About That Economy

     Okay, it's just one set of hoofbeats.  Might be a horse, might be a zebra.  But it doesn't seem like a good sign when a major candy distributor files for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween.

     Sure, SNAP benefits have been shut off by the shutdown (there is, of course, a lawsuit.  Wonder if you can cook that up and eat it?  Nope).  Sure, ACA subsidies are expiring and there's no plan to bring 'em back; if you got your health insurance through the Feds or one of the state exchanges, the price is going up, and possibly by quite a lot.  And there's a whole big mess around Federally-subsidized flood insurance, too.  But candy at Halloween?  The people who usually couldn't afford it still can't; this is result of people who once could deciding they'd better not.

     Oops. 

Tool-Geekery

     It's expensive enough that I can't recommend it unless you really need one -- or have money to spare.  But it's as neat a combination of useful tools as I have encountered, and comes packaged in a carrier that keeps all of it together.

     I'd better start at the beginning: for a couple of decades, I have carried and used a Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company Mini-Ratchet set.  They use a proprietary 1/4" spline drive, and come packed in a neat little box with a wide array of bits, a screwdriver handle, extension, a couple of tiny spin handles and a clever small ratchet with 12° indexing.  It was a small company, and I think it changed hands a few years ago; their website shows most things as "out of stock" these days and there's no contact information now, but they keep the copyright up to date.  Their big set includes 44 bits and easily fits into a cargo-pants pocket.  It is also around $180.00 now.

     Or it would be, if it wasn't always listed as not being in stock.  And it is handy, with almost every driver bit you might need.  There was a time when you'd call up the order department and the nice people there would ship the stuff in advance of your check, if they remembered you from previous purchases.  (Yes, that was a long time ago.)

     Stumbling around on a big sales site, I discovered Wera Tools has the next best thing, their "Tool-Check" line.  Sorted out into Imperial and Metric sets, with a number of interesting variants, the basic versions have 37 bits, a small screwdriver handle, a short (locking) extension and a nice small ratchet with 6° indexing, packed into a neat little carrier with places for every piece.  They use standard 1/4" hex drive (with an adapter for the sockets).  Prices run about $100; a little more for the larger sets and a little less for the smaller ones.  It has most of the driver bits you might need, and since they use standard drive, you can add more.  (The set sensibly includes two #1 Philips and three #2 Philips, the most commonly use-worn types, and you can always stow the spares elsewhere and sub any added bits in their places.)

     Wera's even got a modular system that will let you add and expand the carrier with other small sets.  It's decent quality; give me a few years to stress-test my set and I'll give you a full report, but I don't expect any bad surprises.  You might know Wera from their Kraftform ergometric grip, one of the most widely-imitated driver handle designs in the world.  I'm not saying they've been watching some of you guys work, but their line includes screwdrivers that can be used as chisels without wrecking them, and beefed-up ratchet handles with striking surfaces intended for hammering.*
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* I have to admit that at my work, we've referred to linesman's pliers as an "electrician's hammer" for years.  A good set of Kleins will stand up to this kind of abuse, but the company doesn't encourage it.

Milestone

     I did something today I have done only four times before in 38 years of my job: I put a new transmitter on the air.

     In this case, it's new only to my immediate employer, having already served for five years elsewhere in the corporation.  But it's new to us.

     Depending on how you look at to, they have only had four or five different transmitters since the station first went on the air, and I am the only person who has worked on all of them.  I was the last person to operate their first transmitter, an all-tube 1950s behemoth that took a little coaxing to get working again (and every second of tuning it up was an adrenaline-heavy thrill ride).  Now I'm the first person to put their newest transmitter on the air, a device so rich in surface-mount components that there's no troubleshooting most of it down to the level of individual parts: most problems, you trace back to whatever subassembly has gone wrong, and order a new one.

     The previous transmitter, in analog and digital configurations, served for over 29 years, and it's still a backup.  The 1950s giant lasted for 32 years, counting backup service and that record will probably be broken by the one I just shut down.  Except for a few hours here and there -- the day we overloaded the big generator during a power outage was the longest, five or six hours -- it was on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly three decades.

     The transmitter I put on the air today will probably still be on the air when I retire, and that's a strange feeling.

What, No Monday?

     I was up late Sunday night for no good reason, and slept in a little Monday -- but I have to admit it, the strangeness and unpleasantness of current events leaves me spoiled for choice and lost in the noise.  Which strain of awfulness is so dire as to invite further comment, and what stands on its own, inherently horrible?

     There's a giant hurricane headed toward Jamaica (and Cuba afterward), the eye moving slowly but circulating wind gusts inside the storm in excess of 200 miles an hour; at the same time, Indiana's Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, who has picked up a reputation for condemning every rainbow flag or lapel-pin listing pronouns as "grooming," has found himself right next to a real case of felony child exploitation charges involving the son of his podcast partner, and has nothing whatsoever to say about it.  Both of these are tragedies, one of unthinkable scale, the other of unspeakable harm, and yet they're nearly lost in headlines clamoring things just as bad, if not worse.

     Most of it defies easy remedy.  If you want to do something, donate to your local food pantry -- money, time and/or food.  With SNAP and WIC funding unavailable (and the Feds too busy dreaming up new Hatch Act violations to find creative solutions) and Federal employees not getting paid, they're about to be hit by a flood of need far in excess of their resources.

     We are careening towards a precipice -- and there are many, all far too near: economic, weather (or climate; go argue with the dead about terminology), politics, and that unlovely extension of politics, war, all of it on both national and global scales.  Which will pop first -- and how many of the rest will follow -- is a fool's bet and will eventually be a career for historians.  "Events leading up to..." and we are in the middle of them.

When The Feds Say "Do This" And "Don't Do This" At The Same Time

     There are a number of Federal grant programs, some dating back decades, that aim to help survivors of domestic abuse, human trafficking and violent crime.*  Many of them are written in such a way that the immigration status of the victim is no bar to getting such aid, and some even have provisions to make it possible for victims to seek permanent residency.  The notion is that crime is crime, victims ought not be made to suffer further, and escaping an abuser shouldn't make it less likely that a person could get permission to stay here and even work towards citizenship.  For most of these, the money flows to individual states, and from them to non-profit aid groups (as well as local police, prosecutors and public defenders).

     Mr. Trump's Justice Department is no fan of such open-handedness, especially the sweeping inclusion in the Violence Against Women Act, and has issued guidelines restricting the kinds of legal services this money can be used to provide to people without legal status in the U.S.

     The problem is, that's not what the law says.  That leaves the states stuck at a fork: they can obey Federal law, passed (and later reauthorized) by Congress and signed by Presidents, and get sideways with Justice in the doing, or they can go along with DOJ's guide, and get sued six ways from Sunday for noncompliance by attorneys for the victims who don't get help.  Unsurprisingly, twenty states opted to do the suing themselves, and are hoping the courts will sort out the contradiction.  The clock is ticking; unless there's a preliminary injunction or other resolution, the new rules go into effect in November, and it's not entirely clear what is and isn't covered.

     This is one part of a broader tangle of preexisting Federal law, contradictory Administration guidance, and puzzled state agencies and nonprofits suing to hold the status quo or at least get the courts to weigh in on which set of rules to follow.  Do we follow the law, or Executive Branch whim?  At one time, I thought the proper course would be obvious to nearly every American; these days, I'm not so sure.
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* Violence Against Women Act, Victims of Crime Act, and, slightly less directly, Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, among others.

Steak, Sure, But The Risotto!

     Dinner tonight was a splurge.  Our corner grocery had good -- well, not insurmountable -- prices on ribeye steaks, so I bought a couple of small ones.*  They didn't have any lump charcoal, and I'm out, but they had "assorted hardwood" firewood and I decided to try it.  The hardwood kindling I use burns down to coals, after all.

     It turns out that a wood fire works fine in my covered grill: close the cover once it's well underway, and it smolders with little or no flame.  Splitting the wood down to grill size with a hatchet -- not an axe -- and a mallet isn't quick or especially easy, but it's not all that hard.  I'd get a real axe and a proper wedge if I was going to do it often.

     Along with the steaks, I picked up a bagged salad and some cherry tomatoes.  You're not going to find them in a salad kit: cut tomatoes don't keep.  Adding them really helps.  Some sliced olives are a plus, too. And I snagged a box of assorted fresh fancy mushrooms and Alessi brand dehydrated mushroom risotto.

     Alessi's shelf-storable pasta dishes, soups and rice have never let me down.  It's about as good as scratch-made (Italian grandmothers will disagree).  I cleaned and cut up the mushrooms -- trumpet, maitake and golden oyster -- and put them in a covered grill pan with glob of butter, parking the whole thing on the back of the grill as soon as the fire had caught.  The steaks followed in order, on a perforated stainless-steel tray, medium for me and very rare for Tam.  The rice just simmers once it's been stirred into boiling water; you set the heat on low and ignore it.

     As the steaks came off the grill, I brought in the cooked mushrooms and stirred them into the creamy risotto, and the combination smelled delicious.  It tasted delicious, too, an excellent accompaniment for the little steaks.  Throw in some well-cooked stew meat or sausage, and the rice dish could have been a main course.  I had a last few nibbles when I was clearing away the pots and pans -- it was just that good.
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* The child of Depression babies, I'm usually half-convinced the economy is about to tank, so why not have something special for supper once in a while?  Growing up, we had steak for supper most Fridays, once Dad had a good job.  He never tasted a steak until he was an adult, and he was bound and determined to make up for lost time.  These days, that would be quite an indulgence (and what would my doctor say?), but I'll have one every so often, until I get priced out.

Lift The Curtains

      Canada ran a TV ad in the US that included excerpts from a Ronald Reagan radio speech about trade barriers, back when he was President, and the ad leaves the impression the late President was no fan of tariffs.

     President Trump was annoyed, firing back on social media, "The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. [...] Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED." (You can go read the whole thing on "Truth Social" if you like.)  And indeed, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute said the ad “misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address.”  As CNN notes, they didn't explain just how.  It's a whole Dance of the Seven Veils, over something that is part of the public record.

     Why take someone else's word about it?  Newsweek published the entire text of the radio address and you can read it for yourself; Mr. Reagan makes it clear that he's opposed to tariffs in general, greatly prefers free trade, and has imposed very specific tariffs on some Japanese products in response to their failure to abide by a previous agreement -- and that he hopes to resolve the issue soon and return to free trade.  But see for yourself.

Ah, Cleverness

     It would make me happy to have something witty to say about the demotion of the East Wing of the White House, and the monster of a ballroom that (supposedly) will rise in its place.  But I don't.

     The money for this work is coming from "private donors."  At the same time, the present government shutdown means SNAP and WIC coffers will -- probably -- run dry, just in time for Thanksgiving.  There's some private help, but it's pretty paltry compared to the big government programs.

     You don't have to believe that government food assistance programs are a good idea to understand that shutting them down abruptly is a bad idea.  It's a rugpull, just as the heating season is starting up.  It'd be one thing if Congress, after due debate, ramped them down, but this is, well, cruel.  And all the more so in the light of a lavish building project for the Presidential mansion.  It might be "The People's House," but don't count on getting in if you show up for dinner unexpectedly, no matter who's living there at the time.

     States and cities and private food charities are scrambling to make up the shortfall, but they're not going to have enough.  One of our local food banks has already extended help to Federal employees working without paychecks -- yes, they've opened the doors to the families of TSA agents -- so they're already under an extra burden.

     Somebody tell me how this is making us great again?

Pulp Fiction

     I wrote yesterday in a rush, and at first sight, it implies something I had no intention of saying, something I don't believe in: I said recent events were like a scrambled Atlas Shrugged, lacking John Galt.

     Ayn Rand was a huge fan of pulp fiction when she was younger, translated stuff in Russia and the pure quill once she came to the U.S.  Those stories were generally cast in the Gothic mode: there's a clear conflict between good and evil, a villain -- and a hero.  Robin Hood, Zorro, general Western Sheriffs, the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, Batman, G-8, Doc Savage: they appear at key moments, solve the crime, vanquish the bad guy(s), save the day!   When Rand turned to novels, she used archetypes for her characters; of course she had a hero.  It's larger-than-life pulp.  A lot of famous literature is, if you take a step back.

     In real life, the guy who rides in big and bold to save the day is as likely to be a villain as a hero, if not more likely -- Napoleon springs most readily to mind, but you can fill in the blanks.  Good guys getting through tumultuous events and carrying the gen. pop along are likely to be committees: the Founders and Framers of the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution; the leaders, generals and admirals of the Allies in WW I and II.

     A recent news commentator opined that the Democrats are unlikely to sweep the midterm elections despite widespread disapproval of Republican performance in office, because voters see Dems as "weak" and the GOP as "strong."  Since when did we stop rooting for the underdog?  We got into two world wars a bit late, on the side that looked weak -- because it was the proper side; because the other guys were authoritarians with no respect for individual freedom, for freedom of the press, freedom of religion.  Unlike the pessimistic commentator, I don't think we we've lost that.

     We're Americans.  We dance right up to the brink.  So far, we've always known when to step back.

     (PS: Tam said, "So you're rehabilitating Ayn Rand?"  I don't think so.  She fell for her own fiction; you shouldn't.  There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around in fiction, SF especially, everything from The Moon Is A Harsh Matters to The Dispossessed and beyond.  None of them are guidelines around which to remold society, a project that always involves oppression.  One of the overlooked things about the governments that arose from the American Revolution is that in large measure and at every level, the people involved were trying to hold on to what they had and keep it going, not knock it flat and build a New Citizenry from the rubble and ash.  For better and worse, there weren't any huge departures from the trajectories they were already on.  Eventually, the most contradictory elements came into conflict....)

Hurtling Though History

     Photographs of the destruction at the East Wing of the White House from yesterday and today suggest that this Administration is speedrunning the notion of "ruin value."

     Or perhaps it's the boast of Caesar Augustus, who claimed to have found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble -- only, you know, the average Roman was still living in a flimsy apartment house, hoping the lightweight upper stories wouldn't catch fire while the Emperor was fiddling around with his building plans.

     Hey, did you hear about the anthrax outbreak in Argentina -- the country our Federal government just bailed out and is talking about importing cheap beef from?  Dig in!

     It's like someone threw Atlas Shrugged in a blender, only with no John Galt.

No More Kings

      The "No Kings" rallies across the country appear to have gone without a hitch: no tea thrown in the harbor, no throwing things at the police until the police shot back, plenty of U.S. flags, silly inflatable costumes, and hand-made signs.  Between five and seven million people took part, very probably the largest mass protest in our history.

     And we do have a history with kings.

     Rule by decree is bad; Congress and not the President is supposed to have the power of the purse (it's right there in the Constitution).  There's still a broad consensus about this, but it's weakening.  It shouldn't, no matter who is President.  Love him, loathe him or feel indifferent, all Presidents are obliged to play by the rules, and when one won't, it's not a thing to chuckle over, it's a reason to chuck him out.

     The first chucking-out is going to be Congress.  Even when they're not shut down by an unwillingness to negotiate across party lines, the present Congress has been largely supine, bullyragged and led around like dull oxen by the Executive.  That's not how it's supposed to work.  They're due for a housecleaning, starting with next year's elections

     Our government is a circus.  We need the clowns, the ringmaster, the lion-tamer -- the whole thing.  One guy leading a herd of elephants to trample it all down isn't much of a show.
  

Which Way Does Your News Lean?

     Look, all reporting bears some imprint left by the people that report it.  Selection of stories, choice of people to interview, questions asked, and so on.  Good reporters work to minimize this; they research and check facts; good editors call 'em on it when they fail to, and send them back to mill to grind more finely. And honest media outlets label opinion as opinion when they present it.

     Not all outlets are honest.  Sometimes they're lying to themselves.  Sometimes they're trying to pick winners and losers instead of just reporting who won or lost.  And sometimes, they're lying to you.

     These guys do their best to sort 'em out.  It's a big job and they don't always keep up, but they don't stop trying.

     Which direction do your news sources lean?  Do you know?  Are you sure?  Find out.

Conan The Historical Preservation

     Robert E. Howard's house, now a museum, is falling apart.  The Foundation running it needs our help.  While the author of Conan the Barbarian -- and a great many other cracking good stories featuring wonderful characters in fantastic situations -- hasn't lived there in quite some time, having ended his own life in 1936 -- the house still stands, restored much as it was.

     Few fantasy and SF writers get much physical recognition; Robert A. Heinlein's houses in Bonny Doon and Colorado Springs (much changed) bear little memory of him; you can look at Octavia Butler's typewriter, but not her workspace; Ray Bradbury's basement office has been recreated here in Indianapolis with original artifacts and there's a museum dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut not far away.  But the actual places where it happened, where the magic met paper?  Those are few and far between.

     You can help save Conan's birthplace.

Spooky Season

     No, not goblins and ghosts and things that go bump in the night -- spy stuff.  Intel stuff, open-source and covert, military and political.  Come to think of it, some of that stuff might go bump in the night, or possibly ka-blam.

     There's a new podcast out, from a source that seems unlikely at first sight, and they're doing good work, serious work, talking to newsmakers a little but mostly to people who avoid headlines, about things that sometimes make headlines.  Sources & Methods is not the usual fare, and in its best moments, is as fascinating as a good spy novel.

Diversity Fire?

     One of the big TV networks is splitting up, spinning off its opinion-focused cable channels and websites from the main news and entertainment operation, and who could blame them?  Their audience goals are very different, and opinion TV rises and falls on the tides of politics; today's soaring eagle is tomorrow's albatross.  Meanwhile, the more mainstream outlet strives to serve (and gather) the widest possible audience.

     That said, mainstream TV in the U.S. still skews white, male and upper-middle class in a manner very disproportionate to the population as a whole, and news staffing leans more that way than entertainment.  One fix, long required by the FCC, has been not diversity hiring but diversity outreach: licensed stations are required to cast a very wide net when seeking employees, and to document their efforts.  The theory is that talent (and the enthusiasm required to employ that talent for the relatively low pay earned by most positions) is rare enough that qualified applicants will have a fair chance -- if they know the jobs are open.  And it has worked; TV today is more diverse than it was sixty years ago, for all that it remains less diverse than the country as a whole.

     Large broadcast companies have supplemented this with news (and entertainment) sub-groups that look for stories about, from, or of interest to underrepresented demographic groups and while it might be tempting to ascribe that to some notion of liberal uplift, guess again: those groups are markets for advertising, and if you can expand the reach of some generic cop-and-lawyers show by adding a Goth-y computer gamine, a lady boss, a gay cop or ensuring that the cast is a cross-section of America, they're gonna do it, and pick up an extra ten or twenty percent in ad revenue because they've got better ratings among red-headed working mothers of Latvian descent, etc. than the competing networks; likewise, news divisions don't want to miss developing stories just because nobody on the staff speaks Spanish or is likely to notice a wave of murders among an ethnic minority or a pandemic emerging among a disregarded group; those are legitimate news "beats," and you need reporters who know the territory.

     So it's not a great sign when a line like this scrolls across social media:
     "NBC News has laid off 150 employees, eliminating teams dedicated to Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ issues."
     The details are not quite so dire, some of them will land jobs on one side or another of the split; but the teams will be gone, out from under the current glare of official disapproval, just a little more compliance in advance.

     It's become fashionable, at least in some circles, to sneer at the notion that diversity is a major source of our country's strength, but the version of that sentiment without layers of gloss and varnish is that we're a chaotic, cross-grained mob who, faced with a problem, will try to solve it in a dozen different ways and fight among ourselves over who has the best solution even before it is solved -- but we will solve it, and then bicker about the solving while tumbling towards the next crisis.  Hammering our lovely, awful mess into some square-cornered whitebread straitjacket isn't going to make us better, and you can take that to the bank. 

Sometimes, Silence

     Occasionally, I'll look at a current issue, dig a little deeper -- and decide not to say anything about it.  I had an idea for this morning, but it's just not worth it; I'd be adding more heat than light about something both contentious and impossible to resolve, a matter of opinion and taste rather than fact.

     People are entitled to their own opinions.  Even when I think they're wrong.  Even when their notions are morally suspect.

Remember WENN

     It's back!  The TV series Remember WENN ran on AMC for four seasons starting in 1996 and then vanished.  A mostly-gentle comedy, it follows the career of a plucky young woman from Elkhart, Indiana who arrives at a radio station in Pittsburgh in the late 1930s to work as a radio scriptwriter.  The sets and costumes are first rate, the dialog is period-snappy, and while the technology isn't one hundred percent consistent, it's generally so close you'll never notice.  (I will, especially using carbon and ribbon mics together in the studios, but here's the thing: they're all real microphones, and it's not that far off.)

     It's on AMC and another streaming channel now.  I watched the first episode again tonight.  It's just as charming as I remember.

Peace In Gaza

     As I write this, a long day of speeches and congratulations is underway.  Smiling politicians in nice suits (or the local equivalent) are applauding one another.  That's fine, and I'm not going to say anything snippy about the political figures involved because, hey, they did it.

     All peace in the Middle East is temporary -- but that's true of all peace, everywhere, and of all wars, too.  What's important right now is the last of the living hostages have been freed, prisoners are being released, and people in Gaza aren't being bombed or shot at as they begin, however tentatively, to return to their homes or to the rubble where their homes once stood.  Reports say food and other aid is moving   Maybe it will last a week, a month, a year or only a day; but every day that passes without war in the region is a better day.

     I hope everyone involved -- even the individuals I don't like -- has many better days to come.

Dinner With What's On Hand

      Sunday night, I was a little tired from yard work (and had made scant progress on a wild area of maple saplings and some tree-like weeds).  I didn't want to reheat leftovers, but what did I have?

     Let's see, the tail end of a batch of Canadian bacon, a couple of slices; part of a bag of fresh Shishito peppers; eggs; part of a jar of chunky salsa; a little can of green chilies and, in a corner of the cupboard, a microwave-in-bag of Puerto Rican Rice & Gandules Sofrito.  Gandules are pigeon peas, a delightful legume with a distinctive flavor.

     I heated up the rice and beans per the package while lightly frying the ham.  Then I added the rice to the skillet and cooked it a bit before pouring in the can of chilies (with a healthy sprinkle of dried onion flakes; chopped green onions would have been better, but I didn't have any) and snipping in three large Shishitos.  I gave that a stir, pushed it to the sides and scrambled a couple of eggs in the center.  When the eggs were cooked, I mixed it all back together and gave it just a little more time.  Served in a bowl with a large dollop of chunky salsa on top, it was warm and filling.

     While it was cooking, I remembered I had fresh mushrooms, too, but it was too late.  I had some of them in an omelet this morning, along with bacon, another Shishito pepper, Swiss cheese, a little feta cheese and an olive.

     Some people look down on beans and rice as "poverty food."  You're missing out.  There are remarkably many distinct combinations and most of them are delicious.  Your fellow humans are a clever bunch and you should probably go try what they're having for dinner, if you have the chance.

Metaphorical Floodwaters

     Friends and neighbors, does it seem lately that your zone has been flooded?  Is disinformation, misinformation, arrant BS and rumor crowding out accurate information?  Has it become far more difficult to distinguish between the true metal and mere dross?

     You may be suffering from The Russian Model of Propaganda!  Sometimes known as the "Firehose of Falsehood," if what you're seeing is:
A. High-volume and multichannel
B. Rapid, continuous, and repetitive
C. Lacking in commitment to objective reality
D. Lacking in commitment to consistency
     Then you may need to adjust your social media and news consumption to slow or dilute it.  RAND Corporation wrote a nice paper about it.

     In other news, I noticed our Vice President made the circuit of the Sunday morning politics shows, pressing hard on blaming the Democrats for the government shutdown* and Gish-galloping through questions that didn't fit his goal.  At one point, when an interviewer kept asking about things she wanted to cover, he scolded her, "You're talking to the Vice President, and you've spent five minutes on [unwanted topic.]"  Yes, dear boy, that's how it works: the person conducting the interview asks the questions, and you can answer them however you like or refuse to address them.  You don't get to set the agenda; that's what press conferences are for. 

     The Vice President, the President, members of Congress, judges, journalists, Cabinet members, police: they're all Just Some Guy.  This is the United States of America and none of them are more special than the others.  And if any of them decide to "flood the zone," know it for what it is, and judge it accordingly.
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* As I have noted before, this is nonsense.  Either party could break the impasse by giving the other one exactly what they want; neither of them have made a secret of what it will take.  Or they could sit down together and work out something they'd all dislike equally.  This last option is extremely not happening.  The GOP only needs a few votes in the Senate but they have so far been unwilling to unbend enough to get even a handful of Democrat Senators to come over.  The Dems have made an opening bid, and it's pretty high -- but the counteroffer is bupkis and an empty promise to talk later.  Meanwhile, if you bought your health insurance through the Feds, it's gonna cost a lot more; if you're counting on food stamps or other aid, those coffers are running dry. 

Ladder Diagram?

     It's incredibly geeky, and (at least in part) out of date: what's a "ladder diagram" or a "control ladder," anyway?

     To make matters worse, in the ones I know best, they laid the "ladder" on its side.

     But it's not intentionally arcane: in the days when all the control and logic in electronic devices was done with relays, a convention arose of drawing the schematic diagram of it with the power supply (AC or DC, one side grounded or not) as a pair of lines at the right and left, with all the "stuff" in between: switches, relay coils, relay contacts, lights and buzzers, electrical motors or controlled equipment, looking something like strange rungs of a ladder, with the power supply lines as the rails.*  The order of operations generally ran from top to bottom, and left to right for each "rung."

     It makes for simple, clear diagrams, or as simple and clear as they get for that sort of thing, and over time, it evolved its own specialized set of symbols, which came to be used interchangeably with the more usual set in some applications.†  RCA tended to rotate the diagrams, so the rails were at the top and bottom of a long blueprint and the order of the "rungs" ran from left to right -- this is a better fit to a long drawing table.  By the 1970s, it was starting to run up against advances in technology: the fifteen foot drawing I mentioned yesterday had a gap in it, with dotted lines leading to a box marked "Solid State Logic."  A card cage tucked behind a meter panel held eight or ten plug-in cards, loaded with early optical isolators, solid-state relays, and logic gates built with discrete resistors, diodes and transistors‡ (2N4401 and 2N4402, if memory serves, an NPN/PNP pair) -- and those circuits were not at all friendly to ladder-type diagrams.  They had their own set of drawings.  It was the beginning of the end -- and the start of twisty, hard-to-follow multi-page schematics that were drawn as a guide to manufacturing and passed along to the techs who had to service the equipment with little thought given to clarity. 

     You'll still find ladder logic in industrial controls, and ladder-type diagrams are used as a kind of programming language to set up the workflow for programmable logic controllers; but in my line of work, it's a lost art, as dusty as Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.    
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* One of several convergent uses of the term "rail" in connection with power supply.  The primary source of this is probably the live third rail of an electric train -- but any power bus in electrical or electronic applications can be casually referred to as a "rail," and the people who work with it will know the meaning.
 
† This, in turn, eventually resulted in a change to the general set of electronic symbols: prior to WW II, capacitors were represented by a pair of parallel lines with connections coming off the sides, -||-.  Ladder logic used a similar symbol for normally-open relay contacts: -| |-.   Context was usually sufficient to tell them apart -- until wartime needs meant a huge number of workers and techs had to learn in a hurry!  After the war, capacitors were given a curved line for one side: -|(-.  Since many of them are round in one dimension or another, it made sense.  And just to make things interesting, there's an entirely different set of symbols for relay contacts in general electronics, which have been used all along.
 
‡ Troubleshooting in the solid state logic was difficult -- a clamp-on card extender would let you move one card at a time to an easier-to-reach position, but it was awkward and didn't always make good electrical contact.  I started adding "state monitor" LEDs to the cards as I worked on them and eventually, opening up the cover and looking at the little red lights would localize problems to one card -- or eliminate them as the cause and point to any of the several dozen relays in the control ladder.

Two Days, And Longer

     I have spent the past two days closely focused on the replacement for a highly configurable widget that doesn't work.  The replacement doesn't work, either, in the very same way.

     It is literally configured by the book and confirmed by factory technicians, looking at photographs and talking me through it.  The manufacturer's installation crew, hired contractors who have worked for them before and who I found clueful, did the initial setup and testing, and pronounced themselves stumped.  But they were confident the factory techs would sort it out. 

     This has not happened.

     One complication: I admit that I have been lazy.  This particular company -- we've bought major items from them for years -- has some of the worst habits I have ever encountered when it comes to drawing schematic diagrams.  They rarely manage to get all of one function on one page, and their continued-on-page-n jumps are hard to follow and often fragmentary; most of something happens on one page, the circuit goes to another page and wends through a series of connectors and jumpers, splits, does minor things on two other pages, and dead-ends.  You backtrack and find a tiny note that directs you elsewhere, and so on.  And on and on. 

     RCA was plagued by this, back when RCA was a big company that made every single item in the path from, say, the camera and microphone on a TV reporter in the studio to the TV set in your living room, and they (eventually!) came up with two answers: absolutely enormous blueprints for complex subsystems (one showing the "control ladder" for a 1970s TV transmitter was a yard high and over fifteen feet long!) and summaries or "one-line diagrams" that identified and followed critical functions.  Between the two, you could get from Point A to Point Z and have a good understanding of every intermediate step.  But the giant drawings relied on long-gone technology (not to mention workspace with a lot of open floor area!) and the one-lines took the careful attention of engineers who knew the whole system, inside and out.  Degreed-engineer time is too expensive for that these days, and by the time the product is in the hands of low-level people like me, they're six projects further on, and probably working for a different company.

     All of my older drawing-package books for this company's products have a Bobbi-added extensive array of color-coded tabs with drawing numbers and titles, careful highlighting and plenty of on-page notations (they're inconsistent about telling you where to look for continuations).  I haven't done that with these yet, and I need to.  I'm going to have to grit my teeth and trace this thing out fully, and try to understand why one of the most common configurations of this gadget is not working for us.  It's probably something simple, some detail that may be known to a few field techs by word-of-mouth but hasn't been written down.

     It's happened before.  The cause of an ugly and expensive fire at my work almost exactly thirty years ago came down to not relocating three large components that run very hot from an enclosed cabinet to an open-air mounting.  I'd seen it done at a different installation of a similar device, and no one there ever said why; they might not have known.*  The factory field-installation techs started doing it after the product had been on the market a few years, but they apparently never told the factory engineers.  No factory change notice was ever issued, no memo or bulletin, and the factory support engineers don't appear to have known it was being done.  But it was -- only it wasn't done in ours, and one Fall evening, at least one of them caught fire and cost my employer a small fortune.  Or small for them; I could have retired on what it cost, and lived in luxury.  The equipment was over twenty years old at the time.

     I don't think this is quite as bad an oversight but there's a piece missing from this puzzle, and someone knows what it is.  But so far, I don't know, and neither does the factory tech trying to help me troubleshoot it from hundreds of miles away. 
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* Sola constant-voltage transformers, for readers who know what those things are.  They run hot and often loud; this gadget had three of them, each slightly smaller than a footlocker.  The place where I saw them mounted on a wall even had fans blowing air across them.

Too Far Out

      As nearly as I can figure, the President of the United States is waging low-grade war on some parts of the United States.

     I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.  I'm pretty sure "Nacht und Nebel" was never U.S. domestic policy.  Or at least it didn't used to be.

     But I'm so old-fashioned and out of touch that I didn't think Presidents could suspend freedom of speech, so what do I know?

     I'm working on a short story.  Fiction.  The fascts, er, facts are too darned hard to look at for very long at a time.

Utter Nutjobbery

     In a piece of propaganda better suited to Joe McCarthy's Red Scare or worse, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is vowing to go after "Leftist terrorists" in a news release almost too unhinged to be believed.  But it's as real as any of Stalin's purges, and you do have to wonder just how far he and men like him are willing to go.

     Here in the real world, almost every one of these political assassins and mass killers are lone wolves,* most of them espousing incoherent notions that barely fit any category of political ideology.  In recent years, a preponderance have leaned more Right than Left, but in either direction, their notions are a far cry from any Republican or Democrat platform.  Their ideas are generally, well, unhinged.  And if AG Paxton was merely one nut chasing after a whole sackful of them, I'd ignore his release as unworthy of adult attention; but he's got the entire might and credence of the state of Texas behind him, and woe betide any loudmouthed fools who come to his attention.

     This is going to come to blood, by and by, and I think the forces of Trumpism, of American authoritarianism, are longing for it.  It does not take two willing participants for that particular tango and so here we are, with the Sword of Damocles one hand of a steadily ticking clock.

     I wish I had not been born into such times.
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* I have written about this before: murderous madmen have an advantage.  Most people who struggle with sanity are harmless; most of the violently-inclined are more dangerous to themselves than anyone else. But the sober, serious men and women who work to protect at-risk individuals and society as a whole are focused on predictable threats, not someone who kills over harsh words, perceived slights or because they got up on the wrong side of the bed.  And while all conspiracies leak, an individual acting alone is difficult to spot before they strike.

Three Kinds Of Chaos In A Trenchcoat

     The thing about Americans -- the people of the United States, at least -- is that we're essentially ungovernable.  Left, Right and Center, "You're not the boss of me!" has many fans in this country.

     Nevertheless, the Founders and Framers managed to cobble together a framework that forms a country, a federation of states under a -- hey! -- Federal government, the states themselves composed of counties, parishes, boroughs, townships, cities, towns: lots of little government, to argue over, protest, vote out, vote in and complain about.  We write letters to the Editor, go on local cable or global podcasts, call in to radio shows and generally raise hell, and for most of us -- for the overwhelming majority -- it's enough.

     We're not good at getting into line en masse behind a leader or a specific party line; the Bill of Rights has long been as close to a shared ideal as we have, and it's a list of things government is supposed to not mess with or is obliged to protect -- and we argue over the meaning and enforcement of even it.

     Two massive World Wars brought us about as close as we've come to unity, and there was plenty of pushback, both personal and in groups.

     That's our national character: taken as a whole, we're a disorganized rabble.  The results of our most recent national elections bear that out: the House and Senate are within a sneeze of being evenly divided; a bad flu season might tip the majority back and forth, depending who's been hanging out together and if they got their shots.  The popular vote for the Presidency was even closer, with a margin of  victory less than 1.5 percent.

     We don't march in step.  We've got a Constitution and a body of law that protects our chaotic nature.  So the Trump administration's present efforts to quell dissent, going after critics of the President and prominent Democrat-supporting people and institutions, is not only unlawful but a huge mistake.  Rolling Stone's got a great article about it, but the article is at least partially paywalled.

     Attempts to beat this country into line with any single set of narrow notions are doomed.  Usually, such efforts fizzle out.  Sometimes they fester, explode into violence, and then fade away.  And once -- just once! -- we had widespread conventional war.

     Mr. Trump, and especially his inner circle, appear to long for war; they've targeted Portland (the one in Oregon) and Chicago (the one in Illinois, if you were wondering) for the deployment of Federalized National Guard troops and the President is toying with involving the Insurrection Act.  Portland, OR is pretty reliably Left-leaning and had a long run of telegenic violence (arguably in reaction) during the first Trump administration; Chicago is the dominant city of Illinois, a state under popular Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, a prominent Administration critic and likely 2028 Presidential candidate.  They're likely places to start trouble, and sending in the National Guard appears to be intended as provocation: neither city is in a particular crisis at this time.

     I'm not seeing any serving generals lining up to wage war on this nation's cities, even after the President's speech to them calling for just that.

     Americans thrive on chaos.  As a group, we don't like to pushed around.  We don't like being told what to do, what to think, what to believe, how to worship or even if we ought to be religious at all.  Tell us it's a crime to burn the flag (it's not) and you've guaranteed the appearance of public flag-burners.  Oh, most people won't approve of it -- but most people will also disapprove of arresting and charging the flag-burners, as well.

     This kind of thing will be the downfall of the incumbent Republicans.  The only question is how long it will take, and how big a mess it will make.  --And the end result won't be Democrat dominance, but a return to our normal level of chaos and disagreement.  We're a fractious lot, but that's how it works here. 

It's Here

     It's here, it's in -- and I had not realized that "Normal" really is a setting on a washing machine, all by itself.  This one has a weird array of settings, including "Delicates," "Casuals," "Quick Wash," "Normal," "Whites," "Colors" and "Spin and Drain." There's another setting for water temperature, which does not include separate wash and rinse temps.  But it's got two different cold settings, plus "Cool."

     The installers and I had about fifty percent of a language in common.  We got by.  I guess I'm supposed to be all up in arms about that, but I'm not.  They did a good job, didn't faff around, and cleaned up what little mess they made.  The lead guy had a very strong accent, but he was patient and willing to slow way down.  They took the old washer out and brought the new one in using a wide two-man lifting strap, rearranging it for the stairs and level walking.  It's effective and gets through narrow spaces -- but you need a couple of men built about like Li'l Abner to make it work.

Uh-Oh, Marco

     There's a chance that a breakfast plate hit the wall in the White House this morning.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio is making the rounds of the Sunday morning political shows* to flog the tentative peace agreement for Gaza.  It's a good thing, though years and lives late in coming, and who knows if it'll actually go through, but it's as close as we've seen so far.

     On ABC's This Week, Secretary Rubio praised President Trump for arranging the agreement -- and then went on to give equal or nearly equal credit to a long list of Muslim-majority countries which have been pressing Hamas, facilitating talks, and providing insight and locations.  He looked a little furtive in the doing; he knows it's not what his boss wants to hear, not with a Nobel almost within scent, but I suppose there's a vestige of spine that prompts him to give credit where it's due.  Look for some kind of ritual humiliation from above to follow.
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* He's scheduled for This Week, Meet the Press and Face the Nation.  Sure hope he ate his Wheaties this morning!

It Stopped Making Noise

      No noise is good news when the washing machine is running, right?  I replaced the last wobbly block under it a couple of weeks ago and it's been a lot happier.

     Until today, when I finished vacuuming and went downstairs to load the dryer...only to discover the washer had filled for the rinse cycle and just sat.

     The motor-driven sequencer isn't running, and refuses to run at any point in the cycle.  The machine has already got two broken vanes on the agitator, and I know from looking it up when I was working on the dryer that parts availability for these thirty-plus-year-old Amana units is very limited.  I've ordered a replacement (a Maytag), which will be here Monday between -- get this -- "8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m."  Beats trying to carry it home myself, even at that.

     I took the load of work slacks out and they're soaking in the tub.  A round of hand-wringing* and rinsing will follow after dinner.  It was easy to siphon most of the water out (the trick, of course, is to fill the hose first) and the old Shop-Vac should get most of the rest.

     This is what happens when you try to make things better.  After replacing the last bad block (old mortar was stuck to it!  I thought I had removed all of those last year), I'd added a hanger rod over the dryer to hold unused clothes hangers within easy reach.  Make too many improvements and Murphy notices.
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* But not handwringing.

     

Potato Shortcut

      It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of this blog that I like potatoes.  I like 'em baked and French fried, I like 'em diced and in wedges, I like 'em mashed and as hash browns.  I like 'em spiral-cut and broiled.  I like potato chips, both home-cooked and store-bought.  I like latkes and I like potato pancakes.

     Many of these require some amount of preparation.  Potato pancakes, the kind I make, start with leftover mashed potatoes and here's the thing: much as like potatoes, I try to limit my intake.  I only make mashed potatoes once or twice a year, and I make them from scratch.

     But grocers sell instant mashed potatoes, and they've gotten better and better.  Used to be, you only kept them around for a Sunday-dinner stopgap, when you'd run out of fresh or the supply had unexpectedly turned, but these days, they're pretty hard to tell from fresh.  The texture's right and the flavor's good; not great, mine are better, but it'll do.

     And if you have mashed potatoes, you can make potato pancakes.  There's nothing too odd in the instant version so--  Will they work?

     Readers, I give you Exhibit A:

     This is the second batch of three, after I'd upped the temperature a bit.  They brown fine, and they taste just fine, too, a nice accompaniment for a strip of bacon and a fried egg.  I put ketchup on mine and they're good.  Sure, they're not quite the same as scratch (and I didn't add a beaten egg to this batch, which would help), but they'll do.

     You make the potatoes per the package directions, then slap a half to two-thirds of a cup blob on a hot, lightly-greased skillet or griddle, give it enough time to brown a bit, slip a spatula under, flip it, mash it down, and leave it to brown.  Flip it again and do the other side, and there you go.  Time and temperature interact and you'll have to find your way, and as mentioned above, if you let the potatoes cool a little and add a well-beaten egg, it will help them hold together and add to the flavor.

Government Shutdown, Reichstag Fire...

     It always amazes me that when the Federal government shuts down...it doesn't shut down.  Okay, I can see keeping the armed forces going, and DOJ (crime always ignores the shutdown memo, dammit!) and DHS (those passports aren't going to stamp themselves, nor will your carefully-folded underwear paw though itself at the airport); Congress has to stay on the job if they're going to even fake trying to resolve the impasse.*  But there's a whole list of optional stuff that Presidents get to pick and choose, and most of it is nonsense.  The current resident at 1600 Penna† has promised to set up the cuts for maximum partisan pain, which is pernicious nonsense: during a shutdown, the President -- any President -- needs to get the Cabinet working on limiting harm, not seeing what they can make even worse.‡  Other things have funding limitations.  I logged on to my doctor's website yesterday to discover this notice:
     "Medicare virtual visits currently not covered. Effective immediately, due to government shut down."
     Yes, Granny's got to make an in-person visit -- with a lead time measured in months for most appointments, as opposed to 24 hours or less for a virtual one.  Sure hope the old girl holds up!

     The Administration is using the shutdown as an opportunity to increase Executive Branch power and enact more of the dire promises of "Project 2025."  It's unAmerican.  It's contrary to our history and traditions.

     There's more and more revulsion to this trend:

     This page has a link to neat little booklet, Understanding Fascism.  It's designed to be printed out double-sided, cut and trimmed to pocket-size.  It includes the U. S. Army piece I quoted from and linked to recently.

     Then there's this article on a harm-reduction approach for reporters covering modern populists.  It's interesting reading, especially if you've looked into 20th Century U. S. history; Huey Long of Louisiana was one of that century's most successful populist politicians, playing the media with great skill, and  there's good, hands-on, nuts-and-bolts insight into how to avoid being used.  It also links to a clear and concise 32-page booklet, and an even shorter "toolkit."  The Press is far too easily made into a partisan megaphone by extremists and it's well past time they realized it again, and pushed back.  One thing caught my eye: several times, the writer calls for greater specificity in quotes and descriptions, and fewer blanket labels, even looking askance at the use of "populist" and other broad terms when covering politicians and events.  Details matter!  Facts matter!  Fuzzy reactions and handy-dandy us-vs-them labels often obfuscate rather than clarify. 
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* On the other hand, heating, ventilation and cooling for their offices and chambers?  Maybe not so much.  That nice cafeteria, coffee service, on-demand water carafes?  Surely a needless luxury!  Nose to the grindstone, Congressthings, a little more cloakroom dealmaking and a little less Ritual Grimacing.  We already know you're foursquare with whatever will get you re-elected but voters are increasingly wondering what it is you're actually going to do.
 
† I've seen pictures of what he's done to the place and he is not gonna get his security deposit back.  I don't think he quite understands that it's essentially a rental.
 
‡ Of all the Administrations I would not associate with "harm reduction," I would not associate this one the most.  They came in vowing to create trauma and they have.

"Blue Channels"

     Action, meet reaction.  The Committee for the First Amendment is getting a relaunch.  Considering how the first launch went, it's a little surprising: in 1947, a bunch of prominent Hollywood types banded together to speak out against McCarthyism -- and then found out some of their friends were, indeed, communists.

     "It was a different time," as they say, and the Soviet Union had managed a remarkable degree of control over their public image in the U.S. (and the West generally) from the end of the Russian Civil War through the Spanish Civil War (though many volunteers, like George Orwell, came away disillusioned about the Soviets) and right up through the The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; when Hitler turned on Russia and they joined the Allies, it brought rehabilitation.  All kinds of political notions took root in the U.S. during the Great Depression, and communism developed a following among writers and actors.  Some of them were quite serious about it; others went to a rally or two and then moved on.  After WW II, HUAC, McCarthy et al went after all of 'em, inflating the numbers a few genuine Reds by adding in anyone who had ever admired the Soviets or spoke approvingly of Marx in public.  They painted with a very broad brush.

     1947's Committee for the First Amendment waved just as broad a brush back, with predictable results, like Humphrey Bogart's 1948 article, "I'm No Communist" explaining his involvement.  

     Defend freedom of speech, and you find yourself in the middle of a howling pack of people speaking freely, many of them espousing ideas you do not agree with.  That's how it works.  But it's not at all comfortable and it may be terrible PR.

     And perhaps that's something the 2025 Committee for the First Amendment understands.  Anyway, they're out there trying, and that's not nothing.  The current Administration is certainly flapping a broad brush around and they're overdue to get brushed back at.

     I'll leave the last word to the United States Army, in 1945's Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet/Number 64:
     "Many fascists make the spurious claim that the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as 'communist' everyone who refuses to support them. [...] Any fascist attempt to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of 'super-patriotism' and  'super-Americanism.' Fascist leaders are neither stupid nor naive. They know that they must hand out a line that "sells." Huey Long is said to have remarked that if fascism came to America, it would be on a program of 'Americanism.'"

     Real Americanism knows the answer to speech you don't like isn't suppression but speaking up yourself, and that the marketplace of ideas only works when it is a free market.

Bad Management

      Congress has ground to a halt, as predicted.  Democrats blame Republicans; Republicans blame Democrats.  It's a dance we've seen before.

     Both sides admit they're far apart.  The GOP wanted a basic, nothing-changes continuing resolution to keep the wheels turning for a couple of months.  Dems, aware the funding was about out for some key health-care subsidies -- money that helps pay for insurance for lower-income Americans -- wanted concessions.  

     Either side could break the jam by giving the other guys what they want.  Both sides could break it by finding some middle ground that everyone would loathe.  Neither side could work out a compromise and so here we are.

     The shutdown comes with something we haven't seen before: the Executive Branch has decided to violate the Hatch Act.  Go the the website for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and (as I write this) you'll be greeted by both a banner and a pop-up reading, "The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need."  The second sentence is just their job.  The first sentence is inaccurate at best; see previous paragraph.*  It takes sixty votes to get a budget bill through the U. S. Senate.  The Republicans haven't got that many Senators and any Senator with five friends could add up the results† and see they were going to have to work something out.

     Nor do the violations stop there.  Set up to prevent abuses under the New Deal, the Hatch Act essentially prohibits any member of the Executive Branch except the President and Vice President from engaging in partisan politics.  Something like, say, sending official messages to everyone working for Federal agencies explicitly blaming Democrats for the shutdown would, in fact, be in violation of it.  So you'll never, ever guess what happened.  Not only illegal but, as explained above, untrue.

     As things stand, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid payments are unaffected.  The mail will still be delivered, the military remain at their posts, air traffic controllers and TSA agents are still at work -- and ICE and the the Border Patrol under DHS will keep on doing their thing.  The latter appears to be the Administration's top priority, so what do they care if the lights are off everywhere else?  The Executive Branch is threatening to use the shutdown as an excuse for further permanent reductions in the Federal workforce, a threat that would probably be more effective if it wasn't what they were already doing anyway.

     In the meantime, if you wanted to ask the FCC or the Social Security Administration (etc.) a question?  Tough luck, kid.  Planned vacation to a National Park?  Better research nearby State Parks.  Many are quite nice, though lacking the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful and so on.  And isn't there a hurricane or two headed for the Southeast?  Oops.
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* This appears to be telling us all Democratic Senators except for Catherine Cortez Masto and John Fetterman, along with independent Angus King, are members of "the Radical Left," as is Republican Rand Paul.  It will come as a surprise to many of them, especially Senator Paul.
 
† I am not going to explain this.