Grazin' In The Grass

     There is no reason to threaten any elected or appointed official with any level of violence.  Vote 'em out, impeach 'em, stick them in front of a Congressional committee and (try) to make them answer questions or get 'em hauled into court if they can be (it depends on the office).

     And, sure, criticize 'em.  It's right there in the Constitution that you can do that. This can include very harsh criticism.  "Throw the bum out" isn't especially harsh, as such things go.

     All that said, some critic or group of critics decided the National Mall, that big patch of grass in Washington, DC that stretches from the Washington Monument to the pool in front of the Capitol building could do with some commentary, and they have inscribed -- or tried to -- "86 47" in huge numbers, using something to discolor the grass.  The 8 and 7 are easily visible in photographs; you can trace the 6 but it takes imagination to see a 4. 

     There are about a zillion ways to pull this off, using everything from weedkiller to picnic blankets to fertilizer or even just coordinated dancing.  Make no mistake, it's vandalism however it is accomplished, but it's got more in common with crop circles than, say, the Weather Underground.

     What "86" might mean is presently disputed.  I always thought it was old diner/bar slang that meant "throw out," with a contextual secondary meaning of "not available" and dictionaries generally agree.  DOJ is claiming it means "to murder" in their case against former FBI Director James Comey.

     Defacing grass is hardly likely to amount to a "true threat" in the legal sense, but it's sure to rouse the administration's ire.  There's a big event coming up on the mall, and the setup and crowds will obliterate any marking on the grass: The "86" is going to get 86ed itself.

The More Fool Me

     Maybe I should be less trusting.  I skipped my muscle relaxer yesterday so I could drive to the orthopedic specialists.  My back hurt pretty bad despite OTC pain reliever but I could take it, because I was going to make some progress.  It wasn't easy to find the place, a building ticked behind other buildings, nestled between busy Shadeland Avenue and the freeway.  After a couple of false turns, I was there.

     The office is on the second floor and out of habit, I started up the stairs.   By the landing, I was sure that had been a mistake, but it was too late to turn back and take the elevator.

     Up to the office.  No one in line, a couple of people in the waiting room.  To the receptionist window.
     "Date of birth?"
     I told her.
     "Do you have an appointment?"
     "No, I'm a walk-in.  The online nurse said it was okay?"
     "What are you here for?"
     "My back.  I strained it a week ago Sunday and it still hurts.  Pretty bad."  The small of my back was, in fact, a knot of fire at that point.  Taking the stairs wasn't a wise choice.
     "Oh, we don't do back pain walk-ins."
     "What?"
     She repeated the statement.
     "But the nurse--  Here, I can show you."  Which I did -- called up the conversation on my phone and handed it to her.
     She agreed the nurse had told me to go that office for my back pain.  Unfortunately -- and she wasn't unsympathetic -- the nurse was wrong.  They could maybe see me on the 18th?
     That was a week away.  By that point, as the Stoics put it, either the pain would come to an end or I would figure something out.  I thanked her and left.  Since I had the app open, I texted to the online help system that the ortho clinic didn't accept walk-ins for back problems.  They expressed sympathy.  You will not be surprised how very little pain relief there is in sympathy, no matter how sincerely meant.

     I took the elevator downstairs.

     I've got an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Friday, I'm going to grovel for four more sets of twice-a-day anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxers.  What I have will run out Sunday and I'm not confident my back will be better by then. 

     Update: I do not, in fact, have an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Either I misunderstood the nurse at the clinic last weekend or she misspoke.  It's for July 14, and now I can't see the ortho specialist until June 22.  I went ahead and scheduled it, but I'm going to try for the regular clinic tomorrow.  I'd go today (Friday as I revise this) but the muscle relaxer has me way too out of it to drive.

I'm Off To See The Ortho....

     After three days of the big pills and no better, I got hold of the medical practice that my doctor (and the drive-thru clinic too, these days) is with.  Their online real person (bit of a luxury!) read my tale of woe, opined a week and a half was Too Long to not see significant improvement and directed me to the walk-in ortho clinic tomorrow.

     It's almost an oxymoron, but the notion is that it's for people hale enough to get through the door on their own -- but not so comfy in the doing.  If you can't get in by yourself, the usual path to an ortho specialist is through the door of the ER, and conversely, followups get scheduled in the usual way.  This office deals with issues that are neither this nor that. 

     Back problems, maybe I'm never going to be all that comfortable again, but at least these people will have the gadgets to find out and the experience to know what the pictures mean.

Models Of Leadership

     Vice President James David Vance is a weirdo who believes UFOs are demons.   He's right up there with Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, though he appears to be slightly less bloody-minded than our local talent.

     Look, I get the GOP's hangup with wanting Executive Branch leaders in the general mold of a stern paterfamilias/grouchy grampa, some of whom will even try to run interference for their junior partners.  In a party bending to authoritarianism, "hetman" principle is inevitable.  But where do they get this string of freakish thinkers for the Number Two spot?

     It used to be the great weakness of the GOP was that they stank on ice at mentorship.  Presidents, Governors, even Senators tended to pick "safe" seconds and helpers, Party-line fools or sycophants who could be counted on to be no threat to the guy with the big desk.  But they were rarely way out there -- they left that to the Democrats on one side and the John Birchers on the other (and the Dems tended to marginalize their whackiest, too).

     Anymore, the kids are letting their freak flags fly, and heaven help the Union.  It's for sure they won't.

The Weight Of It

      "I'll just stand this 24-pack of water on end, keep my arm straight and lift with my knees to get it over the threshold and into the house.  How bad can it be?"

     Readers, it was bad.  Back spasm.  I once again saw the logo of the company that owned* whatever is left of RCA's technical IP, rotating and strobing.  I'd as soon see the old 1920s RCA meatball, myself, but what I get is far more colorful and I do not recommend it. 
_________________
* They were Thomson when they ate RCA and that entity is gone now, bankrupt, split up and some of the parts recombined -- including one big chunk, back under the famous technichromatic name. RCA barely kept their patent pool corralled when they existed and it's no surprise the successors never quite managed.  Their pro gear was a wild mix of in-house, contracted out and rebadged products, and you kept it running by keeping track of where the parts had been sourced.

Status Report

     I am in sufficient pain and of such restricted mobility that my temper has no fuse at all.  Every minor annoyance or household mishap triggers anger bordering on rage.  This is nothing I am proud of.  It's annoying.  It's embarrassing.

     One of those remote-grabby things is on its way to me, along with a front-porch delivery of bottled water.  I have a 24-pack, but it's in the back hatch of my car, on the far side of the garage, and I can no more carry it in than I could fly.  Getting those should help with some of the frustration: I'll be able to pick things up from the floor without a heart-pounding series of scary moves to get down to floor level and, far worse, back up.  And Indianapolis city water is nothing to write home about.  It's okay fresh out of the tap but carries the faintest aroma of wet dog after it sits a spell.  (It has been this way for years, no matter how well our reservoirs are doing.  Is it that hint of canal water?  The scattering of city wells?  Some purifying chemical or process?  Our water company draws on a variety of sources and they do honest work, but it's a bulk business, not a boutique bottler.  It's clean water and plenty of it.)

     Just took the second muscle relaxer pill and the first anti-inflammatory.  The latter is some turbocharged prescription-only relative of naproxen, so I had to wait for the previous dose of aspirin to time out; you can't take both at the same time.  Fortunately, acetaminophen is still okay, and I'm watching the clock for my next dose.  Such excitement!

     First commenter to suggest horse-paste, moxibustion or a chiropractor gets punched in the face as soon as I'm feeling better.

Progress?

     Went to the doc, got checked out, got the meds.

     Five hours later, I'm still miserable.  I can't pick stuff up from the floor.  It's a gymnastic exercise to stand up.  But I'm hopeful.  It beats not being hopeful.

Almost

     I rested well overnight, got up and took a walk, napped more, did a little laundry very carefully and almost convinced myself I was getting better.

     Almost.  I relaxed eating dinner and stood up incautiously to clear away my take-out platter.  My lower back went into a spasm that nearly buckled my knees.  Technicolor pain.

     Time to stop pretending.  Tomorrow, I'll get washed up well enough to face the world and go to the doc-in-a-box. 

"Oops?"

     Between work yesterday (trying to rebuild a portable camera tripod that has had a hard life, typical of them; they're extremely difficult to take apart after a few years of heavy use) and my contributions to Trash Night last night (cleaning out the freezer and fridge, a bending-heavy activity, and changing two litter boxes, a task I have long done while sitting on the floor due to bad knees), I am back at square one with my back.  Maybe square -1.  Or -2.

     Hello, Dial-A-Doc?

     Update: The the dickens with them.  They never connected.  Waited an hour, with the little reminder that someone would be along Any Time Now blinking away at the top of the screen.  Oh well.  They don't prescribe muscle relaxers and I won't take them, so what was the point?

Walking

      During the pandemic, Tam and I got into the habit of taking a walk around the block every morning.  Or, by and by, two blocks, or three....  It was decent exercise for a couple of spinsters, and we don't actually spend much time in one another's company otherwise; I work, she's always got writing projects underway, and a lot of our interaction consists of keeping out of the other person's way.  We're usually watching a TV series over supper -- 45 minutes or an hour of staring at the same screen.

     So walking around the block is a good way to find out what's going on with the other person living in Roseholme* Cottage, as well as exercise.  We'd stopped our walks at the worst of winter, and as that damn virus became endemic and the vaccines made it far less a problem, we eventually came to a spring when we didn't start our walks back up.

     That was a mistake.  We're getting old; we need the exercise.  We're getting grouchy, too, and it helps to have a little time to go talk about inconsequentials: Oh, look, a cardinal, a squirrel, the Moon; what lovely flowers! what kind of bush† is that? and so on.

     So we're walking again, this time with our smartphones keeping track.  I need it, especially after the way I strained my back last weekend.  It's getting better, but still a little sore.  And some one of these days, our track will go as far as the place that sells breakfast pastries -- maybe it's not the most healthy goal I could have, but at least it's a goal.
_____________________
* This name of my house is not a reference to the similarly-named university but a mocking allusion to the heraldry supposedly associated with my family name, a "naturally-colored" rose on a silver-grey background.  Oh, the arms are real enough, a minor title that faded over three generations, apparently a War of the Roses version of the GI Bill, but my last name is a toponym, and so far there's no evidence I'm related to that long-ago soldier/squire.
 
† I'd sure like to know.  Feathery, reddish-green needles, gnarly branches, dense and no more than three or four feet tall.  Interesting-looking shrubbery. 

That Was...

     Monday wasn't fun.  Tuesday wasn't great, either: my back.  I've been living on aspirin and sleeping on an ice pack, walking as much as I can manage, and I'm getting better, but oh, jeepers.  I did not see this coming.

     I mean, it could be worse.  I could be stuck in a country rapidly sliding down into competitive authoritarianism, in which one party's politicians were uniformly crooks, cranks and grifters, while the other party distinguished itself by fielding many more plain old hacks and allowing the occasional idealist to slip though, counterbalanced by a scattering of outright weirdos; not that their opposite numbers didn't have a few of those, too.

     Oh, wait.

     The United States may be the only two-party democracy (in the broadest sense) that does itself in by the two parties leaping off a precipice, one shouting, "Hey, everybody, lookit me!  I can fly!" while the other party mutters, "Oh dear," and frantically tries to improvise a parachute from a pocket handkerchief all the way down.  They'll both make identical splatters when they hit the ground.

     The next person who gives me a version of "Same old same-old" in response to our present crisis is going to get the unexpurgated version of this diatribe, because no, it's not.  I'm looking back on LBJ and Nixon and both Bushes and Bill Clinton with fond regret: we didn't realize how good we had it at the time.

We Did It!

      Actually, we have almost done it.  For, well, years, Tam and I -- mostly me -- have been accumulating fallen branches and twigs on the front porch, and trimmed saplings in a pile out back.

     Some of it is decent firewood and we do have a fire pit.  I have sorted that out in batches and stacked it in small crates.  The brushpiles remained.  A couple of months ago,* I picked up a canvas mini-dumpster.  They're sold folded up flat, of course, and the package sat in the garage, in mute recrimination.

     Or it did until yesterday.  The weather was nice, the heaps were annoying, and even if we only made a little progress, it would be worth it.

     The work went much better than expected, and after a couple of hours, what do you know?  The porch was clear.

     I felt so good about it that I went out after supper, added a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes, and there was still room for the back yard brushpile.

     Still to come, calling up the provider and paying a little more to have it taken away.

     Maybe we'll even plant some flowers again this year.

     Downside?  My back feels pretty awful.  Too much bending over, not enough proper squatting.  Price of age -- and of getting rid of some of the mess.  And my creaky knees are, at least., not any creakier this morning than they were yesterday morning.
_________________
* Yes, I do have only two speeds, but they're not Dead Slow and Full Stop, only Slow and Slower.

Clever Cicero, Time Traveler?

      The Roman lawyer, writer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is greatly admired for his command of language.  Like Shakespeare centuries later, he introduced new words and conventions of form that persisted ever afterward.

     And like the Bard, he was fond of wordplay -- but how could he possibly have invented a riddle that works the same in English as it does in Latin?  Sheer luck, of course, the same chance that preserved his words and Shakespeare's.

     A greeting:
     "Mitto tibi 'navem' prora puppique carentum."*

     In English:
     "I send you a 'ship' lacking stern and bow."

     Something of an "Aenigma a patre," I suppose.
___________________
* I have here taken the cheapest/easiest transcription of written Latin.  For Romans vowel "u" and the consonant "v" were distinguished only by context, as readily as we skip through the myriad inconsistencies of English orthography.  While contemporary fancy inscriptions and (probably) professional scrolls would have written MITTO TIBI NAVEM PROPRA PVPPIQVE CARENTVM at best and probably abbreviated many of the words in standardized ways, Cicero himself probably jotted it down in a chicken-scratch cursive not too unlike a modern doctor's handwriting, with a character like a cross between a "v" and "u" and what looks to our eyes like a ruthless disregard for getting the letters on the same line; Romans didn't see 'em the same way we are taught. 

When An "Idiot Plot" Isn't, Maybe

     Writing -- and chairing the critique group -- has me in the habit of taking a critical look "under the hood" of books and TV/movies/radio shows.  One of the gotchas is what SF writer (and critic) Damon Knight called an "idiot plot," though he gave credit to James Blish for originating the term

     Simplest form, it means a plot that only works if one or more of the characters ignores something that is obvious to the audience.  Now, that's one thing if the plot is just an excuse for razzle-dazzle (the Ginger Rogers - Fred Astaire film Top Hat is often cited, but nobody cares: you're there for the dancing), and something entirely different in a serious work.

     No spoilers, but-- The most recent season of For All Mankind has a crucial plot development that only works if a very smart character misses a point that should be entirely clear to the audience and perhaps the other characters involved, based on past behavior.  They miss it, and keep on missing it, several times.

     Now, the individual involved has been set up as a deeply focused and somewhat neurotic person, probably neuroatypical* and everyone else in a position to work out what happened has a vested interest in staying mum -- so is it really an "idiot plot," or were the writers playing a deeper game?

     Flip a coin.  Much as I love the big, rich story, I've got to admit I'm there for the sets and the characters, for the broad sweep of an alternative history, one in which the Space Race went on and on.

     Moral?  You can get away with it -- if you're as quick on your feet as Fred and Ginger, if you're that gifted at choreography (in the broadest sense), if you're willing to subtly lampshade it, if you've got the sets and costumes and skilled photographers and editors (and/or literary chops) to pull it off.  I think For All Mankind managed the trick, but it's there if you look for it.
______________________
* It's not original with me, but inclinations and skill sets that make for good scientists have a lot of overlap with some autism-spectrum behavior patterns, so much so that it has often been pointed out that while there's zero evidence that vaccines cause autism, there's a pretty good case to be made that autism causes vaccines.

In Other News

     Odds are pretty good that I'm in a recurrence of rheumatic fever.  It's an autoimmune ailment, triggered by strep, and sure enough, I had a sore throat a few weeks back.  The sore throat ran its course and went away, as such things do, and....

     And I've had creeping fatigue, and aching knees, and figured I needed to move more, so I did.  And I kept on being tired and started to have eyelid twitches around my left eye, and sore knuckles, and wow, was I tiring easy, getting other aches and pains here and there, and oh, gosh, did my knees ever hurt, and...

     This morning, I went back to sleep for an hour after I fed that cats.  When I got up again, I was moving slower and slower.  It hurt like the dickens to go down the basement stairs and hurt worse to head back up.  Those darned knees!  Because I can (eventually) take a hint, I loaded up on aspirin* and kept moving, but things did not get better and I ended up back in bed by and by.  I managed to do my part in the Trash Day festivities (cleaning out the refrigerator and changing two catboxes, in that order) but it was slow going and left me worn out.

     Is it or isn't it?  This collection of symptoms lines up pretty well; if I was twitchier or had a bit of a rash, it'd be more likely.  But even physicians differ on diagnosing  mild cases, so darned if I know, but it sure feels like the last couple of bouts I have had with the stuff.

     Tam and I did watch the last episode of this season of For All Mankind tonight, and I would happily watch more if there was any more.  So far, they have done nothing to shake my theory that the series can be taken as a prequel to The Expanse.
___________________
* If the underlying strep infection is gone, aspirin is still the hot ticket for treatment: it's one of the best anti-inflammatories around.  I usually use it as my backup pain relief, since it's a bit harsh on the stomach and acetaminophen in milder, but until this either settles down or drives me to the doctor, I'll do steady aspirin and take the other as-needed.

Gearless Ratchet

     Multitool maker Leatherman sells a gearless ratchet about the size of a fountain pen, and nobody told me.  There was apparently a lot of hype when they first showed up, probably driven by scarcity -- it was a few years back, when supply chains were still shaky, and availability was variable on the manufacturer's website and elsewhere.  Not so much now; you can find 'em anywhere that stocks a good assortment of the maker's tools. 

     What the thing has going for it is that A, it's a ratchet, which makes the slightly awkward Leatherman bit-driver less so; B, it's an extension, which is often less awkward; C, it's also a bit adapter.

     For those who don't know, a very long time back, Leatherman started including a double-ended "precision bit" on most of their multi-tools, a flat, double-ended straight/Phillips gadget that is held in a receptacle by a flat spring.  It's a mixed blessing -- the bits are considerably better than the usual multitool fodder, and you can swap 'em out, but it's one more item to lose and small enough to fumble when you're changing it.  Critically, though the bits are very flat, the shape is a subset of a standard quarter-inch hex drive: the short sides are "pointy" and fit into the widest part of the hexagon recess!  (A downside is that the amount of torque you can apply with the modified drive is lower.  In practice, it has never been a problem for me.) 

     The specialized shape means a plain Leatherman extension -- and this ratchet -- has a flattish end that plugs into the driver receptacle, but the bit end is standard hex.  They'll fit any bit, and it works with any driver.*

     I wanted one of those ratchets on sight, and wouldn't you know it, Tam and I tend to give one another gift certificates on our birthdays.  So that's what she got me for my birthday.  It arrived this morning and I'm very happy with it.
____________________
* Or almost any.  There was an outfit in New England, the Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company, who made one of the neatest and most compact sets of bits and drivers imaginable, with a straight-knurl quarter-inch drive that formed part of a 3-degree ratchet.  Their ratchet drive system was deliberately compatible with quarter-inch hex -- but that ratchet won't work with Leatherman's "slice-of-hex" bits.  The company appears to be fading or gone now, and more's the pity.  There are alternatives but nobody makes 'em as small. 

Happy Birthday, I'm Old

     Oh, I'm not as old as old, but I'm really quite an age, and I had thought I would be spending more time at my own keyboard and less time punching someone else's clock by now.

     That's not how it has worked out.  Bad knees and bad luck have me hanging on, looking at Wall Street and Washington, wondering when the bubble will pop.  (Probably first in my knees, though it feels more like rust and grit.)

     Having grown up in an unacknowledged but overwhelmingly real tradition in which birthdays were far more for painful reappraisal and remorse than celebration, I have to wonder if I missed my stop.  Most of my friends at work already stepped off, and the four techs who remain, we're all bouncing around like peas in a bucket and are about as effective.  But here I am, no matter where I go.

     I'd like to thank everyone who has shared birthday wishes, especially my friend from the 8th call district who sent a card!  They really are nice to receive.

     Be well, all of you.

Seen In A Glass, Darkly....

     There's no darker glass, at least in metaphor, than a monitor or TV screen.  I had occasion to rewatch the film Civil War recently and, juxtaposed with radio and video coverage of the current mess in the Middle East, especially Israel's ongoing invasion of Lebanon, it makes for sobering viewing.  And the movie's deliberately incoherent conflict (it's about war correspondents, after all, not war) looks less and less so as time goes by.  Even the alliance between Texas and California as the "Western Forces:" if you had told an American or Russian in 1932 that they were going to end up fighting on the same side of a major war within a decade, they would have laughed at you.  A separatist California and a Texas "taking back its Lone Star" might find themselves with as much in common as Churchhill and FDR did with Stalin.

     The United States of Civil War aren't united. Some regions are in denial; a vast sweep of states are, apparently, largely untouched.  Others are less fortunate, crowded by internal refugees or wracked by war, buildings bombed, populations decimated, civil government gone or powerless.

     The second Trump administration has shown a marked propensity to route FEMA disaster relief (and similar aid) to GOP-supporting states and cites, and not to Democrat areas.  This is entirely aside from any overall reductions in aid: whatever there is to be had, you're a lot less likely to receive it if you live in a blue region than if you live in a red one, no matter how you chose to vote.

     ICE and CBP enforcement has shown a similar pattern, leaning more heavily on cities and states with Democrats in power and far less where the Republicans hold a majority of elected offices.

     Depending on where you live, it's life as usual, and what's all the fuss about -- or it's anything but usual.

     Civil War?  You're already soaking in it, in the slow, nightmare preliminary steps.

     There's still time; we may yet wake up, get a sip of water or take a trip down the hall, and return to blissful rest.  Or the nightmare could turn for the worse.

     None of us can be sure how this movie, these very American dreams, will play out.

     The 2026 and 2028 elections are crucial.  Choose wisely.

Memorial Day

     It's Memorial Day -- and like pretty much every Memorial Day of my entire life, U. S. troops are in danger.  Soldiers and sailors, Marines, aircrew and Guardians.  Fifteen serving military personnel have been killed in the last few months in our ongoing conflict with Iran: undeclared wars are no less deadly than declared ones, and it doesn't matter to the dead or their survivors if it was a war of choice or an unavoidable clash.

     They served and died.  Remember them, not as faceless statistics but as individuals no different from you, your family and your friends.  It's all you can do.  It's little enough to ask.

Oh, Hey

     I forgot to post today. Distracted by the race -- the Sunday morning political shows are usually a rich source of fodder, but pre-Indy 500 coverage preempted all of them except CBS, and it was apparently guest-hosted by "Flo" from the insurance-company commercials 

A Capsule Illustration

      Here's how ostensibly neutral journalism goes wrong -- though this example isn't journalism nearly so much as it is stenography: The Hill covered Secretary of Defense "Pete" Hegseth's commencement address at West Point this morning.

     One the face of it, it's straightforward reporting: who, what, where, when.  His remarks are quoted extensively -- with zero historical context.  In the Secretary's opinion, West Point was adrift in a sea of horrific wokery until he came along and freed officers from having to worry their decisions might be second-guessed by higher-ups, that there might be consequences to bad decisions, and -- oh, hurrah -- he's returned the painting of Robert E. Lee in full Confederate uniform to the academy's library.*

     There is passing mention of the coalition of Democratic federal legislators who spoke out to remind military officers of their duty to refuse illegal orders -- but even that leans heavily into the President declaring such a statement "treason" (it isn't) and the Department of Justice's attempt to have them indicted, which was refused by the grand jury -- and remember, "a halfway decent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."

     The Secretary's wild notions and wilder orders and rearrangements at the Department of Defense are not normal, and trying to normalize them with reporting that parrots his talking points without showing their imaginary basis won't make them okay.  
____________________
* Complete, it should be noted, with a slave holding his horse.  Not that readers of The Hill got any of that context.  Nope, all they read was Secretary Hegseth's celebratory quote, "...you've seen...statues taken down, paintings placed in the basement."  Statues and paintings of whom, Mr. Secretary?  And what could they possibly have done to deserve such ignominy?

Tulsi Gabbard Out...

     Tulsi Gabbard is out, and what are the odds that her old job will become one more hat for Marco Rubio to wear?

     I don't agree with Mr. Rubio's positions on, well, anything, but he's one of the few competent people they've got.  One of these days, he's going to wake up to the way in which he's the smart kid being strongarmed into doing the difficult homework for the jocks and sons of privilege and connection.  Or maybe he already knows, and figures it's the price he has to pay for a seat at that table.

     That only plays out one way, and it's not him being invited in as an equal.

A Government Of Smart-Assed Punks

      The current collection of ne'er-do-wells, failsons, solipsistic opportunists, toadies, religious extremists and other vile nutjobs and crooks -- see the list from Blazing Saddles -- running things in Washington D.C. and throughout the Federal government includes a great many men and women of a familiar type, one that comes tagging along no matter what party is in power: arrogant punks, secure in their access to authority and/or knowledge of how to manipulate the law.  They sneer and wink their way through Congressional hears and press conferences, not just lacking in humility but contemptuous of it.

     Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced they have issued an indictment against six Cubans allegedly involved in shooting down two unarmed U. S. private airplanes in 1996.  The planes were operated by Brothers To The Rescue, an effort to help people fleeing Cuba by sea.  There are genuine questions of fact -- Cuba says the planes were in their airspace, the U.S. says they were over international waters.*  There are genuine issues of the Cuban government being repressive and generally awful, of the need to help people who got to sea in inadequate vessels; there's a lot of go work out in court, and plenty of room to argue over what court it should be, or if diplomacy is a better way to sort things out; or even if thirty years is too long to wait.

     But one of the Cubans is Raúl Castro.  He was in charge of their defense department at the time, and later served at President and leader of the Cuban Communist party, positions from which he has since stepped down.  He's 94 now.  Age is no shield from criminal prosecution (though you do have to wonder what the courts could do to him that Time has not already done or is about to do).  He's charged in the U.S.; we don't have an extradition agreement with Cuba, naturally enough, and there the matter sits.

     Or does it?  Acting U. S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking at the press conference announcing the indictment yesterday, said this to reporters: "There was a warrant issued for his arrest. So we expect that he will show up here, by his own will or by another way."  Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

     Cuba's government is far from admirable.  Raul Castro is no teddy bear.  The incident in question was tragic at best.  But the acting AG is hinting and shrugging his way through the kidnapping of a former foreign head of state, in his own country.  That's fine for the movies, but in the real world?  It's not.  Oh, we've probably all got lists of leaders and former leaders we'd like to see nabbed and hauled before a court (if not worse), but that's not how it works.  It's how wars start, and there are plenty enough of them simmering already.  Regular, ordinary Cubans are already suffering and the kind of military intervention it would take will only make things worse for them.

     But to the smart-assed punks of the world, the "little people" don't matter.  They're up there parading on the world stage, all suits and uniforms, legal writs and jet planes, bombs falling clean, high above the dust and blood and tears.  People getting killed are just a handy prop to them, to be pulled out and put to use decades after the fact.
____________________
* All things being equal, I'm a lot more inclined to trust the accuracy of U.S. radar than Cuba's; but unless you were staring at those screens at the time, it's a matter of opinion.

Crazy Pills? Voters Eat Them Like Candy

      Apparently, crazy wins.  At least in some elections.

     This post could have been called, "Why I'm no longer a Libertarian," except I never was a big-L Libertarian.  The state party was always too welcoming to people whose ideas skirted racism, eugenics and/or religious extremism.  It might have been called "Why I stopped being a default Republican voter," since it used to be that most of Indiana's GOP politicians were safe choices: they didn't support change.  Cautious to the point of stodginess, when the state did manage to change the laws and regulations, they stayed changed.  Progress was slow but it didn't go backwards.

     The problem was, some voters wanted something different -- and it wasn't classical libertarianism.  It wasn't steady-on conservatism.  It wasn't New Deal progressivism, either; it wasn't even old-time machine politics, with cigars (and and more substantial rewards) for party workers and the well-connected and damn-all for individuals, groups and organizations on the outs.  No, what voters wanted was--

     But why should I try to formulate it, when Kentucky's Thomas Massie put it so well in 2017?

     "All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."*

     So far, what voting for crazy has got us is gas over $4.00 a gallon -- over $5.00 in seven states, fueled by a simmering war of choice with Iran; ballooning measles cases in the U.S., a hantavirus outbreak that officials assure us is bottled up, a rare strain of ebola without any vaccine or specific treatment erupting in Africa not far from overcrowded and under-sanitized refugee camps, and a President who just got immunity from federal income tax enforcement, while building himself a combination bunker/ballroom and declaring, "I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me."

     I'm not too keen on a nuclear-armed Iran† -- who, other than some Iranians, is? -- but bombing their nuclear program flat whenever it got too busy seemed to be working.  Not as well as the enforced treaty they were under for a few years, but it worked.  At present, they've got more incentive than ever to be building a Bomb, and I think only the fact that they can shut down the Strait of Hormuz and dare the world to do anything about it has distracted them from whatever remains of their nuke effort.  Naval mines are cheaper than Manhattan Projects, and there's less to worry about downwind if one goes off unexpectedly.

     The thing about leaving out big bowls of crazy pills is that eventually everyone either freaks out or passes out.‡  I don't know if we've reached that point yet, and I'm worried about just what form it will take if we do.

     After World War Two, the United States took on, however imperfectly, the role of the world's designated driver.  We've now given up on it and joined the partying.  It's fun, fun fun -- until we wrap the T-Bird around a tree.
_______________________
* Massie tried to keep up, but as of this morning, he's no longer the craziest S.O.B running for U. S. House in Kentucky, having lost his primary to Ed Gallrein.
 
† I'm not especially happy with a nuclear-armed anybody.  We're stuck with the countries that already are, but expanding membership in that club is a very bad idea.
 
‡ Or, in fact, leaves.

Do Your Homework, Politicians

      I usually run radio news in the morning as I clean up the kitchen and make breakfast, and this morning, they were interviewing a U. S. Congressman on a recent mass shooting in his district.

     Not knowing the man, not even knowing his party when I heard the interview, I was struck by how much he sounded like a schoolkid called on to deliver a book report when they had not read the book, right down to desperately riffing on the title.

     "Congressperson" is essentially an impossible job if you make an honest effort at it.  A good staff can help, knowing or at least looking up the things the officeholder needs to know and feeding them just enough information, right before they need to know it.  It's not even dishonest: it's effective staff command.  Nobody can know everything that job requires 'em to know; the best we can hope for is that they dig in and learn the most salient stuff, and get good support for the rest.

     But this morning's guy?  At a guess, he'd seen news reports; he had some idea of the location, might have shaken hands or given a campaign speech there, but he hadn't even hit Wikipedia for more information.

     I'd have to know more about him before I made my mind up, but if I lived in his district, I'd sure be finding out.  House and Senate seats are not sinecures.  They're not supposed to phone it in.  Do the darn homework!  Is it a hard job?  Yes, it's extraordinarily hard, and if they do it right, the paycheck-to-effort ratio is lousy.

     I'm sick and tired of Senators and Representatives who won't do the work.  I dislike 'em more than the few whose politics I dislike who actually show up to interviews and events -- and their Chamber -- with a good grasp of what's going on (or even the mere appearance of understanding): at least they put in the effort.  Even if it's glib, facile and based on a quick sheet of talking points a staffer handed 'em at the last minute, better that than trying to get by on BS and blather. 

Maybe Later

     This morning, I'm just tired of the chaos and stress.  Which is, of course, what the forces of oppression want.

     Too bad, authoritarian losers: I'm not giving up.  But this morning, I'm denying you my specific attention.  Go play in traffic or something.  Go harass the birds for singing, the butterflies for being too colorful, the ants for being too organized.  (Y'all are coming in a distant third to ants on "regimentation," which I'd think would be a good strong sign that humans aren't wired up to do a whole lot of it; but you've already shown you won't be convinced by evidence, so....)

Got Through Another Day

     I even managed to finish up the laundry, do some vacuuming, change my sheets and grill a couple of little steaks for dinner, with mixed tiny potatoes, fancy mushrooms and a bagged salad.

     That's about as low-effort a nice meal as can be had.  Sure, I had to build a charcoal fire (even emptied all the ash from the grill!), any clean and cut up the mushrooms -- but the purple (all the way through!), red (only on the outside) and brown (ditto) potatoes get microwaved in their bag along with the pat of seasoned butter they're sold with, and the mushrooms go in a covered pan over low heat with a little olive oil, a smidgen of butter, some truffle zest and a hint of salt -- you just put 'em in there and ignore them for ten minutes or so.  I would have cooked them in a grill pan, but I forgot about them until the last minute and stovetop is easier to prepare.

     Tomorrow, back at it!  I've had a project going downtown at work that I might be able to make some progress on.  It involves working on the rooftop, which is good (no adult supervision!) and bad (a long climb up a fixed ladder and people tend to forget you're up there).

     Anyway, in 2026, with the world a mess and seriously askew people in leadership at home and abroad, today was about as good as it gets. 

Lookit Me! I'm Almost Human!

     I chaired the critique group this morning, and that went well.  It's usually pretty draining -- the cost of being an introvert -- but afterwards, I actually managed to get nerved up to walk over to Fat Dan's and enjoy a late lunch with Tam.  (Adequate coleslaw -- look, I'm judgemental about that dish because I like it -- and a very good toasted pastrami and corned beef sandwich on rye, with Swiss cheese and brown mustard.)

     It might not sound like much, but it's been months since I had a meal out -- and months since I walked that far.  I'm having a lot of trouble with social anxiety these days, and with my knees, and it's much too easy for me to just avoid it all: to have minimal social interaction, not go to new places, order online as much as possible and avoid physical exertion.  I'm trying to break those habits, reinforced during the pandemic (except for walking -- Tam and I were taking daily walks around the block for a couple of years), and it's slow going.

     One step at a time.  I can do this.  I've done it in the past.  The knees get better when I get out there and interact with the world, and so does my ability to deal with people.

Nuttier Than Ever

     Indiana's Lieutenant Governor continues to express peculiar opinions -- now he's concerned "Marxist Democrats" are going to lay the groundwork for an "Islamic Caliphate," right here in River Cit- er, Indiana.

     Take this as your regular reminder that not even our arch-conservative Governor Mike Braun wanted to run with this guy as his Number Two; the state GOP leadership made him do so.  And Indiana Democrats, while they're certainly Democrats, run more in the Evan Bayh mold, Lefty-Centrist or even a little Right, depending on the issue and the individual.  (Our actual Hoosier socialists -- Eugene V. Debs, for instance -- never hid it.)

     I'm not at all sure why he thinks there's any love or collusion between Islamic fundamentalists and Marxists; history suggests they're not exactly compatible, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to the Uyghurs.*  He appears to be just piling up scary things so he can warn everyone of the terrible, terrrrrible dangers that he's sure only an application of the exact right kind of Jesus to civil government can protect against -- I'm surprised he didn't throw feminism or transgender people in, as well.  Oooga-booga!  Guys like him live their life as if it's an episode of Scooby-Doo, never realizing that they're not the good-hearted "meddling kids" but the man in the monster mask.

     Bonus: Ohh, friend, either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated....

     Always doubt the motives of a man who's pushing you for a quick emotional reaction; he's reaching for your wallet -- or your fundamental freedoms. 
________________
* Largely but not entirely Muslim.

A Return To Space

      The next season of For All Mankind is out.  On Apple TV, it's an "alternate history" in which the Russians beat the U.S. to the Moon (barely) and the Space Race never stops, forcing technological advancements.

     It's a world both familiar and strange.  In some ways, it's the future the adults promised us during my childhood -- but in the real world, we'd stopped going to the Moon before I started High School.  Because of that, at times it's almost painful to watch the show: they've got science bases on the Moon and a settlement on Mars!

     In other ways, it's clearly fiction -- and remains on a timeline that would result in the setting of The Expanse.  Politicians exhort, "Earth first!" in both shows, Martian settlers are determined and resentful, asteroids are mined for minerals (just beginning in For All Mankind and an ongoing industry in The Expanse). Some of the fractious nations of Earth have come together in the Apple TV series as the "M-7," which runs Mars and oversees the exploitation of space-based resources.

     It's a timeline based on the Sunday-supplement articles and TV specials of my childhood, but the showrunners aren't looking through rose-colored glasses.  "If only..." is a wistful dream and the TV series eschews wistfulness for a sprawling cast, a storyline as wide as history and a past that feels like a future.  The story hasn't quite leapfrogged the calendar -- the current season is set in the 2010s -- but the technology certainly has.

Television Of Interest

     Tamara and I recently watched the entire run of the CBS-carried show Person of Interest, finishing last night.  Despite ending nearly a decade ago, the show is surprisingly current, addressing the rise of "machine intelligence," pervasive surveillance, government (and government contractor) corruption and the morality of power.

     Heavy stuff -- but carried along with no small amount of action and adventure, by a group of competent characters who will beat you at chess or in hand-to-hand combat.  The series begins as one more entry in the "mysterious strangers help good people and stymie evil" genre, along the general lines of, say, The Pretender, Mission: Impossible, Quantum Leap, Have Gun Will Travel, Danger Man, The Avengers and so on: drama in the Gothic mode, with a clear conflict between good and evil, in which good triumphs just in time for the credits to roll, usually by the skin of its teeth.

     That would have been more than enough to carry a TV series, but Person of Interest didn't stop there.  A smart underlying concept and strong characters pushed it more and more along science-fictional lines, in a near-future, near-cyperpunk world of corrupt cops, honest cops, warring criminal gangs, computer geniuses, super-spy/assassins -- and a number of surprisingly human touches, throughlines of love and loss.  From season to season, the story deepens, the bad guys get bigger and badder, and our small band of heroes rise to the occasion or die trying.  There are Classical mappings to most good drama, and if you ever wondered what might happen if clever, lame Hephaestus; bold, handsome Apollo; wise, cryptic Pallas Athena; implacable Nemesis; Artemis the huntress; the Delphic Oracle and a gritty NYC police detective* faced off against Hera, Zeus and Hermes (with a small army of giants and Titans on their side, all answering to Colossus the Forbin Project), this is an answer, with enough side characters and conflicts left over to fill out any collection of ancient gods or a modern rogues' gallery. 

     This is a series well worth watching while it is still fiction.  Don't wait too long.
_________________
* Even I can only strain a metaphor so far, though impulsive Ares is a not-unreasonable analog for Detective Lionel Fusco.  But I will still argue that most ensemble-cast dramas (and not a few comedies) can be mapped onto the various pantheons of the past, for a very simple reason: our stories still deal in archetypes and in human emotion writ large.  Good casting helps; the actors in Person of Interest were as varied as their characters, people of divergent inclinations and career paths who all brought something of themselves to their roles. 

Eggs Pomodoro, Sort Of

     Last night, I made a kind of soup or ragout with ground turkey, mushroom, onion, carrot, celery and mushroom-chicken broth.  It was quick, fresh and easy to make, and there was a little left, which I froze.

     This morning, looking at the choices -- bacon and eggs, oatmeal, Malt-O-Meal,  toast -- I was unimpressed.  All good, but all the same old stuff.

     I had three mushrooms left over, and a little celery and....h'mm, a can of crushed tomatoes.  So I fried up a strip of bacon and drained off most of the fat, diced and cooked the mushrooms in the same pan along with a little celery, and defrosted the leftovers in the microwave.

     The broth had been okay at best.  I poured it off, then added the turkey and vegetables to the skillet with the can of crushed tomatoes and "Italian blend" seasoning, crumbling in the bacon.  Once it was bubbling, I broke a couple of eggs into it and let it simmer, covered.  (I have clear "universal" pan lids in a couple of sizes, very useful for this kind of thing.)

     A dozen minutes later, it was done.  A "fancy" breakfast from this and that.

Omininousity

      Things didn't end well for Cassandra, but they were bad long before they got worse: the thing about prophecies of doom is, even if they're right, they're a downer.

     The downer at present is that we're in a "K-shaped economy," which feels preposterous to most Americans: how can a rising tide not be lifting all boats?

     But that's how it's working: if you were well-off to begin with, came out of the pandemic with money to play the stock market and not worry, a bit in crypto, maybe dabble in prediction markets, you're doing fine.  The trade war (wars?) haven't bothered you; the un-war with Iran hasn't been an issue, and while there's a whole lot of oil and gas (and aluminum and ammonia plus nitrates for fertilizer) bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz, those chickens are still scratching in the yard, and aren't due home to roost for weeks yet.  The top half of the K is going up, up, up!

     But this K is a fancy font: the bottom half is a quarter circle.  If you started out just okay, you're still mostly okay; if you were worse off, you can already feel the pinch of high gas prices and grocery prices that have barely budged down or even gone up, of rising energy costs....  And the people near the bottom, where the curve is getting steep?  They're hosed.  (Welcome to Calculus 001, by the way.  Oh, we've reached my stop already.)

     There are a lot more of us in the bottom of the K than the top, but we don't make colorful news copy; we're not part of the "AI boom" and some of us have lost jobs to it; still, one of the biggest groups is right there where the curve is barely sloping: they're not feeling it much so far.

     But the big dip in the road is coming.  There is no magic restart for the lost months of global trade in oil and all the stuff you can make with it.  Fertilizer is in short supply and expensive, and that's what grows the crops you and your entree eat.  Aluminum -- beer cans, soft drink cans, all manner of consumer and industrial goods -- is getting scarce and costly.  And oil prices -- well, you buy gas; you know how that's trending.  There will be a "capture transient" as it ends, prices ramping up beforehand, undercut by the sudden bump in supply that may result in a nasty fall.  A saving grace as the problem continues is that idled refineries and oil wells (etc.) don't start up quickly; but it's a bitter pill, since it will mean lingering shortages and higher prices until it's all back up to speed.

     Nobody liked Cassandra very much.  They liked her predictions less.  And in a K-shaped economy, you can see the party is roaring!  Look at 'em, in their Rollses and Bentleys, with BMWs and Mercedeses (Mercedii?) for the kids, and all their outrageous costumes -- surely you, too, will soon join them!  It's right there, online and on TV, glittering and shiny, nearly close enough to touch.

     Thing is, you're not gonna get there.  In a K-shaped economy, very few cross over.  The odds it'll be you or me are lousy.   I'm not Cassanda; I'll be happy to have missed my mark.  But that's not how I'm betting. 

Slow-Roasted Skirt Steak

      They've had skirt steaks at the grocer's for some time at a price that is only a little unreasonable and today, I decided to go for it.  It's probably going to cost more later, after all.

     They don't take well to rapid cooking.  You want to go at a skirt stake low and slow, or apply some interesting culinary trickery, or perhaps both.  I picked up some diced red onion, a Poblano pepper and a couple of containers of oyster mushrooms.  (And a box of beef broth, just in case, but I didn't need it.)

     I have just the pan for the job.  As winter ebbed and I started using the grill more, I was thinking about cookware.  I used cheap Teflon pans for years until that started looking like a bad idea, and Revere Ware (copper-bottom stainless steel), which is great to cook in but so very not non-stick. I love my skillet and stewpot from Our Place, but they don't like high temperatures.  My graniteware oval roasting pans are nice, but too thin for direct heat....

     Graniteware is enamelware, and there's a famous, colorful brand of enamel-finished cast-iron pots and pans that has long tempted me.  The Our Place people have a whole line it, too.  Both are first-rate cooking hardware -- and priced to match.  I went looking for something closer to entry-level, to give it a try with a little less commitment.  It turns out that Lodge, a company which makes all kinds of plain cast iron, also does enameled versions.  I've had a round 12" roasting pan with a lid for a while now, and it's working well.  (Bright red with a cream-colored interior!)

     It was just the thing for the skirt steak.  I applied unsalted "steakhouse" rub to it and let it sit while I melted a half-teaspoon of butter and a splash of light olive oil in the pan, just enough to coat the bottom.  I left the fire very low and once the pan was warmed up, I laid the skirt steak in it in a big circle,  covered it and started doing dishes.

     After ten or twelve minutes, it was cooking pretty well and smelled good when I lifted the lid.  I added about half an onion on the meat and put the lid back, and went back to my dishwashing.  When the sink was clear, I washed the Poblano, cleaned out the seeds and white pulp, and diced it finely, then added it, mostly on the steak.  There was now plenty of liquid around the meat; I wasn't going to need the broth.  I puttered around for another fifteen minutes, then washed, cut the stems away and added all the oyster mushrooms (you could use ordinary Porcinis, but we like the fancy ones).

     I let it simmer, covered, for about a half hour while I cleaned up the kitchen and set up for supper.  The total cook time was out an hour and a half start to finish.

     It was good -- the skirt steak is sliced into thin strips crosswise to serve, and with a generous helping of the mushrooms and vegetables and a bit of the liquid, it only needed the least touch of salt.  We had salad on the side, too.

     I am pretty sure hard times are coming.  The effects of the long closure of the Straits of Hormuz haven't hit yet, and when they do, it's not going to be the politicians or the high-rollers playing Wall Street who will feel the pain.  It'll be you and me.  Might as well enjoy a few small luxuries now, while we can.

     (I wrote this on the big iPad last night, and as the post got longer, the keyboard became laggier and laggier.  By the last couple of paragraphs, it was nearly impossible to edit, trying to chase the cursor around.  Better now, but there are probably still a few left.)

Easy-Open Oranges

     They're not cheap, and they have a somewhat limited season, but "Sumo" Mandarin oranges are delightful, for all the name is a cultural mishmash.  The Sumo part appears to be because they're burly, as oranges go, and they have a topknot at the stem end.

     That topknot makes them easy to open: just grab it and twist.  The fruit inside is sweet and juicy, easily separated from the thick rind.  Tamara loves them, and will buy them any time they're available.

     As the season goes on, they get even sweeter and juicier.  I was enjoying one today (kind of, ahem, "borrowed" from Tam's stock) and I was reminded of a gadget from my childhood: An in-orange juicer.

     We called them "squooters," but the "OJ Squeater," world's smallest juice extractor, seems to be what we had, and it's a riff on the Citri Sipper, patented in 1931.  I looked in vain at the big retail sites, but eBay's got plenty of them, and the original Citri Sipper appears to still be a staple of Florida orange stands.  Caveat emptor on those links -- and are you sure you don't have one in the back of the kitchen-gadgets drawer?

     I didn't, and I wish I had.  These late-season Sumo Mandarins are made for 'em.  Nicest Vitamin C I ever had.

Blindly "Edgy?" Disgruntled Employee? What?

      Not to be too vague about it, but the online official swag store of a certain auto-racing sanctioning group briefly offered a T-shirt design so offensive that I won't post it here.

     There's also the fact that they memory-holed it shortly after the image started making the rounds on social media.  Sure, the page got archived; but provenance is a bit tricky when all you've got is a big stack of HTML that anyone with the skills could write, having grabbed the code from a different page of the same site.  I saw it myself, so I think it was indeed real; doubting the initial reports, I had done a search on their site to find it and had the page up for about thirty minutes before hitting "refresh" and pulling a 404. 

     The design in question featured a race-car driver in full kit -- helmet, fireproof union suit, gloves and so on -- seated in a throne-type chair modeled on the one the statue of Lincoln sits in at the Lincoln Memorial, fasces and all.*  Vertical red and white stripes in the proportion of the ones on our flag fill space behind and above the seated figure.  It was apparently in promotion of an automobile race in Washington, D.C. that is part of the celebrations for our country's 250th anniversary.

     The image itself is not the offensive part; it's a little tone-deaf to unseat Lincoln, but decades of zany Presidents' Day-themed ads show that general kind of thing isn't uncommon.  Nope, the problem was the text: Above the driver, "ONE NATION."  Below him, between five-pointed stars, "ONE RACE."

     It's not a cute pun. It's not a dogwhistle.  It's an air-raid siren.  To their credit, the page selling that shirt was taken down shortly after it started getting general attention; to their detriment, somebody made the decision to create and post it in the first place.
____________________
* There's a tendency in various corners of the Internet to point at such representations of rods bundled around an axe in various government buildings, documents, coins, etc. and sagely intone, "That proves it! It's a fascist government!" It proves nothing of the sort; our government was established by men LARPing the Roman Republic (with a touch of Ancient Greek democracy) and for Rome, fasces were a symbol of the power to dispense high and low justice.  Mussolini co-opted it, but he was way late to the table, and was thinking more of Imperial Rome.  And yes, Republic or Empire, the Romans were a bloody-handed bunch, and there are better ways to symbolize government than implied beatings and beheadings.  It's a pretty good reminder of the need for checks and balances, and that justice had better be tempered with wisdom and mercy; but artistic and symbolic use in the U.S. is rarely that nuanced, either.  It's just one more bit of semiotic shorthand to say that government is still in charge of all levels of justice, right up there with the eagle clutching arrows in one claw and olive branches in the other.

Aw, Spare Me

     My family, what's left of it, sometimes shares nostalgic text messages about our happy childhood, and that's fine; we're all pretty old and enjoyable memories are a great comfort.

     Thing is, I disliked childhood.  I never saw anything clearly at farther away than arm's length until I was eight years old -- after being chided for years, "Don't you see it?  Oh, look there!" and not figuring out the reason why.  They tell me what a bright and inquisitive child I was, and darned right: I was trying to figure out the trick to understanding those blurred shapes.

     I spent all of first grade in trouble for not paying attention to what was on the blackboard, and all of second grade being humored as a child who was clearly, mystifyingly, unable to learn much.

     Here's a free tip: if your child is sitting a foot away from the TV or computer (etc.), it might be a good idea to get their vision checked.  Those halcyon years are apparently way better when you can see what's going on.

--

     This post started out to be a rant about news coverage of the current President, which still veers between normalizing stuff with an "Oh, that wacky, limits-testing Republican!" tone and pundits claiming that this time he's gotten himself way too far out on a limb or askew from popular opinion or whatever, and he's about to be brought to heel.  Yeah, well, his will to power is unprecedented for all it borders on incoherent -- and I can write that as someone who was reading newspapers during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, though I did need some help with the big words in LBJ's early years.  And just who or what. exactly, is going to rein the man in?  His party?  Don't count on it.  Congress?  Nope.  The Courts?  The Supreme Court is brought and paid for, or a large chunk of the Court's conservative majority is. (Look up Leonard Leo, who is to the Right what they say George Soros is for the Left.)

     The misadventure with Iran may yet prove to be an own goal he can't avoid.  Fuel and fertilizer prices are nowhere near done spiking, even if the Strait of Hormuz magically opens up this afternoon.  It will likely be a year or more before the disruption works its way through the system and once it has, prices are unlikely to drop much.  2026 and 2027 will be hungry years.  How hungry remains to be seen, and this is the kind of thing that loses elections -- but it's also the kind of thing that powers major upheavals in systems of government.  So don't tell me "We've got him now!" when that pig isn't even in the poke.

     Chaos is Mr. Trump's very own briar patch. He's not well-spoken; he has never struck me as being particularly bright in a puzzle-solving way.  But give him a clamorous mess, and so far, he has a real skill for coming out on top.  Maybe it's all just bluster and bullshit and associates who have figured out how to profit by upholding and riding his coattails, but it works for him, even as it leaves most of us worse off -- and it leaves his rank and file followers sufficiently less worse off than the people they (and he) most dislike that they have not been minding the downside.  That's a formula for a certain kind of political success, one largely confined to authoritarian, personalist movements.

--

     I believed I was out of childhood when, finally, I got to the point that I was free to starve on my own merits.  I wasn't done growing up until I learned that sometimes, you need a hand when things get bad.

     I won't believe we're done with Trumpism until we are -- and we're putting in the effort to build better checks and balances, to keep Congress, the courts and the Executive Branch more protective of their own powers and less inclined to get in one another's pockets.  If we do not, the system will remain vulnerable to whatever demagogue, from whichever part of the political spectrum, comes along next to work it for their own gain.

And The Winner Is...

      Advertising! That was the biggest winner in Indiana's primary elections yesterday.  There was a big uptick in ad money, largely spurred by supporters of President Trump's efforts to unseat the seven State Senators who thwarted redistricting efforts.

     Turnout was unusually high -- in Marion Country, nearly double that of the previous two primaries.  And that's half of the story.

     The other half is not so great.  All that money pouring in, those TV ads painting that candidate as a closet liberal* and this candidate as a true-hearted America First† stalwart did bring people to the primary polls in record numbers, but that record still amounts to a 14.9% turnout instead of the usual single digits.  Just over eighty-five percent of registered voters are, apparently, okay with whoever the rest of us pick.  I'm honored, I guess -- but should you really trust me when you have a chance to put your own two cents in?

     (And by the way, my thanks to the two parties, especially the GOP, for spending the big dollars buying airtime from my employer, whom you otherwise revile.  You helped keep my paycheck from bouncing, in a market where my industry's share of dwindling advertising dollars continues to shrink.)

     Looking at horserace-level results, of the seven primaried Republicans, five lost to nearly indistinguishable challengers, replacing Tweedle-don't with Tweedle-do.  One held on, and the seventh hung in the balance over a difference of three (3) votes for a long time before being called for the incumbent.  Still okay staying home for the primaries?

     Don't look at me to lay a feather on the scales against either candidate's heart in that close contest.‡ I voted in the Democrat primary.  These are times to pick a side, and downstream of the 2021 insurrection, I'll never vote for a Republican.  They could have cleaned house, tossed out the vandals, religious extremists and authoritarians.  They chose to retcon recorded history and double down instead, so I'll content myself with picking the best Democrats I can find.  (As the late P. J. O'Rourke said of Hillary Clinton in 2016, "...she’s wrong within normal parameters.") 

     The 2026 Indiana primary is done.  The main event is in November -- and the future of the country is on the line.  Nobody's coming to save us, nobody except for us.
_________________
* Despite, in every instance I could check, a voting record somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan and fulsome support of the incumbent President on nearly every issue except redistricting.
 
† Seriously, when did they stop teaching U. S. History in our schools?  That slogan has an ugly history, only barely outside living memory.  Yes, the surface meaning of the words is just fine -- in much the same way as an English word of Scandinavian origin meaning miserly has utterly no relation to a vile racist slur and swastikas have a long and innocent history in Greek, Indian and Native American art.  People of good sense avoid 'em anyway, because the negative associations are far too strong.
 
‡ Indiana Senate District 23 isn't my neighborhood anyway.

Primary Day

     Today's election results should be interesting.  The outcomes for the Indiana Republicans being primaried at the behest of the Republican president may tell us a little -- not a lot, but a little -- about the extent to which Mr. Trump still commands his base.

     Hoosiers remain crossgrained, and tend to prefer the familiar to the new; the latter trait probably finds stronger expression among GOP voters than Democrats.  On the other hand, a lot of the former have hitched their wagons very firmly so Mr. Trump's star.  So we shall see.  A rising star -- or a falling one?

Election Homework Done

     A good start for a Monday: I have located our polling place (a little Lutheran church that has hosted voting several times in recent years) and re-reviewed the (few) primary choices.  Indiana runs closed primaries, but neither party fielded a whole lot of candidates; the Democrats managed a full slate, while the Republicans skipped a few offices, but neither one offered more than one choice for many offices.

     Most of them are unglamorous jobs, like county assessor and clerk of the courts, where there's a lot of actual work and not much shaking hands and making speeches.  Only a few are even useful stepping stones to anything bigger; so what you end up with are people who want the job, either in and of itself or to show they're good members of their party, willing to step up, run, and (usually) do the work if they win.

     Someone's got to do the dull grunt work of government, and I have made my list and checked it more than twice.  I'm going to be interested in turnout numbers; it's not a great predictive metric for the general election this Fall, but it's what we've got.  If turnout for the primary is usually high (or low), that'll be a hint what to expect.

I'm In!

     The new desktop arrived late this afternoon, and after a break for dinner, I'm setting it up.  I've got some applications to download, and I'm hoping to dig out an optical drive and install Word eventually, but the process is underway.

     It's a Windows computer, and this is yet another thing that is pretty comforting with an Apple/Mac product -- and kinda scary in Windows.  I haven't been pulled all the way into the walled garden; work is still very Microsoft-centric, but were it not for a lingering fondness for Paint and the older version of WordArt in MS-Word, I would be very tempted.

Wow

      It's more frustrating than I would have thought.  My replacement desktop computer has been delayed by a day, and I'm not good with it.

     Which is silly.  It will be here when it gets here, and until it does, I have many alternatives.

     I can't say the same about the current Administration: there are no alternatives, and they are taking the kinds of actions that suggest to me they expect a drubbing at mid-terms and want to accomplish as much of their extreme agenda as possible before the axe falls.

     From paying off energy companies to not build new wind and solar plants -- while waging a war that is driving up the price of oil! -- to making abortions ever more difficult to obtain legally, to last minute attempts at redistricting now that the U. S. Supreme Court has finished gutting the Voting Rights Act and frivolous, vengeful prosecutions (most notably over a former FBI director posting a photo of the number "8647" to social media, despite the current President himself having posted a picture that included "8646" and a bound and gagged Joe Biden during the latter's time in office*).  None of it is popular outside of the most dedicated portions of the MAGA base or those to the extreme Right of even it.

     That's both Wow-worthy and frustrating.  This is well past "political hardball," and on its way to a soft coup or autogolpe.  I think a majority of voters won't like it and will register their disapproval at the ballot box this Fall.  But will it matter?  I don't know.  And that worries me most of all.
______________________
* They're both childish things to post.  This is exactly the kind of ultimately petty tit-for-tat that led me to start using only actual names and titles for politicians, no matter what I thought of them.

Backup Laptop, Backup Skull

     I'm stuck with the original-issue Mark I head -- which is a pity, since I have a migraine of remarkably dizzying intensity.  I have taken OTC pain and allergy medicine and promised myself that as soon as the symptoms fade a little, I will rinse out my sinuses.  The wave after wave of rain and the pressure fronts that drive them are playing a big part this, I hope, and clearing things out should help.

     Meanwhile, I managed get my desktop to run long enough to grab essential Firefox stuff and the Downloads, Documents and Pictures folders.  I'm on my backup (Windows-lite) laptop and my pandemic-indulgence MacBook Air for now, which gets me just about everything except the big screen.  Fiction and writing-related stuff was already on Dropbox, since it allows me to go between Windows and the MacBook almost seamlessly.  I've got a replacement desktop machine on the way, and there will be a certain amount of rebuilding once it arrives.

And..."Your Computer Has Encountered A Problem And Needs To Restart"

     Over and over, and the longer it runs, the worse it gets.  I thought I had solved the problem, but nope.  My current desktop computer was like a hundred and a half when I bought it, used/refurbished, almost three years ago.  So I guess I have got my money's worth, and nearly all my writing is saved elsewhere.

     Not everything else is.  I'll recover what I can and keep moving, but it's annoying and unexpected.  And yes, once I have a replacement up and running, I'll be checking for thermal issues and other simple stuff.

Punished For Retroactive Bad Taste

     There was a time when you didn't mess with The Mouse.  Used to be, if legislators started talking about the need for copyright reform, you knew one or more of the copyrights covering a certain famous animated cartoon rodent and his pals was about to expire.

     Back when every major TV network changed hands and ended up belonging to one huge corporation or another,* Disney got hold of ABC.  They've never let go.

     And they had deep pockets.  TV networks in the United States own only a few of the stations that carry them, with the remained being independently-owned "affiliates."  ABC's got seven stations that are all theirs at present.  And in the U.S., the FCC regulates stations: anyone using up over-the-air RF spectrum has to have a license.  Networks themselves don't get a lot of FCC regulatory interaction; the individual stations do have to promise to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what they say and do, and to respect themselves and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and....  No, wait,  that's Girl Scouts; but the FCC regs for broadcast stations are almost the same thing, plus a pile of technical stuff.

     ABC was a latecomer among radio networks; NBC had "Red" (primo stuff) and "Blue" (B-grade, things they were trying out, some highbrow shows that didn't make a profit) networks serving different stations and went into WW II under an anti-trust cloud because of it.  Once the war was over, Uncle Sam made 'em sell one off, and of course it was Blue that went.

     A candy company bought it up and eventually changed the name from "Blue" (c'mon, the word already had that connotation) to ABC, the kid brother of networks, gamely charging after the older, larger NBC and CBS (and Mutual), doing their best to keep up.  The first two were already into TV and as television bloomed, ABC leapt in after them, underfunded, scrappy, willing to try almost anything.  (After a few experiments, including developing Meet The Press, Mutual stuck with good, dependable radio.  They're gone now.)

     ABC remained the upstart network for decades, until Fox (entertainment, not News) came along and showed there were realms of edginess yet to be explored.

     And with that as background, their evening talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, a few days before the White House Correspondents Dinner, made a tasteless joke about the First Lady and how she'd look at the dinner, referencing the 23-year age gap between her and Mr. Trump (and perhaps her usually-serious expression): he said she had "a glow like an expectant widow."

     It's funnier if you don't see public figures you dislike as quite human.

     It's not funny in hindsight after a guy apparently tried to make her a widow at the dinner.

     It's much less funny if you react in an all-too-human way: the Trumps aren't laughing.  FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has crossed swords with Kimmel and ABC once already, and blinked, announced the handful of TV stations directly owned by ABC are now up for license renewal, well ahead of schedule.  They've got thirty days to get their paperwork together and filed (and there's rather a lot of it), and they're going under the microscope.

     This is bureaucracy-as-punishment, and it is punishment not so much for a crass joke but for failing to predict the future when the joke was told.  It's a clear violation of the First Amendment, which protects even cruel and insensitive speech.

     The Mouse still has deep pockets, and though they have, finally, let the earliest version of their well-loved Mickey slip out from beneath copyright protection, Disney may decide to fight this one out; knuckling under will just get them more of the same, and the burden is likely to be laid more heavily on them than the three other major networks.  Or they may try judo: those "O&O" TV stations represent the smallest part of ABC's income; running them, mostly in major metropolitan areas, is more for prestige and ready access to newsmakers and they could easily sell them off and stand back, largely insulated from the wrath of Chairman Carr and the President he serves.
____________________
* Arguably, when General Electric bought RCA, NBC wasn't their main interest: RCA had a nice collection of lucrative government contracts, including plenty with the Department of Defense, plus an array of patents to warm the cockles of shareholder's hearts -- or wallets.  Nevertheless, GE held on to the network through some years of David Letterman ribbing that kept the company name front and center, before selling it off and making money on the deal.

Idiots

     Did we -- as in our Federal government -- not already know this?  Late word from the White House is that if the White House Correspondents Dinner gets a do-over, maybe -- just maybe -- Vice-President James David "JD" Vance won't be there.

     No, not because he doesn't like the Press; not because they tend to loathe him, either.  And like him or not, we can reasonably assume that a Marine would not flinch from either the prospect of violence or the rubbery chicken and overcooked vegetables common to such dinners.  A serving politician is going to eat a lot of lousy food and sit in an exposed position in a lot of large, crowded rooms.

     But Saturday night, a remarkable lot of the line of succession to the Presidency was at the dinner, an event of zero diplomatic or government importance, where a remarkably inward-looking (if sometimes confrontational) collection of people look even more inward, and if the would-be assassin had completed his aim, Iowa's Chuck Grassley could well be President today.

     Senator Grassley was apparently the designated survivor (or not; there are contradictory reports, including that with the President Pro Tem of the Senate and a few Cabinet members not at the dinner, nobody got the official designation).  He's also the last elected official in the order of succession and maybe -- just maybe -- the Executive Branch might want to hold one more high-level player in reserve.  Most of the Cabinet was at the dinner, possibly because the President's people were hinting he was going to say scathing things about and to the assembled reporters and they do so enjoy that.  And the problem is, the Cabinet fills out the list of successors.  Hey, I think they're a pack of incompetent clods -- but even when it appears the Executive Branch is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the result of a successful decapitation-level attack would be immeasurably worse.

     There were eleven known attempts against Barack Obama's life during his Presidency, more than one and a third a year.  Mr. Trump is on pace to beat that rate rather resoundingly, but all Presidents are targets and one way to limit the possible damage is to limit who else in the line of succession is exposed to the same threat at the same time and place.

     The Daybreak series by John Barnes explores some of the ways Presidential succession and Continuity of Government plans can get tangled up.  He used a science-fiction setting, with an (ultimately) external threat -- but internal factors do much of the damage.  I'd prefer not running the experiment in real life.

     "Idiot" comes to us from Ancient Greece, where it came to mean something very much like "rube."  The present Administration likes to bring in relative outsiders to politics, to government, and that means they don't necessarily have all of the situational savvy the insiders have got, things like the importance of not putting all of the eggs in one basket -- or the yeggs, either.

"We're All Looking For The Person Responsible...."

     Who's most likely to commit politically-motivated violence, the Left or the Right?

     It is unlikely to surprise you that the answer is "people askew from reality," close to a wash between Republican-or-farther-right and Democrat-or-leftier, with "fricking incoherent" in close third place.

     Most people, including the ones with political opinions that many Americans find reprehensible, know you can't assassinate your way to a better world, and a little selective murder produces only more dead people and grieving families.  While major political upheaval often involves killings, it doesn't work the other way (and most Americans are not looking for major upheaval -- again, not even a majority of the ones you disagree with most).

     Don't get sucked into the nitwittery.

I Suppose I Should Comment

     It's appropriate to make some comment about the disruption at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

     It was something of a fiasco long before it started; the famously touchy President Trump has -- unusually for a sitting President -- never attended while in office until last night.  The event is often something of a mutual roast, it's always been a little too cozy, and mostly it's a rare fancy dinner for the White House Press corps, many of whom will who wallow in it while affecting disdain.  The entertainment this year was going to be a mentalist instead of the typical comedian, a transparent shying away from discord.  It was widely anticipated that Mr. Trump was going to go hard on the assembled reporters.

     And--  Most of it never happened.  Someone with a gun tried to crash the party, and failed.

     Security at events featuring high-ranking Federal politicians is always pretty tight, and the professionals do their best to manage every rational threat they can think of.  This means an irrational assailant has an advantage, and indeed, every known attempt on the lives of Presidents since John Wilkes Booth, successful or not, has been made by someone who was, in some way or another, not rational; they appear to have acted alone* in every case.  Add someone else to that kind of a plan, and it leaks -- and should.

     There's generally some distance in well-controlled space between the security gate(s) with metal detectors, suspicious Secret Service types, etc. and the room itself, and that's on purpose.  (I've had to pass though that exact kind of gantlet† on a couple of occasions.  It's serious business.)  It buys some time.  It worked just as it should last night; the would-be attacker -- whose precise target(s) remain unknown, but there's only one way to bet -- was stopped long before he got through the last set of doors.

     And I'm glad he was.  I happen to think Donald Trump is a loathsome human being, and his inner circle are no better.  They are doing immense harm to the proper functioning of the Federal government, to American society in general, and to both our country's stranding in the world and to world peace in general.  But nobody -- nobody -- not presenting an imminent mortal threat rates extrajudicial killing by some random guy with a grudge and/or a screw loose (or by anyone else, for that matter).  Impeachment, criminal trials, 25th Amendment, losing big at the ballot box?  I wish all of it on him.  But not what was successfully headed off last night.

     Of course, I have also been hearing claims it was all faked, or "allowed to happen."  I wouldn't count on it.  Everything about the sequence of events suggests very strongly one more Lone Gunman, getting as far as he got because he started out well askew.  And I think Trump and company are enormously more reactive than proactive.  They'll make hay with this; they already started to within the first hour.  But they didn't set it up.

     In a time of chaos, this is just more damnable chaos, and the worst people will proceed to turn it to their own ends as much as they can.
_______________________
* The Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists are welcome to debate that among themselves, but as far as can be proven, it is true.  (IIRC, there has been one attempt by a pair of desperate and borderline men working together, which failed.)
 
† Although the words are so widely misused that most dictionaries have given up, a gauntlet is a kind of glove, one that once upon a time was occasionally flung down in challenge.  A gantlet is a double row of your nominal peers, or perhaps Native Americans, who are going to whale the tar out of you as you run between them.  This does not sound like a good time, and heavy gloves aren't going to be much help.