the thing: Members of Congress are allowed to be just this kind of meddlesome.  It's in their job description.

     Officially, Cabinet Secretaries and Senators are just about co-equal; for diplomatic purposes (who gets their hand shaken ahead of whom or gives way in the desert line at a State dinner), the Cabinet (at 12th) is one notch ahead of Senators (at 13) and they both get to elbow aside state Governors and House members.  But in the checks and balances kind of way, Senators and Representatives are supposed to get kid-gloves treatment, especially when acting in the interest of those they represent; the military rank them above 4-star officers and Secretary Noem, were she just a bit more slick, would have countered with an impatient, "Yes, Senator?" Then let him speak, and made a non-committal or cutting remark before returning to her prepared statement. 

     She didn't.  By chance or design, a ranking member of the Executive branch caused a ranking member of the Legislative branch to be silenced, shoved aside, and restrained.  He was made to kneel before being proned out and cuffed.  It's holographic; you can take the part for the whole, and understand this to be the Trump administration's entire approach to federal governance: autocratic and high-handed, believing its authority to be unquestionable.

     This is not the way our government was supposed to function.

Congress Keeps Stepping Back

      The Framers of the U. S. Constitution thought Congress would be where the action was; that the numerous Representatives and august Senators would serve as a check on one another and, protective of their power and mindful of their responsibilities to their constituents, as a check on the Executive Branch and careful gatekeepers of the federal judiciary.

     Congress has never done an outstanding job of living up to this expectation, but historically, they've done about as well as we might expect of ordinary men (and a few women).  Through my lifetime, they've increasingly taken up the habit of handing power over to the Executive whenever they found the exercise of it inconvenient, had a majority of the same party as the President or wanted to dodge the blame if things didn't work out.

     The most recent piece of authoritarian backsliding comes from the House, at the hands of South Carolina's Nancy Mace and Brandon Gill of Texas.  Mace and Gill* want to give the Attorney General the power to deem any city "lawless" if it meets any of a vaguely-defined set of criteria, and to rinse away† federal funding to any not-so-fresh city so labelled for up to 180 days.

     You probably know what feedback is -- that howl that sometimes arises in a PA system when the microphone is taken in front of the speakers, growing louder and sharper until someone relocates or turns off the mike.  That's positive feedback.  Negative feedback works the other way, damping down distortion; in electronics, it's how we stabilize amplifiers and limit their gain.  Too much can be a problem; it's got to be set just right.  When legislators try social engineering via laws, that's a kind of feedback.  It's got to be just enough to accomplish the goal -- and it had better not be positive feedback, or it will only make the the problem worse.

     The news release for the bill specifically mentions Los Angeles, where four square blocks of downtown have seen both peaceful protest and violence over the last few days, where 4,000 federalized California Guard members have been sent in -- without, so far, pay or provisions -- to protect federal buildings and some employees and where some 700 U. S. Marines have been dispatched to do something -- DoD hasn't been forthcoming about their exact mission.

     I wondered just what federal funding Los Angles might be receiving now, and for what purpose?  Was it, perhaps, paying a plushy addendum to the Mayor's salary?  Supporting a den of fatcat politicians?  Imagine my surprise to read the city "receives federal funding for a wide range of programs, including transportation, housing, community development, and public safety," and, under the American Rescue Plan, funding to "support initiatives like housing and homelessness services, community development, and justice diversion programs. Federal grants also contribute to infrastructure improvements and social services."  In short, it goes to programs intended to reduce lawlessness across a wide range of situations and behaviors, everything from police to getting the homeless off the streets.  Cutting the money for that in response to a determination that a city had become lawless is positive feedback!

     It's a bad bill.  It surrenders yet more power from the Legislative Branch to the Executive -- and sets up the exercise of that power in a way that makes the problem it purports to address even worse.
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* Make of that what you will.
 
† I certainly did.

Breakfast Sandwich

      A remarkable substitute for butter on a breakfast sandwich is...muffuletta olive salad!

     The stuff is a chopped-up mixture of olives and other vegetables in seasoned olive oil, best dipped out with a fork and spread between layers.  It would work directly on thick, toasted bread, but I prefer thin-sliced rye.

     This morning's had a slice of crisp bacon, a thin slice of ham and read-through-it slices of roast beef, the latter two heated a bit in the skillet, plus a broken-yolk egg and a slice of Colby Jack cheese, and a generous amount of olive salad.  Delightful!

Bad Math

     Sure enough, someone took me to task: "One could also argue by your logic that 68% or so of the people were opposed to the Democrats [...] borders policy...."

     Nope.  One can argue that 30.9% of the possible voters favored the border policies put forth by the Democrats, 31.8% preferred Mr. Trump's Republican border policies, 1.3% wanted something different....and 36%, the largest group of possible voters, didn't care enough to fill out an absentee ballot or go vote in person.

     Understand this.  People who voted for candidates with a realistic chance of winning the Presidency constituted roughly 32% for the Republican and 31% for the Democrat.  That's not a mandate.  More voters said "Meh" and stayed home than exercised their franchise for either one.  That's not a commanding victory.  It's not a clear policy choice.

     Sharp eyes will have spotted a "[...]" in my quote.  The commenter wrote "...Democrats open borders policy...," and the problem with that* is, the Democrats do not have an open borders policy; you can go look up that party's 2024 platform (start on page 64) and read all about their actual border policy, amidst the campaign glurge.  Under "Securing the Border," they wrote:
     "In President Biden's second term, he will push Congress to provide the resources and authorities that we need to secure the border. This includes additional border patrol agents, immigration judges, asylum officers, cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop the flow of fentanyl, and funding for cities and states that are sheltering migrants."
     They published that version of their platform shortly before their abrupt change of candidate.  Readers with undamaged memories may recall a 2024 bipartisan bill to beef up border security, tanked by the GOP after initial support: then-candidate Trump asked them to stop it, lest he lose an important campaign issue.  He would not have done so if it promised to make border security worse.  So don't come to me talking about "open borders."  Democrats and Republicans ran on securing the border, with significant policy differences, but neither one was in favor of "open borders."  Both of them promised to increase border security.

     Hype and bullshit don't impress me.  Repeating unsupported opinion as fact doesn't overawe me.  We have a great big Internet and you can look this stuff up, and then look up the sources it relies on.  Why people are so unwilling to do so mystifies me.  I guess it's just too uncomfortable, all those long words and unfamiliar concepts.
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* Aside from improper formation of the possessive, that is.  Blog comments, like social media microblogging or dropping a postcard in the mailbox, are one of those things where you make an irrevocable act and watch, aghast, as your typos and slip-ups sail off, unreachable.  It will happen to each of us over and over, and it probably already has.

Predictably...

     A few innumerate folks have written to tell me that nuh-unh, most American citizens really do want ICE raids and federal response to protests against them.

     So let's run the numbers.  64% turnout in 2024, so 36% of possible voters picked None Of The Above, or at least didn't care enough to vote.  The remainder and a bit of math gives us 30.9% of possible voters for Harris, 31.8% for Trump and 1.3% for someone else.  That's 31.8% of possible voters who wanted Mr. Trump badly enough to go vote for him -- and 68.2% of them who did not.

     This is a close match to a President whose favorability scores run in the 40s.  Which they do, and were falling the last time I checked.

     Sure, a lot of people aren't upset enough to go marching and waving signs, and even fewer are so mad they'll set cars on fire or throw things at well-armed police.  But don't for a minute confuse that with enthusiasm for oppression or masked federal agents staging raids on people showing up for immigration hearings or hanging around big-box building-supply stores hoping to pick up work.  It's not popular -- and will get less so as the high-effort, low-paid jobs that keep us fed and housed increasingly go unfilled.

     My suspicion is that these chickens will come home to roost in the midterms, and the Trumpists in office and holding Administration jobs will cry foul when their numbers shrink.  The only question is how bad the rout will be -- and if the opposition party (parties?) can come up with a clear counter-message of their own in the meantime.  California's Governor Gavin Newsom, who was trying pretty hard to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares at the same time, is presently learning a painful lesson about carrying a scorpion across a river, but will it stick? 

You Voted For This

      Stock-market volatility; the CDC's entire vaccine advisory board removed despite RFK, Jr's promise to Congress not to do so; ICE raids in Los Angeles (and elsewhere) that triggered protests (also in LA and elsewhere), protests that periodically flare up into violence, and the violence in LA has resulted in 4,700 federal troops being sent in, despite LA and California officials saying they had the situation under control.  California is suing the federal government: 4,000 of the soldiers are California National Guard members, and there's a difference of opinion over the legality of federalizing them in this manner.

     Meanwhile, at least two foreign journalists covering the mess in LA have been hit by "less-lethal" fire, and if you're in the few blocks where law enforcement, ICE agents and protesters clash, it looks pretty bad even before it turns physical.  (Elsewhere in the sprawling city, it's life as usual, which seems to be a surprise to some commentators.  There are ten million people in LA County, compared to almost seven million in, say, all of Indiana or Tennessee: there's a lot of room for life-goes-on. We only see what the cameras are pointed at.)

     American voters chose this, 49.8% to (at least) 48.3.  (Yes, yes, only the electoral college votes matter, and that was more lopsided, call it 58%.).  In LA County alone, out of 3.7 million votes,* 1.2 million went to the Republican Presidential candidate.  They voted for this, and I hope they don't have urgent business near the protests.

     Vote for blood, expect blood.  Still think it was a good idea?
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* 37% turnout?  An estimated 17% of LA County residents are non-citizens.  That leaves 46% sitting on their hands come Election Day, and compares very unfavorably to a national turnout of almost 64%.  If you worry that a few high-population states dominate elections, I guess LA's got your back. 

Poking The Bear

      Sure, you can probably make a case that those hard-working ICE agents are "just following orders" in LA, but even if they're victims of the system (eye roll), the people who gave them their initial orders and who keep sending them back out either know in advance or at least know by now that the protests are reactive; the violence is reactive.

     If the feds were serious about stopping the protests, they'd pull those ICE agents out.  Send them home or, better, to Las Vegas, and wait for the furor to die down.  Come back more stealthily another day.

     Instead, they've got LAPD in there running interference, and the last I heard, National Guard troops were warming up in the bullpen.  I sure hope their officers didn't miss the use-of-force history lesson about Kent State.  You can go on social media right now and find video of protesters tossing tear gas canisters back at the gas-masked police, and if that's just the early innings, it could get way more spicy.

     And it will do so just as long as ICE and police and the National Guard keep getting sent in to poke the bear.  This isn't subatomic rocket-brain physics; we know what started it.  We know what's keeping it going.  And you're either in there cheering on the spectacle or you're asking why the feds are still leaning on the throttle.  What's in it for them?  What's their endgame?

     Better look close.  This isn't war -- it's three-card monte.

Giant Dopes

      I am convinced the people helming the so-called "Artificial Intelligence" efforts don't understand how a Large Language Model works -- or they think that's all anyone is: a mechanism that, given a topic and general direction, is able to predict the most probable next words and phrases, over and over:

     "Our vision is that, over time, A.I. would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education." 

     That's Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s Vice President of Education.  She's talking about a contraption with no mechanism for distinguishing between truth and fiction, no sense of right and wrong, no notion of the difference between meaningful art and utter dreck.  This is not a matter of preferring Rodin to Picasso but of not understanding the distinction between the work of either of them and a mud pie -- or a cow pie.  The software knows nothing of pain or joy, truth or beauty, lies or horror.

     It's not that AI doesn't care; it's that there is nothing there to care.  The output may be telling you Jane Austin and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley were sisters, but it's not because the machine believes that: there's nothing inside it to do the believing.  It was just the most plausible sequence of words in response to your particular question at that particular point.  The haunting truth is there is no ghost in the machine.  And it appears that most "AI" executives believe there's no ghost of personhood inside anyone around them, either.

     Trained on plagiarized works, even the very best "AI" anyone has isn't doing anything more than coming up with the most likely logical and grammatically-correct sequence of words in response to a prompt.  It's an impressive feat, and I'd trust a good (and well-disciplined) AI to create a meeting transcript, or a top-of-the-line one to suss out whether I'd correctly employed the subjunctive (as if!).  But you cannot learn from them; they cannot be trusted to referee facts, let alone exercise judgment.

     It should be no more legal or socially acceptable for a private entity to build and make use of LLM "AI" in open-ended discourse, counseling or teaching than it is for a private company or individual to stockpile sarin gas or make their own nuclear weapons.

Watching The News

     I cannot help but think that it is not a good sign when a spat between two very powerful men over a piece of legislation neither one of them has a vote on dominates the headlines for an entire day.

     One of the two will, eventually, have the opportunity to say yea or nay to the entire bill, but until then?  They're both Just Some Guy; any American has a chance to write to or ring up the offices of their Senators and Representatives, and no one of us should have any louder a voice than the rest of us.

     Yeah, yeah, realpolitik admits it ain't that way and it never has been, but the field used to be at least a little bit flatter, and everyone pretended it was even more so than it was.  Now you can't even express an opinion without picking a prince.

     It's not a horse race and neither of the principals knows what he's doing when it comes to the national economy or the federal budget.  Watching them is like watching a couple of chimpanzees fighting with sledgehammers in a house under construction: sure, it's fascinating, but sooner or later, one or the other of them is going to knock out something load-bearing and it will all come tumbling down.

I'm Done Reaching Out

     There's no point to it.  No point in reaching out politically, the gulf is too wide; no point in reaching out professionally, since I have at most three and a half years to go; no point in reaching out personally because friends are a nearly universal disappointment (perhaps I have terrible judgement).  I'm happy to have congenial acquaintances, but no closer.

     No point in finding new places that stock the oddball stuff, much of it electronics, that interests me: the ones that haven't already closed are winding down.  The same is true for fiction magazines; what were once paying markets (and they do still try) are endless wells of financial need and to subscribe is to receive emails a few times a year, admitting things aren't going so well and inviting you to kick in a few bucks to keep the publisher going.  You'd have to be heartless (which I'm not) or wary of losing money (which I am, past a spare five I didn't need for lunch anyway) to turn away.

     The world I grew up in and became a functioning adult in was fading away before the pandemic, albeit with a little grace.  The pandemic and political turmoil upended it and what's left is mostly ruins.  I don't care for the world that is emerging from the wreckage and I am unwilling to spend the rest of my days weeping in the ashes of the past -- and so I am done reaching out.

     You people want to fuck up the world?  Great, get to it.  Go screw yourselves.  I'll be reading books I already own.

Context Stripping

     One of the things a news story should do, past "who, what, when, where, how," is provide context: a Mob hit done by running the victim over with a car may look just like a pedestrian struck down by a driver busy texting, but an English teacher from Springfield arguing online about WWE wrestlers who flattens an elderly shopper and a "button man" from Hoboken taking out a damaging witness with a stolen Caddy are not, in fact, the same story.

     Early coverage is going to be the same -- "[NAME] was killed at [TIME/DATE] by a hit and run driver while crossing [LOCATION] Street.  Police are seeking...."  Follow-up should tell readers/listeners/viewers more: what notable connections did the victim have to wider events? If the suspected driver is arrested, what is known about him and his circumstances? If he is charged, what are the charges?  Did accused killer and victim know one another?

     There are limits.  News stories aren't trials; you'll notice I wrote "accused killer" in the previous paragraph, not "murderer;" he or she will not be the latter unless they are charged and found guilty -- and in the case of the distracted wresting fan, "manslaughter" is the more likely charge.  Ledes (the first few sentences or opening paragraph) are generally written in neutral language.  It should not be so neutral that it obscures what happened: "Died following a shooting incident" is mealy-mouthed avoidance; the victim was shot and killed, presumably by the accused killer.  This kind of dancing around is most evident when police kill someone -- the facts are often not in much dispute, though circumstances may be murky, but the Press shies away from admitting that yes, sometimes the police kill people, in favor of passive-voice construction in which people are, somehow, killed.

     Of late, this kind of "exonerative" construction has been bleeding over into non-police killings; when a gay voice actor was shot and killed at the site of his family home, itself recently destroyed by fire, after what appear to have been months if not years of conflict with neighbors, news stories have carefully tiptoed around the situation; he's another person said to have "died following a shooting incident," as though a mistaken hunter or some wandering, self-animated firearm shot him, and not a guy from his street, presently in police custody.

     Maybe it's the influence of corporate attorneys, worried about lawsuits; maybe it's just lazy writing.  Maybe they're trying to avoid delving into what appears to be a complicated situation.  But I'm here to tell you, when a person is shot, someone's finger was on the trigger.  Maybe it was a distracted English teacher; maybe it was a hitman.  Maybe it was a homophobe shouting slurs or a hothead annoyed about late-night parties and beer bottles over the fence.  Whatever it was, those things are part of the story and the lede should at least put alleged fingers on real triggers, and not just float the gun in via a telekinetic poltergeist.  It's not too much to ask.

News Cycling

     I'm so tired of a news cycle that consists of "Crazy/extreme politician does something crazy" followed by "Mass violence and/or war crime," followed by "Crazy domestic politician clashes or communes with crazy foreign politician" replaced by "Crooked politician gets caught and/or commuted" followed by "Crazy politician(s) rattle sabers" followed by "New fighting in [site of long-term conflict]," on and on, all of it a sameness and very much in the mode of our always having been at war with (or in) Eastasia or Eurasia.

     Call me soft and sentimental, but I want a news cycle with headlines about curing cancer or an HIV vaccine (which we almost had, until the Feds decided to cut the budget and spend whatever was left on trainee plumbers), about Moon landings or progress on self-sustaining, controllable fusion reactions.  Not "Economy tanks because some nitwit pulled the wrong cord."

Nehemiah Scudder, Is That You?

     Indiana Governor Mike Braun, about as four-square a Trumpian politician as could be, a businessman with strong roots in traditional Indiana conservative Republicanism, didn't want him.  The state party insisted, and Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith was on the ticket in 2024.

     Mr. Beckwith is an unabashed Christian nationalist; as far as he's concerned, the rules of the Bible -- his faith's version of the Bible -- ought to be the laws of the land.*  And there he is, one notch away from the state's top executive office.

     When you get one of these fanatical fellows in high office, there's not a lot to be done other than watch them closely and sue if they get over the line.  They've got a tendency to overestimate the popularity of their positions and to overreach.

     In Indiana, there's a pretty good watchdog, and they publish what they observe.

     And Nehemiah Scudder?  He's always lurking.
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* Although, shockingly, that doesn't include just about all of the Old Testament stuff about what foods one should eat and how they should be prepared, or details like the prohibition on wearing cloth woven from two kinds of fiber.  Shrimp cocktail and polyester blends are still on the menu, boys!  Women making their own decisions, not so much.  The picking and choosing can be quite selective, and the end result has more in common with a fictionalized far-Right version of 19th-Century or 1950s America than Bible times.

And He's Out!

     Not Elon Musk, who is apparently promising to stop by the White House from time to time in the future and lend Mr. Trump's government his own special stink.  That's practically moot, like bums urinating into a five-alarm fire.

     Nope, the latest departure hadn't even arrived: Jared Isaacman, nominated by then-candidate Trump to be the next NASA Administrator, has been de-nominated after what the administration is calling "a thorough review of past associations."

     As oligarchs go, Isaacman's not an especially bad one: he's a sure-enough pilot, with over 7,000 hours of stick time and is qualified on many military jet fighters, a notoriously unforgiving class of aircraft: there are old fighter pilots and bad fighter pilots, but old, bad fighter pilots are as rare as the dodo.  And he's genuinely space-happy, funding and flying aboard commercial orbital missions.  With Washington picking zillionares for the top jobs, he'd be a natural for NASA, one even I could tolerate.

     So what happened?  Here's a hint: White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston has said, "It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda...."

     Just what did Isaacman do, you ask?  Support Hamas?  Hang out with agents of Red China?  Sneak in illegals to process credit card payments at his company, Shift4?  Cozy up to the Russians to buy MiGs at a discount?

     Um, no.  Open Secrets has the skinny: it seems the gazillionaire has been donating to Democrats at least as often as he has to Republicans, in keeping with America's time-honored tradition of letting rich men buy as many congenial politicians as they can afford.  In particular, he gave to state Democrat parties in Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2024, states with Democratic governors where the Republicans eked out a narrow Presidential victory.  That's too much Mr. Trump and company to bear, and so he's out, despite being reasonably well qualified, a close associate of Elon Musk and promising to go along with the Republican plans for NASA.  He'd've offered to rub red Huntsville, Alabama mud in his navel on stage during that city's Oktoberfest,* if that's what the job required.

     It wasn't enough.  The Party, like its many authoritarian predecessors, requires total commitment; hedging one's bets is grounds for expulsion.

     They'll name someone else for the job, possibly Marco Rubio or Stephen Miller.  Back to the Moon?  I wouldn't bet on it.  And it gets worse: they've hacked severely at NASA's budget.  Goodbye, Moon!
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* Oh yes they do.  You're surprised?  After all those paperclips?  The references to FTL travel via "Gobau-Heim-Droscher space" over at I Work On A Starship didn't happen for no reason, though I don't think any of them got recruited for U. S. rocketry.

Progress

     I'm probably done editing the short story that was recently accepted for an anthology.  The editors were kind to it, except for one change that was -- how shall I put it? -- based on a misunderstanding of Indiana law.

     We straightened it out without friction, which is a great relief.  I sent in the author bio and some background material and that's that. 

Year After Year

     Birthdays hit me hard.  They have done so for years.  I had one not too long ago and I'm in a funk I can't shake.

     Economic and political uncertainty has bollixed my retirement plans.  Better now than once I'm out the door, but I'm not happy about it.  I had started some non-work involvements, on the idea that while I was a little overstressed now, things would ease up when I had fewer responsibilities.

     That day will probably never come.  As things stand, I'm very likely going to have to keep working as long as I can work, at a job that is considerably less fun than it once was; I'm just one of a dwindling number of good gray techies in a vast corporation, doing whatever good (or bad; the corporation doesn't care) gray work comes along.

     So I need to think about cutting excess, probably starting with writing fiction and being in writer's clubs.  The writing is fun, but unless you're Stephen King or one of a very few others, it doesn't pay.  The clubs are stressful for me, but are a partial substitute for the companionship my work no longer provides.  Thing is, I don't actually need it, and the kind of friends you have to pay money to hang around with are not, in fact, actual friends.  They're just fellow customers.

     This mood will probably pass, but the feeling of being about to go over Niagara Falls in a woefully underequipped barrel will not.  I'm starting to see what Twain and Mencken were getting at.

The Former Voice Of What Still Calls Itself America Is Winding Down

     If you were a radio-minded kid in the 1970s -- and I certainly was -- the shortwave presence of the Voice of America was impossible to miss.  Impartial but patriotic, the government-run (but largely independent) international broadcaster was a massive operation and you could scarcely spin the dial without tuning across their powerful signals on multiple frequencies.

     The VOA newsroom was first-rate.  They tended to report positive stories, without shying away from uncomfortable truths.  VOA reporters were respected throughout the free world, feared and hated by autocrats.

     In recent years, shortwave broadcasting has scaled back nearly everywhere, and VOA was no exception, transitioning to Internet delivery and, in countries where it was permitted, local FM stations.  The Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station in North Carolina was the last transmitter site VOA owned and operated. It was shut down this past March and the nature of big shortwave transmitters is such that if they are sitting cold, all the way off, it will be a major effort to ever make the site operational again.

     There are still plenty of shortwave transmitting installations around the world, and many of them are for hire; the loss of transmitter sites is hardly the end.  The heart of the Voice of America is their newsroom, which has been laboring under budget cuts.  The most recent were the most drastic; some 700 employees remain on the payroll and they are now waiting for the ax to fall.

     US Agency for Global Media (the Federal agency that oversees VOA) Special Advisor Kari Lake -- yes, that Kari Lake -- has floated plans to source news from the right-wing One America News Network for distribution through VOA's online network.

     The damage being done to our country -- and our country's international influence -- is generational.  It will not be repaired quickly, if it ever is.

     This is typical of the Trump administration; you can take the part for the whole, and be assured that as Trumpism runs its course, our country will be left impoverished, morally, culturally, intellectually and financially.  Many of the perpetrators will move on afterward, untouched and wealthy almost beyond measure, leaving a corporal's guard of saps and patsys to take the blame.  Kari Lake will probably be among them, but she is much more symptom than cause.

Three Branches

     Oh, that James Madison, how he did worry about the ways in which a government could get out of control:
     "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
     You'll find that gem in The Federalist Papers No. 47, in which Madison fisks theories of democratic government as put into practice in some detail, with particular attention to the separation of powers.

     The History Channel has a quicker read on the subject, with only a little handwavium.

     Either way, it's worth a review, especially against the backdrop of a President who claimed to West Point's graduating class, "We won everything.  [...]*  We had a great mandate and it gives us the right to do what we wanna do to make our country great again."

     Presidents do not, in fact, have the right to whatever they want to do, no matter their motive; the powers of the President of the United States, like the powers of our national legislature and of our Federal courts, are circumscribed by our Constitution and each is balanced against the powers of the other two branches.  That's how it works.  Those are the rules, and if you kick over the table, what you are left with is not the United States as created by the American Revolution and codified by our Constitution, but some other thing, an illegitimate and malformed accumulation of powers, "the very definition of tyranny."
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* I left something out: he said, "We won 2,750 districts against 505, 2,750 against 505."  It's a number from thin air.  That's not how Presidential election results are tallied.  Yes, he won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, but this number is neither of them, and the total does not square with the number of counties and their equivalent in the U.S.

About Those Tariffs...

     The U.S. Court of International Trade is saying "Whoa, Nellie!" to nearly all of President Trump's Executive impositions of tariffs; the trade court says that power is not actually within any President's remit, at least not under the present circumstances.  (Presidents do still get to impose tariffs on imported cars, steel and aluminum, thanks to a different piece of legislation.)

     It's a safe bet the decision will be appealed, and I'm not sure where it goes from here, Federal Appeals Court or right to the U. S. Supreme Court, but it will go, and so the matter is still far from resolved. (Update: it goes to an appeals court, barring a request to skip steps.)

     I didn't see this one coming.  Like perhaps many of you, I didn't even know we had a Court of International Trade.  But the plaintiffs knew it was there.  It was their ox being gored, and that's how it works: you files your lawsuit and you takes your chances.  I'm not entirely satisfied with AP story I linked to; it's a little shallow.  But it has links to more info, and you don't have to register or pay to read it.

     Note, too, the the White House has hinted it might be spoiling for a showdown with the Judicial Branch.  This ruling by an obscure court on a matter that has been in the news for weeks might fill the bill.  In that case, all bets are off.

They Blew Up Another One

     SpaceX has a lousy record so far with their Starship rockets.  They keep blowing up.  They do appear to be blowing up in a different way each time, so that's something.

     On social media, it's easy to find people fretting over the damage these huge machines must be causing every time they fail, and wondering who is footing the bill for that harm.  The answer isn't simple, but it breaks down into two parts:
     1. Launch damage: This is the most predictable (assuming the rocket doesn't blow up on the pad or shortly after launch) and does a lot of harm -- especially the first launch, done before the water-deluge system had been installed, a self-own by Mr. Musk that remains largely inexplicable and which rained chunks of concrete and more across the launch area.  Payment was mostly via Federal fines and "on lawsuit" for everyone, at least until Elon Musk buddied up with the present boss of the FAA, EPA and other alphabet agencies; now, well, good luck in court.
     2. Re-entry damage: once again, payment on lawsuit, though in what court?  The good news is that there's very little in the way of exotic materials in those rockets, other than carbon-fiber wrappings around high-pressure tanks. It's mostly stainless steel, oxygen and methane, and the primary danger is if big pieces fall on persons or property.  SpaceX is a little more careful about launch and flight trajectories than the People's Republic of China, who let expended boosters and expired satellites fall where they may, and the American company's LOX and methane is considerably more safe than the damn near nerve gas of UMDH and nitrogen tetroxide the PRC uses.  Nevertheless, pieces fall unpredictably when rockets fail and it's difficult to shrug off as the price of progress if you happen to be underneath them.

     These big rockets are not quite Cyril Kornbluth's The Rocket of 1955, and I find myself less and less of a fan of Mr. Musk based on his abrasive personality and extreme politics, but they are fundamentally different to the Saturn series of boosters they superficially resemble: NASA put men on the Moon by hand-tightening every mine-to-installation-tracked bolt with teams of engineers and scientists checking each step, and then triple-checking the checks.  Dogged by the tragedy of "Apollo 1," well aware that failure could hand Moon-race victory to the Soviet Union, no expense was spared -- and they still nearly lost Apollo 13 after a string of successes.  Compared to every element of a Saturn, the Starship is a passenger car -- or a commercial airliner: built on assembly line, in volume, and intended to be a "big, dumb booster" supporting a high launch rate.  It's a giveaway calendar* with 4-color process decorative scenes for every month, up against NASA's old hand-painted masterpieces -- and SpaceX is essentially the model for every other company making launchers in the U. S., including NASA's current subcontractors.  Nobody can afford the kind of painstaking effort that went into the first series of Moon rockets; it's unsustainable.

     Starships are going to keep on blowing up until they get them right or Elon Musk and his investors run out of money, politics and personalities bedamned.

     Update: On the other hand, maybe Starship is The Rocket of 1955, only scaled for maximum return.  I don't have enough design development background to evaluate this article, but it doesn't look great.  Infuriating if true.  There was supposed to be a Lunar base by now, something on the order of an Antarctic research station and instead, what have we got?  Plagiarism robots that tell lies and make bad art?  Pfui! 
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* Who remembers those?

It's Memorial Day

     It's a day to remember fallen military personnel.  Many of them -- not all of them -- young, most of them -- not all of them -- male.

     War falls hardest on the most vulnerable.  We think of women, children and the elderly, but so, too are the "tip of the spear," the ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen sent or swept into battle.  Presidents and Generals make their plans far removed from the fighting (and for good reason).  Those who fight and those who die are nearly always from the lower ranks, the bulk of them not career military; the man next door, the kid from across the street.  They may not have a deep grasp of the issues at hand in the conflict, and even if they did, nobody's asking their opinion.  They served.  They fought.  Some of them didn't come back.

     Don't forget them.  Don't lose sight of the ideals they fought and died for.  They could have been you, your father, your brother, your child.

I Don't Want To Do That Again

     The plan was simple: get up an hour early, head downtown to work early, snag one of the "privacy rooms" on the second floor (rarely in use on a weekend) and use Guest Wi-Fi to do my critique group meeting (this is allowed) before clocking in.

     Because of the parade, I needed to come in from the west and talk my way past a police barricade to get into the parking lot, same as every parade day.  Thanks to the sprawling Methodist/IU hospital complex, the interstate and the river, there aren't a lot of southbound options west of Meridian Street -- Capitol Avenue is the only one that really works.

     I was running late. Capital was unexpectedly closed north of 16th St.  I weaved around, got into a construction dead end and had to double back to Capitol.  The police car near work was unoccupied, and I sneaked past it, into the parking lot, gathered my stuff, hurried upstairs and set up.  Comes nine o'clock and there's nobody.  Uh-oh.

     Opened my personal email to find several notes from group members asking after the meeting link.  I had carefully scheduled the virtual meeting and saved the invitation in a text file, a week ago Wednesday, then sent out a group message with the deadline for manuscripts.

     Unfortunately, I had failed to include the saved invitation with that message and never checked the copy I send to myself specifically for making such checks.  I hurriedly sent the link out to everyone, and by 9:10, everyone had checked in.  But it made for a poor start and I was pretty rattled.  I managed to get through the meeting; it ran late, but I still had plenty of time before work.  I packed my stuff up, went downstairs and looked over the position where I thought I'd be working.

     There was no information about the task at hand.  Nothing in my work email.  I checked the setup for some other things -- all lined up, ready to go -- and sat there, wondering, until the phone rang.  My boss.

     "Um, boss, what exactly am I supposed to be doing?  There's nothing here."
     "Oh, right.  We're running it all from [a different area, with different hardware].  You'll need to get over there and I'll call you." (The same phone number rings at both locations.)

     I double-timed over and still didn't beat the next call.  He gave me a quick talk-though while I grabbed a notebook and wrote frantically.  I was basically a human "break glass in emergency:" if the connection failed, I was there to switch to a backup, using an unfamiliar interface.  There were a few other things to check and monitor, but that was the main job; the rest of it was run at the point of origin or by remote control from far away.

     Traffic was still heavy when the event wrapped up several hours latter.  I killed time until driving was easier, then went home and promptly fell asleep.

     Last year, this was almost as much a challenge.  Next year, I'm either rescheduling the critique group or having someone else chair the May meeting.

"It Only Gets Worse If You Pick At It"

     I don't know if the title statement is true when it comes to politics, but yesterday's news was depressing overall, with further government strongarming of universities; the United States Supreme Court strongly implying the independence of some Federal agencies explicitly set up by Congress as independent agencies might not, in fact, be all that free from Executive Branch meddling; Congress set to cut food assistance for poor families, Medicaid and Medicare; juvenile taunts from the Secretary of Homeland Security on social media over a serious court case; the President lending a ready ear (and a lovely dinner) to billionaire top buyers of his personal memecoin; on and on and on....  I want to look away but it's too worrisome to ignore.

     Picking at it doesn't fix it quickly and it's not as if this stuff was not playing out in the headlines and on video almost everywhere you look.  I understand that a certain percentage of my nominal peers still think it's all hilarious.  President Lyndon Johnson explained to a young Bill Moyers, when the latter wondered why so many white Southerners were willing to vote against what Moyers thought were their own best interests, "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you."

     The key concept there is not so much race, though that's an easy handle for politicians to grab, but the last part: "Give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."  Undocumented migrants, protesting students (especially if they're here on a visa) LGBTQ people (particularly if they stand out) and anyone who can be portrayed as a "DEI hire."*  All seen as lesser by many Trumpists in office and in voting booths.  All seen as people they can look down on, and there's nothing that makes a person feel tall like looking down.

     Eventually it comes home to roost.  Your unemployed cousin suddenly can't get food stamps, and shows up at your door with a new baby and three hungry toddlers.  Grandma's out-of-pocket costs for medical treatment go way up.  The Executive Branch pulls out the wrong Jenga piece and the economy takes a big tumble.  And maybe a significant number of voters will reappraise their choices when that happens.  On the other hand, maybe they'll decide all the things that have been happening simply haven't been enough, and doing more of the same, harder, is the cure.

     Picking at it won't make it better, but it's already certain to leave a scar.
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* I take that one personally.  I had a boss -- not the one who hired me and certainly not my present boss -- who loved implying the only reason I had my job was to improve the Engineering department's demographics on EEO reports.  In fact, I had been hired --- and they were glad to get me -- because the station couldn't keep its main transmitter on the air for more than week at a stretch and the 1950s backup transmitter was inoperable.  It had been a long, difficult slog of years of repairs and learning to get them to where the main was reliable and the all-tubes backup did, at least, work, and I damned well resented a man who hadn't even worked for the station at the time claiming I was only there because I had tits.  I still resent it.

Nope, Nope, Nope

     Looks like another thumb-headed goon is up for promotion; there's word that Trumpist hatchetman Emil Bove is being considered for appointment to Judgeship in a Federal Appeals Court.  He may be best known for stepping up to push through the deal with NYC Mayor Eric Adams that resulted in about a dozen DOJ lawyers connected to the case resigning over ethics concerns.  Most of the lawyers who bailed rather than playing along were old-school GOP conservatives, too.

     If there was ever a time for a home-state Senator to exercise the privilege of nixing a judicial nominee, this would be it.  This man should not be a Federal judge.

No Kings, No Masters

     I haven't written much about politics recently and it's not because I think it doesn't matter.  Politics can shove a stick in your spokes like nothing short of war or famine.  From your neighborhood association through the Feds, There Be Dragons.

     But the political dichotomy is a deep and possibly unbridgeable partisan divide.  You either think the President and his Administration are wise patriots out to save the country, or you think they're a pack of flakes, fools and crooks with authoritarian and often theocratic inclinations.  Whatever your opinion, it is deeply felt, and there's no reasoning a person out of an emotional conviction.

     Me, I'm skeptical of concentrations of power, no matter who holds it.  I'm skeptical of allowing narrowly-defined religious dogma to determine laws for civil society -- or allowing any other dogma to make the rules.  Government is a big tent; to work for all of us, it's got to have a lot of extra room and a certain degree of stretch.  An unpublished comment pointed to my quoting "What all men own, no man owns" as "the reason why communism doesn't work," but that's only a theoretical reason: that kind of communal-property communism has never been practiced past the scale of a self-selected commune, a few hundred people at most, chipping the good dinnerware, abusing tools and leaving the toilet unscrubbed.  At the nation-state level, communism fails because it gives individual men too much power and too little accountability -- Mao and Stalin might not have lived like kings, but they could wave their arm and set sweeping agricultural policy or put vast industrial efforts in motion; hunger and privation for ordinary folk usually followed.  The difference between them and Louis XVI or George III is little more than details of vocabulary, wardrobe and furniture.

     And the difference between that and the Wilsonian "Unitary Executive" our President and his people are implementing is only a little greater, especially as more and more of the Federal government is shoved willy-nilly under the unitary umbrella or smashed into irrelevance.   The non-department tagged "DOGE" has attempted to push its way into the Government Accountability Office, which is under the Legislative Branch, not the Executive; DOGE also tried to embed a team at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, established by Congress decades ago as an independent corporation outside of government control (including DOGE) -- Congress was wary of even the appearance of setting up a state-run broadcaster in the manner of some kingdom or "dictatorship of the proletariat."  Other Executive tentacles are still reaching out, seeking, grasping.

     No kings, please.  Not even kings in a plain uniform or a business suit.  We haven't needed one in nearly 250 years and we don't need one now.

Schedule Conflict

     Found out yesterday that I am scheduled to work Saturday morning, a shift starting about a half-hour after the online meeting of the critique group I chair ends.

     This wouldn't be much of a problem on a regular day -- but where I'll be working is inside the perimeter for the Indianapolis 500 Festival Parade!*  My employer's building is right there on Meridian St. and you have to sweet-talk your way past the police to traverse a closed side street in order to reach the parking lot.  Traffic is busy and I'd never get there in time.

     The answer, of course, is to go in early, having begged permission from the boss to borrow one of the "quiet rooms" set up for the open-office folks on the second floor.  This should get me past the officer on roadblock duty before he or she has quite reached the boiling point of frustration and might even provide a head start on a busy workday.

     Of course, I'll probably have to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get ready for work, make coffee, gather everything for the meeting, pack my lunch, etc. but I knew it would be extra effort when I volunteered.  Ah, the glamor of showbiz!  The glamor of the literary life!
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* It is one of the largest holiday parades in the U.S., after the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, CA.  Those two are huge and the numbers fall off rapidly for the remainder, but it's not small.

Split Response

     One one hand, it's so good to be home, in a house where I built most of the furniture, where things are where I expect them and I can reach the nightstand from my bed without feeling as if I'm about to plunge to the floor.

     On the other hand, I have so much to do!  I'm struck again by the realization that I am a terrible housekeeper; to call my home "bohemian" is a grave insult to the good people of Bohemia, even the slovenly ones.

     No time like the present, I suppose, and when it's all a mess, I can start anywhere.

Not A Navigator

     While I have a little bit of a sense of direction -- I usually know which direction is north -- my memory of maps and routes has a tendency to become mirror-imaged, flipping east and west or, less often, north and south.  And once I'm off my mental map, I tend to fret.

     So the ability to get directions from Google Maps, and then smartphones that do the same thing only out loud and on the fly, has been a real help.  Software, however, is only as good as the questions we ask of it, and when I left for my in-factory class on Monday, I slipped up: I told my phone to take me to the destination city, and not the specific hotel where I had reservations.

     I left late, and drove mostly in a clear patch with storm clouds all around, perhaps one of the best ways to travel wide-open agricultural spaces: the sky was spectacular, anvil-shaped thunderheads lit from below, cream-colored against deep blue, ragged purple scarves flowing across turquoise; distant lighting flashing from slate-colored clouds or illuminating them from within, and as sunset approached, a thin spot in the storm allowed a pinkish-orange streak across the western sky.  It was stunning.

     It was also distracting.  The sun set while I was still on the road and my poor night vision combined with intermittent oncoming traffic meant 65 mph was about as fast as I could go without feeling like I was overrunning my headlights.  I still had fifteen miles or more to travel.  A mile away from an exit to a state highway, my phone told me to take it, and reminded me again as I got closer.  "EXIT NOW!"  So I did.  Clever phone, it knows all the shortcuts, right?

     The highway angled off and downhill, in what felt like the right direction.  The city I was headed for is along a large river, with hills and bluffs to the east.  With plenty of curves and a 45 mph limit, the two-lane highway led me through the dark, past a few small businesses, through intersections with a house or store, and up the river valley.  I sensed more than felt an increasing bulk off to my right, and as I rounded a long curve, bright streetlights illuminated what looked like a castle wall with a pair of gates on that side of the highway: the huge entrance and exit of an underground quarry!

     Various industrial areas got thicker on either side and I started to worry.  I was well behind schedule, and this didn't look like hotel territory!  Factories and refineries gave way to warehouses, gas stations and corner stores; my phone directed me to turn among larger and newer buildings.  A couple of blocks more put me in downtown, about the time restaurants were closing.  "YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION," my phone announced.

     The hell I had.  I found a parking spot, fished my phone out of the cup holder and had a look, realizing for the first time that I had told it to take me to the city, not my hotel.  I corrected that and, a mere six and a half miles, ten stoplights and an increasingly protesting bladder later, reached my hotel.

     Check-in was refreshingly brisk, my luggage had somehow become unreasonably heavy along the way, and my room was comfortable, cool and inviting.  Especially the modern plumbing.  While I don't sleep well in hotel rooms -- the beds are too big, too soft and too high -- that night, I claimed every hour of the eight I had earned, entirely zonked out.

Got Back Home Yesterday Evening

     Of course, I managed to get lost on the way home: got off the interstate and turned south to pick up the county road that eventually becomes Kessler Avenue.  Too bad it was north of me.  Drove into Indianapolis on 38th Street instead, only a couple of miles farther south than intended.

      I had occasion to drive near a few large windpower farms twice over the past week, and I have to tell you, Don Quixote could be onto something: the windmills might indeed be giants.  They just might.  The darned things almost look alive.  The blowing wind is a free gift, and we'd be fools if we didn't put it to a little work along the way.

I Took A Break

     I am finishing up a week of intensive training on some fancy hardware for work, and it hasn't left a lot of energy for anything else.  It's been a long time since I last had this kind of "brain upload," both easier (no tests!) and more demanding (a lot of highly specific information in a very short time) than a college-level class.

     A fair amount of my education has come this way.  There's a lot to be learned -- if you pay attention.

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     On politics, I don't have any insights.  I'm just watching it like everyone else.  For me it's like being a block away, watching two trains headed towards one another, unable to prevent the crash, hardly able to look away and wondering if I'm far enough back to avoid personal harm.  Probably not.  Probably none of us are.  Maybe it's an illusion, maybe the crash won't happen, but "maybe" is nowhere good enough.

Is This America In 2025?

     Committee To Protect Journalists: "Trump’s first 100 days portend long-lasting damage to press freedom."  More than mere portents.

     New York Post, and a zillion other news outlets: "President Trump is set to receive a “flying palace” Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar’s royal family, which he will use as Air Force One." But don't worry, folks, DOJ says it's totally not a violation of the Emoluments Clause and couldn't possibly be mistaken for a bribe -- even though it's entailed to be donated to Mr. Trump's Presidential Library after it's done serving as Air Force One.  Just a fill-in until Boeing finishes the real replacement Air Force One, some time in...well, it's way overdue and they aren't sure.

     ICE agents making raids with their faces and badges covered -- or no badges at all; the Executive Branch wanting to suspend habeas corpus; gold and more gold in the Oval Office; FEMA trimmed down to almost nothing; cranks and quacks running HHS and subsidiary agencies.  What are we doing?  What are we allowing to be done?

Kinda Slacked Today

     I spent the day on housework, laundry -- and slow-roasting four lightly marinated thick pork chops in a covered pan on the grill, with apple, turnip, carrots, onion, celery, a few cherry tomatoes, canned mild chilis, a couple of pickled Piparra peppers, fresh red, yellow, orange and green bell peppers and a half-dozen Shishito peppers.  Once it was pretty well cooked down, I added a half-dozen each sliced Castlevetrano and Kalamata olives, a tablespoon of capers and small jar of vegetable-heavy spaghetti sauce.

     The pork chops had a little time in a mixture of soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar, ginger, garlic and a little Cajun seasoning ahead of cooking.  The turnip got a dusting of smoked paprika.

     Cooking took three hours.  The meat fell off the bone, tender and moist.

An Organization Not Known For Surprise; Numbers That Will Remain Officially Unknown

     So the new Pope is an American by birth, though he most recently spent many years serving in Peru.  Like his predecessor, the first Pope from the New World, he is likely to bring a different perspective to his Church.  Nevertheless, and despite wild talk of the political leanings of the man, bear in mind that his Church has lasted longer than even the most generous read of the lifespan of the Roman Empire, and that as a result, it is institutionally conservative in a way few (if any) other organizations even come close to.

     Don't get pulled into the speculation.  This was a routine (if major) event, one that has happened many times before.
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     Elsewhere, the Trump Administration has announced they will no longer be determining, sharing or tracking the price tag of damage done by large-scale natural disasters.  Combined with an ongoing push to diminish the the role and functions of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), this might have the effect of minimizing the impact of news about such disasters, and possibly reducing voluntary contributions -- except, of course, that insurance companies (and many state governments) gather such data, share it with one another and often release it publicly; also "if it bleeds, it leads" in news coverage, and nothing bleeds headline ink and newscast opening video like a big disaster.

     Hurricane season, tornado season and wildfire season will be interesting this year.  Pretending a thing isn't there doesn't make it go away.  Never has, never will.

Why Not Let 'Em Be?

     If you're not Catholic, what do you care about who will be elected Pope?  If you are Catholic, the Cardinals will let you know when they settle on someone.

     It's not a horse race.  It's not even like electing a Speaker of the House of Representatives.  They'll get it done, in much the same way they have been since 1492.  It's not the World Series, and if you have bet on the outcome, I don't want to hear about it.

Civics Review

     A comment yesterday -- unpublished so I can address it here on the "front page" -- argued that the President is being frustrated by the courts in the faithful execution of his job:

     "...[T]he Executive can no longer fulfill Constitutional duties because Judicial Branch, particularly district courts, keep blocking his attempts.

     "The President is to faithfully execute the law as defined by the Legislative Branch, but it seems that the Judiciary and Democrats disagree."

     It's an interesting take, and I'll bet if you tuned the radio/TV dial and trawled the Web down the right-hand side of the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart, you'd find it repeated -- but it's got some problems.

     First and foremost, the three branches of the Federal government are supposed to get in each other's way.  It's that "checks and balances" thing you might remember from high school Civics or American Government class.  I hope you remember it -- an awful lot of talking heads in the media ignore it when they don't get the outcome they prefer.  If a law (or other Federal action) gets jammed up with any one branch, it can be stymied.  It might not be; but the Framers, well aware of how badly a powerful government can mess people up, were not at all shy about designing a system that offered many opportunities to reconsider.

     Second, "law as defined by the Legislative Branch" is one thing -- and Executive Orders are quite another.  And that other thing is not being laws.  Point to any specific Federal laws the current President is enforcing: nearly all of his high-profile moves have been based on his own Executive Orders instead.  The 119th Congress has been historically passive, enacting four (4) laws so far -- and that includes the one they had to pass to keep Federal paychecks from bouncing.

     Third, while Congress writes the laws -- and, ideally, writes them so clearly their meaning is unmistakable,* when issues of interpretation arise, it's up to the Judicial Branch to try to dope out what Congress meant: the courts define the law, not Congress.†

     Fourth, "it seems that the Judiciary and Democrats disagree," pretty much defines both why we have three branches of our Federal government and the role of opposition parties: they're there to disagree.  If the point intends to take aim at Federal judges appointed by Democratic Presidents, I have bad news for you: a significant number of the judges standing up to potentially unlawful or unconstitutional actions by the Trump administration were appointed by Republican Presidents -- including Mr. Trump himself.  The law is the law, the facts are the facts, and judges are reasonably expected to take a logical, dispassionate look at them.  Will they nevertheless tend to worry more about people caught up in the gears, or about the orderly workings of enforcement, or any number of other angles?  Probably; they're human beings.  But we expect them to make a solid try at getting it right.  And if their decision is the Executive didn't play by the rules, well, there you go.

     Look, there's a name for a system of government in which the guy in charge makes his own laws, sends armed minions to enforce them and expects the courts to condone his and their actions while nobody dares say boo, but it's not a democracy or a republic.  It's an old, old system, one the Ancient Greeks kept falling into and Rome threw over until it crept back nearly five centuries later.  It's a system Europe suffered under for centuries, and one that oppressed the American colonies until we stood up and kicked the King's men out.  Why are you so hot to bring it back?
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* Ha!  If there's one thing every Senator and Member of the House is good at, it's obfuscation.  When they send vacation postcards, you can't even figure out where they went.  Then there's the little matter of lobbyists handing out suggested draft legislation, like high school students with bootleg Cliff Notes....
 
† This is an oversimplification.  In practice, Congress often sets goals for the various Departments, Commissions, Bureaus and Agencies, and they in turn proceed to write regulations.  In the past, the courts have generally given considerable deference to what those entities have written and promulgated, but this arrangement is under increasing challenge.  Broadly, the courts decide -- and they may find themselves doing a lot more deciding in the future.

Maybe There Should Be Some Penalty Lines

     I'm starting to believe there are some lines that, if crossed, should cause a politician to be summarily stripped of office and tossed out into the street.

     It would be a high bar, foundational stuff, like refusing to admit the basic, Constitutionally-protected rights of citizens and residents of the United States.

     The U. S. Constitution is not an obscure or tricky document; while the language is a little archaic, it was written before lawyers had really polished the art of building in wiggle room and clever traps.  And it was written by a group of men who were not entirely all lawyers, and who were uniformly concerned with having the thing make sense and hold up* over time.

     When a President -- any President -- is asked if he is supposed to uphold the Constitution and his reply is that he doesn't know, he's got to check with his lawyers, that ought to result in immediate disqualification from office.  It should be a red card.  The requirement is right there in the oath of office publicly sworn by all Presidents:
     "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
     There isn't anything in it that needs to be parsed by a member of the bar.  Pretending otherwise is just bad-boss BS, the same as when you are promoted, negotiate your new salary with your boss, and when that first paycheck arrives, it's ten percent short.  You go to the boss, and his immediate response is, "Oh, Corporate trimmed it.  Tough luck.  It's not like we had anything in writing."  The Presidential oath of office is in writing -- and the swearing or affirmation of it by incoming Presidents is preserved on film, tape or electronically, as far back as we have had such media.

     Alas, there is no such automatic penalty clause, and Presidents inclined to dissemble and evade their clear duty do so with impunity -- and to our and the nation's peril.
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* Many of them became pessimistic about the results of their efforts in later years -- and not a one worried they had given the President too little power, or made too great an effort to protect the rights of The People.