What Are The Odds

     What, do you suppose, are the chances that a man who still denies he lost an election to the Presidency and incited a (dimwitted) insurrection to stop it after running through a great many legal-system gambits will try a rugpull on midterm elections that are likely to cost his party at least one house of the legislature and maybe both?

     This guy figures it's a likely bet.  He's probably right; losing will be somewhere between personally frustrating to catastrophic for the incumbent, who is not a man who will put up with that.  What form i will take and how well the effort is likely to succeed, that's another set of questions.

     We'll find out.

The Thing Is...

      "Every spot in history is the most dangerous," a commenter told me the other day.  Which is on one level a tautology: we're a species that floats on the edge of disaster.  Our genetic heritage tells the story of multiple narrow escapes; many of our legendary heroes, all around the globe, are clever tricksters who talk or connive their way out of trouble.

     Humanity spends a lot of time running right at the red line.

     On the other hand, we're got a regime in Washington right now that is an outlier in both degree and kind:

     Degree because they're profiting from holding office far in excess of the usual.  I have resigned myself to believing that with billions wooshing by overhead, Federal politicians all eventually conclude they'd be fools to not do as all around them are doing, and net a few million for themselves.  Okay; I don't like it but there it is.  But these guys are raking in billions, and most are not the least bit coy about it.

     Kind, because we haven't seen this level of racism from the party in power since Woodrow Wilson.  We haven't seen nativism so bullheaded since the Know-Nothings.  We've only seen this much division once before, and it didn't end well.  A little over two years ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, source of the Project 2025 agenda, told Steve Bannon on his podcast, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless -- if the Left allows it to be."

     That's not politics as usual.  That's not normal.  That's a promise to turn things over, to purge and remake not by compromise but in the likeness of just one party, just one part of the American electorate.

     So, yes, the present is always the most dangerous time -- but some presents are more dangerous than others, and they don't become less dangerous by pretending it's the same old same old.

Alea Iacta Maybe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bear In Mind

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

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

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

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

Reality

     I found the article, but I didn't bookmark it: it would appear that the state DSA in New York is somewhat at odds with the wider Democratic Socialists of America. (Found it.)

     The reasons why are a microcosm of how political parties work, especially when they are forced to be "big tents," despite the DSA not being a freestanding party.  The tl;dr is that in New York, and NYC especially, the DSA's got a pretty good chance of influencing the Democratic platform and of affiliated politicians winning office, so they're focused on pragmatic goals with some chance of achievement -- it is a city that had a radio station (WEVD) named after Eugene V. Debs for three-quarters of a century, after all.  The dog occasionally catches the car it chases and New York's DSA has learned what to do about it.

     Elsewhere, DSA-linked candidates stand less of a chance; their local Democrat organization is less likely to listen and as a result, True Believers outnumber pragmatists within most of those DSA groups.  Politics is run by Those Who Show Up; ask me, ask Robert Heinlein, ask any of your local Party organizations and you'll get the same answer.  And True Believers are often very good at showing up.

     So outside of NYC, you're much more likely to find the kind of wild-eyed DSA candidates that rate scare headlines and flaming-letter quotes -- in broad outline, the kind of fringe stuff that all fringe parties and movements generate.  Antisemitism's always popular on the horseshoe ends and in various nooks and crannies of U. S. politics, just as it is in Europe, along with broadsides about bosses and cheaters.  But don't read too much into it; in the wider major-party organization, there are a lot more plain old Democrats showing up in the hinterlands.  I stand by my previous post: the function this sort of outside-insider activism serves is to shake up the big parties when they get too comfortable running things, and I'm never especially sorry to see 'em get a good shaking.

     This is very nearly orthogonal to "leader principle" effects, which can take over a party, at least for a time, and sometimes bend it (see Jackson, Andrew).  I don't like it when any individual politician starts being touted as the Great Hope, especially when they buy into it themselves, and it doesn't matter which party.  The U. S. has a pretty good history of reminding such leaders that they are no more than mortal men, but we've often taken our own sweet time at it and the present run is longer and messier than any.  (FDR got longer at it, but he also got a lot more criticism and outright correction.)  If a sprinkling of DSA-connected Dems will help level the scales, I'm all for 'em -- especially in the U. S. House of Representatives, the (supposedly) fastest-moving and (on paper) highest-turnover collection of elected Federal officeholders we've got.  Reflecting the will of the people, shaking things up, trying even crazy stuff is their job; it's how the Federal government was built from the very start.

Reflecting Fool

     While the rule of law (national and international) and long-established government functions come crashing down, I'm hearing a lot of news about the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

     It's a distraction.  Was the repair work graft-laden?  Probably.  Was the previous condition and repair effort over-hyped?  Almost certainly.  But look -- this is a big, shallow hard-surface pool in warm-climate city.  It's filled from the Tidal Pool and/or city water sources,* and in recent decades, every time it gets drained and refilled for whatever reason, it ends up full of green gunk for a while.  You can't have a shallow, slow-moving pool of water in a Washington, DC summer without stuff growing in it, no matter what you have done to the thing.  They'll solve the current mess, including the self-created elements, by and by, and yeah, probably someone's going to line their pockets over it (again!) to the tune of millions or tens of millions.

     But there are people within the Federal government or closely connected to it, ripping off the public coffers or cheating private-spending suckers and rubes of billions of dollars; the destruction of USAID has resulted in deaths on an enormous scale and helped fuel the present ebola outbreak in Africa, which is on the edge of breaking containment.  The only thing that keeps ebola in check is that it kills infected people pretty quickly, and even those who survive it are usually too sick to travel far until they have recovered.  The present version appears to have a slightly longer period of ambulatory-but-infectious, and that's a problem.

     A little bit (or a lot) of green algae in a (usually) pretty part of DC's memorial landscape is insignificant compared to the infectious dead and burial efforts that are barely keeping up.  Millions of dollars are way smaller than billions.  Yes, it's one more embarrassing farce -- but Europe's melting in the summer heat, disease is way up in Africa, and screwworms are infesting American cattle and pets.  We've got more urgent business than pointing at the green water and snickering.
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* Various infographics show a system of nearly Byzantine complexity.  Make what metaphors of it you will. 

And Thursday

     Thursday is the same, except Tam and I did the trash-day stuff.  Very slowly, for my part.  But the catboxes have been renewed and fridge has been cleaned, and that's something.  And tomorrow, the city will take the trash away.  Probably.  Wait a minute....

     I just checked.  Tomorrow is Juneteenth.  It's a city holiday.  So that would be a No.  They'll get it Saturday.

New Day, Same Stuff

     Yesterday afternoon, I had an unbreakable obligation that meant driving to the far west side of Indy on 38th Street.  I did it, and was merely exhausted and mildly sore later.  I guess that's a good sign, but it's frustrating -- an hour in the car ought not result in needing to go lie down for a few hours. 

     It should have been less than a hour driving, but the city's patching some ugly potholes on eastbound 38th street at a point where the only way to do the job is by creating rolling, alternating lane closures, and shutting traffic down altogether when they cross over.  This would be easy to become vexed about, but the fact is, the crew was in constant motion, a flurry of a half-dozen men shoveling out steaming hot mix and tamping it down while a big truck crawled along pulling the heated trailer of mix, and one guy managed traffic.  Seeing them, it was obvious that if there was a quicker way to do the job, they'd be doing it.  And this was along just enough of a curve to be a surprise, as traffic came off the short section of 38th that's merged with I-65.*  Drivers were taking it with surprisingly good humor.  Possibly the fact that potholes in that stretch had become nearly cataclysmic, combined with the obvious effort on the part of the road crew, kept people from getting too annoyed.

     I got my errand done (I'd bought a National VHF receiver through a proxy months ago, and while it's not very large, the collection of fragile polystyrene-form coils for the thing made commercial shipping a nightmare, so it was passed from hobbyist to hobbyist to reach me as people traveled for various purposes) but that was it for the day, and today has been mostly horizontal.  If Past Me had bought something like an R-390 instead (a tank of a communications receiver built for the military, designed by Collins), I would have had to pass it along to whoever else wanted it; I could not have lifted it, let alone carried the thing.  Next life, I'm gonna collect stamps.  But when you're doing this kind of hand-to-hand, you've got to show up when the baton comes your way.

     A feature of the my present issues is allergy-like symptoms: sore throat, scratchy eyes, runny nose.  This only makes horse sense with back trouble if those indicators came first and I have vaccines for all the likely causes, but after thinking it over, I ordered a flu and covid test last night and took it this morning, just to be sure.  Nope, nothing but the "control" line that shows the nasal sample and reagent diffused up the indicator okay.  So I guess that's a relief.  The doctor can figure it out; that's his job.
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* I don't know what genius came up with the idea, which seems nuts at first but actually works, getting both traffic arteries through a narrow spot in the landscape -- with a certain amount of lane-swapping.  It's spicy at rush hour but it's akin to a stretched-out traffic circle: there are no sharp intersections, no traffic lights or left turns, and while there's a certain amount of hurt feelings, forced merges and the occasional scraped fender, drivers manage to stay out of each other's way better than on most other busy city streets.

Seen In A Glass, Darkly....

     There's no darker glass, at least in metaphor, than a monitor or TV screen.  I had occasion to rewatch the film Civil War recently and, juxtaposed with radio and video coverage of the current mess in the Middle East, especially Israel's ongoing invasion of Lebanon, it makes for sobering viewing.  And the movie's deliberately incoherent conflict (it's about war correspondents, after all, not war) looks less and less so as time goes by.  Even the alliance between Texas and California as the "Western Forces:" if you had told an American or Russian in 1932 that they were going to end up fighting on the same side of a major war within a decade, they would have laughed at you.  A separatist California and a Texas "taking back its Lone Star" might find themselves with as much in common as Churchhill and FDR did with Stalin.

     The United States of Civil War aren't united. Some regions are in denial; a vast sweep of states are, apparently, largely untouched.  Others are less fortunate, crowded by internal refugees or wracked by war, buildings bombed, populations decimated, civil government gone or powerless.

     The second Trump administration has shown a marked propensity to route FEMA disaster relief (and similar aid) to GOP-supporting states and cites, and not to Democrat areas.  This is entirely aside from any overall reductions in aid: whatever there is to be had, you're a lot less likely to receive it if you live in a blue region than if you live in a red one, no matter how you chose to vote.

     ICE and CBP enforcement has shown a similar pattern, leaning more heavily on cities and states with Democrats in power and far less where the Republicans hold a majority of elected offices.

     Depending on where you live, it's life as usual, and what's all the fuss about -- or it's anything but usual.

     Civil War?  You're already soaking in it, in the slow, nightmare preliminary steps.

     There's still time; we may yet wake up, get a sip of water or take a trip down the hall, and return to blissful rest.  Or the nightmare could turn for the worse.

     None of us can be sure how this movie, these very American dreams, will play out.

     The 2026 and 2028 elections are crucial.  Choose wisely.

Tulsi Gabbard Out...

     Tulsi Gabbard is out, and what are the odds that her old job will become one more hat for Marco Rubio to wear?

     I don't agree with Mr. Rubio's positions on, well, anything, but he's one of the few competent people they've got.  One of these days, he's going to wake up to the way in which he's the smart kid being strongarmed into doing the difficult homework for the jocks and sons of privilege and connection.  Or maybe he already knows, and figures it's the price he has to pay for a seat at that table.

     That only plays out one way, and it's not him being invited in as an equal.

Aw, Spare Me

     My family, what's left of it, sometimes shares nostalgic text messages about our happy childhood, and that's fine; we're all pretty old and enjoyable memories are a great comfort.

     Thing is, I disliked childhood.  I never saw anything clearly at farther away than arm's length until I was eight years old -- after being chided for years, "Don't you see it?  Oh, look there!" and not figuring out the reason why.  They tell me what a bright and inquisitive child I was, and darned right: I was trying to figure out the trick to understanding those blurred shapes.

     I spent all of first grade in trouble for not paying attention to what was on the blackboard, and all of second grade being humored as a child who was clearly, mystifyingly, unable to learn much.

     Here's a free tip: if your child is sitting a foot away from the TV or computer (etc.), it might be a good idea to get their vision checked.  Those halcyon years are apparently way better when you can see what's going on.

--

     This post started out to be a rant about news coverage of the current President, which still veers between normalizing stuff with an "Oh, that wacky, limits-testing Republican!" tone and pundits claiming that this time he's gotten himself way too far out on a limb or askew from popular opinion or whatever, and he's about to be brought to heel.  Yeah, well, his will to power is unprecedented for all it borders on incoherent -- and I can write that as someone who was reading newspapers during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, though I did need some help with the big words in LBJ's early years.  And just who or what. exactly, is going to rein the man in?  His party?  Don't count on it.  Congress?  Nope.  The Courts?  The Supreme Court is brought and paid for, or a large chunk of the Court's conservative majority is. (Look up Leonard Leo, who is to the Right what they say George Soros is for the Left.)

     The misadventure with Iran may yet prove to be an own goal he can't avoid.  Fuel and fertilizer prices are nowhere near done spiking, even if the Strait of Hormuz magically opens up this afternoon.  It will likely be a year or more before the disruption works its way through the system and once it has, prices are unlikely to drop much.  2026 and 2027 will be hungry years.  How hungry remains to be seen, and this is the kind of thing that loses elections -- but it's also the kind of thing that powers major upheavals in systems of government.  So don't tell me "We've got him now!" when that pig isn't even in the poke.

     Chaos is Mr. Trump's very own briar patch. He's not well-spoken; he has never struck me as being particularly bright in a puzzle-solving way.  But give him a clamorous mess, and so far, he has a real skill for coming out on top.  Maybe it's all just bluster and bullshit and associates who have figured out how to profit by upholding and riding his coattails, but it works for him, even as it leaves most of us worse off -- and it leaves his rank and file followers sufficiently less worse off than the people they (and he) most dislike that they have not been minding the downside.  That's a formula for a certain kind of political success, one largely confined to authoritarian, personalist movements.

--

     I believed I was out of childhood when, finally, I got to the point that I was free to starve on my own merits.  I wasn't done growing up until I learned that sometimes, you need a hand when things get bad.

     I won't believe we're done with Trumpism until we are -- and we're putting in the effort to build better checks and balances, to keep Congress, the courts and the Executive Branch more protective of their own powers and less inclined to get in one another's pockets.  If we do not, the system will remain vulnerable to whatever demagogue, from whichever part of the political spectrum, comes along next to work it for their own gain.

And The Winner Is...

      Advertising! That was the biggest winner in Indiana's primary elections yesterday.  There was a big uptick in ad money, largely spurred by supporters of President Trump's efforts to unseat the seven State Senators who thwarted redistricting efforts.

     Turnout was unusually high -- in Marion Country, nearly double that of the previous two primaries.  And that's half of the story.

     The other half is not so great.  All that money pouring in, those TV ads painting that candidate as a closet liberal* and this candidate as a true-hearted America First† stalwart did bring people to the primary polls in record numbers, but that record still amounts to a 14.9% turnout instead of the usual single digits.  Just over eighty-five percent of registered voters are, apparently, okay with whoever the rest of us pick.  I'm honored, I guess -- but should you really trust me when you have a chance to put your own two cents in?

     (And by the way, my thanks to the two parties, especially the GOP, for spending the big dollars buying airtime from my employer, whom you otherwise revile.  You helped keep my paycheck from bouncing, in a market where my industry's share of dwindling advertising dollars continues to shrink.)

     Looking at horserace-level results, of the seven primaried Republicans, five lost to nearly indistinguishable challengers, replacing Tweedle-don't with Tweedle-do.  One held on, and the seventh hung in the balance over a difference of three (3) votes for a long time before being called for the incumbent.  Still okay staying home for the primaries?

     Don't look at me to lay a feather on the scales against either candidate's heart in that close contest.‡ I voted in the Democrat primary.  These are times to pick a side, and downstream of the 2021 insurrection, I'll never vote for a Republican.  They could have cleaned house, tossed out the vandals, religious extremists and authoritarians.  They chose to retcon recorded history and double down instead, so I'll content myself with picking the best Democrats I can find.  (As the late P. J. O'Rourke said of Hillary Clinton in 2016, "...she’s wrong within normal parameters.") 

     The 2026 Indiana primary is done.  The main event is in November -- and the future of the country is on the line.  Nobody's coming to save us, nobody except for us.
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* Despite, in every instance I could check, a voting record somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan and fulsome support of the incumbent President on nearly every issue except redistricting.
 
† Seriously, when did they stop teaching U. S. History in our schools?  That slogan has an ugly history, only barely outside living memory.  Yes, the surface meaning of the words is just fine -- in much the same way as an English word of Scandinavian origin meaning miserly has utterly no relation to a vile racist slur and swastikas have a long and innocent history in Greek, Indian and Native American art.  People of good sense avoid 'em anyway, because the negative associations are far too strong.
 
‡ Indiana Senate District 23 isn't my neighborhood anyway.

Primary Day

     Today's election results should be interesting.  The outcomes for the Indiana Republicans being primaried at the behest of the Republican president may tell us a little -- not a lot, but a little -- about the extent to which Mr. Trump still commands his base.

     Hoosiers remain crossgrained, and tend to prefer the familiar to the new; the latter trait probably finds stronger expression among GOP voters than Democrats.  On the other hand, a lot of the former have hitched their wagons very firmly so Mr. Trump's star.  So we shall see.  A rising star -- or a falling one?

Election Homework Done

     A good start for a Monday: I have located our polling place (a little Lutheran church that has hosted voting several times in recent years) and re-reviewed the (few) primary choices.  Indiana runs closed primaries, but neither party fielded a whole lot of candidates; the Democrats managed a full slate, while the Republicans skipped a few offices, but neither one offered more than one choice for many offices.

     Most of them are unglamorous jobs, like county assessor and clerk of the courts, where there's a lot of actual work and not much shaking hands and making speeches.  Only a few are even useful stepping stones to anything bigger; so what you end up with are people who want the job, either in and of itself or to show they're good members of their party, willing to step up, run, and (usually) do the work if they win.

     Someone's got to do the dull grunt work of government, and I have made my list and checked it more than twice.  I'm going to be interested in turnout numbers; it's not a great predictive metric for the general election this Fall, but it's what we've got.  If turnout for the primary is usually high (or low), that'll be a hint what to expect.

Idiots

     Did we -- as in our Federal government -- not already know this?  Late word from the White House is that if the White House Correspondents Dinner gets a do-over, maybe -- just maybe -- Vice-President James David "JD" Vance won't be there.

     No, not because he doesn't like the Press; not because they tend to loathe him, either.  And like him or not, we can reasonably assume that a Marine would not flinch from either the prospect of violence or the rubbery chicken and overcooked vegetables common to such dinners.  A serving politician is going to eat a lot of lousy food and sit in an exposed position in a lot of large, crowded rooms.

     But Saturday night, a remarkable lot of the line of succession to the Presidency was at the dinner, an event of zero diplomatic or government importance, where a remarkably inward-looking (if sometimes confrontational) collection of people look even more inward, and if the would-be assassin had completed his aim, Iowa's Chuck Grassley could well be President today.

     Senator Grassley was apparently the designated survivor (or not; there are contradictory reports, including that with the President Pro Tem of the Senate and a few Cabinet members not at the dinner, nobody got the official designation).  He's also the last elected official in the order of succession and maybe -- just maybe -- the Executive Branch might want to hold one more high-level player in reserve.  Most of the Cabinet was at the dinner, possibly because the President's people were hinting he was going to say scathing things about and to the assembled reporters and they do so enjoy that.  And the problem is, the Cabinet fills out the list of successors.  Hey, I think they're a pack of incompetent clods -- but even when it appears the Executive Branch is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the result of a successful decapitation-level attack would be immeasurably worse.

     There were eleven known attempts against Barack Obama's life during his Presidency, more than one and a third a year.  Mr. Trump is on pace to beat that rate rather resoundingly, but all Presidents are targets and one way to limit the possible damage is to limit who else in the line of succession is exposed to the same threat at the same time and place.

     The Daybreak series by John Barnes explores some of the ways Presidential succession and Continuity of Government plans can get tangled up.  He used a science-fiction setting, with an (ultimately) external threat -- but internal factors do much of the damage.  I'd prefer not running the experiment in real life.

     "Idiot" comes to us from Ancient Greece, where it came to mean something very much like "rube."  The present Administration likes to bring in relative outsiders to politics, to government, and that means they don't necessarily have all of the situational savvy the insiders have got, things like the importance of not putting all of the eggs in one basket -- or the yeggs, either.

Friday, Trash Day

     Hooray, hooray, Friday's here -- and the trash isn't.  In fact, it just left.  Or at least the contents of the city-supplied bin did.  They switched 'em out a month or two back, after nearly a decade of big yellow and blue plastic containers.  It was the result of a new contract, but the old ones were starting to get pretty battered.

     The new ones are gray -- and (for a fee) there's still recycling, with its own green bins.  But something interesting happened: with the old bins, you got one for free, and paid a nominal recurring charge for a second one if needed.  There weren't enough new bins to replace all the "extra" ones and as a result, as a stopgap, you can use whatever you've got, as long as it's got the right tapered-rectangle shape the collection apparatus* can pick up and dump.  And they're not checking too closely.

     After a couple of weeks of noticing the neighbors set out various trash cans, I wheeled out the one we'd been collecting cardboard in, and lo, it was emptied.  This morning, the other one is out there, full of bagged yard waste.  It's almost impossible to throw away a trash can, and we have been stuck with these ever since the city started issuing Official Bins, back when the century was still dewy-fresh.  It's about time they got back to work!

     I expect the honeymoon will be over sooner or later, but for now, it's a time for disposal.
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* You should see it!  --If you live in a city of any size, you probably already have, or something like it: a set of hydraulically-operated forks off to the left right side of the truck on a fancy "arm" that can be quickly steered (by a skilled operator) to pick up the bin, gripping just tightly enough to secure it but not break it, and dump it into a big steel box on the front of the truck.  When the box fills up, the driver pushes a button and the big box arcs up and is emptied into the far larger container on the back of the truck, which has a cover that retracts out of the way as the box swings toward it.  Rube Goldberg would be green with envy!  I'm sure watching it delights small children all over Indianapolis.  And, since they added trucks when they stopped carrying a helper to manually empty trash cans into the truck, collection is faster.  I hope the helpers got first crack at the new driver jobs, but the inner workings of trash collection in Indianapolis are as opaque as any large city's.  They've done a good job of it all along, at least. 

Okay, I Did It

     I'm not thrilled about it, but there is so little good information available for older people trying to navigate the governmental and financial bureaucracy that I gave in and joined AARP.  I still think they're kind of manipulative, but probably less so than the fast-talking insurance hucksters and pettifogging bureaucrats, and I'm tired of it taking me two hours to figure out if I can rollover my work 401(k) into my personal (and embarrassingly thin) conventional IRA without taking a bath on income taxes.

     (Apparently, no, though the IRS presents the information in a confusing enough manner that it it might mean no taxes.  I'm still not entirely sure -- but me needing to pay them is probably the way to bet.  But if it was a Roth...?  I don't know, especially since I get taxed if pull money out of the existing IRA, so doesn;t that make it a Roth?  I may have to go ask the bank, though the last time I did that, they tried to refinance my house and rope me into some high-risk/high yield investment scheme and it took a rather tense meeting with a couple of suits in nice offices to convince them that I do not like gambling, I do not want all my financial stuff in the same bank, and what I wanted was an account that going to still have some money in it even if Wall Street decided October, 1929 might be fun to replay.  The number of people I knew who had their retirement plans wiped out in the dotcom bust has me convinced it's better to plan poor and be able to collect on it.  Think of it as choosing known mild disappointment over lasting regret.)

     This is going to at least double my junk mail, mostly "retirement planners" and great deals on funeral services.  Since I plan to be cremated as cheaply as possible and have most of the dust dumped out at radio towers (some are really easy to get to -- just sneak in and pour it out!), and my "retirement planning" doesn't include enough surplus to pay a planner, it's all just more trash.

Ahistorical, Antifreedom, Agitprop

     Indiana's Lieutenant Governor is at it again: Micah Beckwith is making things up, claiming the Founders and Framers who set up a secular government were all about Christian Nationalism.

     He's talking nonsense.  These men represented a mix of beliefs -- Unitarian, Quaker, Congregationalist, Universalist, Deist, Methodist, Catholic, Judaism and others -- and they knew history.  They had read of and in some cases observed the damage a State Church can cause.

     And they were open to the good religious faith can create, too.  You'll find them writing of the "public utility" of religion as a beacon of individual morality.  They had no problem with individual legislators looking to their own beliefs for guidance -- but they were wary of any faith leading the government, and of any government running and requiring adherence to a church.

     This is not a difficult concept.  It's not at all hard to find in the historical record -- and even then, a few men wanted one religious sect or another upheld and enforced -- or suppressed.  (John Jay was an ardent advocate of Christianity in government -- and bitterly opposed to allowing Catholics to hold office, vote or even immigrate, calling for "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.")  Their views did not prevail then, and should not prevail now.

     Look to your faith to your heart's content.  Express it in your words and deeds.  But don't use the blunt instrument of the State to make everyone else do so -- or claim it, and it alone, should be enshrined in our government.

     America's tradition of religious freedom and tolerance was a rare and precious thing when the country was new, and it still is.

Over $5.00 A Gallon

     I had put off filling up my car.  I started out the non-war war with a full tank and who knew, maybe it would all be over before I ran out.

     It isn't.  I nearly did.  I had too much fun this weekend to remember to get gas, and when I set out for work today, the tank was much lower than I like.  The only name-brand station on my way downtown that I'm comfortable at is at 49th St., and it's rarely the cheapest.

     But an $85.00 refill is painful.  Gotta have it, and it's not like I can't cover the cost, but it's a bigger bite than I'm used to and indications are that the price of oil isn't done going up.  Almost anything that happens in the Middle East right now, especially around Iran, is going to reduce the availability of oil.  Some events will have longer lasting results, but over the next thirty days, you can count on the stuff costing more, even if there's a sudden outbreak of peace, goodwill and brotherhood: damaged refineries and seagoing traffic jams don't get sorted out overnight.

     My present bet is that we're headed for a recession at best.  Oh, our country and the planet keep lurching towards them, and dodging at the last minute by shoving one industry or sector into the mud for awhile as everything else goes roaring past; but sooner or later, someone's going to miss a step, and the damage will become widespread.  Wars, declared or not, have a tendency to break the rhythm.  That can be helpful if things are already really bad; but if they're on edge, not so much.

     Me, I'm going to get my motorcycle tuned up, and shop for saddlebags so it can be more a commuter vehicle.  Mechanic's fees are a one-time cost; gas just keeps on going up.  The motor scooter will follow -- I love it, but 10" wheels and Indiana roads after a harsh winter aren't a great match.  Unlike my car, the motorcycle and scooter will burn regular gas, too.

Agog

     I admit it: I'm watching history reel past, shocked.  I had thought the rule of law and the strength of tradition were stronger in our government; and if anyone was going to break them, I didn't think it was going to be the Republicans.

     Sure, the occasional Republican or Democrat would try to bend the rules, and more often than not get slapped around for it; or sometimes Congress or the Courts would change the rules in a way that bugged me, and not all of that got reversed down.  But the wholesale abrogation of the separation of powers, the meek rollovers from the House and forelock-tugging of the Senate and the absolute partisanship-over-law on the part of some members of the Supreme Court stuns me.

     Historically, representative governments don't last (no form lasts forever).  The first few decades are the most risky.  But if they get past that, they usually last for centuries.  Two hundred and fifty years is pretty weak.

     Maybe we'll pull back.  We've done it before, more than once.  That's what I'm hoping for and voting for.  But it's a long way from being a sure thing. And there sure are a lot of citizens cheering for it to go the other way.