Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Clumsy

     Things aren't going great this morning.  I've been using a Qwerkywriter II keyboard for several years.  I really like it, and since I bought it during the funding phase of the maker's Kickstarter, the price was substantially lower than what they cost now.

     This morning, I knocked about a third of a cup of coffee into it.  I usually put my coffee cup on an elevated coaster between the mousepad and the keyboard and today, a little distracted while moving my right hand from the mouse to the keyboard, I caught the upper edge of the cup and over it went.  (I have to pay close attention to where my hands are in relation to external objects; starting out severely nearsighted seems to have left me with a lousy sense of where things are unless I slow down and look right at them.)

     There's a lithium battery in the keyboard.  To make matters worse, I take my coffee with cream and sugar.  So immediate action was required.

     Once I had the keyboard draining and cleared off the desk to wipe up the worst of the spill, my computer crashed and started an update!  I had to ignore it while I got the battery out (only a little coffee on it), wiped up the coffee on the desk, rinsed off some small items and started opening up the rest of the keyboard.  It's got several tricky screws and I've only accessed the worst-soaked part so far.  Full disassembly will have to wait.

     I can't afford to replace it at present.  The exact model is no longer made, but the current version is a functional equivalent.  So I'll see how the cleaning process goes.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Monday, February 10, 2025

Reading For Our Times

     While many people have read and enjoyed the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, his "Space Travel Trilogy" is less well known.

     The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is, at first sight, a straightforward space adventure of its day: our hero stumbles into a secretive mission departing for the planet Mars and is abducted.  Arriving at Mars, he and his captors are separated, have various adventures and are reunited.  --But all is not as it seems.  Like the Narnia books, there is considerable Christian allegory at work.  It's entertaining fiction, and is probably the most widely read book of the trilogy.

     The next two are...different.  Perelandra is a fairly overt struggle between Good and Evil, in which Lewis treats in some detail the banality and pettiness of evil.  I was reminded of it when I read Adam Serwer's 2018 essay "The Cruelty is the Point" in The Atlantic.  While C. S. Lewis devotes considerably more wordage to the topic and addresses it within an explicitly Christian context, the parallels are indeed striking. Professor Weston, the villain of both Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, has many counterparts in current politics, willing and even eager to commit cruelties both great and small, allegedly for the greater good but in fact, largely for their own sake, artifacts of a corroded soul.

     The third book, That Hideous Strength, is a cautionary tale and one the years have brought into ever sharper outline.  Combining elements of Arthurian legend with the mythos established by the preceding two books, it investigates both the risks of reducing of the human experience to a series of algorithms and the perils of AI simulating human behavior.  You do not need to share the religious spin Lewis gives these themes to follow along -- and the entire story is set within the exciting tales of a young academic who is drawn into and the ultimately rejects the machinations of the antagonists.  I won't spoil too story with too many details, but it's well worth the read, full of tension and excitement.

     Lewis saw trends well in advance of his time.  He filtered his impressions through his own education and religious beliefs, but his unwavering belief in the value of the dignity of the human soul shines through his work in a way impossible to ignore.

     Those three books offer a perspective sorely lacking at present.

Sunday, February 09, 2025

Buttered Saltines

     I had a good one all lined up, a blistering piece about how the protege of a billionaire who doesn't think freedom and democracy are compatible was pushing an extreme version of the unitary executive theory in which the courts must never, ever review the Constitutionality or reasonableness of Presidential decisions.

     It's a notion that runs counter to the principle of judicial review, the Major Questions Doctrine and the Administrative Procedure Act.  Perhaps it's exactly what you might expect from a man whose membership in the ruling elite is highly contingent.  He was, after all, willing to exploit his own mother's addiction and dysfunction to further his ambition, an act roughly on a par with sending her out to walk the streets for his own gain -- although at least then, she would have been better able to refuse to go along with it.

     But no, never mind.  If that could reach you, you have already been reached, and if it cannot, you're a lost cause.  Or at least a lost symptom, netted, reeled in and and ready to be sold.  Realization will arrive with the filleting knife, if it ever dawns at all.

     So I'll stop and instead remember the simple joy of a little butter slathered between two saltines.  It was a treat when I was a child and it's still a treat now -- and still, so far, an affordable one.

Saturday, February 08, 2025

Hamfest Missed

     There's a hamfest near Indianapolis today and I was going to go -- but there's also flu and worse circulating, and I kinda didn't want to give my fellow hams a chance to disappoint me, either.

     At an outdoor flea market, there's more space to avoid germs and more chances to overlook the politics that were starting to infect hamfests even before the pandemic.  It used to be just looking askance at CBers* and griping about the FCC and the ARRL (and whatever feuds were infesting the local repeaters), but people started drawing partisan lines.  Me, I just want to look at interesting old junk in person, and swap signal and weather reports over the air.
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* And refusing to sell them linear amps.  4 Watts is plenty, guys.  If you want more, study up for a ham ticket.

About Those Frogs

     In a move that is more rock-throwing than frog-boiling, FCC head Brendan Carr has started an inquiry into KCBS in San Francisco, a radio station that had the audacity to -- gasp -- report on real-time events in public view as they were happening!

     Commissioner Carr says the station has been sent a letter of inquiry, pending "...a formal investigation[...], and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public-interest obligations."

     Indeed, the radio spectrum has limited space for stations, which are charged with operating in the "public interest, convenience and necessity."  We've also got the First Amendment, the relevant sections of which read, "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press [...]."  The FCC has their own read on how those principles interact.

     The old Photography Is Not A Crime website was built around the fact that in the United States, it's not a crime to take or to share pictures of anything in public view.  If you ever wondered why the government kept extending the fences and "No Trespassing" areas around Area 51, now you know.  And if you can photograph it, you can report on it.  Simple as that.*

     Then-candidate Donald Trump was very open about his plans for Federal forces to round up and deport illegal immigrants if he won the Presidency.  He did and they have begun, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)† doing most of the work.  So the Press knew well in advance and looked for activity.  When ICE acted in the San Francisco area, KCBS covered it, who-what-when-where-why, live as events went down.  "What" included ICE raids in East San JosĂ© ("where"); "who" involved uniformed agents in unmarked vehicles.  It's not a secret: anyone could see what was going on.  Commissioner Carr is nevertheless unhappy.  (The Völkischer Beobachter, er, New York Post seems worried about "rootless cosmopolitan" involvement -- but having been there, I can tell you the distance between corporate shareholders and a field reporter is impossibly vast.  Not only do the shareholders not tell 'em what to do, they don't even know who they are.)

     Elsewhere, there's unhappiness all around in Denver, where ICE covered up a home-security camera while knocking on doors.  Border "Czar" Tom Homan wants an investigation -- not into the illegal interference with video recording, but into how local news reporters found out about the raids that, this past October before he'd even got the job, he had promised were coming.  9News reporter Chris Vanderbeen has the skinny on that (BlueSky thread):
      "As a local news operation, it's routine for various people to tell us [...] when a boatload of federal agents are amassing in a parking lot [...]  A number of our crews went to these staging areas and then -- mostly this is because it's what journalists do -- they followed the teams when they went out on the raids. [...] Keep in mind, the ICE presence was OBVIOUS to anyone nearby too"
     His thread is accompanied by multiple pictures of uniformed ICE agents in marked vehicles.  A crew from the Fox News Network was embedded with at least one ICE squad in the area during the raids.  These were not covert operations.

     This isn't a new administration finding their way, unsure of the rules and customs; the principles of press freedom and "in public view" are very well established.  And, yes, there is always some tension between what the Press wants to drag into the light and what governments want to keep quiet.  That's normal.  In the United States, our Constitution and legal tradition favors truth and daylight over night and fog --  or Nacht und Nebel, if you'd prefer it in the original.
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* Interestingly enough, if you're in the military or working for Uncle Sam or a government contractor, there may be things in public view that you, personally, cannot talk about or share images of.  But that's a you and your employer issue.
 
† You'll recognize them in the field by their vests and jackets that say "POLICE ICE" in letters at least six inches tall.  They are indeed ICE, Federal Agents, but they're not, strictly speaking, police; it's there to keep other kinds of law enforcement from making embarrassing mistakes with firearms, etc.

Friday, February 07, 2025

Loosely Translated

     "Boys throw rocks at frogs in fun, but the frogs die for real."
     --Bion of Borystenthes

Ticking Away To Spring

     We're a week into February.  Three weeks to go and it will be March -- and you can see Spring from March.  Dimly at times, but it's there, looming up from the fog.

Thursday, February 06, 2025

It's Veiled Threat Season!

      Checked on comments yesterday, only to read, "Your liberal bias is showing."  Ohhh, nooooes!  Jeepers, what'll I do if people find out I voted for Kamala Harris?  What if they learn I think there's still systemic racism around that we ought to be engaged in ending, or that I am a-okay with same-sex marriage,* think government regulations often serve the common good or that trans people shouldn't be erased or even made to ride in the back of the bus?

     How will I live it down?

     I still don't think an unlimited government is an unlimited good -- and Mr. Trump and his minion Mr. Musk (et barely-adult subminion cetera) are presently engaged in showing exactly the kinds of harm governments can do when unrestrained by Constitution, law and tradition.

     Another commenter mentions a handful of minor actions by the Biden Administration, many of which were held by courts to be over the line, apparently on the theory that if a Democrat President bumps into legal limits, a Republican one should be allowed to take a sledgehammer to them.  Yeah, wrong: when the Dems got slapped for stepping over the line, they took it and stepped back; in the case of student loans, they tried multiple approaches, mostly one at a time.  Comparing that to a full-on partisan assault on intentionally balanced and impartial Boards and Commissions, to a multi-pronged attack on Congressionally-established Departments and budgets, is claiming apples and hand grenades are the same because they are both dense objects that can be thrown.

     Both of my would-be and vaguely-threatening commenters appear dense and can be thrown, too.  Such boys are usually thrown for a loop when a woman tells 'em, "You're not the boss of me."  You don't get to police my opinions.  Go strain at Democratic gnats while swallowing Republican camels whole in someone else's comments.

     Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, his appointees and all their little Misters, along with Karoline Leavitt, the Administration's Baghdad Barbie of a Press Secretary, may indeed succeed in making a huge mess of our Federal government, leaving our Constitution, laws and customs in tatters.  Certainly Congressional Republicans are not going to stand up to them, with several already on the record acknowledging and shrugging off the illegalities being committed.  Their Democratic opposite numbers have largely been ineffectual, their leadership making only feeble protest.  That doesn't mean I have to go along with it.  Wrong is wrong.  The Constitution says what it says, the laws say what they say, and simply because the Trump Administration is getting away with high crimes and misdemeanors at present doesn't they're not going to get slapped down, one way or another.  Maybe in the near term; maybe only in the history books.

     They're villains.  If they will be numbered among the most infamous or are merely minor malefactors who will rate no more than a footnote remains to be seen.

     But my addled commenters, intent on herding the wimmenfolk back into line, need have no doubt about themselves: faceless members of a hateful mob, intent on excusing the actions of men to whom they are nothing at all.
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* Why should the expense and unhappiness of divorce be limited only to heterosexual couples?  Divorce attorneys have to eat!

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

A Reminder

     Blowing past all Constitutional limits on the power of the President might make you happy when the guy in the White House is doing things you approve of, but what happens when he does things you didn't want?  What happens when the other big party is in power?

     Or were you not planning on ever having another election?

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Regressives

     The "Repeal the 20th Century" boys were active in my comments yesterday.  It turns out they don't give a darn about rising egg prices, as long as they can keep African-Americans and women from voting, as long as they can ensure I can't get a bank account or a loan without a man to co-sign it, as long as they can repeal same-sex marriage, antibiotics, food safety, anti-trust laws and television.

     They're not just willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater -- if the baby isn't a healthy, white heterosexual male or his largely silent and totally complaint female helpmeet, they're more than happy to throw the baby out.

     To hell with you guys.  We're not running history in reverse.  It might be what you voted for, but you're not going to get it.  Not even from the grifters you voted in.

Monday, February 03, 2025

"Run The Government Like A Business"

     I have worked for small to medium-sized companies all my life, with a short stint at a big multinational decades ago.

     The medium and smaller outfits are often bought and sold, at which point you get a new set of managers, new procedures, new policies and new goals.  Sometimes it goes smoothly, especially if the place was making money before the sale.  More often, it was a mess; either there was a long, slow march though the departments, the heads being inexorably replaced one by one, no matter how hard they tried to adapt -- or the new owners would sweep everyone away as quickly as possible.  The new acquisition would often be used as a kind of "lab," where new ideas would be tried, and quite often a new boss brought along all his old friends and family members.  (One of the most duplicitous bosses I worked for was famous company-wide not for skill, but for marrying the daughter of a majority stockholder.)

     You didn't always end up with the best and the brightest.  What you got was the best-connected.

     Governments are not companies.  They've generally got hedges against cronyism and sudden changes, which help to protect citizens (and markets!) against uncertainty and the whims of new elected officials -- and their pals and relations.  They have Constitutions, laws, court decisions and customs, a framework that members of the government abide by, a kind of contract with the people.  They have competitive examinations for civil service jobs.

     The United States appear to have elected a government that wants to break the contract.  It has handed over the keys to the President's buddies,  people who were not elected, not officially appointed and not confirmed by Congress and they are moving fast and breaking things with little regard for the human cost.

     They say they want to slash the Federal workforce.  But they're trying to chase away the people who process tax refunds and Social Security payments, veterans benefits and disaster relief.  Is that what you voted for?  Is this an experiment you want to be subjected to?