March

      Oh, frustrating March!  Warm days, some even sunny, and then today was blustery and chilling.  In the afternoon, it was partly sunny and looked great -- until I went out without a coat.

     But the first few flowers are out, the days are longer and Spring is getting all wound up, ready to go off in a flurry of blossoms and leaves.  I'm ready for it.

Agog

     I admit it: I'm watching history reel past, shocked.  I had thought the rule of law and the strength of tradition were stronger in our government; and if anyone was going to break them, I didn't think it was going to be the Republicans.

     Sure, the occasional Republican or Democrat would try to bend the rules, and more often than not get slapped around for it; or sometimes Congress or the Courts would change the rules in a way that bugged me, and not all of that got reversed down.  But the wholesale abrogation of the separation of powers, the meek rollovers from the House and forelock-tugging of the Senate and the absolute partisanship-over-law on the part of some members of the Supreme Court stuns me.

     Historically, representative governments don't last (no form lasts forever).  The first few decades are the most risky.  But if they get past that, they usually last for centuries.  Two hundred and fifty years is pretty weak.

     Maybe we'll pull back.  We've done it before, more than once.  That's what I'm hoping for and voting for.  But it's a long way from being a sure thing. And there sure are a lot of citizens cheering for it to go the other way.

The Churn

     In the novels and TV series The Expanse, spacecraft mechanic Amos Burton makes many references to "the churn," a period of time when everything is in flux before it settles into a new normal.  There's even a novella in the book series and an episode, part of a narrative arc, in the TV series with that title.

     It's an inflection point, a place where the slope of the curve changes.*

     It's where the United States is now.  Up or down?  Authoritarianism or our imperfect-but-striving republic?  War or diplomacy, guns or grain?

     This is not one man's decision, no matter how much the figurehead who's tried so hard to nail himself to the prow of the ship of state may smirk and preen, no matter how much his enablers, handlers and flacks claim otherwise.  We're coming up on critical midterm elections, and it's a time for choosing.

     What do you want?  More imperial presidency, and not just from one man or one party, but a growing trend like the one that twisted ancient Rome?  Or back to the brawling, boisterous and, yes, flawed tripod of American Constitutional government, with a noisy, arguing Congress, an overworked Executive bound by law and a court system that is not open to the highest bidder?

     Our country prospered under the system we put in place 237 years ago.  We'd gotten ourselves well shut of kings, and we needed something that was almost unheard of at the time, a system suited to growing cities, the sparks of industrial production, hard-headed farmers and romantic pioneers.  It was never perfect but the general trend was to make it more accessible, more evenhanded, less corrupt, more free.  It shouldn't be given up without a fight.
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* Strictly speaking, it's where the curve reverses, but the metaphoric use is considerably looser than the mathematical one.

Frustrating

     It's nice to be published.  Another one of my short stories made the grade in an anthology by a new publishing company formed by four writers and academics during the pandemic, and it's a good-looking book, full of fiction, photography, poetry and art with strong links to Indiana.  It pays in street cred and an author's copy, but hey, it's not like anyone else was running after my typewriter, waving cash.  The fictional stereotype aside, writing isn't a job so much as it is something to do while starving (unless you have a day job, in which case you do the day job instead of writing).

     The publishers have a launch party coming up, which promises to be a nice time with a little public (or at least peer) recognition for the contributors.

     It's at very much the wrong time and place for me -- over an hour away, on a day when Tam has a paying work commitment to be elsewhere.  So I'm going to have to miss it.

     The event would have been difficult.  I prefer to be a background lurker, a listener and not a talker.  On most subjects, I couldn't carry my end of an in-person conversation even if I had a spare hat to carry it in.  But it would have been useful, a chance to observe people interacting while claiming to work for the caterer or cleaning crew.*

     Oh, well.

     NOTE: Due to my employer's strict social media policy, I cannot share the title of the book.  This blog only exists because I have been able to maintain reasonable anonymity.
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* True fact: my work ID badge carries the title "Maintenance Technician," and if I forget and wear it outside the building, when people ask about my Exciting Media Job, I explain that I help clean the place up.  It's, er, not untrue.

In A Nutshell

     Here's the problem in all its nuttiness: when you could lose this document among online postings from members of "the Manosphere" and various flavors of "Integralists" and "Christian Nationalists" with no discernable difference, then what you have is just a big stack of things that are all, really, the same thing -- and it ain't the inherent-rights-based representative democracy the Founders and Framers tried to build.

     Yeah, they didn't quite get there in many aspects; but they knew what they were reaching for, and it wasn't jackbooted bullshit marching around, waving a flag and a cross and shouting slogans.

     It's better to fall short reaching up than to succeed punching down.

War! What Is It Bad For?

     You can't see the dead people from here.  But even ignoring that horrible toll, war is bad for a whole lot of things beyond the obvious, from beer cans to electronics to plastic doodads like...uh-oh: your phone.

     Tamara settles in for a look at the facts. Gas prices ain't even half of it.

There Are Still Raccoons In The Chimney

     Thanks to a farrago of crossed signals, the critter removal people were not successfully scheduled until Thursday.  I needed advance notice to get my ham antenna out of the way (and to order a replacement TV antenna, just in case).

     Current plans call for them to show up midday Monday and install a one-way gate on the chimney.  Once the last of the squatters have removed themselves, the chimney will get the same kind of animal-resistant cap all of my neighbors already have.

     Here's hoping for success.

Reading List

     While Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth's supposedly butched-up military machine is stumbling its way through a war of choice in the Middle East, incompetently led and sometimes reluctantly (but competently) served, it might be time for a touch of perspective on current events.  So here are some suggested readings:

     "The Screwfly Solution," by Racoona Sheldon (Alice Sheldon, more famous as "James Tiptree, Jr.")
     The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
     Practically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin -- I'm presently enjoying The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a 2002 collection of her short fiction.

     All of them examine power, and how things break, and how helpless so many people are willing to be while it happens, and (in some cases), how it might begin to heal.  We're presently oversupplied with boys who like the sound of smashing altogether too well -- social norms, people's lives, economies, edifices, anything that looks even a little fragile.  But there is a season for all things, and they mustn't be allowed to pursue ruin forever.

Justice?

     This is your regular reminder that nobody "has it coming," unless what's coming is a fair trial and an honest verdict.  Satisfying as tales of vigilante justice or the workings of Fate may be, the real world is rarely that simple.  Sometimes, a bad thing is about to happen and the only way to stop it is immediate, violent action -- but don't mistake that for justice; it's simply a choice aimed at the least-bad solution.

     There are some loathsome people out there, but you can't fix it by becoming loathsome yourself.

Free Cable!

     Okay, not exactly cable, and there may be a little upfront cost; or not, if you or the previous people who lived in your place were lazy enough.

      See, the other thing about over-the-air digital TV is that in addition to providing video good enough to show on a giant screen (seriously, guys, when I was in my teens, we thought a 25" color screen across the living room was huge and now that's the size of my computer monitor), there was bandwidth left over -- as the technology has improved, a lot of it.  So now every over-the-air-channel has multiple extra "dot channels" to fill.*  You can watch them free for nothing -- if you've got an antenna.

     Some of the TV stations put together newswheels or local weather services for their additional channels, but there were already a few companies providing programming to low power TV stations, and a few independent TV channels in the largest cities that weren't quite the size of Chicago's WGN or Atlanta's WTBS but provided a similar mix of old and new.  Those stations and not-quite-networks saw an opportunity and stepped up, making most of their money from commercials and offering their programming to fill the otherwise unused dot channels.

     That was over a decade ago.  In and around a big city, like, oh, Indianapolis, these days you have the usual ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC/PBS, but also MeTV (a kind of homage to a well-run independent local station, complete with Perry Mason and Andy Griffith reruns, Saturday morning cartoons and a Saturday night monster-movie host), a  science fiction channel, two different Western channels, a full-time cartoon channel, a channel of action/adventure programming, one aimed at Black audiences, one for Indian/Southeast Asian viewers, scads of religious channels, a local newswheel and at least two classic-movie channels.  It's better than you used to get from cable TV without the premium channels (and those are all available on streaming).

     Tam mentioned this on her blog recently.  If you live outside the big city and its bedroom communities, you'll probably need something better than old fashioned rabbit ears or a modern flat-panel indoor antenna (bigger is better for those -- you can hide it behind a picture if need be).  You may find a spiky Yagi antenna hiding in your attic or on a pole strapped to your chimney, left over from the days before most people got cable TV.  They work just as well with digital TV signals as they did with analog ones; the only difference is that if you had a lot of "snow" back then, digital TV will either come in great now or not at all; there's not much in-between with a digital signal.  (If you do have to buy an antenna, all I can tell you is the brand I have stashed away in case the well-worn one on our chimney doesn't survive the raccoon removal process: Winegard has been making home TV antennas since way, way back.  I'm sure there are other good brands, and there are still contractors around who install them.)

     Rabbitears lets you look up TV stations serving your location, and lists the channel they transmit on ("Digital Channel") as well as the one your screen displays; it's not always the same.  (This was supposed to be a clever idea to let stations maintain their established identity while everything got shuffled around during the analog-to-digital transition, but I have my doubts.)  There are still a lot of stations on the VHF channels, even low-VHF, so in many locations, you want an antenna that picks them up as well as UHF.  The channel information will help you figure that out.

     Indianapolis has a staggering number of free channels, well over 70 depending on how fancy an antenna you have and if you're willing to point it in other directions than at the main cluster of towers on the northwest side of town.  And that's about average.  It's not "500 channels and nothing on," but these channels have to sing for their supper and there's probably something on one or two of them that'll hold your interest.
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* People call them "subchannels," which is technically inaccurate, or "dot channels," though the main channel is always "[Channel Number].1" and the others are 2, 3, 4, etc., so they're all dot channels.  The channel changer on your remote clicks through them in order, same as always.

On Knowledge And Ignorance

     I frequently encounter -- and loathe -- invincible ignorance, the kind of weaponized not knowing that denies anyone could know anything and therefore, one person's uninformed opinion is exactly as good as another person's deep understanding.

     Well, it ain't, and knowing what you don't know is the beginning of wisdom.

     I am far from the only person who keeps running into self-made fools.  Another of the frustrated has written about it eloquently and in depth.  It's worth a look.

Enough With The Tapdancing

     It's annoying.  It's terrifying, and most people are nowhere near concerned enough: the President of the United States spent a good part of the weekend just past angrily posting on his social media platform, complaining about not being allowed to rule however he sees fit.  I've been looking for neutral coverage about it and of course, it's difficult to find.  You can go straight to the horse's mouth, though.

     Most of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell came in for harsh criticism, as has D.C. Federal Court Judge James Boasberg.  For those of you keeping score at home, that'd be senior members of a co-equal branch of the Federal government and the chair of a Federal agency whose independence most economists say is key to financial stability. The same series of posts claims, falsely, that the 2020 elections were rigged.

     News media also came in for threats; during a 20-minute briefing on Air Force One, the President accused U.S. media of promoting false stories and "not wanting the U.S. to win," cutting off ABC reporters from asking further questions about halfway through.  On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened broadcast license-holders over their coverage of President Trump's war-in-all-but-name with Iran, posting on X, the former Twitter: "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions -- also known as the fake news -- have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. [...] The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."   The law might be clear but Chairman Carr is not:  Most national and international coverage is done by networks and the Associated Press,* while FCC licenses are held by individual stations and group owners; ABC/CBS/NBC and Fox own only a few TV stations, while NPR, PBS, CNN and AP own none.  But threats are threats, and the Chairman is hoping station owners will act as his catspaws against the networks and wire service -- and there's a good chance at least some of them will.

     This is all the stuff of dictatorial rule, of "moving towards the Leader" on the part of underlings, and when you throw in the President's announcement that the fight against Iran will end "when I feel it in my bones," and giving his "feeling" that they were planning to attack as one of the Administration's reasons for starting the "excursion" in the first place, it forms a very ugly picture.  President Trump wants to rule like a Roman emperor or a modern autocrat, unfettered by the petty concerns of courts or legislatures, indifferent to public opinion, steered by his own whims.  And much as he rails against the Press, they have continued to sanewash and normalize his dictatorial aspirations, to whitewash his tirades, racism and incoherence, apparently in the vain hope that if they pretend everything is normal, it will all eventually go back to normal.  Just keep throwing raw meat to the beast and pray it will go away?

     Appeasement never works.  Hope is nothing if you won't get out and push towards your goal.  Rust never sleeps -- and neither does the authoritarian impulse and the willingness to be ruled, the will to power and the lazy desire to let somebody else do the heavy lifting.
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These days, AP is also a software company: as computer-centric "electronic newsrooms" emerged, AP became a leading supplier of newsroom systems.  Think of it as Windows Office scaled so an entire newsroom can share it, with GUI conventions markedly different to those of Windows and Apple, though slowly converging.