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! 
_______________________
* 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.
______________________
* 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.

---

     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.
---
     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.

Turbo-Dopey Authoritarianism

     The thing about rule by edict is, it'll make your head spin.  Take news about the news -- four days ago, the White House put Federal funding for PBS and NPR in the crosshairs, by telling the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting (of which the President is, literally, by statute, not their boss) to stop sending them money, and by telling the affiliate stations they cannot use their CPB funding to pay "membership fees" or individual programming fees to the networks.

     The first is no big deal; NPR, long in the culture-wars spotlight, has spent decades weaning themselves from Federal largesse, receiving just 1% of their budget from that source.  PBS counts on the Feds for somewhere north of 10%  of their funding.  But the second strikes deep: the smallest NPR and PBS affiliates rely on CPB money to stay on the air -- and their network membership fees are among their largest single expenses.  New York City and Indianapolis will have plenty of NPR and PBS on their air; Bushwhack, Alaska and Back-of-Beyond, Montana may end up with 24/7 polka music or nothing but static.  Many of the small-town and rural stations have only one or two people on staff, and spend a lot of time "riding the network" with nobody at the controls.  Don't like what you hear?  Spin the dial; you'll tune back during local bad weather or natural disaster.

     And here's the kicker, in two parts:
     1. The EO is titled, "ENDING TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZATION OF BIASED MEDIA" and complains "...that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens."  I don't know if any news media manage a hundred percent unbiased objectivity, but those two give it an honest try, and differentiate between news and opinion.  The Ad Fontes chart puts both of them not too far from the middle politically and rates them high on accuracy; NPR's News Now podcast, which consists of nothing but the same five-minute hourly newscasts you hear on the radio, comes in nearly at top dead center.
     2. Five days ago, the Trump Administration launched "White House Wire," a Federally-funded, White House run website devoted to positive coverage of Mr. Trump and his Executive Branch, modeled on news and opinion sites: it is wall-to-wall taxpayer-subsidized biased media.  How does the PBS/NPR EO put it?  Oh, yes, "At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage." Y'don't say?  But websites are different?  I doubt that.

     Do one or do the other, and it's pretty much politics as usual.  In a free society, the correct comeback to speech you don't like is to speak up yourself; through most of my life, Republicans have chafed at having to foot some of the bill for Sesame Street and All Things Considered and tried to skip out without paying.   But doing both at the same time?  Mr. Trump and his gang have not just murdered irony and left it bleeding out in a gutter, they are enthusiastically violating the corpse and sharing selfies of the process.

"What All Men Own, No Man Owns"

     The problem with shared resources in a workplace is, they're shared.  Tools, for example, are often subject to loss or abuse.  People use them and leave them wherever they were working -- or, if they are diligent and frustrated, they hoard company tools, piling them up on their desks or in a drawer.

     At one time, I had a coworker who would lock up miniature side cutters and needlenose pliers in his desk.  It worked well for him, but over the course of a month, every available set of small diagonal cutters and needlenoses would vanish into his custody, and you'd have to remind him that the other kids occasionally fixed stuff, too, and would he please return his accumulation to the marked drawers in the toolbox?

     Another coworker would complain bitterly about how nobody ever bothered to put tools away -- and walk out at the end of his day, leaving the workbench littered with tools he had used.  Asked about it, his reasoning was that if no one else returned them, why should he?

     I don't know.  Nor is is my job to hector people about their habits.  Frustrated by the ebb and flow, one of my first projects was to sort out, organize and label the toolboxes at my employer's various sites.  Finding the right screwdriver should not require checking every single drawer!  Over the past 37-plus years, I have bought my own personal tools for work, especially after the day I arrived with a relatively urgent project all planned out -- and found every one of the specialized crimping tools I needed for video cable had been taken across town to rewire a location used twice a year.  But I also routinely put away any tools I find lingering on the workbenches and elsewhere -- not because I'm such a wonderfully superior person or in an attempt to inspire anyone else but because it increases the odds, however slightly, that if I do need something from the company toolbox,* it'll be there. (At home, I am sloppier about this -- after all, it's just me, and why would I hide stuff from myself?  Yesterday's blog post illustrates how poorly that can work out.)

     Other than the basics (screwdrivers, pliers, diagonal cutters), there's not a lot of overlap between my work and my home stuff.  The plier-driver-and-knives multitool I carry every day (a Wave) covers most simple tasks, with a "green tweaker" analog† handy in my purse.  My work toolbag includes two kinds of tin snips, video coax cable strippers and crimpers, soft-jaw channel-lock pliers to loosen stuck connectors, a compact "drive everything" Wadsworth Falls toolkit (I'm not sure what's up with them these days) and a modern "Yankee" type push screwdriver (they are incredibly handy, subbing for power screwdrivers; recent ones use 1/4" hex drives, so driver bits and small drills that fit them are readily available).  I rely on work for wrenches (too heavy for the small amount of use they get), nutdrivers other than 1/4" and 5/16", and power tools.  In my very first radio job, the station manager was of the opinion that an engineer who was worth a darn would have their own tools (and he was cheapskate enough to not want to buy any from the station budget).  The lesson I took from that was that you can't count on having what you need unless you brought it yourself.  Other people in my line of work are of the opinion that if an employer wants the job done, they'll provide the tools, which strikes me as both optimistic and obstinate, a recipe for frustration and disappointment.

     Shared resources are yours while you're using them, and ideally, everyone would treat them that way.  But that's not what happens, and I try not to set my expectations too high or insist that everyone do as I do.  There are plenty of other things to go be annoyed about, if that's what you want to do.
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* Don't picture something like a tackle box or oversized lunchbox.  These toolboxes are a yard wide and five feet high, chock full of soldering tools, wrenches and drivers of many kinds, twist drills, crimpers, specialized installation/extraction tools, hammers and punches, taps and dies, punchblock and wire-wrap tools, crimpers and wire strippers.
 
† Mine is the smallest reversible wooden-handled "pocket screwdriver" Starrett sold. They're well-made, with hollow-ground tips and complete overkill for the uses I put it to -- but it'll never accidentally get mixed up with the company tools.  It's nicely designed and a delight to use.  I also carry a cheap "freebie" tweaker for situations with a high risk of loss.

Serendipity

     Also: always take the time to return tools to their proper places.  I know this.  I don't always do so.  I should.

     About a month ago, I needed my smallest two standard braces, those offset-cranked tools that drive a spiral auger bit through wood.  I own a chairmaker's brace with a six-inch sweep, meaning the handle is three inches offset from the axis of the bit, and a newer brace with a twelve-inch sweep (among others).  I couldn't find either one; there are hooks for the larger braces* and the chairmaker's brace lives in the top compartment of a wooden toolbox, but the braces weren't there.  I had vague memories of having used them in a project.  Bookshelves, maybe?  But they weren't anywhere near the most recent set of bookshelves.  There was a chance they'd been left in the garage or lost.

     Clearing away clutter so the plumbers would have plenty of room to work, I opened up what I thought was an empty cardboard box.  Inside, both braces and two large auger bits, the latter wrapped in a clean rag.  The big bits jogged my memory: when I replaced the sink faucet, I had drilled a hole in the floor of the cabinet, so I could poke a boresight camera through and see if there was anything unexpected going on with the pipes in the inaccessible space inside the cabinet base.  (There wasn't, and a sturdy cork plugged the opening until next time.)  I had carefully packed up the tools in a handy box, carried them to the basement...and set the box on a stack of other boxes until I'd had a look in the base and finished the plumbing.  They could always be put away later, right?

     "Later" didn't arrive.  The kitchen sink job was was in June and July of 2021, around the same time I had cataract surgery.  With plenty of distractions, I never went back to put the tools away and forgot where I had left them.  It's a lesson I keep relearning: put tools back in their proper place and you'll be able to find them the next time you need them.  Consider it the general case of which the Field Notes notebook company motto is a subset: "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now."  "Later" is never.  Do it now.
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* I've got another 12-inch sweep brace with an unusual chuck, a fourteen-inch sweep brace, a whimble brace, a very small 90-degree brace that is little more than a chuck, a ball-bearing pad and a lever handle, and a much larger 90-degree brace with a heavy frame and a gear drive.  Each one has its use -- but I don't kid myself, it's as much a collection as it is a set of working tools.  And it's not even every size -- there are eight- and ten-inch sweep versions, the latter apparently standard in Bell System installer's tools.

That Was Quick

     I've bought cars for less -- okay, it wasn't much of a car, it was ten years ago and my first step after the purchase was to have a rebuilt transmission put in, but still: replacement water heaters aren't cheap.

     They are, however, about as convenient as possible, at least around here.  A couple of decades ago, one of the large plumbing companies in the Indianapolis metro figured out that they were spending a significant proportion of their service calls replacing water heaters.  While customers were pleased when it went quickly, they were really annoyed when it took more than a day.  And the process had significant inefficiencies: you can't stock a service truck with an assortment of water heaters in the same way you can load it up with pipe, couplers, valves, etc.; if you're selling a wide range of water heaters, customers are going to take longer to make up their minds.  The work was taking multiple visits and skilled plumbers were spending time making estimates and shuttling bulky water heaters around instead of taking old ones out and plumbing new ones in.

     There was a niche for a company that could get the job done all in one day.

     They partnered up with a reputable manufacturer (and there are interesting opportunities there), made some clever choices about stocking and transportation (you do not, in fact, have to be a journeyman plumber to drive around a box truck full of water heaters), trained a group of estimators, and hung out a shingle: you get hot water today, or they'll pay you for the job!

     It's a heck of a system.  I called them after enjoying a brisk cold shower and my hair was still a little damp when the estimator showed up, checked out the basement, took photos and showed me the options.  We negotiated a little and I signed up for a slightly larger water heater, nineteen and a half years newer than the old one.*  He made some notations on his iPad and told me, "Alex and his helper will be by in a couple of hours."

     Ninety minutes later, my phone rang while I was bushwhacking a path from the back yard patio to the back gate.†  The truck arrived as I was unlocking the gate and it took about three and a half hours from then until there was a shiny new water heater in my basement and the old one was aboard the truck, ready to be recycled into cans and calcium supplements.‡  The new one is a little taller and sits in a drip pan that should protect it from the occasional basement flood (yes, it's supposed to be the other way around, but...).  It's got a fancy expansion tank (the city insists) and the safety valve is correctly plumbed down to floor level.  And the water is H-O-T hot!

     Yeah, it wasn't cheap.  But it was fast and involved remarkably little fuss.  No raised eyebrows at (or extra charge for) my preference for copper, no snooty lecture about temperature settings (unlike another plumbing firm I have employed), and no mess left behind.  The floor wasn't even wet.  (The floor drain is just a couple feet away -- props to the 1920s architect and builder, who put everything but the kitchen sink within a few feet of the floor drain: the water heater, basement laundry area and sink are under the ground-floor washroom.)  I knew the water heater would need to be replaced some day.  It turned out that day was yesterday.

     In February, I started receiving Social Security, which makes up for the nice raises I haven't got since 2008 ("Times are tough," they told us.  "Pass up your raises this year.  We'll make it up to you."  Somehow, times never got less tough afterward and us techies have never seen more than 1% in any year since).  I guess the Fates noticed.
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*  Estimator: "You know, that's about twice as long as they're expected to last."  I did not know.  I have never had to replace one, not in the houses I grew up in, not in houses I have owned and not in houses I have rented.  The only one I've seen replaced was at the North Campus, and the new one sat in the basement for months before it was installed.  From the smell of the hot water, I suspect mice made a nest in while it sat, but Building Maintenance doesn't believe my theory.  Fine, I've got an electric teakettle in the kitchenette.  (On second thought, I was involved in replacing one water heater in the late 1980s, shortly after my parents moved back to Indy and long after I was on my own. Dad had removed the old one and set the new one in place, but I'm the family go-to expert for soldering.  Home plumbing comes close to being exactly halfway between the big coaxial line I solder rarely and the small wire I solder often.)
 
† The weather has not been mowing friendly and the back yard has been thick with violets, white and pink Spring Beauty, yellow wild strawberry flowers and another purple-blue flower that may be Creepin' Charlie (Ground Ivy).  Call them weeds if you must, but the bees love them and I'm enjoying them too, though not quite the same way.  I'll have to get out there with a string trimmer, by and by.
 
‡ I'm not saying Indiana water is hard, but the old water heater was thumping and banging pretty good from the thick lime scale.  My glass-sided electric kettle goes from clear to opaque in a week of use, and vinegar's the only thing that'll remove the stuff.

It's Always Something?

     Last night, ten p.m.  My bedtime.  Tamara's washing her hands.  "Bobbi?  You might want to check the water heater."

     I did, Tam trailing after.  The pilot light had gone out.  It has never gone out by itself.

     You can call me paranoid if you like, but having lived in old houses with old appliances, one with a coal-converted-to-gas furnace best described as "terrifying," I will not relight a mystery-failure pilot light and drift off to dreamland.  That furnace, an old "octopus" large enough to climb inside, had a 30" gas-ring burner with a pilot light in the center, which exactly one (1) furnace tech in town would work on -- and in the other side of the duplex I owned at the time, the furnace had the same conversion with an even scarier blower setup, a wobbly 1930s squirrel-cage fan in the hot side instead of the external cold-side 1950s Sears job on mine.  Those furnaces would come on by hissing out gas for thirty seconds or more before starting with a "wumph!" you felt more than heard.  The possible failure modes were not good; the big combustion chamber was essentially a fuel-air bomb.

     Last night, I shut the gas valve.  This morning, I called a plumber.  He or she can check it out.  Maybe it's just the thermocouple that monitors the pilot light; they're designed to fail safe, shutting off the pilot valve even if the failure's in the thermocouple itself. That water heater is pushing twenty years old and if I can manage the cost, I wouldn't mind putting in a slightly larger one.