You Thought Your Workplace Was Messed-Up?

     A news commentator/host at a major cable news network recently remarked live on the air that homeless people who refused official help should be given, "[...I]nvoluntary lethal injections.  Just kill them."

     That's shocking stuff, and he later apologized for it, in very much a "my bosses are making me do this" manner.  Even more shocking is that when he advocated killing unhoused persons who wouldn't cooperate, neither one of of his two co-hosts objected.  One, who had already suggested such people should be locked up, replied, "Yep."  The other host did not so much as blink.

     I'm not going to name any of them, or even the network.  If you're curious, any search engine will find video and news stories with full details.  Nope, I'm here to point out that it takes a pretty askew newsroom culture for "euthanize recalcitrant homeless people" to be an acceptable casual comment, one your co-workers nod along with and don't call out.

     Don't go along with that stuff.  Killing people is not okay.  It is a crime.  The only exceptions are after due process of law and criminal conviction, and it's rare even then; in self-defense from imminent harm (and it generally gets careful legal scrutiny); and in the course of actual warfare (and even some killings in war can count as crimes).  Eschew evil; don't treat people as things, pieces to be taken off the board to suit your or society's convenience.  There are lots of terrible, awful, annoying or lousy people in this world, but very few are criminals and they have just as much right to exist as anyone.

     (I suppose some realpolitik type will comment to shake his head in condescending sadness over my naivete.  I'm not saying it doesn't happen; I'm not saying there aren't vicious folks around who might do abrupt and grievous bodily harm to strangers.  This isn't about them.  It's about you, and me, and the ethical standards any decent person ought to hold for themselves and uphold for society.)

Right-On-Right Murder

     I can't say often enough that I do not condone political violence.  I don't have to like a person or agree with or approve of their opinions to know that they shouldn't be murdered.  And the truth is, I found most of Charlie Kirk's notions loathsome, especially his assertion that womenfolk like me should shut up, stop working for wages (and competing against, oh horrors, men for jobs) and concern ourselves with children, cooking and church.  Nevertheless, nobody should be killed for saying such specious nonsense.

     Republicans, starting with the President, were quick to condemn the political Left for the murder, even before a suspect was in custody.  Some even claimed this kind of violence was especially associated with the Left, conveniently forgetting the previous high-profile assault and murder of Minnesota state legislators -- Democrats -- for which a man long associated with conservative and anti-abortion efforts has been charged.  In reality, it appears the man who has confessed to shooting Charlie Kirk is a very-online gamer associated with the "Groyper" movement and a fan of farther-Right Nick Fuentes -- and perhaps a bit unmoored, mentally,.  It looks very much like he acted alone, and that's typical of such attacks: not only because a solo operator with murky mental processes is harder to predict, but because conspiracies are unworkable and get stopped early: if there are three or more people involved, the odds are high that at least one of them is an informant.

     Supported in part by the obscure online-ironic nature of the messages on the bullet casings, cryptic to most normies, Republican figures are still blaming the killing on the Left, even on centrist Democrats who said mean things about Kirk (a man who never hesitated to say mean things about people and polices he disapproved of).  While the accused killer is as politically incoherent as most of his murderous ilk, it's clear he leaned far more Right than Left.

     But look here: these killers are outliers.  Most sociopolitical conflict in the U.S. plays out without this level of violence, despite acrimony.  Riots are newsworthy because they are rare.  This kind of targeted violence is even rarer, and most people, most politicians, no matter how foaming-at-the-mouth they might be, neither engage in nor promote physical violence.  (It is slightly newsworthy that South Carolina's Nancy Mace was calling for dire vengeance when early interpretations of the bullet casing scribblings suggested the shooter supported trans issues and abruptly switched to calling for prayers for him when it was revealed he was a cisgender white male.)

     Video games don't make people killers.  They get used as excuses.  Politics, likewise.  The converse is a greater risk.  When politicians and public figures start using these kinds of killings to justify wide-scale repression or worse, look out: throughout history and all around the globe, governments gone wrong are more dangerous to more people than any lone-wolf assassin ever was or could be.

9/11

     With the anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks falling the day after both a school shooting and the apparent assassination of a high-profile sociopolitical influencer, I was thinking about the nature of murder.

     Murder isn't scalar, not really.  Murder one person, murder a thousand: the stain of it, the sin of it, if you will, doesn't change after the first one.  And while we feel that the person who kills dozens is more heinous that the person who kills only one, realistically, they can only be executed once, only be imprisoned without parole for one lifetime.

     What scales is tragedy.  The attacks on September 11, 2001 left thousands of grieving families.  One family, we know what to do: you drop off a hot dish, sit with them, cry with them.  Over three thousand?  It's emotionally inconceivable.

     We can remember the day.  We can remember any friends lost.  It feels like so very little, but it's what we can do.

I Don't Post For Two Days And The Department Of Defense Starts Using A Nickname

     That was two days of...something.  I've been dodging politics, in part because the news is so crazy (if recent events were happening in any other country, our media would have no trouble pointing out what it is) and in part because I doubt I can do much good by commenting on it: either you just love, love, love what our Nero posing as Caesar and his clown circus is up to, or you recognize it as a very bad and outright dangerous direction for the Federal government to take, or you're an insensible lump who thinks it will never touch you and will go away if ignored.

     It cannot safely be ignored.  One of the biggest weaknesses of the United States Congress is also its greatest strength: the House and Senate are a contentious, bickering mass of people; the two bodies disagree internally and dispute with one another.  For anything to get done, over half of each body's got to agree it ought to happen, and then hammer out and whittle down a mutually-agreeable version.  It's clumsy.  It's slow.  It a deliberative process.

     Replacing or supplanting that process by the whims of one man and a small circle of his hand-picked advisors allows the preferences and prejudices of a few people, only one of whom was elected, to replace the aggregate likes, dislikes, wisdom and damfoolishness of 535 pontificating blowhards chosen by the voters, by state and district.  They're less likely to leap first and look afterward.  They may still make the wrong choices, but they will have talked over the options, largely in public; they will have received feedback from voters and lobbyists (and maybe even subject-matter experts).  If their choice doesn't work out, it's easier for them to change direction while blaming their peers for the misstep.

     You can vote your way into autocracy, nice as a slice of hot pie.  History's lacking examples of a country voting their way out of it.  It's usually a messy process.

     We ain't there yet -- but you can see it if you stand on a chair.  Maybe it's worth checking for yourself.

     It's the Department of Defense.  It's the Gulf of Mexico.  Green is not orange; up is not down.

N. B.

     Looks like it's time to explain again:

     I don't care if you're the raddest, reddest pro-Trump Republican in the country or a mealy-mouthed, lukewarm, "He's not my guy, but..." anti-anti-Trumper: if you're not against Mr. Trump* and his regime, you're helping enable fascism in the United States of America, and you should stop that.  It's unAmerican.  I am not going to be nice to you, I'm not going to consider your tender, wounded feelings and you will not get the benefit of the doubt.

     There's an administration in Washington, DC right now that is using normalcy bias, entrenched respect for institutions and a tradition of civility as weapons to destroy our freedoms, to trash the separation of powers, to exploit the law for their own benefit and to ride roughshod over the civil rights of all Americans.  I refuse to play along.

     You shouldn't play along either.  Some of you, lifelong conservatives, are going to have to vote for better GOP primary candidates, and when they lose, if you want to keep on having elections you're going to have to bite your tongue and vote for Democrats in the general election, saving arguments about social and monetary policy for later.  Yes, it sucks to be you, oh the pain of having to vote for a woman of color who won't sit down and shut up, but your party leaders and politicians had the chance to stop Donald Trump and they chose to fail, thinking they could ride his coattails to glory.  That's not the direction he's headed and it'll be a damned close thing if he doesn't drag the country down to ruin with him. 

     No commenter gets to lecture me on how to behave.  In her old age, my maternal grandmother became very outspoken.  This was in the 1960s; elderly women were supposed to be demure if not downright invisible.  She was neither.  Her five daughters were horrified, but she told them, "If I cannot speak my mind now, when will I be be able to do so?"  I'm old; I'm past my planned retirement age and the way things are going, I'm not going to be able to retire until I'm too worn out to work.  If I can't speak my mind now, just when the hell will I?

     If you don't like it, don't read my blog.  I'm not going to miss you.  I do this for me, not you.
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* On my blog, I do not use cute or disparaging names for politicians.  They get full names and/or titles and salutations, just the same as if they were decent folks.  A few of them -- notably, the odiously racist Woodrow Wilson -- have left such a stink that I will add that description when they are mentioned, but Mr. Nixon isn't "Tricky" here nor is Mr. Clinton "Slick."  Presidents and Congressthings are Just Some Guy, exactly the same before the law and their fellow citizens as the dude down the block, and I don't call him asinine nicknames, either. 

About Our Lack Of A National Religion

     Some awful things have happened over the past week, and I'll get into them, but first --

     A commenter took offense at my pointing out, despite the strange and unfounded claims of Indiana Lieutenant Micah Beckwith,* the United States of America is a secular democracy that, by Constitution and law, does not promote or privilege any particular religion but protects the free exercise of all religions. 

     I grew up taking that for granted; it was a bland axiom, as uncontroversial as the sun rising in the east.  "Was" is apparently the operational word there, so let's review, starting with the relevant parts of First Amendment:
     "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [...]."
     Seems simple enough.  The first part says the Federal government can't make any religion special and the second part says the Feds don't get to stop 'em, either.  Congress has a website with a lot of explanation of the history, intent and application of those few words, with extensive reference footnotes, but there isn't any secret hidden codicil or exemption for some sort or generic Christianity or the slightly wider handwaving of Judeo-Christian belief.†  "No law respecting...or prohibiting" is sweeping.

     With that as background, you've got to wonder what the first generation of Feds thought about it.  After all, they'd lived through it, and could be expected to have a firm grasp of where the Bill of Rights left the relationship between religion and the Federal government.  Oh, if only they'd left us some official word, and not just letters to Danbury Baptists...!

     Thing is, they did.  But first, a digression to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which says:
     "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding."
     Got that?  Treaties have the force of Federal law.  Presidents and Senators may safely be assumed to know this.

     In 1796, President John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, after the U.S. Senate had approved a resolution of ratification.‡  Adams had been Vice-President when the Bill of Rights was passed and the proposed Amendments were sent to the states; he had taken the VP's job of presiding over the Senate very seriously.  We can expect him to have followed the debate.  Not a few of the original group of U.S. Senators were still on the job, too.

     Article 11 of the version of the Treaty of Tripoli that the Senate approved and President Adams signed begins, "As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; [....]" and goes on to assure the Pasha that the Feds hold no religious enmity towards him or his country.

     Our President and Senators knew what it said, and they were okay with it; they knew that treaties, once ratified, become part of the "supreme Law of the Land" in the U.S. and they were clearly okay with that.

     The Federal government of the United States of America is a secular government, under which all residents are free to follow their own religious faith, and (if they wish) to look to it for guidance.  Individual members of the three branches of government, elected and appointed, may of course do so -- but the Constitution is the foundation of our law, not religion.

     So when I get comments like this, I know it's nonsensical blather:

     "Wrong. No Established Church does not mean an anti religion nation. That is the alternative. Another  'church' takes it place. Marxism, climate change, LBGTQ+ET.EL. You are anti Christianity and that is a loser in America."

     I invite readers to scrutinize the blog post to which that comment was directed, "Ipse Dixie," for any evidence that I am "anti Christianity" or that I think our country -- in which the Feds are barred from prohibiting the free exercise of religion -- is or ought to be "anti religion."

     As for the commenter's proposed alternatives to Christianity, the only one of them that has claimed to be§ would be Marxism, and you can find folks with conventionally religious -- even Christian -- versions of it.  As an economic and political theory, no version of it has worked out, but people do keep on trying, often with guns.  You can find lots and lots of sincerely churchgoing LGBTQ+ people, climate activists and climate scientists, and -- this being the United States of America, with our Bill of Rights still, so far, intact -- you are welcome to form your own opinions about them, but those other things do not constitute or replace religions. 
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* Recent reporting has revealed his utterly brazen use of State funds and facilities to promote a partisan political agenda.
 
† This is essentially the polite way to say, "Monotheism, but only the right kinds of monotheism," leaving Sikhs and Muslims and several others out in the cold.  Of course, once you've thrown all but two faiths under the bus, there's always the guy who argues that adding just one more won't hardly matter....
 
‡ The Senate doesn't actually ratify a treaty; that happens after all parties have signed it.  What the Senate does (or does not), by a two-thirds majority, is agree that the President ought to sign it.
 
§ Well, kind of.  Classical Marxism calls religion "the opiate of the people," claims it is used as a means of control and aims to suppress it.  Countering this, multiple examples of religiously-based opposition to exploitive or oppressive governments, as well as examples from thousands of years of history, across multiple faiths, demonstrating that telling someone their religion is a lie doesn't stop them from continuing to follow it, often even under threat of force.

Ipse Dixie

     Indiana's daft Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith is at it again, this time proclaiming on "X" that the First Amendment doesn't say what it clearly says:

     Separation of Church and State is and always has been a lie—a dangerous falsehood weaponized to dismantle our Republic. From its very inception, this phrase was twisted to marginalize Christian values and strip away the moral foundation that has held America together. They want you to believe that faith and patriotism are separate—that you must choose between God and country. That is unacceptable. Don’t fall for it.
     We are a Judeo-Christian nation. Our Founders did not intend to erect a secular barrier between God and government—they understood that faith and freedom are inseparable. We must reclaim that truth and not let secular agendas undermine what it means to be American.

     He's lying.  And he's lying in a particularly bad-faith manner: there has never been a need to choose between one's deity and one's country, not in the United States -- and the secular barrier between religion and government exists precisely so that none of us ever has to.

     The Founders represented a very wide cross-section of religious beliefs and attitudes, from Ethan Allen's aggressive Deism and Thomas Paine's agnosticism, to devout Congregationalist Samuel Adams (who broke with cousin John Adams, at least for a time, over the latter's conversion to Unitarianism).  All of them had some experience with a state church, and they didn't want it.  Their consensus appears to have been that religious belief and practice was a deeply personal matter, which should not be compelled -- or restricted! -- by government.  They had no problem with individuals looking to their faith for moral guidance, but they wanted government kept firmly out of it.  And as early as 1765, James Madison expressed the thought that a state-established religion was detrimental not only to freedom of religion but also encouraged excessive deference to any authority that might be asserted by an established church.  Thomas Jefferson, in the 1779 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom wrote: 

[N]o man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

     Your religion is your religion, which you share with the fellow members of that faith; our government is our government, a secular matter.  If your faith guides your political choices, that's fine; if your faith compels the political choices of others, or restricts the free expression of their faith, that's wrong.  The United States of America is not a "Judeo-Christian nation," it's a nation with strong protection of religious freedom -- and a government open to men and women of all beliefs.

     Indiana's Lieutenant governor is peddling disingenuous, deceptive crap.  He's shoving men like Paine and Jefferson out of history in favor of nonsensical fairytales about the Founders, in a transparent attempt to justify theocracy.

And You Still Think He's Great?

     After the disturbing spectacle of a Cabinet meeting -- a Cabinet meeting! -- that was mostly an over-the top buttering up the boss session, I would like to think few people still entertain the notion that Mr. Trump is benign or especially competent.  I'd like to, but people keep surprising me.

     I'm no fan of overblown rhetoric on the part of or directed toward Presidents of any party or personal inclination.  The President of the United States is Just Some Guy, named George or Bill, Barack or Joe, Don or Dick.  They're not magic -- and  they don't deserve fulsome praise for getting out of bed in the morning, stuffing themselves into a suit and tie, and shuffling downstairs to the office and claiming to have ended wars.

     Presidents are not kings.  Their Cabinet members ought not suck up to them in public, especially not in a fawning, obsequious manner, and if they are obliged to do so, it's a sure sign something is wrong.

     Judging from that Cabinet meeting, our country is in the middle of a six-alarm helmet fire.

The Ancient Art Of Bear-Poking

     The thing about pushing limits is that it provokes reactions -- especially if the limit is a historic norm that is poorly-defined in law or courts don't protect: expectations are askew from the legal reality.

     Push too hard, expect people to push back.  I think the Trump administration is hoping for it, hoping sending Federalized National Guard troops into big cities will create an incident leading to riots that will justify even harsher measures.  And yes, big cities are crime-ridden; they always have been -- but the rate has been falling dramatically over the last decade in every one of the cities the President has sent or is talking about sending troops into: a lot of people in close proximity is always going to be a hunting ground for the criminally inclined and as a society, the U.S. has been doing an amazing job of getting it under control, using everything from community policing to outreach programs, mandatory sentencing laws and getting the lead out of gasoline.

     This reality, which you can go look up for yourself, doesn't serve an agenda based on urbaphobia and anecdote; it doesn't serve the desire to test limits -- and cause reaction.  Remember the chaos of the first Trump administration?  He loved it, or at least the opportunities it provided, and he's going to get himself more of it, one way or another.  Count on it.

     Chicago, Illinois seems to be his next target.  That city and state has a pretty good chance of litigating the effort to a standstill, but it won't stop there.

---

     Press coverage of the redistricting conflict, with Texas and California at the fore, keeps turning up an interesting tidbit:  Blue states are having a much harder time gerrymandering, because a lot more of them have nonpartisan boards or commissions to draw U.S. House districts, or rules that serve similar ends.  Red states have made no bones about drawing lines to reach partisan goals, even when the result is wildly skewed from voting patterns, pointing out that it's allowed.  This disparity should tell us something, that the Dems are, at least, concerned about the appearance of fairness, while the GOP can't be arsed.  The latter is not a good look; it's not the way our system of government is supposed to work, at least not based on what I was taught about the root causes of the American Revolution.  The English Crown got a reaction there, too.

Another Angle On "Artificial Intelligence"

     Investing is essentially a more-or-less honest confidence game: you convince investors your enterprise will succeed while not guaranteeing it and show 'em (a subset of) the books.  It either succeeds or fails and the investors either get their money back, ideally with some kind of profit or they don't.  But the investors have to convince themselves it's worth the risk and the firm they invest in has to do the work, not take the money and run.

     Tech firms are usually selling smoke, mirrors and a cunning plan.  That's what all forms of artificial intelligence boil to: a cunning plan and some impressive-looking hardware.  Good AI, bad AI -- either way, it's a massive server farm, building algorithms on algorithms to crunch through massive amounts of data in the hope of emergent patterns.  Chatbots are very, very sophisticated, context-dependent word-prediction machines; imagebots do the same thing with pictures.  The process between input data plus user prompts and output is opaque, and it was slow going for a long, long time.  (How long?  Marvin Minsky never did get a robot to build an analog Heathkit TV set, despite the very clear instructions that come with the kit.  Heathkit as a major kit company has been gone since 1992, analog TV since 2009, Dr. Minsky since 2016.  He bought that TV kit before I graduated high school, back when Gerald Ford was in the White House.)

     Then in 2022 (as recently as that!), a Google AI engineer convinced himself that a chatbot called LaMDA was self-aware.  He tried to hire a lawyer for it and went to the press.  Google fired him: that work was a trade secret.

     But mark what happened carefully: a person who interacted with AI in depth convinced himself it was alive, and that was the dawn of our current AI boom.  It didn't build a Heathkit,* or take over the world,† or help mastermind a political revolution.‡  It managed to seem real enough for someone to believe there was a ghost in the machine.  It got his confidence.

     "AI" is a con game, and it gets better at the con every day.  Does it get better at "intelligence?"  Probably not, but it certainly gets better at convincing people, especially those with money and a will to believe, that it is either intelligent, sentient, or on the verge of one or the other or both.  And it may not be an "honest con" in the way investing in general is: there may be zero chance of the actual payoff, or as close to zero as makes no difference: there will probably never be a ghost in the machine.  And that matters.

     The bottom is liable to fall out once it hits its peak, in something akin to the dotcom boom and crash, leaving fortunes for the promoters and ashes for the investors.
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* Minsky, op. cit.
 
† Colossus: The Forbin Project, both the book and the film.
 
‡ The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Heinlein, Robert A.

U.S. Out Of UNESCO; RADAR Out Of Their Minds

     UNESCO is a UN agency that encourages peace through cultural exchange; they also list and track sites of exceptional interest and, yeah, they're pretty much longhaired idealists.

     They're apparently not racist enough for the Trump administration and, just like the last time Mr. Trump* had the gig, the U.S. has withdrawn from participation and funding; the Federal government was picking up about eight percent of UNESCO's tab.

     While it's not up to the level of abandoning international soft-power efforts that fed starving people and built good will towards the United States (cough, USAID, cough), it's another self-destructive move.  But it's also not the second but the third time the Feds have walked away from the table.  Like most UN organizations, UNESCO is kinda slapdash, prone to politicization, sketchy finances and a wavering focus; in 1984, the U.S. bailed for the first time.  Here's what U. S. Congressman Jim Leach (R - Iowa) had to say about it a few years later:

"The reasons for the withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO in 1984 are well-known; my view is that we overreacted to the calls of some who wanted to radicalize UNESCO, and the calls of others who wanted the United States to lead in emasculating the UN system. The fact is UNESCO is one of the least dangerous international institutions ever created. While some member countries within UNESCO attempted to push journalistic views antithetical to the values of the west, and engage in Israel bashing, UNESCO itself never adopted such radical postures. The United States opted for empty-chair diplomacy, after winning, not losing, the battles we engaged in... It was nuts to get out, and would be nuttier not to rejoin."

     You can't fix 'em if you don't have a seat at the table.

*  *  *

     Tam showed me a meme this morning that is circulating among the conspiracy-minded Right, claiming "NexRad," the next-generation weather radar system, actually means "Death Radiation"† in Latin.  At least one lunatic has already tried to blow up a radar tower recently.

     I have long railed against people who want us to live in mud huts, no matter if they were Green types who wanted to give up technology to save the planet (as opposed to, oh, building out wind, solar and efficient power storage) or RETVRN ideologues who figure they'll get to live in the big house while the rest of us till the fields (don't count on it, kiddo).  Threatening a highly-effective weather radar system as storms and similar events are getting worse (go argue causes over there in the corner where you won't annoy the grownups; it's happening no matter why) is another mud-hut move, right up there with eschewing vaccinations.  If you want you and yours to die early and often, go for it, but you don't get to inflict that stuff on the rest of us. 
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* Note that I do not make up or borrow amusing or dismissive nicknames for politicians, even the ones I heartily loathe.  Using silly monikers is foolish habit; you end up engaging with the caricature and not the person.  It's also symptomatic of a grade-school-level intellect, like chasing squeamish kids around with a booger stuck to the end of your finger.
 
† I have been through this before.  In fact, the peak power levels and operating frequencies of radar systems are scary -- but the reality is that they transmit in extremely short bursts, and the average power, roughly the heating power, is very low and falls off as the inverse square of distance.  Add in that the dish is moving and systems are interlocked such that when the dish stops, the transmitter is locked off, and.... Nope.  Radar is not now and has never been a death ray.  It won't even warm up your coffee unless you defeat the interlocks, stick the cup right in front of the dish and risk melting the transmitter.  The Brits would have liked to have a death ray, but when Watson-Watt went looking for one, all he found was a way to spot airplanes -- and clouds.  And all that did was help win the Battle of Britain for them.

A Mighty Own Goal

     As I write this, the U. S. Senate is poised to pull the rug out from under funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the next couple of years.  CPB gets less than 0.01% of the Federal budget.  Oh, it's big money for you, me or your local factories, but it's still a rounding error compared to military expenditures, highways or servicing the Federal debt.  The House has already approved this recission, and the Senate just had a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Vance (wearing his President of the Senate hat, and I do wish the Framers had come up with a different title for the job) to keep the legislation moving.

     CPB is a Federally-funded private non-profit corporation that in turn funds National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) -- largely indirectly.  By law, they're only allowed to spend five percent of their budget on themselves -- salaries, staplers, coffee machines.  65% of their budget goes directly to public radio and TV stations, everything from tiny, one-man stations deep in the Alaskan wilds to massive operations like the WGBH stations in Boston.  About 25% goes to production companies, which make programs for public radio and TV.

     The big public stations have multiple income streams -- those annoying pledge drives, strings of grants, endowments and "underwriting" sponsorships.  NPR has been a political football for decades, and set out some time ago to ease off the Federal spigot; around one percent (1%) their funding comes directly from CPB.  PBS has taken similar steps, but -- television's spendy -- are more reliant on CPB.  There's a catch, though; I'll get back to that.

     The Trump administration doesn't think NPR and PBS are being fair to them, and that's why they want to defund CPB.  I have not noticed this in actual NPR news segments, those five-minute blocks at the top and/or bottom of the hour; they're radio newscasts, strictly limited for time and focused on things that are, in fact, newsworthy.  While they're a little more relaxed than the ABC "Contemporary" news of my youth and more buttoned-down than NBC's hipper "The Source" a decade later, NPR matches any of the old classic top-of-the-hour radio news, CBS, NBC, Mutual or what ABC branded as "The American Information Network."*  The long-form stuff has a much greater proportion of opinion to information, and both NPR and PBS have had controversies.  While CPB's rules have some sober language about balance and perspective, the Fairness Doctrine is long gone, and nobody benefited more from the ending of it than the political Right.

     But NPR and PBS are not living off CPB dollars.  NPR outright sells ads on their streaming services (it's legal), albeit delivered in the same subdued manner as their over-the-air underwriting announcements.  Nope, the CPB cuts hit local stations.  This does loop back around, and there's the catch: in the indirect way networks operate in the U. S., member stations pay the networks, and between a quarter and a third of the funding for NPR and PBS comes from membership and programming fees those stations pay.  The big stations will tighten their belts, lay off janitors and newspeople, and keep on keeping on; they'll probably drop some programs, too.  But those tiny little stations, in Alaska or Montana or wherever, in backwater towns where the commercial AM station went dark and the FM got moved to the nearest sizable city?  Their local NPR station, over at the State School of Cow Mining (etc.), is the only source of local news and weather warnings, and it's got a staff of three, or two, or one: they don't have any janitors to lay off.  Those stations rely on CPB money to meet payroll, rent tower space and pay the power bill, and when it goes away--  Hey, maybe the Cow-Mining College or the Town Board will kick in a few more bucks, for old time's sake -- if they can afford it.  And if not?  Well, gee.  Better buy a NOAA weather radio, if you can pick up one of their low-power stations. (Kinda thin in some states.)

     Those small towns, those rural spaces, they're not generally hotbeds of big-city liberalism, and neither are their radio stations.  They're red spots on red maps -- and they'll be hardest hit. 

     The CPB cuts are an own goal.  NPR and PBS stations -- the survivors -- will have less reason to toe the Federal government's line, and more reason to be fractious.  
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* Speaking of money and news -- post WW II, U.S. radio networks were, by law, singular.  NBC had previously operated multiple networks, with NBC Red and NBC Blue at the forefront; they had to spin off Blue, which became ABC.  ABC started out in fourth place, behind NBC, CBS and Mutual -- Blue network had always been something of a "second string" network for NBC.  By the late 1960s, with radio losing badly to television, ABC came up with a way around the law, becoming not one but four radio news services over the same physical network: they offered different newscasts around the hour, each one suited to a different radio format; Information at the top of the hour, very conventional radio news suitable for middle-of-the road and all-news formats; FM and Entertainment at :15 (or :45, it's been awhile) and half-past the hour, both more relaxed and quiet, and Contemporary, available as a fast-paced two-minute newscast at ten til the hour and a five-minute newscast that ran from :55 to the top of the hour.  If it sounds a little crazy, it was -- but it meant ABC could have as many as four stations in a given town all carrying an ABC newscast, with lovely, paid ABC commercials in each one; and it meant ABC offered specialized news products the other three networks did not.  To my larger point, the actual content of these newscasts was almost identical: news is news, war, famine and natural disaster, and you got largely the same on-the-scene soundbites from all four versions.  The style of delivery differed; the focus varied slightly, especially when it came to celebrity items.

"...Just Ignore The Troubling Politics..."

     I've gotten that advice in comments quite a lot.  Oh, if only I could!  The problem is, politics won't ignore me.

     The United States was supposed to be a place where you didn't have to worry about the Federal government: it was supposed to be inherently stable, in ways that "Westminster" parliamentary democracies weren't.  It was intended to find the centerline in American politics, compromising between the interests of the states as polities and the people as a whole.  It was supposed to have limited, enumerated powers, with inherently fair courts based on law and not politics.  It was supposed to respect individual rights, and not play favorites to any group or creed.  We were a nation friendly to innovation in science, technology -- and ways of getting along with one another.  No majority held forever; the Presidency, House and Senate rotated regularly from one party to the other, often out of step with one another.  We were a nation with open arms.  A lot of that was more aspiration than reality, but the aspiration existed and was held up as a worthy goal.

     We've got an administration in place that doesn't buy any of that old-fashioned bunk.  They've got friends to reward and enemies to scourge.  They're hamstringing science and medicine in the service of politics -- and bending politics to serve religion.  The United States is going to come out of this poorer, sicker and less capable: that's what's happens when you defund universities, slash healthcare and medical research, set up hospitals to close, crash the economy with tariffs and uncertainty, shrink the Federal workforce in key service programs and let religion overrule scientific conclusions.

     It's a revolt of ignorant, opinionated, unqualified middle-managers, pushed to prominence by pressure from below and a moribund, senescent vacuum above.  I can't ignore it; they're hacking away at the foundations of my future and not just in the broad, society-wide sense: my retirement was predicated on Social Security remaining solvent for another decade and the economy staying relatively stable.  Both of those things are no longer true.

     The other thing I get told is, "Your side lost, get over it."  But the Democrats were never my side.  I was closer to the more centrist Republicans, tolerant people who didn't want cultural change to scare the horses and thought budgets should balance (oh boy, remember when the GOP talked big about eliminating the deficit? They could give a rat's ass now).  Now that the Republicans have embraced authoritarianism, xenophobia, vast expansion of Presidential power, so-called "Christian Nationalism" and conspiracy theories, the Democrats are the only remaining party that values our republic; they're the only party left with much variation among their elected officials, the only party that pays even a little attention to reality.  Don't think that doesn't gall me!  Most of my life, I could rely on the Dems to be the party floating zany notions; now I have to open my browser and learn Republicans in Florida have outlawed "chemtrails" and banned any efforts to control the increasingly-violent weather.  In a contest to be the craziest major party, the GOP has a commanding lead -- one that will carry the country right over a cliff unless we are wise and very, very lucky.

     It's as safe to ignore politics at present as it is to ignore storm sirens.  Better head to high ground or the root cellar -- and better still if you know which one to choose. 

Anger

     One of the things I have difficulty coming to terms with is how angry I am.  Not that Mr. Trump won; I don't expect to like Presidents.  It's a lousy job and it attracts flawed men.  No, I'm angry he won after promising, however coyly, chaos and revenge; I'm angry at the shocking extent of damage the Trump administration and a complicit Congress have done and are continuing to do to the Federal government, public discourse and the "civil contract" underlying American society.  I'm furious at opposition politicians, most of whom muster only Michael Dukakis-level responses, a kind of monotone, "Why yes I am shocked, quite shocked, at all this."  I'm furious at a complacent public, watching the rise of a masked secret police force unaccountable to local officials with very little protest -- after all, they're not coming after citizens, are they?  Indeed, they are not -- not yet.  But as President Trump has remarked on more than one occasion, "Homegrowns are next."

     Authoritarianism needs a steady stream of scapegoats.  Immigrants.  Protestors.  Racial, religious and sexual minorities.  Political opponents.  Earlier this month, the President spent time at an Independence Day rally, normally an occasion to stress national unity, proclaiming how much he dislikes -- hates -- Democrats.

     The wheels are coming off.  Checks and balances are being circumvented or undermined.  Executive authority expands daily, while Congress and the courts enable it or simply look on in silence.  History shows how this trend ends, especially if it is not stopped early, and it's not a good place.

We're In The Hands Of Fools

     I'm starting to see news stories -- you know, the kind with actual news about things that are actually happened, supported by interviews with the people to whom they are happening, genuine primary sources -- about shortages of agricultural workers: the people who set cows up for milking, harvest fruits and vegetables, work in meat-processing plants.  There's a lot of "touch labor," hands-on work, in that and it doesn't pay well.  Nor is it entirely unskilled.  The Trump administration and their Republican stooges in Congress keep claiming that those food supply jobs will be filled by former basement-dwelling shirkers, newly kicked off Federal assistance.  Even if they do exist in sufficient numbers (unlikely), I'm not at all sure I want my tomatoes picked and beef slaughtered, cleaned and cut by under-achieving potheads, filled with resentment at being yanked away from their gaming consoles; they're unlikely to be as diligent as the guy working on a temporary permit -- or despite the lack of one.

     Meanwhile, tariff madness continues: they're on again!  Or off again!  Or put off!  "90 deals in 90 days" has become two deals, not especially good ones, with the UK and Vietnam, and a series of not entirely coherent letters sent to world leaders (scroll down to read the original releases on Truth Social).  The deadline to implement most of the higher tariffs has been pushed back yet again.  --And remember, they're assessed on the importer, not the exporter: Uncle Sam has no power to make companies in other countries ante up.  The higher rates are far beyond what any company can be expected to pay without charging more when they sell the goods, and those high prices will roll downhill to you and me.

     But don't worry, Republicans in government have got their eyes firmly on the prize!  Why, just the other month, Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith warned on Facebook, "PRIDE MONTH ALERT: The Rainbow Beast Is Coming For Your Kids!" (link for proof.)  He expanded his, er, thoughts on a podcast, saying in part, "Back in ancient Israel, there was a goddess, her name was Ishtar, and she was the goddess of transgenderism, a gender-warping goddess. She was a homosexual goddess.[...] And she was represented by rainbows in her eyes. Anytime you saw her, you'd see rainbows. And it's like, wow, this is the same demonic playbook just playing out all over again."  This is a fear-mongering mish-mash with no Biblical basis and barely any footing in ancient history. Ishtar/Inanna was a Mesopotamian goddess roughly analogous to the Greek Athena, not strongly associated with rainbows (she "spans the sky like a rainbow" in one myth, seeking a lost associate).  Presumably, the Israelites encountered the Mesopotamian pantheon during their captivity/exile in Babylon, but there's no evidence they brought Ishtar home (she is not conflated at all with earlier Asherah poles and the associated goddess of motherhood, for instance).

     Elsewhere, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has weighed in on Governor Braun's Executive Order from earlier in the year, defining "sex" in the state as whatever a person was believed to be at birth,* echoing a similar Federal EO.  Indiana's being sued by the ACLU over it and the Attorney General recently issued a news release that any change to Indiana birth certificates (a process already banned by the Governor's EO) would be "falsification of records," lining up innocent clerks with possible felony charges for complying with court orders.

     So, the economy's headed over a cliff, we're likely to start seeing higher grocery prices and even food shortages (not counting eggs, already scrambled by bird flu) before Thanksgiving, and the GOP is making sure...we're safe from rainbows and congruent IDs?

     Boy, what a relief.  Who cares about a depression, as long as those multi-colored demons are kept at bay!  Bonus: an Indianapolis church thinks our government isn't doing enough: the church says they ought to be executing LGBT people.

     We're all in the hands of murderous fools.  As Roberts Rules of Order reminds us, silence is consent, and I'm not agreeing to this kind of craziness.  Look, I want people to dress modestly and keep their windowshades down, but I'm not the boss of them, their tattoos, or what consenting adult(s) they fall in love with.
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* Leaving physically intersex people, a group only slightly less common than natural redheads, at the mercy of the attending physician's best guess.  Sure hope they got it right!

"It's All About Salemanship!"

     Elsewhere on social media, a writer told the tale of doing a book-signing, and having a guy come up and ask why he ought to buy that writer's book, in a friendly, convince-me kind of way.

     It's the wrong question, asked of the wrong person.  The author can tell you what their book is about, who the major characters are, and perhaps even why they wrote the book.  They can't tell you why you should buy it and read it.  Only you can.

     To put it another way: "You have clearly mistaken literature for vacuum cleaners.  That's not how books work.  Pick it up, read a few pages.  Does it speak to you?  If not, put it down, go to the shelves and try one of the thousands of other books."

     The purpose of sales is to convince you to make a choice between essentially identical items -- Hoover or Electrolux, Camels or Luckies, MickeyD's or Burger Thing.  Books are not essentially identical, at least good ones aren't, and what appeals to one reader may leave another reader cold.  Flashy covers, blurbs, promotions and yes, even book signings notwithstanding, it's the reader who works out why they ought to buy a particular book.

The Big Fugly

     I admit it.  I've been watching the progress of the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" through Congress with bated breath and growing horror.

     It's an exercise in geeking, in the flexing of Presidential authority expressed as the "Leader Principle:* can the Executive chivvy both houses of Congress into biting off the head of a live chicken? 

     So far, the answer is yes, barely.  For both Dems and the GOP, there's a lot not to like in this bill, from the predictable scale-back (and outright elimination) of Federal services and funding predictably opposed by Democrats to massive increases in Federal spending and a mushrooming of the Federal debt and deficit that ought to give pause to any red-blooded Republican -- but only a handful of fiscal hawks on that side of the aisle appear to have noticed.  By shoving millions of voters off Medicare, it has produced a ticking time-bomb for mid-term elections, and many of the more obscure provisions of this over-900-page monster are likely to have similar effects on voters and their votes.

     The Senate-amended bill has now lurched back to the House, where the earlier version passed by a narrow margin.  Cut in places the junior body had expanded it, puffed up where they had trimmed, it's an open question if it's still got the votes -- but the Chief Executive, who is by explicit Constitutional structure not the boss of them, is cracking the whip just offstage, and Speaker Johnson is only too happy to perform on command.  Will his fractious body of Representatives go along?

     I'd like to tell you no.  I'd like to say they're on the whole too proud and too committed to their various individual principles to bend the knee.  But I doubt that's true.  Heads in the hog trough, a hand out for handouts and only too aware of Mr. Trump's willingness to primary any Congressperson who won't bend to his will, the House may squeal but I have little confidence enough of them will stand fast.

     The Legislative Branch is choosing to sow the wind.  The midterm results are likely to blow -- if the economy or voter reaction doesn't turn stormy even earlier.
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* The term sounds a lot zippier in the original German.

At A Loss For Words

     Between Friday's batch of Supreme Court decisions and the likely passage of the unpopular, so-called "Big Beautiful Bill," I'm not sure what to say.  They amount to Enabling Acts for authoritarianism, an accretion of power to the office of the President that bodes only ill for the American experiment in self-government.

     Many of the people I most expected to react negatively to such a development are instead cheering it on.  I've been treated to amazingly unmoored nonsense in unpublished comments, notions not just unsupported by but refuted by observable events.

     Republican politicians, the President in particular, are behaving as if they will never leave office, as if their party will always be in the majority.  In a functioning Constitutional democracy (using the latter term loosely), turnover is likely; any power one party has granted to officeholders will be available to their successors, even if they're from a different party.  The conclusion is obvious.

     Most members of the House and Senate appear to be quite comfortable with this state of affairs, nearly every Republican and an apparent plurality if not outright majority of Democrats.  Polls of likely voters show the opposite.  You'd think that would be a warning flag for men and women who depend on winning open elections, and yet their behavior indicates it is not.  Once again, the conclusion's clear.

     I don't know what to say.  I've been jumping up and down, pointing out storm clouds on the horizon, lightning, walls of rain and tornado funnels, and a lot of people just smile and tell me we ain't never been wiped off the map before, so why worry now?  Congress is getting rich playing the stock market while the President is selling tchotchkes and memecoins and U.S. citizenship, playing with tariffs like a child smashing toy trains; the Administration is back to insisting on "official truth" at odds with objective reality and the Constitution is slowly crumbling under the weight of "Christian Nationalism," authoritarianism and kleptocracy.  The people who ought to care about it and are in a position to take immediate action, judges and legislators, are smiling and nodding like a heroin addict right after a big hit.

     I am without hope for our country's future.

Fascists, Begone!

     A recent news story neatly encapsulates the present moment: a student at the University of Florida's law school wrote a paper for one of his classes arguing the U. S. Constitution was intended by the framers to apply only to white people, and only they should be allowed to vote -- and the Trump-nominated judge who taught the class awarded him top marks for it.

     The student had expressed similar views in the past, writing that non-white people should be given a decade to leave the country and that naturalized aliens were never supposed to be more than second-class citizens.  The University stood on viewpoint neutrality and free-speech rights, correctly pointing out that people have a right to speak their minds.  What finally got him in trouble was a posting on the former Twitter, saying Jews must be abolished "by any means necessary."  That resulted in his being suspended and barred from the campus, and increased police patrols in the area; the student sued and the case will work its way through the courts.  (One key issue is the difference between an abstract "should" and a concrete "must."  Holding outrageous opinions is one thing; advocating criminal action is very much another.)

     That's Trumpism in a nutshell: push to the limits, reward prejudice, and then see how much farther they can go.  This is just one example but the pattern is repeated over and over, and the people pushing the hardest often embrace the idea of violence even if they do not take action themselves --  the Florida law student wrote that if U.S. courts failed to create white rule, the matter would be resolved "not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword." Whatever a society rewards, it gets more of. This is what Trumpism rewards.

     This not what American society should reward.  That's not a matter for polite debate over tea and cookies, it's a core value.

How Not To Get Published

     Unlike many blogs, this one has a comments section -- but it's not automatic.  I screen comments.

     From time to time, one of my perennially-unpublishable commenters accuses me of "censorship."  Nope, sorry, that's not what it is.  Censorship is when a government (or, occasionally, another powerful entity) suppresses your expression by law or force.  All I'm doing is exercising editorial discretion.  You can say whatever you like on your own blog, or in a comments section that I don't control, or paint your opinions on your own wall.  But this is my blog, and I decide what gets published.  If you want a soapbox, there are plenty available elsewhere.  This one is mine.  I am not obliged to provide equal time for differing opinions.  Just as you are not allowed to daub your slogans on my fence, you don't get to use my comments section as your megaphone. 

     What doesn't get published includes (but is not limited to) comments I deem to be inflammatory or excessively partisan, statements of opinion presented as fact, any unusual claim unsupported by evidence, and anything I suspect of being a cute attempt to smuggle in signals (if your screen name is "Horst1488," your comments are never going to be approved).  If I think your comment is too far off-topic, it's probably not going to get through screening.

     These decisions are a judgement on the comment itself or, in the case of "Horst," on the commenter's lack of taste.  They are not a judgment of the commenter themselves, nor do they represent an endorsement of the opinions expressed in the comments that do get published.