Sometimes....

     Some days, it's not worth turning the TV or radio on.  The news gets stranger and stranger.  The Feds lay off a few thousand more people every day, most of them doing jobs that need doing, and we'll find out which ones were essential the hard way, when airplanes fall out of the sky, severe weather forecasts are screwed up, TB cases soar worldwide and famine spreads.

     All those things come home to roost, even when it's people starving and falling ill in far-off, distant lands: hunger leads inevitably to unrest, unrest to radicalism; disease can circle the globe in months, as we only recently experienced.  Other effects are more immediate -- I hope you've already filed your taxes and received a refund, because the IRS is laying off many of their tax-season hires, the people who were helping to process returns and talk to puzzled taxpayers among them.

     I've got my own Uncle Sam worries, the least of which is renewing my ham radio license.  There are a few weeks before that window opens -- you've got ninety days before the expiration date and, if memory serves, two years after -- and I'll be using one of the commercial services for it, just as soon as I can.  If you've got fed.gov stuff to get done, from Social Security and Medicare to pilot and maritime certification, better get it done now, because the public-facing jobs at most of these agencies and departments are often entry-level, and those jobs are shrinking fast.

     Maybe it'll all be just fine.  But when the inspiration-if-not-official-head of the Federal job-cutters makes a joke out of "little mistakes" like cutting funds for ebola suppression and treatment, hah ha hah, don't think your corner of fed.whatever is going to be immune.  It's not.

     Things are not going to get better soon.