Great Moments In Geography

     This morning, a BBC World Service news anchor interviewed Mandy Gunasekara about her thoughts on the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference winding down in Belem, Brazil.  She was Chief of Staff at the EPA during the first Trump administration and more recently, an employee at the Heritage Foundation, where she help write parts of "Project 2025" addressing climate.

     With that setup, the Beeb on one side, Heritage Foundation on the other and COP30 under the lens, you can well imagine how the interview went.  There were no surprises.

     Except for one thing; when the recent uptick in the size and scale of natural disasters came up, Ms. Gunasekara mentioned the current administration's work in the U.S., "building stronger, more resilient coastal cities all across the country."

     That, I think, merits parsing.  It's not coal vs. solar or CO/CO2 vs. particulates, well-trod ground with well-worn arguments.

     1. If the Trump administration is "building...cities," anywhere in the U.S., it's news to me.  I suspect it would be news to them.

     2. If they're "building stronger....cities," I'd sure like to see the details.  Does an infusion of National Guard picking up litter and showing the flag count?  Does sending in what appear to be poorly-disciplined ICE/Border Patrol squads to round up people for being too brown in public, demand papers, detain them (often in poor conditions) until their status is resolved and ship them out if they sneaked in count?  'Cos you can argue the legal side of it all you like, but roving raid teams don't do anything to make a community stronger or more resilient against natural disasters and shrinking the labor pool is more likely to make preparation, clean-up and rebuilding more difficult.

     3. Last but most saliently, how, exactly, does she think they're "building...coastal cities all across the country?"  The United States has a lot of coastline, but we've got a lot more interior.  And while I used to joke that I didn't need to move to Florida when I retired because rising sea levels and unpredictable New Madrid fault meant warm Gulf waters were headed for me right where I am, the Feds throwing up a series of shiny new bouncy coastal cities against need would be...impractical.  Not to mention the last thing I would expect from an administration that argues the climate is perfectly A-OK, and a worse tomorrow will never come.

     It has been said the Flat Earth Society has chapters and members all around the globe.  I think we'd better sponsor Ms. Gunasekara's membership.  And maybe check to see if she needs a new hot water heater or some pretty plaid polka-dot curtains for her office, possibly in sky-blue pink.

     It's not too much to require that a person's words make sense, no matter what their politics are.  Alas, the BBC interviewer was out of time, and probably far too polite to insist. 

Winter Again

     I think the thing that bugs me most about Daylight Savings Time is that it makes wintertime darkness hit abruptly instead of sneaking up.  One day it's still light at dinnertime and the next day, bang!  Dark!

     Every year, I realize all over again how poor my night vision is.  I'm grateful there are streetlights along most of my routes to and from the various work locations.

     The other interesting thing is that darned thermostat. The house used to be only a little chilly at 65°F.  Now even 68° feels too cold.  It must be out of calibration.  Yes, that's got to be it.

Attention, Mike Johnson

     Yes, Mike, you're Speaker of the House.  Bear in mind that it is not the senior legislative body.

     Speaker Johnson had opined that the U. S. Senate should "fix" undefined shortcomings in the House bill to release the Epstein files that made it to the floor over his efforts to stop it.  The Senate took note -- and unanimously voted to approve the measure exactly as passed by the House.  Which it was, and there you go.

     The House and Senate aren't supposed to be telling one another what to do -- and the Senate in particular is touchy about its prerogatives.  They are, after all, the more august collection of legislators (though these days, picking "white" as the natural hair color of any member of Congress will win handily on percentages), and they never lose sight of that.  Ancient Rome had a Senate, after all, and our Senators get pretty sure they were born to the purple.

     I'll give the Speaker credit for one thing, though: he sure doesn't know when he's whupped.

     By and by -- the Department of Justice has thirty days to let their fingers do the walking and they may take every one of them -- there will be plenty of people sieving through the Epstein files slime, looking to see what kind of dirt they can get and who they can get it on.  My guess is there won't be many surprises, and it will be a series of small icks in the face of the greater awfulness of the whole scheme; True Believers will be able to maintain their happy illusions and the Truly Appalled will find plenty of awful things to point at.  Hey, remember when politics was a little less like a tour of the sewers?

     The French occasionally shove huge spheres through the main drains in Paris, pushing all the big, nasty chunks to the outflow where they can be safely removed.  We get the chance to do so in Washington, DC every even-numbered year, and too often we decide to just leave it all where it fell.

No Shortcuts

     "Make it didn't happen" is one of our great human weaknesses.  When things occur that make us unhappy, we want to find some path back to the status quo ante.  It's rarely there.

     I mention this because there were some expressions of pleasure on social media that parts of the GOP's MAGA alliance was unraveling over the Epstein files.  Yeah, don't get too comfy and start singing the Munchkin song.  These sands are shifty indeed.  They kept shifting all weekend and into today.

     It sure would be nice if the two big parties would go back to being the same old Republicans and Democrats of my early adulthood, aging New Dealers and younger progressives against rock-ribbed conservatives and their louder, not so gray allies, but it's not going to happen.  It's especially not going to happen with Mr. Trump's stalwarts suddenly freezing, their hard shells crumbling away, and besuited Reagan-Bush-Goldwaterish hybrids emerging blinking into the light of a new day while the Dems magically grow spines and they all walk towards the rising sun in spirited, earnest debate, almost safe to ignore between elections.  Dream on.

     The only way through the present mess is through it, and there aren't any promises about what we are when we get to the other side.

House-To-House Incivility

     I saw the film "Civil War" last night and...wow. Reviewers got it wrong; they focused on the lack of clarity in who's rebelling and over what (we barely know the first and never learn the second*).  Genuine soldiers on both sides come off okay; the danger is always from combatants with no flag.

     On one level, the basic plot is "A Star Is Born" with street combat; on another, the divided future, with real war burning, people far behind the lines ignoring it, power cuts and water shortages nearer the lines, with quiet atrocities and fighters hardened to them feels only too real and only too likely.  This is the future some of our fellow citizens think they want, bloody, divided and lawless, where "what kind of American are you?" is a life or death question and it's fatal to be too foreign in the wrong place at the wrong time.

     Arguably, the ending is a little too easy -- but it's miles and years from the ending of the larger (and, I hope, fictional) story it is told within, a story whose beginnings we never learn but can see all around us, a story written in blood and fire and loss.  This deadly chaos is the enemy, even more than the politicians and fools who long for it.  If it comes, it will leave damage for generations afterward.† I'm no longer sure we will prevent it but we had damned well better try.
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* There are vague hints that suggest water issues in the states mentioned as seceding -- California, Texas and Florida -- and the film shows water shortages in New York city; but water appears plentiful elsewhere and prolific water use sets the tone for a visit to a town largely untouched by war.  While Washington, DC is said to be a place where journalists are shot on sight and the movie's President is apparently a bad guy, we only hear him uttering broad and harmless platitudes in speeches while refusing to hold talks with advancing secessionist forces.  Who started the fighting, over what, and who made it worse rather than negotiating an end is simply beside the point of the story.
 
 † Most American lack recent experience of war, or even recent experience of the scars warfare leaves behind.  Most of the real Civil War's battlegrounds are softly eroded and grown over, a century and a half later.  Look at Ukraine, look at Gaza; look and ask yourself what it's going to take to fix just the physical damage, if and when.

Inhumanly Talented?

     I don't think "talent" is the right word for Mixmastering vast amounts of stolen intellectual property, but didja hear the story about the singing cowboy whose Microsoft Copilot ran off with his ChatGPT account in OpenAI's truck?  It's playing out right now on the country music charts, as least in the ratings for downloads.

     Country music has long been a rich source of parody, and is not above self-parody; the best of it is as deep and rich as any genre, sharing roots with blues and folk music, cross-pollinating with rock again and again, sharing bits of swing and occasional jazz riffs.  At its worst, Nashville's Music Row turns out stuff as homogenized as anything from Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building; but we don't remember any of them for their worst or even average music.  We remember their best work.  AI only creates an average of hit songs, empty, catchy sound as disposable as a gum wrapper.

Speculative Fictions

     There are a couple of comments sitting in the "to be screened" stack that I'm probably not going to publish.  Not because they're insulting or threatening; not because I disagree with their content, which I mostly don't.

     Nope.  The problem is that they indulge in a mental game that I think is pointless, one that I speak out against: they're trying to project the future.  They're trying to play serious chess with politics.

     I'm a lousy chess player, but even I know those sixty-four squares and thirty-two* pieces add up quickly to a staggering number of possibilities, and the more moves ahead you're looking, the more there are. And that's with only a limited number of motions available.  Politics is played on a much bigger board with many more pieces, and every one of them, even the pawns, decides its own moves.

     The next move, maybe -- rarely -- even the next two, might be obvious.  Try to predict too much further and you're unlikely to be right.  And it's rarely necessary; you can find out by waiting and watching.  Things that are genuinely unworkable aren't going to work; policies and actions that prompt widespread protests are worth investigating: why are they being promoted?  Why is there protest against or (also rarely) for them?  Who likes the notion?  Who hates it?  Find out as the thing moves.

     And learn the lesson of Cassandra: There's rarely any award for being right.  Work on being nimble instead.  Saying "I told you so" as the boulder crashes down is a distant second to dodging the damned thing before it hits you.
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* Or, if you're on my side of the board, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, more...checkmate....

Keyboard In The Gutter

     Was it only yesterday that a big tranche -- or perhaps a splatter -- of Jeffrey Epstein's emails were made public?  Politicians are circling the fetid mess; most Republican politicians say the contents contain nothing significant, showing only that President Trump and the late sex offender moved in the same elite circles, while their Democrat counterparts are highlighting passages and conversations that put Mr. Trump in a bad light.

     Absolute smoking-gun evidence or sweeping exoneration has yet to be unearthed and I doubt it will.  The emails do show Epstein and most of his correspondents were shockingly shallow, banal and unconcerned with the fiddling details of spelling, grammar or even coherence, reveling in sleazy innuendo and treating women as property: America's financial and social elite is riddled with mentally-lazy creeps.

     What did the President know and when did he first learn of it?  I have no idea.  I doubt these emails will reveal it.  What they do show is a bunch of emotionally stunted, manipulative men whose lives are lubricated by gobs of money, sliming their way through life along and over the edges of moral behavior with no regard for boundaries, scorning probity as a scam for chumps.

     A few online commenters have cautioned, "What if there are Democrats among Epstein's circle?"  I'm sure there were; I'm sure many of them are still in public life and they deserve to be removed from office just as much as any Republican running with that crowd.  Turf 'em all out.  Primary them.  Get some new crooks in there, people with fewer connections.  They may still be terrible people, but it'll take them awhile to pick up the game, and if we keep voting the old ones out and new ones in, they'll have less time to wallow in the ooze.

     Another question the emails don't answer is how Jeffrey Epstein funded his decadent lifestyle; at times, they imply something on the very edge of blackmail or extortion, but -- yet again -- hard evidence isn't there.  Just a lot of skin-crawling stuff, hints and nudges.  He's clearly trading in influence and access.

     If you're happy making excuses for gazillionaires with stomach-churning private lives, nothing in the emails will change your mind.  If you were looking sidelong at this sort of thing already, here are steaming piles of the same ick.

     This isn't the big chunk of files that Congress may yet release, but those are probably going to be pulled from the same cesspool.

     F. Scott Fitzgerald's, "The very rich are different from you and me," wasn't written in admiration (or even in quite that way) but in disappointment; and Hemingway's rejoinder, "Yes, they have more money," is far too glib.  An excess of money lets people people be even more who they already were.  Freed from the necessity of earning a living by the sweat of their brow, a lot of people turn out to be self-indulgent moral cripples for whom other individuals aren't quite real -- especially those others who work for wages.  We live in a representative democracy; why are we letting these wretches run our government?

Word To The Wise

    A reminder for anyone who needs it: having voted for a politician does not make you complicit in his (or her) crimes and missteps. You're not stuck with them to the bitter end. You can always say, "Hell, no," and walk away at any time.

      Today would be a great day for that.

     Repudiating one politician and their circle over horrific behavior doesn't require you to abandon your political ideals, either.  You can keep right on favoring small government or large, being a hawk or a dove, a rugged individualist or a deep believer in community.  None of those notions is attached to any one politician.

Veteran's Day

     Today marks the end of fighting in the first really big mechanized war, one that left scars twisting across the face of Europe still visible today.  Today, the guns fell silent -- and today is the day we chose to honor all who serve in uniform.  Not the date of a tremendous battle, or of an occasion of valiant heroism.  No invasion hit a beach or border on this date.  This isn't even the date the treaty that officially ended that war was signed; that wouldn't come for months later.

     No, today is the day the warriors laid down their weapons, and began the long road home to try to rebuild the peace.  That peace barely held for a generation, and they were back fighting again; but that war came to an end, too.

     All wars come to an end, but the men and women who fight them, who train for them, who hold the line in peace and in war, go on and on, overworked, underpaid and often underappreciated.  Think of them on this day, not as the pawns of generals and admirals or arrows on a map, but as people, doing a difficult job, often under terrible conditions, persisting.  Don't take them for granted.

Let's Make An (Or)Deal!

     The Federal government is on track to re-open, possibly as soon as late Wednesday afternoon.  Senate Democrats made a deal with the GOP, in which the Dems get...  Well, let's see...  Oh, here it is, a vague promise of a vote on extending COVID-years ACA subsidies that will almost certainly be DOA in the House.

     What went on behind the scenes is unclear.  The eight Democrats who voted with Republicans were headed for retirement, or won't be on the ballet until 2028, and/or from states where they can't possibly lose an election, and there's a message in that.  In my opinion, neither party has been covering themselves in special glory in this fight -- but we're not paying them to go roll in glory like a dog wallowing in a festering deer carcass anyway; we're paying them to not make too big a mess of things, and...yeah, they're not great at that.  From the outside, they were stuck unless somebody blinked, and with House members mostly out of town and needing to fly back, and the FAA starting the throttle back on air travel, blinking was certainly on the menu.

     Now we're back to the original mess, with the added fillup of screwed-up SNAP payments and overtaxed food pantries, and Thanksgiving is just over two weeks away.  Don't look for anyone affected by that to be adding their Senators and Representative to the prayer before the holiday meal.  Primary season starts in March, only four months away: voters will remember, and primaries keep on cranking through until well into August, by which time Fall election campaigns will already be underway.  Could be kinda ouchy; the only question is if elephants or donkeys get the biggest pinch.

Souped Up

     We've had over an inch of snow in Indianapolis and it's been cold, with overnight lows in the twenties and highs barely breaking freezing.  So I wanted something warm for supper.

     I work later than most people and I'd just as soon get to bed early, so anything fancy was off.  A bottle of almost-homemade vegetable soup, a half-pound of ground beef and a sausage squeezed from its casing made a good start.  Preparation is easy, just brown and drain the meat, add the soup and a bay leaf and let it simmer for five minutes or more.

     The soup is tomato-based, with okra, corn, onion, lima beans (trust me, you'll hardly notice) and I don't know what all else.  The sausage was andouille, and it was a little strong for the mild vegetable soup.  Not unpleasant, but I wanted something to pair with it -- and remembered the Chicago-style giardiniera in the fridge.  That turned out to be just the thing; a few forkfuls stirred into a bowl of the thick soup added a nicely savory flavor.  (It's not the spicy-hot version of pickled vegetables -- YMMV and if you like heat, that's an option.)

     Next time, I'm going with mild Italian sausage, or even a genuine "banger," but I'll keep the pickled vegetables in mind.