Falling Behind, Catching Up

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

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

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

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

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

Chilly Night

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

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

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

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

Wait, What?

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

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

A Happier Note: Food

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

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

Points To Newsfeed, Shrugs

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

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

Events Leading Up To....

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

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

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

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

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

Y'know What I Want?

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

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

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

Everybody Out Of The Pool?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case Against Public Execution

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

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

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

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

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

About Those Odds Of Civil Unrest

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

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

Political Predictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Pun

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

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

     I ask what's the deal.

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

     I'm still puzzled.

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

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