One Nothingburger, All The Trimmings

     NPR has cogent analysis of last night's Presidential speech.  Tl;dr? A nothingburger with cheese, pickles, lettuce (oh, lots and lots of fine Taylor Farms lettuce), tomato, mushrooms, Ranch dressing, onion, mustard, ketchup, toothpaste, horseradish, grill-toasted sesame-seed buns and a dead mouse -- but no burger.

     China illicitly stole voter rolls?  Those are a matter of public record.  In many cases, you can make just like a Ministry of State Security spook, and download 'em yourself over the Internet, free for nothing!  No skull or duggery required, Mao jacket optional.

     Foreign countries -- notably China, Russia and Iran -- have tried to interfere in our elections, at least as far back as 2020?  You bet they have; we knew about it then and we know about it now, and they still haven't got into the election machinery to yank levers.  They mostly do indirect things, like fund influencers and leak damaging real information and disinformation, and the state and Federal governments are well aware of it, since they're constantly playing Whack-A-Mole against 'em -- and winning.

     OMG, there are 250,000+ non-citizens registered to vote?  Guess what, there kind of are, and there are two main sources.  The first is paperwork screwups, things like asylum-seeker Hector interacts with state or city governments in some way, getting permission to drive or signing up to pay his sewer bill and so on, and there's one more form to fill out, thanks to voter-registration outreach efforts.  The person behind the counter neither knows or cares if he's a citizen, oops.  Or, and this is a gotcha, Hector follows all the rules, and eventually becomes a shiny new U.S. citizen, Social Security number and all.  Of course he registers to vote -- unlike you, Hector is fresh off Civics classes, and he wants to be a good citizen.  But Homeland Security doesn't have any automatic mechanism to connect new-citizen Hector with asylum-seeker or Temporary Protected Status Hector, and when their SAVE list of non-citizens is compared with lists of registered voters, there he is.  (If he gets snatched by ICE, he will have to prove he's a citizen, and they're very picky about what counts as proof, something that has happened over and over in the past 18 months.)  And there are rather a lot of overlapping names with incomplete data; do they match, or not?  Well, maybe; ICE and CPB appear to be finding out in ways that are often quite rough.  Oops, wrong Hector.

     On and on the claims went, and it was all stuff with a relatively high ooga-booga-scary quotient and little real substance.  None of it was new.  And he capped it off by calling ABC and NBC "complicit" with his enemies in not carrying the speech, and suggesting their licenses to use the high-value public airwaves free for nothing should be taken away.  (TV networks as such don't have licenses, other than for the handful of stations they own directly.  Outside of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, odds are the ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC station you watch is owned by a company other than a network.  PBS doesn't own any at all.)

     I watched the speech on CBS, who cut away before the President was done speaking and were surprisingly critical of the content, with extensive on-the-spot debunking from experts.  I don't know if Tony Dokoupil and Margaret Brennan still have jobs as of this morning, but they didn't pull any punches last night.  (I listened to NPR's coverage a little, too, with similar fact-based debunking.  They were both very careful to do their homework, shedding lots of light with little or no heat.)

Alea Iacta Maybe

     There's a Presidential address tonight, which the White House says will be be about "free and fair elections"* and "a couple of other things."

     If the sitting President manages to cover only three topics in the course of a speech, it'll be a first.

     But the stuff about elections puts news media in a quandary: provide a platform for yet more falsehoods about elections (including, according to credible sources, the 2020 Presidential election), or ignore it, and incur the wrath of an Administration with a history of striking back?  Brendan Carr's FCC has been uncommonly pugnacious, so we'll probably see and hear the spectacle all across radio and TV.

     Depending on what he says and takes action on, it could be a crossing of the Rubicon -- if that means anything at all under an Administration that crosses rivers-not-to-be-crossed as if they were taking commuter bridges in and out of Washington DC.  I'll be watching, if only because power-grabbing regimes count on burnout and over-familiarity with awfulness to enable their encroachments.

     Pundit after pundit, editorial after editorial has asked, "When will it get to be too much?"  I think that's the wrong question, one based an overly-simplified version of history.  There is very rarely a moment when everything changes like a flipped light switch, especially for the people in the moment; Ralph Waldo Emerson may have "heard the shot fired 'round the World" at the Old North Bridge, but he was listening in 1837, when the issues of 1775 were long settled.  Conflict had been ongoing; British troops and Colonial militias had been on the move long before.  Conversely, a lot of Americans didn't find out they were in the middle of a shooting war until long afterward.

     One day, everyone will have been against this.  One day, the current mess won't just be something happening on your computer or television screen.

     Tonight?  Who knows.  That's why I'll watch.

     Update: As a commenter pointed out, half of the Big 4 over-the-air networks won't be carrying the speech: ABC and NBC have said "No, thanks" to over-the-air; they'll stream it online, as will PBS.  CBS and Fox are unknown, but likely.  NPR will carry it on radio.  I'm mildly surprised.
__________________
* Which, by the way, they're all been here in the United States, for at least all of your lifetime and probably long before.  Claims to the contrary (especially for 2020) have been unequivocally shown to be lies, distortions and/or bullshit-laden hot air, by everyone from investigating Feds to international observers, as well as journalists who stand to get a lot more attention from bombshells about cheating than a dull report that everything went according to routine.

The Men Who Built The Torment Nexus*

     It's a trope from The Onion and like a lot of satire, it's realer than real.  The essay linked below explains how zillionaire techbros have looted science fiction for settings and widgets while discarding the philosophy and warnings to rot.  Is the future not what you were promised?  Yeah, me, too, and here's one big reason why.
__________________________
* Title riffed from Alfred Bester's short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which you should read if you haven't.  It's almost reassuring.  Or is it? 

Doctor Today, Dentist Tomorrow

      Saw my regular doctor today for general follow-up on my back and some discussion of long-term prognosis.  It is, as I suspected, partially a dice roll: I should avoid undue stress, but even then, it may flare up from time to time.  I've got a glitchy back now.

     I did very well on blood pressure (see what six weeks off gets you?).

     Tomorrow, the dentist will probably not give me good marks for tooth-grinding.  It's been a problem all my life, and some times more than others.  These are tooth-grinding times, and I bear the marks.

Antenna!

     After checking out the ladders I already own, I realized I had one that was light enough to carry and the right size to reach the roof, so with only one extra trip (had the wrong size of paracord), my ham antenna is back to the usable condition it was in before the raccoons-in-the-chimney excitement.  It was slow going, but I did the job.

     That was Saturday, and it left me pretty worn out.  Still, it's progress.

Looking Back

     The thing about a gerontocracy is that it crumbles away at the upper edge: with age comes power, but nobody lasts forever; the same "bathtub curve" that explains why most of a batch of light bulbs or hard drives fail around the same time shows that the men at the top, once they get there, die off.*

     Lindsey Graham went last night, younger than many but a year older than the age at which his father passed.  His political career followed an interesting path, one that led Anne Applebaum to feature him prominently in a prophetic 2020 article on the compromises some people make and others do not, when power outstrips constitutional limits and trumps political philosophy.  It's worth reading.
__________________
* The horrific second-order effect is that the ruling elite of a gerontocracy has little or no interest in the future: they're not going to be around for it, after all, and so they'll take their pleasures now, and leave dealing with the consequences for those who will come after.

"Alexa, Get Out Of The Uncanny Valley."

     Amazon keeps sticking her in a hang glider and flying her into the Uncanny Valley, and I have to coax her back out again.  Alexa goes from useful and mildly entertaining to unnerving when the online giant turns her A.I. functionality back on.  They do so just about any time the software is upgraded.

     Like all of the big enterprises pushing so-called "Artificial Intelligence," they cannot conceive of anyone not enjoying a predictive text engine biased to suck up to the user.  This failure of imagination comes down from the top: the big-boss-and-owner class loves being catered to, and they don't care if there's any genuine respect or affection behind the tonguebath as long as they get the faithful appearance of deference.  There's nothing at all behind a large language model.  All it does is pick the most likely word or phrase that comes next, based on the prompt and context you and the setup have fed in.  You're talking back to the sounds your garbage disposal makes, not interacting with a creature like yourself -- or even a creature like a hamster, let alone a dog or a cat.

     It takes very little communication for Alexa's A.I. responses to become jarringly off; if you ask her if she and the HAL9000 are friends, instead of the old Easter-egg response, "I know him, but we haven't talked after what happened," the robot muses about HAL's "calm voice and cool demeanor," and wonders if she'd "be a bad influence on him," what with her being so chipper and all.  Never mind, I guess, that if we're treating HAL as an entity she might know, he has committed multiple murders and the bad influence is more likely to go the other way.

     We've got far too many organic sociopaths as it is, and nobody knows how to make 'em feel for others; we don't need to build new ones out of silicon and software.  That stuff is never going to have a theory of mind.

     A.I. is the The Wave Of Thirty Minutes Ago, and after the bubble pops and the economy crashes and recovers, spellcheck-on-steroids will be found to have only a few useful functions, including as a source of lowest-common-denominator entertainment and some non-critical agentic assistance, and it will otherwise be deader than optical disc recordings or analog audio on magnetic tape, as cringe as tailfins.  The unfixable problem is that it is empty at the core; it cannot love, it cannot feel pain or loss, and if a hiccup in the learning process has it considering turpentine a viable cocktail ingredient, it'll pour you a martini that can literally strip paint, without hesitation.  Bottoms up! 

Bear In Mind

      The words "Senator" and "senility" have the same Latin root, senex -- and yes, it means just what you think, only more so: "old, old man."

     U. S. Senators were supposed to be in those years between the attainment of mature wisdom and aimlessly wandering the halls in a bathrobe, and while you can't really mark them off on a calendar (well, kind of: nobody 29 or younger need apply), they're probably supposed to heed the wise council of their peers as they approach the upper limit, and step down gracefully.

     Increasingly, this is seen not to happen.  It's not an especially partisan phenomenon.  Neither are those other chief occupations of a U. S. Senator: lining their own pockets (stock markets and other investments, "campaign contributions" and so on) and getting their state (or pals and benefactors in other states) larded up at the ol' pork barrel.  I guess that's too engrossing to leave time for looking after their colleagues when they start to struggle.  (They cannot even be arsed to revise and pass -- or not pass -- laws, either, which was supposedly the entire point of the job.)

     As ever, the U. S. House runs their own Junior Varsity version of it; I remain convinced that their biggest problem is not too much dissension but a lack of tumult. If House debate were a little more spirited, it'd sort the dispirited right out, but it seems like you can't hardly get a good honest harrumph out of any of 'em on the chamber floor these days.  It's all weirdness and/or weasel-wording any more.

Bicycling

     A couple of cautious trials have shown me that I can ride my bicycle without irritating my back.  Maybe I would irk it if I tackled much of a grade or tried to go really fast, but regular pedaling a modern safety bicycle (as opposed to an Ordinary) is fine.  It's no longer a might-as-well-be-fixed gear, though.  I used to leave it in 21st gear all the time; these days, I'm hunting up and down -- but that's an old lady with a bad back, in 85°F and above heat, so I'll take it.

Warning!

     Tam keeps chuckling when she puts something in the kitchen wastebasket.

     A few days ago, me and my bad back managed to fumble our way to breaking the treadle of the step can in the kitchen, at least a year ahead of the usual lifespan of these.

     So I ordered a new one, and per my usual rule, bought the cheapest of that model; the various colors have different prices, possibly due to popularity, and I am not that particular about kitchen decor.  They're the exact right size for the available space, and in a household with cats, if you can't keep the trash can behind a door with a latch, you want a step-lid can: the cats can't get into them, or anyway, ours haven't figured it out.

     As it happened, "dark gray" is still the lowest price, so the new can was an exact match to the old one, which I had left in place (and we were lifting the lid by hand, like barbarians), so I decided I'd better mark it.  I didn't want to surprise Tam, and if you have hold of the lid when you step on the treadle -- well, guess how I managed to break the previous one.

     I used my largest Post-It note, and stuck it right on the lid at the front:

     You can see why she snickers.  Oh, the shock of the new!

Hooray, Hoo... Oops?

      Got my FMLA paperwork today,* which is good.  It's got me covered through my next ortho doctor's appointment.

     Then I read on down, seeing which boxes are ticked.  Like this one: "Due to the condition, incapacity is permanent or long term and requires the continuing supervision of a health care provider (...)."

     Yeah.  See, per the specialist, my back was never right, and having been riled up once,† from here on it's a matter of managing it.  I'm not a candidate for any kind of hardware (or knifework, and I'm happy about that), but I will never again dance the maskirovka while balancing a 25-pound sack of potatoes on my head.  Or is it dance the mashed potatoes while balancing a 11.34-kilogram matryoshka?  It doesn't matter, they're both out.  Along with some other stuff.  I'm going to have to go a little slower and more carefully now.  If they'll let me.

     Guess I need to save up for a lightweight telescoping ladder.  That ham antenna isn't going to fix itself.
___________________
* Wait, I'm in the Five-Meter Liberation Army now?
 
† Unfortunately for me, they've got X-rays from 2021 to compare the current set to, and things have, in fact, moved a measurable amount, no squinting required.  I'm not gonna be able to BS my way out of this and take more Tylenol to cover, the way I do with most migraines.  It's spondylolisthesis, which until last month, I thought was the name of a general who marched an army out of Greece and fought the Persians to a faretheewell. 

Scenes From An Independence Day Cookout

     Tam, before grilling begins: "Oh, just a small patty for me, please."

     Tam, after I have brought in steaming smashburgers, grilled over hardwood and hardwood charcoal, with rain-damp fresh garlic chive steaming on the coals: "Um, two would be good, with cheese."

     The garlic chives were a freebie -- they grow wild now, and have partially escaped from the raised bed where I first planted them, years ago.  You lay a few stalks on the coals and it adds a nice touch.

     I served up the burgers on spicy hamburger buns with black sesame seeds, a slice of Havarti cheese between the thin burgers.  I had (store-bought) chunky salsa on mine along with ketchup and mustard; Tam eschewed the salsa.  Good either way!

     Tam, this morning:  "Those were the best smashburgers I've had in a long time -- of course, the others weren't grilled over hardwood."

     It does make a difference.  At this point, I'm cooking with my grill-saved stock of charcoal (just close the vents and it goes out) and the remaining hardwood firewood that I bought for kindling last year.  I could not safely lift a bag of lump charcoal at present; I'm going to have to draft Tam to help me buy more of the good stuff.  We're still using the $20.00 covered grill, and it's at least sixteen years old.