The Problem With Whiplash

     After my initial comments, I'd been sitting out the ongoing ABC/Jimmy Kimmel/FCC furor.  The most recent development rates a few words: Kimmel's back on.

     In what form, nobody know.  There were serious talks, we're told, but who said what and what promises may have been made remains a mystery.

     Maybe they should've talked to Target.  The retail chain had embraced Pride Month for several years, expanding their rainbow-themed offerings in a way that a few critics decried as cynical "rainbow-washing."  Then came a conservative backlash that included a boycott.  Target backed down, goodbye rainbows -- and that prompted another boycott by liberals and LGBT allies.  The result has been a steady decline in shoppers and sales: many liberals have avoided them since and a lot of the conservatives never came back.  By not picking a course and sticking to it, they lost out.

     ABC/Disney is trying to thread a similar needle.  Kimmel's return will probably get big ratings, but after that, success may take a more-nimble mind than the corporate offices of a big TV network can produce.

     The Press needs to remember they are The Press, covered under what remains one of the world's strongest guarantees of freedom in the First Amendment.  It's uncomfortable; it covers everything from Fox News to NPR, from Hustler to the Christian Science Monitor, from your four-page neighborhood weekly paper to The New York Times, from comedians to snoozingly serious commentators.  Uncle Sam is not the boss of them -- even when they say things the government doesn't like, even when they say things We The People don't like.

     The First Amendment even protects them when they don't say things that many people might like: politically conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group owns 38 ABC affiliates, and they're not going to be carrying Jimmy Kimmel Live!  If the FCC leaned on them to carry the show now that it's back, that would be just as wrong as implying ABC stations that did carry the show might find themselves in hot water.  Say what you will about Sinclair -- I certainly will -- they have picked a position and stayed with it.

     The unifying idea for newspapers, radio, TV and online news outlets has long been -- and should remain -- that they are protected from government pressure over their content.  They should raise a hue and cry when this freedom comes under threat.  They don't have to like one another; I expect them not to agree with one another on politics and culture; but even The Worker and The Wall Street Journal have a shared interest in the First Amendment.  The Press has been taking it for granted.  Recent events show that's not a good idea. "Jawboning" has been ramping up quietly for many years now, and it's past time for it for be tamped back down.

What's For Supper?

     We had home-made chili Saturday night -- lean ground beef, a fresh chorizo sausage squeezed out of its casing, diced onion, diced red, yellow orange and green bell peppers, a few fresh tomatoes from the garden plus a box of finely diced tomatoes, three small cans of mild green chilis with chili powder, bay leaves, fresh basil, smoked paprika, a little curry powder and Cajun seasoning.

     It was good, but I'd bought tomatoes put up without salt.  It took a generous shake to wake up the flavor.

     Tonight, leftovers.  Tam picked up one mild and one hot Italian sausage, and I had my secret ingredient: Italian-style Giardiniera, mixed vegetables pickled in vinegar brine. The brand I like added just enough salt, with the tiny onions, cauliflower, celery, carrot discs and strips of red peppers contributing to the flavor.  I diced them up a little more than they already were.  Is it still chili?  I don't know.  It was tasty.  I could stand up a spoon in it and it didn't need any salt.

Us, Them And The Excluded Third

     The problem with two-value logic is that it doesn't scale directly.  It's a handy way to build small widgets; relay logic, TTL and CMOS have been a backbone of my work for decades.  It's great basis for computers, but to get anything done, you have to lay in a machine language and start clocking data and instructions through the hardware; to do anything big, you need to stick a more human-parsable language on top, with an operating system to shovel in coal and an assembler to turn your code into ones and zeros.

     Likewise, out in the world of human interaction, if you want to draw one line down the presumable middle and call one side Us and the other side Them, it doesn't scale worth a damn.  Worse yet, it sticks everyone from your cousin who thinks the rate of social change is too high (and what's with all the pronouns?) to militia members bursting from the back of a rental truck to beat up Pride paraders on one side, and your Granny who wants to have Social Security and Medicare expanded (and why are rich people not taxed more?) to a mob of anarchists, Leftists and looters along for the grabbing taking over a town center on the other.  Cousin and Granny aren't into the violence, despite harsh words at the Thanksgiving table, and they don't approve of it, either.

     Even all that and everything in between manages to leave out the real problem, the real enemy of civil discourse: the muddy thinkers who believe they can assassinate their way to a better world.  Go back to the previous paragraph: even the worst of 'em, Left and Right, aren't directly out to kill.  Intimidate, silence, drive out, injure, steal?  They're often okay with that, and it's not good.  Some of 'em would like to trigger widespread conflict.  But it takes a sharply bent mind to murder like lightning from a cloudless sky.

     When a prominent public figure gets shot, or people in a supermarket or school (etc.), we want it to make sense.  We want the shooter to not be someone from "our" side.  (I sure do!)  Quite often, when the malefactor's politics are known, they're garbled, but yeah, they lean one way or the other.  (And it's a mix if you look at 'em all.)  Nevertheless, the essential difference is, that person thought they could improve their world through murder -- and nearly everyone around you, all of your fellow citizens, the religiously devout and the scoffers, the Left and the Right, the politically active and the people who ignore it, do not agree. Even most of the worst of Us -- and Them -- don't agree.

     There are arguments and frantic sweeping-under-rugs about which "side" is the most violent, including a DOJ report that got yanked from their website.  The reality is, most people are not violent; most politically-active people are not violent, and even most of the persons at the far fringes of Right and Left that do endorse violence draw the line short of assassination and mass murder.  Most people with strong feelings would rather yell at one another, vote at one another, wave signs at one another.  Some of them will throw punches and rocks, break windows, start fires.  And yet they still stop short of killing.

     Trying to pin the blame on political opponents, and then painting that entire side as supporters of it, is false logic.  It's not who they are.  It's not even who the worst of them are.  It serves to legitimize increased political violence in return; it makes all of Us -- and Them -- worse.  And the excluded third category, lone wolves divorced from normal logic, normal social strictures, normal morality and ethics, are still around, like sparks from a fire.  We can pour water on the sparks -- or gasoline.

Tired

     Four ten-hour days of installing a large transmitter -- one that still doesn't quite work as it should -- is grueling.

     The two-man installation team, subcontractors to the manufacturer, were skilled.  They didn't break for lunch.  They also didn't get quite as much detailed information as usual, thanks to this being a used transmitter a little over five years old, and so we may have missed a couple of network cables that let the various bits and pieces talk to one another.*  The techs back at the factory are pondering it.  They're also pondering our present transmitter, with a sixteen-year-old control system running a collection of high-power amplifiers that are twenty-nine years old: it was made by the same company, but not a bit of it is still supported.  And its performance, at present, is significantly better than the newer one.  Embarrassing.

     The new and old are not talking in more than one way.  There's a very basic connection between them, an interlock that shuts them down when transferring from one to the other.  It's as simple as a light switch, or it ought to be, but the connection that should tell the old transmitter "Lights out!" and then "Lights back on!" just tells it to shut down, all the time.  So we can't hook it up.

     I don't have to troubleshoot it.  I just have to keep pointing out that we paid good money for a system that, ahem, works, and that furthermore, it's not supposed to need risky jeeping to operate.  Alas, I do have to facilitate the troubleshooting; so it's going to be my headache until it gets sorted out.

     Back to that on Monday or more likely Tuesday.  For tonight, delivery food and, I hope, a decent night's sleep.
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* A modern TV transmitter functions in about the same way as an after-school chat room for Junior High girls: "I'm going to wear purple and violet tomorrow, and I want all of my friends to do the same!" vs. "I'm going to set my power level at 50% and so should all the other amplifiers."  I suspect there's even giggling; I know they all tattle on one another: "Power Amp 7 had an overcurrent!  PA 6 is overheating!" Sure, they do so over a CAN bus, RS-422 or a data network, but it's the same kind of thing.

Jawboning

     "Jawboning" is not just rustic-sounding slang for idle talk; it's a term of art.  Specifically, it's when a person in a position of government power uses that power to lean on citizens.  It's considered an abuse of office and can even be a violation of the law.

     Jawboning is what FCC Chair Brendan Carr did to ABC over (intemperate at best and possibly tasteless) comments by comedian Jimmy Kimmel.  The precise comments don't matter.  You can go look them up, and depending on your politics, they may make your blood boil or elicit a shrug.  They're not especially funny, but that's how it goes with topical satire: not every bit lands.

     The FCC doesn't regulate networks.  They regulate individual TV and radio stations, most of which are owned by a handful of very large corporations -- large and hoping to get larger.  For them to grow any further, they're going to need FCC approval.  There are limits -- "ownership caps" -- on how many stations in a given market may be owned by a single company.  Nexstar, one of the largest, is in the middle of a huge merger with another big owner, and they'll need a new, higher cap.

     So when Brendan Carr went on a podcast and said, "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead," Nexstar was listening.  They announced the ABC stations they own weren't going to carry Kimmel's late-night talk show.  Sinclair, another big group owner, followed suit.  ABC responded by dropping Kimmel.

     ABC can do that.  They're his employer; if they don't want his show, they can (within contractual limits, and we can be sure attorneys for everyone involved are very, very busy right now) pull the plug.  Likewise, network affiliates are not necessarily required to carry every show the network shoves down the pipe (though, yet again, contacts and lawyers are involved).  The entity who crossed the line was the FCC Chairman, who was essentially saying, "Nice TV stations.  Be a shame if something happened to them," to individual ABC affiliates.  FCC regulations are many and complex; dig deep, and everyone's got something that might not be quite right.  "Give me the man and I'll give you the crime," or give him the station, in this case.

     It was jawboning.  In the Bible, mighty Samson beat a thousand men to death with the jawbone of an ass; here, a single ass is jawboning the giants of broadcasting to their knees over misfiring political humor.

     Is that really a good outcome?  And how will the next FCC Chairman use that power, if it goes unchallenged?   Even Brendan Carr once thought it was a problem, before he got control.

I'm Holding Off

     I have several comments that I have not published. It's not that they're overly contentious, it's just--  Most of them are trying to map recent events into the old familiar Left/Right paradigm, Democrats vs. Republicans.  An awful lot of politicans and talking heads want to do  that, too.

     Maybe don't.  It's easy, but the essential divide is between people who are willing to treat others as impediments, as things -- and those who refuse to.  You don't kill people for espousing ideas you despise; you don't treat people like cattle.  Suspected criminals offering no imminent threat should be arrested and charged, not killed offhand. Political opponents are debated, not demonized and threatened.  You run against 'em in elections, you don't try to run them out of town.

     These things used to be axiomatic, and while as a society we sometimes fell short of them, we knew it for a failure; we tried to do better.

     When did we stop trying to do better?

Updated

     The more that comes out about the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, the less sense it makes.  I don't trust most of what I'm seeing, so I have updated my earlier blog post to reflect the increased doubt, and I'm waiting for additional reporting from a wider variety of sources.

     What's out there at present is not internally consistent.  The majority of perpetrators of this kind of high-profile attack show a great deal of cognitive dissonance, beliefs that don't sort out as neatly as most people's -- just as this type of crime is uncommon and twisted, so, too, are the minds behind them.  Hunger for nihilistic fame remains a common factor, but if you were looking for "why" and hoping to find some handle you could turn down or even off, that's not much help. 

You Thought Your Workplace Was Messed-Up?

     A news commentator/host at a major cable news network recently remarked live on the air that homeless people who refused official help should be given, "[...I]nvoluntary lethal injections.  Just kill them."

     That's shocking stuff, and he later apologized for it, in very much a "my bosses are making me do this" manner.  Even more shocking is that when he advocated killing unhoused persons who wouldn't cooperate, neither one of of his two co-hosts objected.  One, who had already suggested such people should be locked up, replied, "Yep."  The other host did not so much as blink.

     I'm not going to name any of them, or even the network.  If you're curious, any search engine will find video and news stories with full details.  Nope, I'm here to point out that it takes a pretty askew newsroom culture for "euthanize recalcitrant homeless people" to be an acceptable casual comment, one your co-workers nod along with and don't call out.

     Don't go along with that stuff.  Killing people is not okay.  It is a crime.  The only exceptions are after due process of law and criminal conviction, and it's rare even then; in self-defense from imminent harm (and it generally gets careful legal scrutiny); and in the course of actual warfare (and even some killings in war can count as crimes).  Eschew evil; don't treat people as things, pieces to be taken off the board to suit your or society's convenience.  There are lots of terrible, awful, annoying or lousy people in this world, but very few are criminals and they have just as much right to exist as anyone.

     (I suppose some realpolitik type will comment to shake his head in condescending sadness over my naivete.  I'm not saying it doesn't happen; I'm not saying there aren't vicious folks around who might do abrupt and grievous bodily harm to strangers.  This isn't about them.  It's about you, and me, and the ethical standards any decent person ought to hold for themselves and uphold for society.)

Right-On-Right Murder?

     I can't say often enough that I do not condone political violence.  I don't have to like a person or agree with or approve of their opinions to know that they shouldn't be murdered.  And the truth is, I found most of Charlie Kirk's notions loathsome, especially his assertion that womenfolk like me should shut up, stop working for wages (and competing against, oh horrors, men for jobs) and concern ourselves with children, cooking and church.  Nevertheless, nobody should be killed for saying such specious nonsense.

     Republicans, starting with the President, were quick to condemn the political Left for the murder, even before a suspect was in custody.  Some even claimed this kind of violence was especially associated with the Left, conveniently forgetting the previous high-profile assault and murder of Minnesota state legislators -- Democrats -- for which a man long associated with conservative and anti-abortion efforts has been charged.  In reality, it appears the man who has confessed to shooting Charlie Kirk is a very-online gamer associated with the "Groyper" movement and a fan of farther-Right Nick Fuentes* -- and perhaps a bit unmoored, mentally,.  It looks very much like he acted alone, and that's typical of such attacks: not only because a solo operator with murky mental processes is harder to predict, but because conspiracies are unworkable and get stopped early: if there are three or more people involved, the odds are high that at least one of them is an informant.

     Supported in part by the obscure online-ironic nature of the messages on the bullet casings, cryptic to most normies, Republican figures are still blaming the killing on the Left, even on centrist Democrats who said mean things about Kirk (a man who never hesitated to say mean things about people and polices he disapproved of).  While the accused killer is as politically incoherent as most of his murderous ilk, it's clear he leaned far more Right than Left.

     But look here: these killers are outliers.  Most sociopolitical conflict in the U.S. plays out without this level of violence, despite acrimony.  Riots are newsworthy because they are rare.  This kind of targeted violence is even rarer, and most people, most politicians, no matter how foaming-at-the-mouth they might be, neither engage in nor promote physical violence.  (It is slightly newsworthy that South Carolina's Nancy Mace was calling for dire vengeance when early interpretations of the bullet casing scribblings suggested the shooter supported trans issues and abruptly switched to calling for prayers for him when it was revealed he was a cisgender white male.)

     Video games don't make people killers.  They get used as excuses.  Politics, likewise.  The converse is a greater risk.  When politicians and public figures start using these kinds of killings to justify wide-scale repression or worse, look out: throughout history and all around the globe, governments gone wrong are more dangerous to more people than any lone-wolf assassin ever was or could be.

     Update: the alleged killer's politics may be even more incoherent.  Gamer memes are a mirror-maze incomprehensible to outsiders and where they intersect with politics, there's even less clarity.  Various groups use -- and flip or mock -- the symbols of their opponents.  I have added a question mark to the headline, and...time will tell.  Or it won't, and perhaps this will be one more example of an attack rooted in chaotic notions that don't fit neatly into comfortable, familiar categories.
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* Later information does not bear this out.

9/11

     With the anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks falling the day after both a school shooting and the apparent assassination of a high-profile sociopolitical influencer, I was thinking about the nature of murder.

     Murder isn't scalar, not really.  Murder one person, murder a thousand: the stain of it, the sin of it, if you will, doesn't change after the first one.  And while we feel that the person who kills dozens is more heinous that the person who kills only one, realistically, they can only be executed once, only be imprisoned without parole for one lifetime.

     What scales is tragedy.  The attacks on September 11, 2001 left thousands of grieving families.  One family, we know what to do: you drop off a hot dish, sit with them, cry with them.  Over three thousand?  It's emotionally inconceivable.

     We can remember the day.  We can remember any friends lost.  It feels like so very little, but it's what we can do.

Thought For The Day

     If you are thinking you can’t say something “without coming off as a racist SOB,” that means it’s a deeply racist thing to say, and you might not want to say it; maybe you should examine your reasons for thinking it.  They're almost certainly nonsense, driven by emotion rather than fact.

Prediction

     I continue to condemn violence against people -- even ones who ideas I despise -- who are running their mouth and otherwise engaging in normal, peaceful political activity.  In a contest of ideas within a free democracy, violence has no place.

     The most recent assailant, when they catch him, may claim political motivation, but he (or she, or they) will most likely turn out to be like the vast majority of these killers, a person obsessed with high-profile murderers, and their primary purpose will have been to make themselves famous.  They'll be someone who lives in the borderlands between sanity and insanity.  Such people -- and the half-baked notions they espouse -- don't deserve serious consideration as anything but criminals.

     Politicians often seek to exploit these crimes (or more accurately, the public's reaction) to further their own interests.  They will seek to boost whatever cause or program they were already favoring.  Others will express sincere sympathy, and I trust them a little more than their opportunistic peers.  Both the sincere and self-serving/cause-serving reactions can be found all across the political spectrum.

     Less universally, for every high-profile death, there are barbarians who will express glee.  It's unseemly.  Ungracious.  You can dislike or disagree with a man's ideas -- or even the man himself -- without dancing in his blood when he is killed.

     When the most recent attacker is hunted down, he (etc.) is going to be one more warped flake hyped on nihilistic fame, just like the vast majority of similar murderers. 

     Update: the killer is still not found, and my in-house subject-matter expert reminds me that the late Charlie Kirk had critics to the Right as well as to the Left, many of them extremists who decried his lack of antisemitism.  So the killer's screed -- of which there will probably be one -- is as likely to lean that way as the other; the "No enemy to the (Left or Right, depending on the speaker)," types should bear in mind that most shades of political opinion have foes who are even farther in their own direction; the only ones who don't are so far out that they're off the map.
     The other point that merits bearing in mind is that a 200-yard rifle shot is not, in fact, all that far or difficult; hunters and U. S. Marines routinely do this with stock AR-15s and hunting rifles, however James Bond it sounds to you or me.  It's a chilling reality.

Old

     Yesterday was a solid day of physical work, much of it near floor level, and I'm paying the price.  I can still work with vinyl floor tile* but even a little leaves me with a sore back and aching knees.  We've got the first major piece of the big project in place.

     It turns out the manufacturer did make one tiny little mistake when they refurbished this (slightly) used transmitter: while most of the components didn't require adjustment when moving from the previous channel to ours, one high-power radiofrequency filter is critical and difficult to adjust.  It's a factory job, set once and never touched again.  Or, at least, not touched again unless you put the transmitter on a different channel.

     So they touched it.  While most of the component parts -- about half a semi-truck load -- were dropshipped from the previous owner† to us months ago, a few that needed high-level test equipment and esoteric skills to set up went to the factory instead.  There, they were all retweaked without delay, packed up and put on the shipping dock.  The filter, in a refrigerator-sized crate, never left the dock.  Monday, checking through the big box I thought it was in and finding everything but, I asked and after about an hour, heard back from the guy who found it in a corner, "Oops."  The plan is to get it to us before the installer arrives next week.
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* Vinyl Composition Tile, that is, and not Vinyl Asbestos Tile.  The latter is generally removed by moon-suited specialists when found.  I learned to do tile work after three successive floor-tile crews left bad impressions when we rebuilt the transmitter site; the ones that did very good work were primadonnas, who begged off after having to work around electricians for three days: "We usually have the whole jobsite to ourselves.  This is too difficult!" --On a project proceeding under immense time pressure, rebuilding after a fire while the smoke-damaged equipment in the back room, patched up and mostly functioning, tottered from minor failure to minor failure.  It was difficult for everyone.  The next crew arrived high, stayed high, did adequate work for a day -- and were never seen or heard from again.  The final ones also enjoyed their glue fumes and, from circumstantial evidence, other substances, but they had the job mostly finished when the general contractor escorted them off the site, paid them off at the gate and suggested they and their contraband depart forthwith, because they were, ahem, too under the influence for safety and he would call the police if he saw them again.  Every single crew had delivered a constant stream of complaints.  At that point, I learned how to cut and lay tile: Most people use too much glue even with a serrated trowel to spread it, a hot air gun softens tile for cutting, a big rubber mallet knocks out the trapped air.  Don't get too fancy!  I don't know if I could tile a floor from scratch; it's a big job and there's some critical prep work.  Over the years, I have cut, patched and filled enough floor tile to cover the floor of a large bedroom.  I don't know if all tile crews are flaky, but if you find good ones, don't lose their number!
 
† Technically untrue, since both stations have the same corporate owner.  The transmitter is free, left over from a reshuffling of TV channels in that other city -- free aside from the cost of factory retuning and checking, and field installation with their expert.  This is "free" like the cost of my house, almost, and still cheap as such things go.

What Day Is It?

      It's Star Trek day, among other things, the day the first episode of the series aired on NBC, the first step in a long cultural arc that took science fiction from being that crazy stuff your parents razzed you for watching and your English teacher despaired of you reading* to a cherished institution featuring Star Wars day every May and Star Trek day as summer comes to an end.

     Fun stuff, but it's a reminder that every day is History Day.†  I was reminded of that more forcefully while listening to a radio news piece from Kyiv this morning, covering the Russian drone strikes in that city.  The reporter had been awakened in the night by the sound of incoming Sahed drones and recorded parts of her story with the engines of the weapons throbbing in the background.  It's an eerie sound, and reminds me of Edward R. Murrow of CBS, broadcasting live from a London rooftop during the Blitz.‡  Or, much later in that war, the guttural buzz and sudden halt of an incoming V-1.

     We're in the run-up to World War III, or at least to a wider European War.  This time, America First holds the White House and Congress; Zelenskyy is no Churchill, nor is Putin Hitler: history does not repeat.  But it does rhyme, and the present verses carry a familiar rhythm.

     I hope I'm wrong, but there's a chill in my bones that freezes optimism.
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*Not quite a decade later, my high school offered a class on "Science Fiction."  But the English department was pretty desperate, in that huge Sports, Shop and (slightly) Math-heavy high school.  My Dad, on the other hand, never stopped regarding it as silly stuff, unworthy of adult interest.  He preferred Westerns.
 
† Is there a History Day?  Well, yes and no.  It's not just one day.
 
‡ At first, BBC didn't want him up there, and refused use of the roof of their main studio location, Broadcast House, fearing Germans might use the sound to fine-tune their bombing.  Eventually, someone realized the value of broadcasting live coverage of the attacks, and British resolve in the face of them, to the then-neutral United States.

Sunday Supper

     It's nice to have at least one conventional sit-down meal a week.  Any more, I mostly have salads, sandwiches or "trash night" pizza, our time-saver on the night we empty all the trash cans, clear out the fridge and set the can out for the city to empty.

     Sunday or Saturday, I try to do more.  This was a busy weekend, as I continued straightening up the library/dining room and, on Saturday, took delivery of a large, heavy flat-pack box with a famous blue-and-yellow logo on it.

     It's a new storage cabinet for the bath.  The old one was tiny, and Roseholme Cottage lacks any semblance of a linen closet.  It's barely got closets at all.  I found a six-foot-tall cabinet online that would fit the available space, and after dishes and housecleaning, I spent Sunday emptying the old cabinet, cleaning the corner where it sat, assembling the new one, modifying it slightly to clear the baseboard, and getting it into position and anchored to the wall.

     But that left no time for the grocery, and not much for cooking.  I asked Tam to pick up a couple of cased sausages, whatever appealed to her, and some of the fresh, microwave-ready vegetables our local grocery sells, all cut up in a cooking bag, with a little seasoning.

     I was expecting the usual assortment -- onion, carrot, asparagus, pea pods, zucchini, cauliflower and/or broccoli, etc.  Brown the sausage, drain, add a small jar of good garden-type spaghetti sauce,* heat and add the nuked veggies.  The store was out of them.  They did have Parmesan zucchini, with a nice pat of butter blended with the cheese and Italian herbs.  I'd forgotten just how well the combination works, but it certainly does.  Tam picked up a chorizo sausage and a mild Italian, a nice combination.  I added a small can of tomato paste to thicken the sauce, since zucchini's got a lot of water in it.  We both went back for seconds.

     It's a low-effort meal that looks and tastes like you spent a lot of time on it.  Add some garlic bread and it's as nice as anyone could want.
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* Michael's of Brooklyn Home Style Gravy remains my go-to.  There are other good sauces, but it's tasty and consistent.

I Don't Post For Two Days And The Department Of Defense Starts Using A Nickname

     That was two days of...something.  I've been dodging politics, in part because the news is so crazy (if recent events were happening in any other country, our media would have no trouble pointing out what it is) and in part because I doubt I can do much good by commenting on it: either you just love, love, love what our Nero posing as Caesar and his clown circus is up to, or you recognize it as a very bad and outright dangerous direction for the Federal government to take, or you're an insensible lump who thinks it will never touch you and will go away if ignored.

     It cannot safely be ignored.  One of the biggest weaknesses of the United States Congress is also its greatest strength: the House and Senate are a contentious, bickering mass of people; the two bodies disagree internally and dispute with one another.  For anything to get done, over half of each body's got to agree it ought to happen, and then hammer out and whittle down a mutually-agreeable version.  It's clumsy.  It's slow.  It a deliberative process.

     Replacing or supplanting that process by the whims of one man and a small circle of his hand-picked advisors allows the preferences and prejudices of a few people, only one of whom was elected, to replace the aggregate likes, dislikes, wisdom and damfoolishness of 535 pontificating blowhards chosen by the voters, by state and district.  They're less likely to leap first and look afterward.  They may still make the wrong choices, but they will have talked over the options, largely in public; they will have received feedback from voters and lobbyists (and maybe even subject-matter experts).  If their choice doesn't work out, it's easier for them to change direction while blaming their peers for the misstep.

     You can vote your way into autocracy, nice as a slice of hot pie.  History's lacking examples of a country voting their way out of it.  It's usually a messy process.

     We ain't there yet -- but you can see it if you stand on a chair.  Maybe it's worth checking for yourself.

     It's the Department of Defense.  It's the Gulf of Mexico.  Green is not orange; up is not down.

New Refrigerator Arrived

     It's here.  I paid extra to have the installers take the old one and all the packing away.  And it appears to be working okay.

     This one is reminding me why I dislike top-freezer refrigerators.  It manages to make matters worse by being about seven inches shorter than the old one.  I can fix that part; I've already got a riser with a storage drawer sketched out.  But it's still kind of a sit-down fridge, if you're looking for something that's not frozen.  Pull up a chair and browse!  The appliance outfits just don't seem to be making the arrangement I prefer in anything shorter than six feet tall.  (Powell Crosley, Jr. seems to have started the big top freezer trend.)

     An old-time single-door fully-enclosed refrigerator and most of the "Monitor Top" models that preceded them had good internal sightlines: the small freezer compartment didn't obscure the view of items in the refrigerator proper.  But a two-door model with the freezer on top has a huge barrier for anyone whose eyes are higher than the top of the main compartment, and the deeper the unit, the worse it is.  With older technology, you wanted the freezer up high; the coils around the outside of it made the small freezer freeze, and cooled the much larger compartment.  Monitor tops picked up a little more efficiency by mounting the condensing coil and compressor on top.  But modern insulating materials are much better, and compressors are more efficient, too.  There's no reason other than tradition to stick the freezer up top.

     I'm stuck with it for a while now.  Awkward though it it, it seems to be a nice little machine, with lots of space inside.  And it fits the available spot in the kitchen.

     A huge plus is that I have made a good start on straightening up the dining room/library.  It really got out of hand during the pandemic and it was badly cluttered before.

About Mass Murderers

     Every time it happens, the same general coverage plays out: normal shock and horror at the horrific crime, and once the initial outrage begins to fade, everybody but everybody, from NPR to your uncle who shares loud opinions at every family gathering, from Fox News to gun-control organizations, starts trying to suss out the mind of the killer, often with an eye towards catching the next one before they go off the rails and usually grinding their own axes in the process.

     And they keep on saying the name of the killer, over and over.  Making them famous.

     You want to know the prime motivation of all of these murderers?  They want to be famous.  Many of them treat the stats on similar criminals as some kind of twisted leaderboard.  Sure, the nominally-religious ones say it's for their faith, the racist ones give racist justifications, the political ones claim its for some greater good or to silence their enemies, the seething nutjobs talk about striking back at whatever institution, authority or peer group they think wronged them, yadda-yadda yackety-yak, but it's blather.  They're looking to write their names across history like misbehaving boys peeing their names into fresh snow in their neighbor's front yard.

     Every single person doing a deep dive into the supposed mind of these criminals, "Whatever made Firstname Lastname commit their horrific crime?  We talk to the former yoga instructor of their neighbor across the alley and analyze their MySpace page from twenty years ago," is just feeding the next would-be mass killer: Look how much attention Firstname Lastname got!  Look at how many views their manifesto got!  Look how angry they made people!  They want to be just like Firstname Lastname, only more so -- and they don't mean the killer's religion, politics, or particular flavor of non-murderous nuttiness.  Nope.  It's the killing -- and the fame.  It's the attention.

     We have to stop stoking the flames of criminal celebrity.

     These crimes, striking though they are, are rare.  Over a hundred people die in traffic accidents in the U. S. every day and we scarcely blink.  One person kills two and injures nearly ten times as many, and it makes headlines and gets live special reports.  The overwhelming majority of people in this country didn't kill anyone; Sunday School teachers and the worst racists you can think of, hardcore Antifa people and the nice little old Republican ladies who work as pollwatchers every election didn't kill anyone or even plan to; nearly every Muslim, Evangelical Christian, agnostic and Sikh (etc.), along with just about all Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Whigs (etc.) didn't commit mass murder.  Even most insane people are, in fact, not murderers.  How lovely if we could point at some demographic group and say, "Yes, these people are the ones who commit mass murder," and stop them.  But that's not how it works.

     The most recent mass killer as I write this was apparently a member of a stigmatized group (and also a rabid fan of other mass murderers, from the available evidence).  That is being leveraged in ways that are, in fact, lies; lies that contribute nothing to finding and stopping mass killers and instead deflect attention elsewhere.

     The specific bent that these mass killers share is an intense desire for posthumous fame earned through terrible crimes.  That's as deep as it goes; politically, religiously, socially, they're all over the map, and while most are white males, there have been female, nonbinary and non-white mass shooters -- and all of them wanted to be known for their crimes.

     Deny them that attention.

Labor Day

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

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

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