Unexpected Physics

      Oldies TV network Me-TV has been running The Wizard of Oz film most of this month, along with various (old) behind-the-scenes shows about it.  And they've run The Wiz, the much later reinterpretation of the first Oz story (and one that correctly puts Dorothy in silver shoes -- the ruby slippers in the classic film were substituted because the red stands out wonderfully in Technicolor).

     The Wiz was playing this afternoon while I did my various chores, and I'd watch for a bit whenever I took a break.  I was doing just that when Dorothy (Diana Ross) and Toto (some nice stage dog) encountered an unrecognizable Micheal Jackson as The Scarecrow, being hounded by crows who were singing--  They were singing--  Oh, wow!

     What they were singing was social commentary, expressed in the informal or joking version of the laws of thermodynamics:
     1. You can't win.
     2. You can't break even.
     3. You can't quit the game. 
     Economics is known as "the dismal science," but let me tell you, thermodynamics is pretty dour, too.  In The Wiz, the Scarecrow is as crab-bucketed a character as ever was, literally pulling quotes by great thinkers out of his head while the crows caper around him, eating the products of the garden he's supposedly protecting and chortling about how stuck he is, unable to get ahead, unable to walk away.  I hope this isn't a spoiler for anyone: Dorothy eventually shoos them off and gets the scarecrow to walking, in a dance number that shows off Jackson's remarkable abilities.  And in the meantime, audiences have had one of the fundamental truths of the universe sung at them.

     Of course, humans are localized entropy-reversers.  We may not win at thermodymanics, but we can cheat a little.  We can push back, and that's what Dorothy does for the Scarecrow: helps him stand up and start pushing back.

     I am far from the first person to notice this.  One of the others is a huge physics geek, and dug into the history of the plain-language version of the three laws.  It's worth watching!

Vacuum Of Nope

      So, week before last, I dropped the motor unit of my "Amazon Basics" rechargeable, HEPA-rated stick vacuum by not realizing that I was holding on to the wrong part when I unlatched it from an accessory.  Bang! Down it went from waist height, striking the floor with the hinge over the dust receptacle cover and leaving me holding the business-end widget.  Of course hinge broke and the cover came off, leaving me with a nasty splash of hairballs and dust on the floor and a useless vacuum.

     Solvent glue didn't work -- wrong kind of plastic.  There's no way to build up tooth enough for epoxy to get a grip.  I might be able to use 2mm nuts and bolts to fasten a piece of aluminum across the break, but the size of the hardware is a clue to the scale of the thing: it was only strong and large enough to keep a small plastic cover in place.

     I liked that little vacuum a lot.  It was relatively light and didn't strain my back, plus it was quiet enough that Holden the big baby tomcat could (barely) tolerate it.  (My old upright sent him cowering behind the couch.) So I went looking for another one.  It was an inexpensive import and surely the big retailer still offered--  No.  There were some similar models from companies with imaginary names, some with good reviews, some not so good, none of which looked to use the same filters as my defunct Amazon.  After a couple of days spending spare time looking, I gave up and bought a name-brand, well-reviewed, line-powered stick vac.

     The box was pretty heavy.  I unpacked it today, put the big stick vac together, gave the floors a once-over and it's a nope.  Oh, it'll replace my ancient upright, which is overdue.  The roller design on the carpet attachment is great, and doesn't build up hair at all.  But it's too loud (Holden just reappeared as I started this paragraph, looking around for the dire howling Thing) and it's too darned heavy.  It can't be my daily driver.  And it turns out I dislike managing the cord.

     Back to the internets, I guess.

"You Should Smile More. You're Prettier When You Smile."

     You should walk a mile in my ears.  Men (especially) say things to women that they think of as well-intentioned -- but which communicate something quite different.

     For instance, looking pretty to the men around me is, in fact, not one of my goals.  I hope I'm neat, clean and reasonably well-groomed in the eyes of everyone who sees me, but the choices I make in attire, grooming and even facial expression are for me and nobody else.

     Another aspect of it is the assumption of an avuncular relationship.  Wrong, buddy.  I've been walking around on this planet for a long, long time, and I have outlived all my real uncles, of whom there were many.  At 68, I do not need any new ones.  Friends, acquaintances?  Sure!  That's fine.

     This my blog.  You get whatever I have been thinking of, most often the parts that I believe will be of more general interest, or that I am worrying about, or I'm enthused over.  Including politics.  Don't like it?  Go read something else.  Come back later, if you wish; there will probably be something else at the top of my blog.

     Just understand that I'm not your niece.  I'm a mean old lady, and I have a few things I can do very well indeed, and many more that I can muddle through with.  Sometimes I write about them.

Tired

     I have spent the entire work day -- 9:30 in the morning through 8:00 at night -- working with a very sharp factory support engineer to get a vital piece of equipment (okay, a small TV transmitter) functioning normally again.

     We succeeded.  Ten and a half hours of geekery in the constant roar of cold air and noise with no lunch, just a few snacks and sips of water and tea, is tiring.  I'm going to take the victory, however impermanent it might be, and go to bed.

Falling Behind, Catching Up

      I find it difficult to write these days, mostly due to politics and business.

     One one level, a lot of the GOP seems be adopting an apocalyptic "victory or ruin" approach to elections, and an increasingly authoritarian style when they do win.  This is not a viable long-term approach in a democratic republic -- or in any other kind of democracy.  It is one reason I have put off retirement; a fixed income is perilous if there are major disruptions.

     More immediately, my line of work is undergoing a series of consolidations and adjustments that mean more and more work is being done by fewer and fewer people, and to step out of the game of musical chairs at all means losing your place.  The big owners are more and more remote, the pay gap between the corporate bosses and the clock-punchers is getting larger and larger, and as far as they're concerned, "artificial intelligence" is probably going to make most of us redundant before too long anyway.  There's a lot of incentive to keep on getting while the getting is at least adequate, because tomorrow it may all go away.

     But all of this (and plenty more) is not at all conducive to calm reflection.  I'm running as fast as I can to stay caught up, knowing the music will stop and at that point, the question will be not if things are bad but how bad they are, and how quickly will they get worse.

     I was hoping to retire in more or less genteel poverty, under a largely stable national and local government, in a world that wasn't notably more screwed up than the one I grew up in (which had an ample supply of problems, many without clear solutions, but people were at least trying).  That's not what we've got and navigating the present makes me feel like a drunk on a highwire.

Chilly Night

      This morning, a sign of the changing seasons: it was 61°F inside Roseholme Cottage and I ran the furnace for the first time this Fall.  

     Between the ancient thermosiphon (or "gravity") coal converted to gas forced-air furnaces* in my long-ago duplex and the smelly, cantankerous oil-burning furnace in my first Indianapolis home, the first furnace run of autumn always worries me.  It wasn't too many years ago that the furnace here had a cracked heat exchanger (which I smelled and then saw) and had to be replaced.  The process went okay this year.  Now it's a toasty 64° and I'm enjoying a plate of Breakfast Hash for lunch.

     It's a fancy variant of Breakfast Hash.  I don't make the stuff much, partially because I need to pick up a decent modern wok or deep cast-iron skillet, and because I've cut way back on potatoes and rice; the doc is right about enjoying that stuff sparingly.

     Still, every once in a great while is acceptable, and today's mixture of diced potatoes, scrambled eggs and a couple of strips of bacon is accompanied by sliced green olives, pickled okra and mild banana peppers, a hot piparra pepper,† a whole fire-roasted piquilla pepper and a half-dozen little peppedew peppers, all of them pickled and, except for the very last, chopped up.  
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* They were an education in the start-up process, with a large ring burner in the old coal combustion chamber and a candle-sized pilot flame in the center, all under a thick steel plate and with a thermocouple stuck in the pilot: if the pilot went out, the furnace couldn't open the gas valve, since the tiny current from the thermocouple powered the controls.  A normal start took nearly a minute, from the tiny click of the valve, the whoosh of gas, the long pause 'til the burner caught and a muted roar as it heated the air enough to trip the fan control.  The fans were different on each side of the duplex -- an external squirrel-cage unit in the cold air return on my side, but the other side had a much larger horizontal squirrel-cage fan inside the hot-air distribution octopus at the top of the furnace and an external motor hanging in a spring-loaded mount driving a set of belted pulleys to run the fan -- a little one on the motor and a large on top of the furnace.  When that system kicked on, the motor would bounce in the springs and the big pulley would wobble and yaw until the fan rotor came up to speed and stabilized.  The entire top of the furnace flexed; the bearing for the fan was in great shape but the sheet metal hadn't been designed to support a fan and the reinforcement wasn't enough to hold it steady.  My furnace guy -- the only one in town who would work on such historic contraptions -- swore it was perfectly normal behavior.  Still, knowing what was lurking down in the basement, I laid in bed on many a winter night, counting the seconds after the first click and rush of gas....twenty-two, twenty-three, twent- foomph, there's the fire, okay, one, two...fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seven--...click, whirrrrrrr, there's the fan, all right, I can go back to sleep.  Running big transmitters for work, I applied the lessons the furnaces taught me, learning the sounds of a normal start-up and often noticing when it stalled before my coworkers did.
 
† For my taste, these are hot enough that just one is plenty in this, and two or three in a big pot of chili.  However, they're very tasty and YMMV.

Wait, What?

      It's a cold, wet morning in Indianapolis, and checking on Indiana fuel prices has led to a chilling discovery: while the state has suspended the 37 cents-per-gallon gasoline road tax, the corresponding 63 cents-per-gallon tax on gas-station diesel* remains in effect.  The road tax money is earmarked to be spent on just that, and the reason for the disproportion will be found hauling freight trailers on the interstate.  The overall state budget has been running a surplus and it will supposedly be used to make up the lost revenue.  Indiana drivers will be well aware that our usual road spending is, um, thrifty, and so I'm not sure if this will make driving much worse.

     I was hoping to sweeten the pot for a field technician planning a swing through the state; we've got a widget he's far more qualified to look over than I am (the book for the thing is more of a user's manual) and we'd like to see him sooner rather than later.  You'd never guess what the powerplant in his service truck full of test equipment, replacement parts and tools runs on, not in a million, jillion years -- but it ain't ethyl.
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* "Red dye diesel" is not taxed by Indiana; it's intended for use in off-road farm machinery, though the Governor has decreed farmers can now use it in their on-road transportation.  Everyone else needs to stick with the undyed version and pay the tax.  If you pull up at the Co-Op in your Benz, they're going to send you on your way unfulfilled.

A Happier Note: Food

     This morning, I had a treat: a toasted ham, cheese and egg sandwich on rye bread.  It's every bit as bad for you as you might think, consisting of a fried egg sandwiched between two thin slices of lightly-fried ham and slices of Havarti cheese on the outside, fried in a nonstick pan with a little butter.  When the cheese is melted and both sides of the bread are toasted golden and crunchy, it's ready.  (A little mustard or hot sauce would not be out of order, though I passed on 'em this morning.)

     Look, I had oatmeal yesterday and I'll probably have it tomorrow, but there was only a little bit of bread and ham left today and it wanted used up.

Points To Newsfeed, Shrugs

     Look at almost any newsfeed; sure, Fox News and the sites to the right of them are whistling in the dark more loudly than ever, but from the center onward, things aren't looking great for the Trump administration and it's rubbing off on a lot of Republicans, even in states and districts long thought "safe" for the GOP.

     Does that mean the upcoming election will be a romp for the Democrats?  I doubt it.  It's likely they'll do better than expected, but I don't think we'll see a dramatic majority for them in the Senate.  But the image of Republican politicians is getting tarnished even in the demographics most favorable to them, and that slide is unlikely to reverse as long as fuel (and everything downstream of it) remains expensive, Iran remains defiant, and the Russians keep pounding away at Ukraine.  Spin can only do so much, which President after President has learned the hard way.  Mr. Trump is not so much on learning, but the bill comes due nevertheless, and he's not the kind of guy who will happily pay up on presentation.

Events Leading Up To....

     Tamara's line for times like these is "Events leading up to...," that part at the beginning of a history book (or maybe a chapter in an especially thick one) recounting the factors, actions and events before some kind of noteworthy change for good, ill or maybe just very different.  Steamships, wars, disasters, revolutions: Archduke Ferdinand's murder, the promulgation of the first written code of laws, landing on the Moon, the Russian or American or French Revolutions: they didn't happen in a vacuum.

     We're living in "Events leading up to," but leading up to what, I can't say.  I don't know.  It's a cusp, a discontinuity.  The three branches of the Federal government are at war among themselves and with the public; it's a low-key, slow motion war (unless you happen to be Ilhan Omar, a tree on a public golf course in Washington, D.C. or an immigrant with less than spotless papers or less than impressive wealth) but it's unsupportable nonetheless.  You can see it in the polls, in the President campaigning in what should be safely Republican states and districts, making dire warning that he may be "the last Republican President."

     As an amateur student of history, that particular warning doesn't bother me.  While the United States of America has had a de facto two-party system almost from the outset, they've not always been the same two and their disagreements haven't been consistent.  The emerging parties named themselves the Federalists (more or less Hamiltonian, big-government as their day saw it) and the Republican-Democrats (roughly Jeffersonian, generally small-government), but only one has survived to the present day, and it with only half its name and few of the original principles or core issues intact, due to the changes under Andrew Jackson,* Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.  On both sides, party names and key issues have come and gone.  Who remembers the Whigs, the Know-Nothings, the Anti-Masons?   The spot the Republicans now occupy has seen the most changes of name, and both sides have had huge discontinuities, with the emergence of Jacksonianism for one and the collapse of the Whigs for the other.  Nobody weeps for them now except students who didn't study hard enough for the test.

     The thing about historical discontinuities is that although the term is bloodless, the real-world working out is not always so.  Things are not great now.  They could be much worse and I don't have any confidence they won't be.

     It's time to stock up on canned goods again.  Just in case. 
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* I somehow managed to conflate him with Hamilton in an earlier draft, resulting in "Alexander Jackson," a hybrid who is best not speculated about.

Y'know What I Want?

     I want to get back to a country where it's (mostly) safe to (largely) ignore politics.  The problem is, of course, that politics isn't doing a very good job of ignoring us.

     No matter who or what you blame 'em on, fuel prices, inflation, various kinds of food contamination, a slow-growing measles epidemic, simmering war in the Gulf and Ukraine (and a few other smaller hot spots) is affecting all but the most wealthy of us, every day.  Meanwhile, those rich people keep on getting richer while the rest of us are running as fast as we can to stay where we are.  I know I am; adjusted for inflation, my pay has gone steadily down for the last 25 years, and probably longer.  There's nothing "trickling down."

     If a politician ran on a platform of Make America Boring Again, I'd be seriously interested.  We've had way too much excitement.

Everybody Out Of The Pool?

     The Trump administration's DOJ -- far more a creature of Presidential whim than ever before -- is investigating the member news organizations of the White House Video Pool over their not covering the President on events that CNN (a long time member of the Video Pool) is barred from attending.

     To explain all this, I need to start by taking a long step back, to the White House Correspondent's Association.  The roots of it go back -- allegedly -- to Theodore Roosevelt's time in office, but the official founding of the organization was in 1914, during a time when -- wait for it! -- the odious Woodrow Wilson, then President, was feuding with the press and threatening to stop holding press conferences altogether.  They managed to broker terms between a President angry over what he saw as publication of off the record information, and a press corps hungry for news.

     There's only so much room in the White House, and even less when a President travels.  The WHCA operates as a kind of as "funnel," sorting out precedence (and, traditionally, seating arrangements) in the White House press room and selecting a subgroup of reporters to provide "pool" coverage for the entire membership when it's impractical (or impossible) to haul the whole bunch of them along.  In theory, they are the eyes and ears of the nation, and in practice, their membership and leadership represents a broad spectrum of political leanings and news philosophies.  This happens not because they're all so very chummy but because they're highly competitive and the only way to avoid anyone having an unfair advantage is to all be watching one another, all the time.

     The Video Pool reflects this.  There are many events where one or two cameras (a main and a backup) are all there's room for, and the outfits with the most experience making moving pictures and the best tech and production support comprise the Video Pool: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox News.*  They're not there to be the President's best pal or worst enemy, they're present to get whatever is newsworthy, and to share it with the other members of the pool and the rest of the WHCA.  When the President decided CNN (after trying to ban CNN, MS Now and Politico from White House press coverage and being told by the courts that having invited the press in, he didn't get to be picky-choosy about kicking some of them back out) was uninvited to those events that required Video Pool coverage, the other members of the pool declined to step in.  If CNN was the WHCA-designated Video Pool lead and they weren't allowed to do the job, none of the rest were going to pick up the slack. 

     DOJ is crying foul over that, saying such a showing of press solidarity may constitute illegal collusion under anti-trust laws.  Bartleby may "prefer not to" all by himself, but if he's been getting together with the other scriveners and stepping away en masse, well--  The courts will get to figure this one out, but the Press has considerable freedom, which the Federal government is Constitutionally disallowed from abridging.

     What, exactly, that might mean in this context remains to be seen.  Most administrations manage to do their work without needing to test every damn limit and norm; even the prejudiced and haughty Wilson saw the light of sweet Reason (or at least of bittersweet Compromise).  This crew, not so much.
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* This is in rough order of the formation of their TV news operations, with CNN and Fox News coming along well after the other three.  Bear in mind that pool video is share and share alike, and it's a prestige gig for the videographers and reporters, real "Don't screw this up" stuff.  They don't get brownie points for playing partisan gotcha, they get 'em for eye-catching, attention-grabbing coverage, period.  There is always a mildly adversarial relationship between Press and politicians, and I wouldn't have it any other way, no matter who's involved: you want 'em looking close.

The Case Against Public Execution

     The most recent barbarism from the Trump administration is the planned public execution of the man who committed the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting,* by firing squad.

     While I am opposed to the death penalty on moral, economic and margin-of-error grounds (you can't unkill the person if the verdict was mistaken), there's no question that the man in question committed the crime, nor that it was heinous; his actions were those of a bloody-handed barbarian and had he been stopped by being killed, I wouldn't have shed a tear.  I won't weep for him if he is executed as planned.

     I will weep for us.  Our Federal and state governments execute people rarely, and not in public.  It does not have a deterrent effect, and in his case, it will only make him a martyr for the cause he embraced.  He was paralyzed from the waist down by an injury sustained when people ended his murderous rampage, and while I have no pity for him over it, shooting a man in a wheelchair (or strapped to a support) only makes the spectacle worse.  There's no claiming the moral high ground after such an act.

     And possibly even worse, it's one more trial balloon for authoritarianism: can the government execute a man on live TV without pushback?  Will the sensation-hungry flock to the online video, share screengrabs and clips on social media, cheer on the administration for doing it?  If it flies, they'll do it again, and again, and again.  They've already shown a considerable taste for blood, and executions are much easier to control than street violence and enforcement overreach.

     It's one more spot of mold on the rotten fruit of Trumpism.
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* You do have to specify the date, there having been another one at the base in 2014. 

About Those Odds Of Civil Unrest

     ...Maybe they just went up.  Consider the source, but the source's source is a well-respected Denver TV news station.

     The world is such a giant shitshow that I'm still kind of hoping I never woke up from anesthesia when they did my cataract surgery and it's all some horrific nightmare as the last neurons fire in near-random order.

Political Predictions

      With the mid-term elections about a month away, I'm going to make some guesses:

     One in ten to one in twenty chance of political violence -- roughly on J6 lines but state/local, the probability starting on Election Day and continuing until after the counts are finalized.  It only takes a handful of violent fools to make a mess, and we have no shortage  Those sound like long odds, but with fifty states, I will not be surprised at all by one or two instances.

     75 percent chance of something ugly and stupid happening at a polling place that is significant enough to make national news.  Much more likely to be county-level law enforcement or self-appointed nitwits than any Federal force.  Related, two in three of some kind of brawl among voters (let's all remember that campaign laws mean you cannot wear your political-slogan T-shirt to the polling place.  Smile and talk about the weather, and keep the line moving). 

     50/50 there's an ugly legal fight over a close race for a high office -- U.S. House or Senate, the many elections for Governor.

     85 percent chance of a premature declaration of victory by the President, and that's being optimistic; I think he'll call the outcome a win for his party even if it's a rout.

     Speaking of routs, I don't think we'll see one.  The House will probably get a Democratic majority; anyone confidently predicting which party will take the Senate is whistling in the dark.  But it is unlikely either party will sweep into office with a commanding majority.  Both bodies are closely balanced now and they will almost certainly be closely balanced after the dust settles.

     I think there is a one in four chance of something spinnable happening between now and Election Day.  It may or may not be staged and it's unlikely to originate at the highest levels, but if anything occurs, it will be spun and spun and spun.  I encourage you to ignore it when you vote -- bad stuff can happen at any time, society never runs out of violent idiots, but giving them a "heckler's veto" cannot prevent it or heal whatever harm they do, only make it worse.

     And speaking of harm, I predict Vice-President James David "JD" Vance* will continue to exhibit the charm and charisma of an STI.  Most Veeps are their party's next in line to run for the highest office but he is likely to face a crowded primary field in 2028.  The President's crude schtick† still holds appeal to his base and he knows how to work it; Vice-President Vance remains uncomfortable and awkward around the modern GOP base -- or almost anyone else not well-insulated by wealth and power.

     This election -- and the two years that follow -- is most likely to be a brutal slog.  Norms have been broken and institutions have been demolished with nothing to replace them.  Many will have to be rebuilt from scratch no matter which party is ascendant, but neither party's politicians have shown much appetite or aptitude for the job.

     They'll have to do the work nevertheless -- or find their way through the smoking ruins of Caesarism.
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* Named James Donald Bowman at birth.  Yes, I often point this out.  For a man who sneers at other people who have re-invented themselves, he's certainly done a lot of it -- "hillbilly" to Marine to attorney to venture capitalist, poor student to scholar, lower-class to upper-class, Protestant to atheist to Catholic, child of poverty to rich man.
 
† You can call this "Trump Derangement Syndrome" if you like.  I think it's a rational response to a crude, preening bully who is nowhere near as smart as he believes himself to be, but I'm not the boss of you.

Morning Pun

      So the radio ad offered "Free gutter examination," and I thought it would be nice to have a professional look at 'em.  I called the number and get an automate scheduling system.  Okay, fine; they've got an opening only an hour away and I took it.

     An hour later, a mobile mammography van pulls up and an absolute hippie nurse steps out, flowers painted on her face, white macrame shawl, darnedest look I've ever seen.  "Get in," she says.

     I ask what's the deal.

     She gives me a look, the kind hip and happening young people reserve for the clueless old.  "You scheduled this, didn't you?"

     I'm still puzzled.

     She looks at her clipboard, reads me my own name.  "Signed up for the freak udder exam, just an hour ago, right?"

     Man, I have got to start looking this stuff up.

Peposo

     I made peposo for dinner last night, and it was fantastic!

     Put too much salt on the meat at the start, and had to dilute the broth at the end.  Next time, I'll do better.  But what even is peposo, and why is it a big deal?

     Well, it's kind of connected to one of the most famous domes in the world, Filippo Brunelleschi's vast brick dome on Florence Cathedral, a job he inherited with no blueprints or guidance from the man who'd spent most of his life designing and managing the construction of the rest of the building.  The style didn't provide sufficient support for a masonry dome -- and he chose something slightly lighter but even less strong for the job!  It's one of the first examples of an engineered structure, with hidden tension elements and an internal design that keeps the whole thing hanging together by its own weight, while guiding stresses to supports and pitting force against force to minimize the worst.

     And here's the thing: brickwork is slow.  If you've ever had the pleasure of watching professional brickmasons at work, you know that when the whistle blows, they're a blur of motion, each step blending into the next, mortar applied, bricks laid, everything squared and trimmed in motions that might well be a dance.  (And at break time, it all stops on a dime, bam!  Only to start again at the same pace when time's up.  --Because it's a process; only rarely does one mason work alone.)  But it still moves one brick at a time, and past their normal speed, you cannot hurry it: one flaw can doom an entire wall.

     Brunelleschi's masons were building a dome hundreds of feet up.  The main route up and down was  a complex winch he'd designed, and even by the standards of the Middle Ages, it was slow.  At noon, bringing the whole crew down for lunch and hauling them back up afterwards took time, far too much time.  You don't ask brickmasons to work without lunch -- especially not when you're the high-and-mighty builder at ground level and they're way up there, assembling a dome that will bring your reputation crashing down with it if it fails.  (Also, they've got a lot of bricks up there -- oops, one less, look out below!)

     While Brunelleschi was negotiating for more bricks from his supplier, he noticed the brickmakers would set out covered ceramic pots right by the kilns at the start of their day, and haul them back at noon, with the most delicious aroma wafting out when they lifted the lid and speared out chunks of meat.  What -- the stories tell us he asked -- was that stuff?  Oh, nothing much, really, they said -- they'd buy tough meat, cover it with wine and toss in some salt and a lot of black peppercorns, and let it bubble away for half the day or longer in the heat of kilns.

     Brick holds heat.  The builder was buying as much brick as the place could sell him, and they were shipping it still warm.  What if they made more of that beef and wine stuff, and shipped it to building site with the bricks?  He'd make 'em a deal on it....

     And so (or so they say), every wagonload of bricks arrived at the cathedral with a hot pot of stew, got winched up to the dome, and he had a couple of shelters built up by the base of the dome where the crews could have their lunch.  And you thought DoorDash was new!

     It still isn't a complicated recipe, and the outcome is still pretty magical.  Cracked peppercorns and Chianti, a little garlic and olive oil to brown the beef in before simmering, and two or three hours of simmering, mostly under a lid -- you would never predict the outcome, which is not especially peppery or wine-flavored, just tender and full of umami.

     Tam and I had our peposo with steamed mixed vegetables and good crusty Italian bread, and agreed we'd have it again.  It's not a difficult entree to prepare, and the result more than repays the small effort.  Those brickmakers had the right idea. 

I've Figured It Out!

      Various teams and individuals have been searching for Amelia Earhart -- or what's left of her airplane -- ever since she disappeared, especially after WW II.

     And it's a fascinating mystery; as things stand, both the famous pilot and her navigator Fred Noonan are under a bit of a cloud, which is almost certainly unfair to both of them.  But as long as there's no evidence, all anyone has is guesses about what happened and why.

     Many of the teams have been connected with Purdue University, where Earhart was a guest lecturer -- but more than that, the university put up the bulk of the money for the Lockheed Electra airplane she was flying when she went missing!

     Purdue's administration is, um, not to put too fine a point on it, parsimonious.   There's an expedition to a likely prospect just offshore of a tiny Pacific island right now.  (Don't get too excited -- the wings and fuselage of an airplane are not too dissimilar in outline to many kinds of ocean-going vessel; the Pacific is vast and has seen plenty of war, storm and plain bad luck afloat, and how likely is a nearly 90 year old, mostly aluminum airplane to survive in shallow salt water?)  You've got to wonder, though -- if they do  find the plane, is Purdue still holding on to an insurance policy, waiting to collect if they can come up with solid evidence the plane went down?

The Semi-Ancient World, Through Dr. Stephen Ressler's Eyes

     The centuries between the Romans and us -- the so-called Dark Ages -- were darkened by plagues and population loss, by painful decentralization across Europe.  But people did plenty of interesting things.  Progress continued.  Last night, Tam and I finished watching The Great Courses series "Understanding the Marvels of Medieval Technology," conceived and taught by this guy, as kewl an engineer as there is (also a retired Brigadier General). Highly recommended geek history!

     If you enjoy the late Henry Petroksi's books, this will probably be right up your alley.

Been Quiet

     I had computer problems the last few days -- stumbled into a stupid trap link.  I think I rooted out the worst damage, but who can be sure?

     A different bug is making the rounds, especially on GMail, a fake "event invitation" that comes from the pwned account of a trusted contact.  I've received two of them and they're innocuous-looking enough that I hovered over the link before thinking better of it. It's easy to get so used to the routine spam and phishing that some of the old-time malware will bite you.

Chicken Salad Cordon Bleu

     Because why not?  Our corner grocer makes a first-rate chicken salad sandwich, served on a fresh-baked croissant, and despite the -- shudder* -- lettuce leaf they add on the bottom.  The greens make for longer shelf life; they'll make up a batch of sandwiches in little clear plastic boxes, stick them in the self-service deli cooler, and often sell out by the time I stop by after work.

     They were out last night, but had the makings: nice croissants in boxes of four, and plastic containers of their roast chicken salad.  The problem with this is, Tam's not a fan of the stuff.

     Tamara's okay with ham and cheese, though, and I was out of Swiss anyway.  Good Black Forest ham, sliced Swiss cheese, vinegar-dressing coleslaw on the side: a light supper.

     Putting together a sandwich for Tam, I was thinking about how to use up the ham before it expired, and added a slice of ham to my sandwich, cut in two with a little spicy mustard between them, to the bottom of my chicken salad sandwich. (No, I didn't buy lettuce; I'm still a little wary of raw vegetables I didn't grow myself.*)  This turns out to be outstandingly tasty, and I recommend it to my readers.
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* It's annoying.  I like salads, and I like not having to buy all the ingredients and build them myself even more.  Thanks, Trump -- cutting way back on food inspectors, that's some real effective government streaming from you and your party right there.

Leftovers? Luxury!

     Last Wednesday, we had sliced zucchini in puttenesca sauce, with a little ground sirloin and pancetta* in it.  The sauce is absolutely delicious, and carries the squash along nicely.  Then Saturday, I'd made grill-baked meatloaf -- well, not exactly made: the butcher counter at or neighborhood grocery makes "Italian  meatloaf," ready to go in a foil pan, with bell pepper rings and a couple of cherry tomatoes on top.  Cooking it on the grill sounds crazy, but it works; the foil pan goes on mostly-flat perforated grill pan and enough to the hardwood smoke permeates the meatloaf to give it a nice flavor.  My covered grill hits 350°F easily with hardwood lump charcoal. (Fresh green beans, steamed with slivered almonds, on the side -- a four-minute microwave dish.)

     Both meals resulted in leftovers -- more than half a small meatloaf and a fair amount of tasty, meat-laden puttensca sauce.

     Sunday dinner was obvious.  I set the sauce to thawing while I chopped and sauteed a small white onion, followed by mixed exotic mushrooms (King trumpet, maiitake and oyster).  A small can of plain tomato sauce and some sliced olives, a pipparra pepper cut up small and pickled red peppers followed, then the thawed puttensca and, once it was bubbling, the meatloaf, cut into more or less meatball-sized cubes.  With a little grated Parmesan cheese on top, it was a nice ragout.  Leftovers?  Sure.  But what leftovers they were!

     I keep wanting to try baking bread in the covered grill.  It'll be tricky, but it might be very good indeed.
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* The one thing I'd do differently is that I bought a small container of cubed pancetta and some of them were a little tough even after slight browning and long simmering.  A little dab is all it takes, so the slightly more expensive but oh so delicate thin slices would be better, scissored into bits of flavor and added to the ground sirloin very shortly before pouring in the sauce.

About "A.I." And Data Centers

     You want to know what I think about so-called "Artificial Intelligence?" I think it ought to be banned while there's still less there than meets the eye, while it still hasn't got hands.

     I still think there's a very large element of scam to it, and a lump of self-delusion equally as large.  It's the Internet meme, "If friend-shaped, why not friend?" writ large: "A.I." usually simulates an affirming if not outright obsequious collaborator.  There is still nothing inside the box; it can't feel pain, it has no theory of mind, and there is no actual self-awareness at the center of it.  Say it kills us all, or brings about a golden age: either way, there's no part of it that knows what's going on, or that grasps the difference between Utopia and Ragnarok.

     "A.I." is deadly the way a four-year-old with a handgun is deadly, only more so, because the code has no emotional bonds to Mommy or Daddy and it never will.  When research is done on these simulated-intelligence programs, it should be sandboxed and firewalled as if it was refined plutonium, not offered up for any fool to play with.

     And as for the data centers it (and, apparently, everything else) runs on, they're an enormous vulnerability, and one I thought we'd outgrown.  Go back a step or two in technological development, and they're an approximate analog to telephone switching centers ("telephone exchange"); CLifford Exchange was (and is) near my house, just a few blocks over and north on College Avenue.  Typical of post-WW II exchanges, it was a semi-hardened building: very few windows, stout steel doors, thick brick and concrete walls, backup power.  It wouldn't survive an atom bomb, but it has shrugged off storms, floods, being struck by vehicles, tornadoes and civil unrest without a mark.  The only destruction it has suffered was the loss of the larger of the two buildings that once comprised it: telephone switching equipment is minuscule these days, and the real estate was worth more than the empty building.

     Data centers are built using the same methods and materials as your nearest Target, Meijer or Walmart, just like the ones that have the roof peeled off in summer storms or get looted during riots.  Their best physical security consists of chain-link fences and ordinary locks.  If they're so darned important, how come they're built like big-box stores or modern warehouses?

     At one time, the distributed nature of a pretty clever computer (or three) on everyone's desk and, eventually, in everyone's purse or pocket, all interconnected via the Internet, was seen as a great strength, and the fat nodes on the network were understood as weak points that the system was designed to route around in case of individual failure.  Suddenly it's utterly vital to stick one or two or a dozen around every county seat?

     In Frank Herbert's Dune series,* computers are strictly limited in function and computing power; centuries before the setting of his stories, machine intelligence had reached great heights of power and tyrannical authority over humanity, and was only defeated after a long and bitter struggle.  High drama indeed, later novelized as The Butlerian Jihad, named ostensibly after a key character in the battles, though probably a nod to a 19th-Century utopian novelists's cautions about machine intelligence.  Maybe the time to deal with that sort of thing is before it becomes a problem?

     In February 2024, writing about the possible overturning of Chevron, I included "Artificial Intelligence" on a list of things about which I preferred our generally ineffectual Congress get expert advice, but now I'm wondering if the Feds are listening to the right kinds of experts -- better philosophers than tech moguls, better ethicists than software engineers.

     The price of getting this wrong is exorbitant.  
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* The first book is great; I think it kind of tapers off from there, though not for lack of worldbuilding.

CNN Still On The Outs

     Apparently, CNN's out of the video pool for now.  They've got access to the White House, but not Air Force One or special events like the recent state dinner.  The other members of the pool don't agree, but so far, there's no explicit policy, just a series of pointed snubs and counter-boycotts.

     Beside's the Executive Branch doesn't have any pressing problems to deal with -- just a little pocket recissioning, a tactic of highly questionable legality, in which Congress sets up a government program, funds it -- and the administration declines to spend the money.

     Boy, it's sure good there's not a war on, or a price crisis in anything important, like food, housing or fuel.

They're Back In! --Except Where They Aren't

      Around 12:30 yesterday afternoon, the White House started reissuing passes to journalists from CNN, MSNBC and Politico.  They were back!

     Well, sort of.  CNN had long been a member of the cool kid's club video pool, and the administration, having kicked them out of it, is maintaining a sphinxlike silence on whether they're allowed to swim again.  In solidarity, the other members of the pool -- ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox -- are sittin' on their cameras and whatever dignity they can muster.

     The issues here remain that, A) Having opened their doors to the Press, Federal institutions can't kick 'em out without "due process of law," meaning there are charges and a rebuttal and a determination from the git-go, or it ends up in court anyway; and B) Having opened their doors to the Press, Feds cannot give individual reporters or organizations the bum's rush over what or how they write.  Clearly actionable stuff might rate legal cases for libel, slander or over national security issues, but calling the President a big ol' meany or accusing Cabinet members of being stupid or excessively flatulent (or even just saying their approval numbers have reached new lows) are criticisms that Uncle Sam's official and loyal servants must endure -- and have had to from the first days of our Republic.  These are things that stem directly from the Bill of Rights and about which there is no lack of statute and legal-case precedent.  (This doesn't stop the back-and-forth; a local pundit reminds us that it's an ongoing struggle and I think it probably always will be.)

     If the Press, in their various and sundry slants, attitudes, angles, opinions, perceptions and limitations are blind men looking at the elephant (or, occasionally, donkey) of government, then let's have as many of 'em, and as many different kinds, as we can get -- because what no one seems to remember from the children's book is that when you put together all the disparate descriptions of the subject animal, you get a pretty accurate overall picture of the beast itself.

     Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner:
     For years, the easiest way to get journalists to pay attention has been to feed them. Not feeding them can have the opposite effect.  CNN* and MSNBC showed up to cover the big state dinner for China's President Xi last night, and were sent home without so much as a roll or a stray fork in their pockets, let alone any video or sound bites.  This appears to be more limits-testing, and it's an area that is at least slightly gray; limited-access events (as opposed to press conferences) do have greater leeway for discrimination.  (And there's no word if Politico tried to get in and was sent home without dinner.)  What's next?  I don't know, but it's clear this bit of middle-school jostling is far from over.

     Conflict between the Press and the President is always uneven -- one has a bigger megaphone, but the other has the Secret Service, not to mention the Border Patrol, Space Force, Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard.  The Bill of Rights offers a little more balance, but when you come right down to it, one side's got locked gates and people to guard 'em, while the other side's got old-fashioned Mark I ears and eyes, a pen, a voice recorder and a camera.  If we want to keep an eye on what our elected officials are up to, we need those ink-stained wretches, even the ones whose fool notions we detest.
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* To be fair, CNN sent a list of who they were sending and the administration returned it with a note: only videographers and sound technicians were invited. CNN replied it was everyone on their list including reporters and producers, or nobody, and the upshot was, nobody, not even if they wore their best outfits and had a guide to which spoon to use for what dish.

Well, What A Surprise

     The news organizations ousted from their spots at the White House went before a judge yesterday -- a Trump-appointed Federal judge, presumably vetted and blessed by the Federalist Society* -- and were granted a temporary order putting them back in the job in the Oval Office, etc. for the next two weeks while the legal process moves forward.

     The judge says the news organizations are likely to prevail when the case goes to trial; there are no do-overs in the news business and government restriction on Constitutionally-protected rights is a serious matter, so CNN, MSNOW and Politico are back in immediately, where no doubt they will be graciously received,  Or not; as I write, there's no evidence that their White House press credentials have been restored.  (Will he or won't he?  The slow accrual of power to whoever holds the Oval Office ought to be chilling to even a superficial student of history, and the Trump administration has done more to further it than any President since Jackson or Wilson.  Enthusiastic partisans should bear in mind that no one man, or even party, can hold the office forever, and that immense power will pass to someone with a very different set of priorities.)

     A couple of things are going on with the case itself.  One is a First Amendment two-step: if you're a responsible party in The Government, once you've let the Press in, you can't shut them out if you don't like what they write, no matter how mean they are.  The other is the right to due process: the government cannot shove people or organizations around arbitrarily, based on whim  They've got to follow due process of law -- pull you over, write a ticket, aim you towards the courts.  A President can't just point and say, "You -- out!" in the manner of a Roman Emperor or a beat cop rousting someone sleeping on a park bench.

     It will be interesting to see what happens next.  Mr. Trump has already said he will appeal if he loses this case.  There's a step or two until the case reaches the U. S. Supreme Court (unless they apply to jump the line, a process governed by arcane rules I would have to go look up), and there's no telling what the slut-gnomes of false Berlin the nine robed eminences will do.  It should be utterly clear, but....

     Presently, none of the affected organizations have White House access yet.  And here's the bitter pill under those sweet, sweet Bill of Rights headlines: it's kicked the disastrous non-war with Iran and six-fifty-a-gallon diesel (chased by gasoline at $4.50 and both rising) plus the President's low and sinking approval ratings right off the front page, or at least below the fold.  Is pushing the Press around a bad look?  Probably not, especially to his base; while the public generally thinks better of news media than they do of Congress or the President, it's not very much better.  And there's nothing like a good fight to gather a crowd.
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* In fact, he's been a member of it since 2009, and they're picky about the conservative creds of anyone they let into the clubhouse.  Sending a boxtop and an SASE isn't sufficient, no matter how much Ovaltine you drink.

Stop Shouting!

     Alternative titles: "Get Off The Bus!" and "Partyline."

     It has nothing to do with politics.  I went to work on a transmitter yesterday; it's been behaving oddly, slow to "wake up" after power hits, and the first, simplest step was to replace the transient suppressors on the incoming power.  They're conveniently socketed, and somewhat inconveniently mounted -- you have to remove the front panel from a module and it exposes the incoming mains voltage, 208 Volt 3-phase.  So I had to shut it all the way off.

     I proceeded to do the task, transmitter off, breaker off, panel off, unplug and replace three little widgets, then put it all back together, look it over, flip the breaker, power up, wait for the hearts and brains of the thing to get happy (okay, the RF modulators and controllers, each nicely redundant) and then the ON switch, a little power-up cycle of yellow and green lights, and--  And--  And--

     And the darn green lights went nuts.  Multiple faults, amber and blinking red in the "Christmas tree" status lights down one side of each amplifier; on the other, where three power supplies should light up green and steady, instead it showed blinks, green and off, chasing one another down the front panel in waltz time, 1,23; 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3.  One amplifier showed a few more faults than the other three.

     I started digging through the front-panel menus on the controllers.  They had apparently signed up with the Wobblies: one should be Active while its pal is on Standby.  Instead, they were both on Standby!  Checking the computer-screen GUI confirmed it.  They weren't a-gonna work.

     The manual recommends setting the power output to zero and rebooting.  So I did.  Nope.  The next step is to try shutting things off -- it will run with one controller and one exciter, after all -- and rebooting.  Nope.  At that point, I sat down and put in a request for tech support with the manufacturer,* then went back to trying things like shutting off each amplifier module one at a time, and trying to take off with one prop feathered.  No luck.

     Eventually, a note came back from the factory.  They were reaching out to their subject-matter expert -- who just happened to be the contract engineer who had supervised our installation.  I remembered him as a guy who'd known all the quirks of the transmitter.

     Back to trying things.  My phone lit up with a message: Their guy was deep in another crises, and suggested putting the old transient suppressors back in. That's right, he'd said those things could be flaky, back when we put the transmitter in.  So I did that.  No change.

     I tried a few other things, got a message saying a call to me was next in the queue, and spent some time going back through the manual.  There's no tutorial, but the English translation has all the drawings and implies quite a lot.  I rebooted the internal network switch, even though it mostly communicated with the outside world; internal communications uses a different system.

     Man, still no call.  It had been an hour and a half since the initial contact.  I sent another email to the factory support coordinator, suggesting I'd been waiting long enough to hire a truck and make a good start towards driving the thing back to their parking lot.  That got a reply.  "What?  He hasn't called you?"  By this point, I'd also told my bosses, and they were sending increasingly worried text messages.

     The expert eventually did call.  He was mystified by the symptoms.  We wasted a half-hour trying to connect to the amplifiers directly.  They've got USB jacks, but it takes a stone-simple terminal emulator; it pops up a blinking cursor and we got that far, at least.  From there, a menu should appear in response to a tap on the ENTER key, but none of 'em were answering the phone.

     This made no sense to me, and, at first, not much more to him.  Then he asked if I'd tried shutting things off and restarting.  I had.  "Have you tried shutting off two things?"  That, I had not. So, with the most-complaining amplifier and one of the controllers off, I did yet another reboot.

     It's a slow process, a power-up self-test that steps through each part.  Green lights came up, flickered amber, came back green one at a time.  Green lights that stayed green.  I tried turning up the output power and my analog meters flickered.  (They're external.  It bugged me that the thing didn't have a nice big "I'm happy!" indication I could see across the room, so I added them.)  I told the expert, and kept on turning up the power, a little at a time.  "You're not going to make full power, of course," he told me, "But it'll do at least fifty percent."

     With one of four amplifiers off, you might think 75 percent, but that's not how the math works; the combining uses clever physics tricks that only add up nicely when everything is balanced, and when it isn't, some energy is lost.  Fifty is still greater than zero, and that's where we ended up.

     So what happened?  The internal communications is a kind of "party line," a shared serial data bus.  The expert figures the bad amp has been yelling for help -- but not flagging any alarms -- for a long time.  That's why the transmitter's been so slow to recover from power hits.  When I shut the transmitter down for half an hour, that's longer than it has been off since we put it in, and one of the controllers woke up unhappy.   I'm told that's a known problem.  And the controller was spamming the party line, too.  That's way too much traffic: neither controller could promote itself to active, the good amplifier modules couldn't report themselves ready for duty, and that transmitter wasn't going nowhere nohow until we shut off all the racket on the line.

     If it's not one thing, it's two things.  And it was.  The amplifier modules -- eighty pounds or so! --  are factory repair only, so they're shipping me a box and we'll cycle it through the repair process.    
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* Or as close as I can get.  It's actually imported, then fitted out to U. S. standards by the importer.  But both the overseas manufacturer and the U.S. importer are owned by the same multinational, headquartered in yet another country, so they're actually doing business with themselves.  Happily, all three are mostly geek-driven.  Unhappily, all three got downsized as the last of the U.S. digital cutover process met the COVID-19 pandemic.  There are a handful of engineers and techs left, in three languages.

Strange Bed- Er, Well, This Is Awkward

      Yesterday, CNN had "pool" video duty for White House Coverage; the job rotates between ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC, and with CNN barred, the others refrained from stepping up and say they'll be sitting out pool coverage.  (Not to worry -- the President just launched his very own TV channel, with nonstop, officially vetted and approved coverage of whatever the White House wants covered -- and nothing it does not.  For those keeping track at home, this is the exact opposite of a free press.)

     Radio and online/paper Press have their own pool rotations and a few of them have stepped back, too, which meant yesterday, the Print Media pool covering the President was led by....  Envelope, please!  The Washington Blade, which (per Wikipedia) is the country's oldest LGBT newspaper, backed up by the arch-conservative website, The Daily Caller.  Both of 'em are known to wear their political hearts on their sleeves, and to not avoid sensationalistic stories.  The dynamic out there in the reporter seats must have been interesting; I'm picturing a couple of earnest scriveners desperately trying to read over one another's shoulders while not getting, you know, too close.  What if it's catching?

     There's a certain amount of comfort in knowing that even in these fraught and conflict-filled times, we'll be getting a diversity of perspective on the Executive Branch -- and even more comfort in the thought that they're probably creeping each other out.

It's A Little Thing, But

     It's got me wondering: actors who do one-act plays, or shoot short subjects, do you wish them luck before a performance by saying, "Break a toe?"

It Wasn't A Dare

     Last night, I pointed to, and mocked, the increasing weirdness of the present administration and their Legislative counterparts (and let us not forget the nutjobs and partisan hacks they've ushered into the Federal Judiciary or who were already in place and happy to step up).

     Truth is, I was thinking it was just about Peak Strange.

     Guess again.

     The huge, ugly triumphal arch Mr. Trump would like to put up along the sightline from the Lincoln Monument to Arlington National Cemetery isn't something I've written about much.  While I think every bit of it demonstrates execrable taste, from the design and decoration to the location to the very idea of it,* it was indeed a matter of taste, and paled next to barring press organizations from attending public events of the Chief Executive of the republic, or the markedly violent immigration enforcement dragnets that have wept up legal residents and naturalized citizens, and which have resulted in the deaths of non-citizens and citizens alike.  The arch seemed like a minor detail, more gold-dripping frippery going up while the price of everything skyrockets.

     Turns out I was wrong.  Here's the President of United States of America, on his social media platform last night:

     "At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, [...] at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. [...]."

     Nothing like it anywhere in the world?  Ain't that the truth -- though I have seen similar setups, usually in church belfries, while watching reruns of Combat!  They were occupied by German Army snipers or sometimes machinegunners.  Lest someone accuse me of hostile editing, you can read the original in its entirety at the source.  You can also read news stories about it, but yes, this is just what it appears to be, a sniper tower just off the Mall.  That'll deter the next poor sod who picks up a loose flap of pool coating!  What it reminds me of are the later scenes in the recent film Civil War, when opposition troops are converging on a fortified White House cowering behind high walls -- well, that and the kind of thing military-obsessed boys liked to draw in middle school during class when they should have been taking notes.

     I'm now unwilling to believe the unprecedented actions and events will stop at the present level.  Buckle up, kids, there's no predicting what's around the next corner.
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* Most Roman triumphal arches, and all of the surviving ones, were built by the Roman Empire, not during the Roman Republic.  And the United States federal government has never built any -- certainly not in the national capitol.  There's a message there, for those willing to heed it.

It Just Keeps Getting Weirder

      There's no end to the strange turns.  Let's see -- the President says he's banning some U. S. news organizations from the White House, which is not a specifically enumerated or implied power of the office and which previous Federal court cases have determined is, in fact, not a power Presidents have.  At present, the credentials of journalists employed by MSNOW, CNN and Politico have been revoked.  This is a bad notion and I hope the courts won't let it stand.  I want our elected officials to be scrutinized from every angle, so I can make up my own mind.

     Elsewhere, Congresspeople are getting themselves in trouble of the slept-with-the-wrong-person or took-money-they-shouldn't've type.  You can look up the various scandals, not all of which have been to court, for yourself.  It's too tawdry to list.  This is why you need every shade of reporter looking at them.

     At this point, there are plenty of trailer parks in the U.S. with fewer outrageous and/or or illegal activities going on than there are among the elected officials of the Federal government, and among the wildest offenders you will find many of the same people who have been presuming to lecture us Great Unwashed about our bad behavior.  Y'know, there's no honest path to the moral high ground from waking up in bed with an employee or someone else's spouse (or someone other than your own), dead drunk and violating the U. S. Constitution and I'm sick of the politicians, most of the Press and a whole lot of the rest of us acting as if there were.

     Politicians, appointees?  Fix you own hearts and whatever vestiges of a soul or conscience you've got before you come after the rest of us.

This Is...Unwanted

     I missed a couple of doses of my anti-inflammatory this past week, and maybe I did a little too much awkward lifting on Trash Night last night.  Whatever I did, this morning I woke up with an unhappy back, and gentle exercises and soaking in warm water didn't help.

     So I have taken a muscle relaxer and called in sick.  I'm not going to try to tough it out.  The last time I did that, it ended up costing me most of the summer.

A Staggering Own-Goal

     Through misadventure, misjudgement and incompetence, the United States has led the way to a global shortage of diesel fuel.  Prices have skyrocketed -- and there are service stations in the U. S. where you can't buy it at all: they're out.

     This is bad when you go to top up the VW Golf and approaches catastrophic when the Super Duty pickup has run nearly dry, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Every single item on the shelf at the grocery store and the five and dime, every drug in the pharmacy and most children in the schools got there by diesel.  The box and tractor-trailer trucks and farm machinery all run on it.  The trains run on it.  The river barges are moved by tugs burning it.  Most school buses burn it.  The electrical peaking plants that keep the grid up on especially hot or cold days?  Diesel.  And speaking of cold days, fuel oil still runs many furnaces, and it's the next thing to diesel; if refineries adjust to make more truck fuel now, there'll be less heating fuel as winter comes in.  Jet fuel's another cousin (though even closer to kerosene), so close that hospitals and TV stations that fly helicopters sometimes get the emergency generators set up to run on the same fuel, sharing their supply.  And there have already been rolling jet fuel shortages.

     Big ships still run on thick bunker oil, which is pretty much at the bottom of the stuff refineries distill, what's left after they pour the diesel off -- but wait, some of them switch to clean-burning diesel as they approach port.

     Bottom line?  Everything you buy is going to get more expensive, and will stay that way as long as diesel fuel remains scarce and costly (and probably long after, until inventories turn over).

     The problem here is not Orange Man Bad.  Sure, he is, but we've had absolute bastards in the Presidency before (Jackson, Wilson, Nixon...); it's not actually a disqualification.  Nope, the problem is Orange Man Dumb and Orange Man Have Poor Impulse Control. Not to mention Orange Man Not Listen To Qualified Experts, of which his administration has vanishingly few anyway.  We're all going to pay the price for it -- all of us who are not high-and-mighty Federal officials and politicians, anyway.  They're still tucking into nice steaks and rick, thick Senate Bean Soup,* the ingredients for which were carried to the Capitol by train and/or truck, and paid for with your and my tax dollars.

     They've shot themselves in the foot, but we're doing the bleeding for them.
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* Apparently, it's not all that great.  My own 15-bean soup is undoubtedly better, though I rarely have time to make it. It's based on the Hurst packaged beans but uses a different recipe and is served with raw chopped onions and celery for toppings, and generous amounts of fresh cornbread.  And you'd never guess what fuel brought all that wonderful stuff to the grocer's.

Running, Running

     These have been a busy two days. Both cats had early-morning vet appointments, Holden on general principles and to schedule teeth-cleaning, Huck other to check his blood pressure.  Yes, they use a tiny cuff and it's a real struggle to hear the change.  Sometimes they have to shave a spot for the electronic stethoscope microphone, but not this time.  Offer him a Churu treat and he's pretty tolerant of whatever they need to do.

This Timeline Is Deeply Wrong

     "Lay down with dogs, get up with a job at the FBI," shouldn't be a thing, but here we are.  2026 is the gift that keeps on taking.

Getting The Lead Out

     I bought a filtering water pitcher, and the reason is--

     City water tastes pretty lousy if it sits for more than a few minutes.  I drink bottled water and I'd been thinking about a filter carafe for a long time, but, well, what motivated me is that the LSLRP crew has been working two blocks over, and it worried me.  That's the Lead Service Line Replacement Program, our local water (and gas) utility's effort to replace lead pipe from the main to the "meter pit," which around here is more likely to have a shut-off valve in it while the actual meter lives in your basement and is connected to a wireless access port on the outside wall of your house.

     I hadn't been too worried; my house was built in 1924, the water line into the house is galvanized, and I was okay, right?

     Apparently not.  Between ordering the pitcher and receiving it, I got a letter advising me that what I keep thinking of as "L-Slurp" was in the neighborhood, swapping out the old lead pipes and yes, my house was on the list.

     Apparently, I've been running on leaded for twenty years.  Probably not much -- our various water utilities (the thing kept getting bought up and going bankrupt) have known for years and been careful about the chemicals they used, but, still.

     Like smoking, the best time to give up lead is before you start and the second-best time is right now. (And yes, the filtering widget I bought, a well-known name brand, promises it really does remove the lead, honest, cross their heart.)

That Whole Charlie Kirk Anniversary Thing

     Not the terrible thing that was done to him.  I wrote at the time and I'll say it again: nobody has that coming.  Certainly not a guy whose shtick was showing college students that if you go arguing with a man in a venue he controls, where he sets the ground rules and picks the issues, you're going to lose.  It may even be a valuable lesson or two: the grown-up world does not play fair.  You cannot reason someone out of a position he holds on faith.

     I disagreed with most and maybe even all of his positions.  Nevertheless, the violence that was committed against him was absolutely inexcusable and should be condemned by every decent person.

     But I don't quite get why all the media outlets made a point of noting the anniversary of his murder.  What are they after?  They've been covering the trial of the man accused of killing him, and that's appropriate, but this is someone who didn't hold public office, and whose fame was based on employing his rhetorical gifts in remarkably uneven debates.  Big fun if you agreed with him, I suppose, but he wasn't otherwise notable.  The organizations he founded have faltered as cultural forces without him, and many people on the far Right have drifted towards even more extreme figures.  That's not great -- but it's likely those individuals were already headed in that direction.  He wasn't a moderating influence.  I'm sorry for the loss to his family and friends.

     We've got too damn much political violence in this country, and we're too easily chivvied into "Us vs. Them" conflicts that pit working people...against other working people.  Meanwhile, the rich get richer, no matter what their politics happen to be -- and their politics have often been shown to be remarkably flexible, depending on which party is in power and what they they think it can do for them.  Against that, making killers famous, marking the date of their crimes and shedding performative tears over their victims is an utterly cynical sideshow.

Forward-Looking Perspective

     Data centers are the abandoned Kmarts and dead malls of tomorrow -- and tomorrow is right around the corner.

It's 9/11

     Politicians and media will be pulling out out their hair shirts and weeping hankies, and look, it was  a terrible day, an unexpected blow, a mass murder of innocents, a nasty piece of asymmetrical warfare.

     So was Pearl Harbor, and we still mark the day.  But December 7, 1966 was not a day-long commemoration.  My Dad didn't blink when I bought a Toyota in 1977.

     Remember -- by all means, remember.  But don't be consumed by it.  Understand the changes it, and our reaction, wrought in our country. 

He's A Biter

      Holden still can't grasp that his adoptive mommies are relatively fragile.  He sits on the typewriter shelf of my desk, and if he thinks he's not getting enough attention, he'll bite me.

     Flinching doesn't help.  Scolding doesn't register with him.  So I've started crying, as soon as I feel the little cat teeth.  I pull away before he can get a good nip. put my head down and sob, in as heartfelt a way as I can.

     And that works.  He'll either start smoothing on me or go into clown mode, rolling and grabbing at small items on the desk, very much, "I'm playing!  See?  See how amusing I am?  Please stop crying!"

     I just started a few days ago.  We'll see if the lesson sticks.

It's A Kind Of Genius

     Oh, it's crude.  And it's not possible, not to mention illegal.  But it's absolutely an example of how the man works: the President of the United States has promised to pay each and every American* a middling-large sum of money if his party retains control of Congress.  He's made similar payoff promises before, which somehow never materialize.

     It's the same appeal as a one-armed bandit, only with far less chance of a payoff: pull lever, get money.  And there's a group of voters, ranging from low-information to so deep in the fantasy they'll take it on faith, who will be moved by it.  Is the size of that group decisively large?  Is greed a stronger motivation than high prices for everything and stagnant wages?  Stronger than the reaction to an increasingly authoritarian Federal government whose masked secret-police thugs act with impunity?

     I don't know.

     The truth is, the money's not his to spend; it's Congress's.  And Congress doesn't have it; the payout would run to more than 1.3 trillion dollars and they're already deeply in the red funding his don't-call-it-a-war with Iran, the same one that's driving up the price of oil, fuel, and everything that relies on oil-derived stuff to be made or grown and transported.  I suppose they could just have the Mint print it -- that's what the Left calls "Modern Monetary Theory" and the Right mocks (so does the center); it's inherently inflationary, meaning by the time you get your money, it'll buy fast-food dinner for two and a daily newspaper as long as it's not the Sunday edition.  And it's illegal in the U.S. to pay people for votes, not that illegality is much of a deterrent.  (And it's the actual paying for votes part that is illegal -- candidates and everyone else can talk about it all they like.)

     It's money no American will ever receive, no matter who they vote for.

     Politicians have been selling pie in the sky for years; Mencken called elections a kind of advance auction of stolen goods, but the modern, jet-propelled GOP version auctions off the stolen goods -- and then keeps them.

     I beg people to choose a better class of crook.  I have no faith left that they will.

     Update: The "dividend" headlined every TV and radio newscast I saw or heard today.  It'll never be paid -- but using it as a lure is indeed a kind of genius.  Flim-flam genius we should be ashamed of falling for, and yet....
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* Citizens, presumably, given his party's positions, not resident non-citizens.

It's Junk Food

     It's junk science, too: "A.I.," which is certainly artificial but has yet to demonstrate actual intelligence, is going to kill us all, warn the....people working frantically to build ever larger versions of it.

     While it is true that the inhuman, hyperscaled fuzzy-logic might indeed do immense harm, all of it will require human actions -- being fool enough to connect it to critical systems, applying it to cybercrime (it's really, really well suited to that, which reveals quite a lot about the people promoting it) and treating its advice as if it was coming from another soft, vulnerable human being instead of generated by a big, clever next-likely-sequence-of-words machine.  Most of your fellow humans already don't give a flip about you, but a majority would still cringe if you suffered grievous bodily harm in front of them and started to bleed and scream.  A.I. would react to it in the precise same way as lump of mud: not at all.  There is no there there.|

     And of all the junk-food junk science, "Roko's Basilisk" is among the worst.  It's nonsense.  It's brainrot.  It assumes there's a ghost in the machine.  Might some future "A.I." punish anyone* who knew it could be brought into existence and didn't help (or fought against it)?  ...First, it presupposes that there's something to do the knowing; second, it absolves the humans who built and trained the thing, directly or indirectly, of blame.  This is "The lawnmower ran over the rabbit nest" levels of passive voice guilt-dodging: no, stupid, you ran over the baby bunnies with the lawnmower you were wielding, which is why there's blood all over your shoes.

     The basilisk isn't a thought experiment, it's a threat, from the same kind of irresponsible teen-aged thinker that shouldn't be allowed to use dangerous machinery around the powerless and vulnerable.  We've already run that experiment at scale, when DOGE dismantled USAID, and it has resulted in at least hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths so far, with some sources projecting tens of millions dead by 2030.  There's your creature, and it's humans pushing the button, same as always.

     Maybe we should stop them -- or at least stop pretending their imaginary playmate is real.
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* Or, in some versions of the fable, their simulacrum, which is brainrotted brainrot: a copy of you simulated in the machine will not be you, and the illusion of continuity of consciousness does not run in reverse: your copy may "remember" your joys and sorrows, but whatever simulation of suffering it might endure will never affect you.  Fretting this one is like laying awake at night worrying someone will tear up a photograph of you, and I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your ex already did.

Wow

     It's harder and harder to jump back in the hopper of the daily grind.  I'm not sure if I'm more hopeful or more worried about November's elections and whatever follows.  I suppose if all that happens is an economic crash, we'll be getting out easy, but man, do I loathe interesting times.

It's Labor Day

     Anymore, I'm not all that sure what we mean by "labor," and to what extent a Federal holiday to celebrate it means anything.  Sure, sure, both big political parties will tell you they're the party of the working man (and, occasionally, woman) and the other guys are the party of the "elites," moneyed and/or intellectual.  Socialists and Communists and Labor -- and far-Right -- parties overseas will make similar claims (usually around May first in most countries, and you can ask the Communists to explain that one).

     But as a species, we don't actually like work all that much, and given a chance in literature or art to side with a sweat-of-his-brow farmer or the barbarian who shows up to steal from him or worse, a lot of people prefer Conan to the plodder behind the plow -- and we admire Tom Sawyer, half-covertly, and think the peers he gulls into doing his fence-painting are saps.  We keep coming up with ways to dodge even intellectual work; Socrates was none too sure about literacy and writing things down, fearing it would weaken memory and devalue being present in the moment, and we've kept on cheating -- log tables, printing presses with moveable type, typewriters, word processors, abacuses, slide rules, calculators, photography, computers, and now A.I.: forget tractors, why do the heavy gray-matter lifting when you can build a machine to do it for you?

     And yet -- we do still have gardeners, farmers, stonemasons, poets, singers, miners, men and women toiling in the kitchen or on the assembly line.  One of them might be able to do the work of ten of Socrates' students (or their wives or servants), but work they do.  (Alas, genius still resists force-multipliers; we don't get ten Greek philosophers of the price of one).

     Labor still matters.  It shouldn't be disparaged, not scrubbing floors or unpacking the mysteries of subatomic physics.  We must, still, work, and it's probably built right into our genes, long-haul hunter-gathers who stumbled out of Africa, ganging up to harvest tasty megafauna and sweet, sweet berries, singing before they went and telling each other stories about it afterward.

The Man Who Mugged Analogy

     Tam and I watch the Sunday political talk shows.  I wouldn't say we like watching them, but it's not a hate-watch either.  The programs are the lowest common denominator of American political discourse, available to the widest cross-section of the gen. pop., and because the big networks do have to keep their advertisers, viewers, the FCC and a smattering of basement lunatics* reasonably happy, they're as close to a big-picture look at the current scene as can be had.

     Today's snapshot comes from NBC.  Kristen Welker was interviewing Republican Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana, a politician who could out-awshucks Foghorn Leghorn or his inspiration even spotting them three "Ma'ams," one "I say," and a wilted magnolia.  Asked about the economy and specifically inflation, he had this to say:
     "I’m labor. I’m not management. I don’t run the show."

     He -- a U. S. Senator -- would have us believe he just works there.  To continue the parallel with business, that is as if a member of the Board of Directors pretended to have no more influence over how a company is run than some hourly person on the assembly line.  This is not the position of a member of the United States Congress, it's a neat summary of a Senator's job in Imperial Rome.  He's asking us to believe he's just a-watching the whole train run off the trestle, caboose over boiler, as he sweeps the floor in the railroad station waiting room, powerless, thinking if only: "...[W]e’d be on this issue like a hobo on a ham sandwich. We would be all over inflation passing bills."

     If he was my Senator, I'd be asking for my nickle back.

     The interview is a marvel of a man with money, power, influence and authority claiming he's just a little fellow caught up in the gears, a-doing whatever he can, which is nothing at all.  If that was true, why d'ya suppose he even bothered to appear on TV, or the TV people bothered to invite him?  You can find the whole thing here.  Don't eat first..
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* I'd like to be able to tell you that one "side" or the other, out at the fringes of our two-party system, has a definitive lead over the other when it comes to political violence.  But even though it's often more one than the other at any given time, metaphorical meteorologists blowing up Federal buildings or supposed law'n'order fetishists bushwhacking a talk-show host (or vice-versa), the truth is they're usually so far off the Left/Right horseshoe that their political "philosophies" are largely horseshit, and viewed as a whole over history, they're as likely to have gone galloping off from one end of the horseshoe as the other.

The Spider

     It's not a metaphor.  A large Orb Weaver has set up shop in our side yard, between one wall of Roseholme Cottage and a skinny wooden post for the temporary fence around the tree-smashed house south of us.

     I noticed her weeks ago, initially with a medium-large web between one of the pillars holding up the roof of our porch and the front wall of the house.  A gold-kneed Orb Weaver!  She'd weave a new web every evening, seine the air all night and take it down each morning.  A few days later, I blundered into an anchor strand in broad daylight between our house and the wreck of our neighbors, and didn't give it much thought.

     Thursday, Tam and I were taking the trash can to the curb.  The usual division of labor is that she wheels the bin and I stand watch;* it's large and heavy.  Even though it has wheels, it's an awkward thing and there are plenty of places to take a fall between the back yard and the curb out front.

     Tamara was in the lead, puffing with effort, and came to an abrupt stop.  "Uh-oh!"

     "What is it?  Are you okay?"  Our normal route follows the narrow sidewalk to the south of the house.  After the tree fell and was rapidly cleared up by a team of a half-dozen men, the usual bumps and little hollows were supplemented by more of the same, and they're big enough to catch a wheel.

     She paused before saying, "There's a huge spiderweb!"

     I walked around her, flashlight on.  There was indeed a huge spiderweb, at least a yard across and about five feet high, supported by a very heavy diagonal of silk from our gutter to a foot above the base of one of the neighbor's fence posts.  It was neatly signed with a white squiggle, and at the very center, a large, light-brown spider with pale knees, half again as big as last seen.  The fishing must be good.

     Tam was unhappy.  She's uncomfortable with spiders, especially big ones.  You know how some people who are nervous around cats or dogs seem to attract them?  She's like that for spiders.  If a spider's going to screw up rappelling, she's who it will fall on, panicked.  "We can't go this way."

     I like spiders.  They catch and eat noxious bugs, and often perform fancy dances (ever watch a zebra spider hunt?  They leap and spin like a cartoon ninja!) or weave elaborate nets in the process.  "I'll take the trash around the other side of the house," I said, "if you'll open the gate on that side."  I took the bin from her, backed it up and got it turned around, and horsed the heavy thing through the long detour.

     Once we'd got the bin to the curb, I went around to the south to see the spider and her web from the other side.  Her abdomen is marked with a pattern like snake scales, with a paler + right in the center.  She didn't seem to mind the attention -- an annoyed Orb Weaver will start to bob up and down while holding on to the web until the whole thing is rippling; they'll let you know when you're in the way.  I didn't want to spoil her fishing by getting too close.  The web is one of the largest I've seen in years, truly impressive work.

     When Tamara and I returned from our morning walk right before sunrise today, I had another look.  The anchor strand is still there, a good sign she still considers that spot her patch -- but she'd taken the web down.  There's plenty of room to walk under the anchor at the high end.

     I guess we've got a new helper!  Around here, the Orb Weavers usually fish a spot for a few weeks and then move on, folding their nets and slipping away.
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* While this may seem unfair, on Trash Day I clean out the fridge and change two of the three litterboxes, and usually buy the pizza as well.  It evens out.

Worse Than Crooks

     Lying and cheating is kind of expected of politicians -- but they're not supposed to embezzle millions; they're supposed to keep their lies small and personal, and stop at merely shading the truth about big things.  They're supposed to have some respect for the government of which they are a part, or at least to fake it in a convincing manner.

     The Trump administration's egregious nonsense about voting, and especially voting by mail, is far outside even these lax norms.  Their proposed "fix" for the non-existent problem appears to be designed to create chaos and disenfranchise the greatest number of legitimate mail-in voters.  It imposes a "zero error" requirement on outgoing ballots, in which a single mistake on one envelope would result in the rejection of an entire batch of thousands of them.  At least 24 states have pushed back, including some controlled by Republicans -- and even though pending court cases only blocked mandatory compliance with the proposed USPS mail voting requirements, not a single state has chosen to voluntarily comply and many report that they simply cannot.  Nevertheless, the administration has gone to the U. S. Supreme Court to ask for a ruling that will allow the scheme to proceed, even as the first states prepare to send out ballots within days.

     It's a huge, dirty Federal thumb on the scales of a balance the individual states are supposed to be looking after -- and they have done so from the first days of our republic.  No entity has ever produced evidence of statistically significant vote-by-mail fraud, despite a great deal of very diligent searching for it.  At this point, even a nursing-home worker helping the frailest of the people in their care fill out ballots must surely be aware that the slightest fudging will come under the microscope.

     Stealing from campaign funds for nice dinners and limo service, sending Federal business to your son-in-law's uncle's firm, ignoring constituent complaints while swapping votes with colleagues -- sure, we voters don't like it, but it's not unexpected.  Election interference largely aimed at the most helpless or isolated voters is far worse than ordinary crookedness.  It's a slow-motion, low-key coup attempt, an autogolpe under the thinnest veneer of pretended concern.

     You can help stop 'em.  No, I doubt the Supremes listen to anything but the ringing in their own ears these days, and the only thing the Trump administration listens to are its own worst members and the whims of the man at the top, but you can get out there and vote in November, in person if possible, and vote hard against the undermining of American democracy.  You might end up with a few farther-out Democrats than you'd prefer, but the Dems have demonstrated a willingness to accept being voted out, and voters can always remove the most egregious in the next cycle.  Mr. Trump's Republicans, especially the man himself, have repeatedly refused to accept defeat in fair and honest elections: vote 'em in one time too many and you may be stuck forever.  Consider the stakes.  It's not a safe gamble.