Well, What A Surprise

     The news organizations ousted from their spots at the White House went before a judge yesterday -- a Trump-appointed Federal judge, presumably vetted and blessed by the Federalist Society* -- and were granted a temporary order putting them back in the job in the Oval Office, etc. for the next two weeks while the legal process moves forward.

     The judge says the news organizations are likely to prevail when the case goes to trial; there are no do-overs in the news business and government restriction on Constitutionally-protected rights is a serious matter, so CNN, MSNOW and Politico are back in immediately, where no doubt they will be graciously received,  Or not; as I write, there's no evidence that their White House press credentials have been restored.  (Will he or won't he?  The slow accrual of power to whoever holds the Oval Office ought to be chilling to even a superficial student of history, and the Trump administration has done more to further it than any President since Jackson or Wilson.  Enthusiastic partisans should bear in mind that no one man, or even party, can hold the office forever, and that immense power will pass to someone with a very different set of priorities.)

     A couple of things are going on with the case itself.  One is a First Amendment two-step: if you're a responsible party in The Government, once you've let the Press in, you can't shut them out if you don't like what they write, no matter how mean they are.  The other is the right to due process: the government cannot shove people or organizations around arbitrarily, based on whim  They've got to follow due process of law -- pull you over, write a ticket, aim you towards the courts.  A President can't just point and say, "You -- out!" in the manner of a Roman Emperor or a beat cop rousting someone sleeping on a park bench.

     It will be interesting to see what happens next.  Mr. Trump has already said he will appeal if he loses this case.  There's a step or two until the case reaches the U. S. Supreme Court (unless they apply to jump the line, a process governed by arcane rules I would have to go look up), and there's no telling what the slut-gnomes of false Berlin the nine robed eminences will do.  It should be utterly clear, but....

     Presently, none of the affected organizations have White House access yet.  And here's the bitter pill under those sweet, sweet Bill of Rights headlines: it's kicked the disastrous non-war with Iran and six-fifty-a-gallon diesel (chased by gasoline at $4.50 and both rising) plus the President's low and sinking approval ratings right off the front page, or at least below the fold.  Is pushing the Press around a bad look?  Probably not, especially to his base; while the public generally thinks better of news media than they do of Congress or the President, it's not very much better.  And there's nothing like a good fight to gather a crowd.
____________________
* In fact, he's been a member of it since 2009, and they're picky about the conservative creds of anyone they let into the clubhouse.  Sending a boxtop and an SASE isn't sufficient, no matter how much Ovaltine you drink.

Strange Bed- Er, Well, This Is Awkward

      Yesterday, CNN had "pool" video duty for White House Coverage; the job rotates between ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC, and with CNN barred, the others refrained from stepping up and say they'll be sitting out pool coverage.  (Not to worry -- the President just launched his very own TV channel, with nonstop, officially vetted and approved coverage of whatever the White House wants covered -- and nothing it does not.  For those keeping track at home, this is the exact opposite of a free press.)

     Radio and online/paper Press have their own pool rotations and a few of them have stepped back, too, which meant yesterday, the Print Media pool covering the President was led by....  Envelope, please!  The Washington Blade, which (per Wikipedia) is the country's oldest LGBT newspaper, backed up by the arch-conservative website, The Daily Caller.  Both of 'em are known to wear their political hearts on their sleeves, and to not avoid sensationalistic stories.  The dynamic out there in the reporter seats must have been interesting; I'm picturing a couple of earnest scriveners desperately trying to read over one another's shoulders while not getting, you know, too close.  What if it's catching?

     There's a certain amount of comfort in knowing that even in these fraught and conflict-filled times, we'll be getting a diversity of perspective on the Executive Branch -- and even more comfort in the thought that they're probably creeping each other out.

It Wasn't A Dare

     Last night, I pointed to, and mocked, the increasing weirdness of the present administration and their Legislative counterparts (and let us not forget the nutjobs and partisan hacks they've ushered into the Federal Judiciary or who were already in place and happy to step up).

     Truth is, I was thinking it was just about Peak Strange.

     Guess again.

     The huge, ugly triumphal arch Mr. Trump would like to put up along the sightline from the Lincoln Monument to Arlington National Cemetery isn't something I've written about much.  While I think every bit of it demonstrates execrable taste, from the design and decoration to the location to the very idea of it,* it was indeed a matter of taste, and paled next to barring press organizations from attending public events of the Chief Executive of the republic, or the markedly violent immigration enforcement dragnets that have wept up legal residents and naturalized citizens, and which have resulted in the deaths of non-citizens and citizens alike.  The arch seemed like a minor detail, more gold-dripping frippery going up while the price of everything skyrockets.

     Turns out I was wrong.  Here's the President of United States of America, on his social media platform last night:

     "At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, [...] at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. [...]."

     Nothing like it anywhere in the world?  Ain't that the truth -- though I have seen similar setups, usually in church belfries, while watching reruns of Combat!  They were occupied by German Army snipers or sometimes machinegunners.  Lest someone accuse me of hostile editing, you can read the original in its entirety at the source.  You can also read news stories about it, but yes, this is just what it appears to be, a sniper tower just off the Mall.  That'll deter the next poor sod who picks up a loose flap of pool coating!  What it reminds me of are the later scenes in the recent film Civil War, when opposition troops are converging on a fortified White House cowering behind high walls -- well, that and the kind of thing military-obsessed boys liked to draw in middle school during class when they should have been taking notes.

     I'm now unwilling to believe the unprecedented actions and events will stop at the present level.  Buckle up, kids, there's no predicting what's around the next corner.
________________________
* Most Roman triumphal arches, and all of the surviving ones, were built by the Roman Empire, not during the Roman Republic.  And the United States federal government has never built any -- certainly not in the national capitol.  There's a message there, for those willing to heed it.

It Just Keeps Getting Weirder

      There's no end to the strange turns.  Let's see -- the President says he's banning some U. S. news organizations from the White House, which is not a specifically enumerated or implied power of the office and which previous Federal court cases have determined is, in fact, not a power Presidents have.  At present, the credentials of journalists employed by MSNOW, CNN and Politico have been revoked.  This is a bad notion and I hope the courts won't let it stand.  I want our elected officials to be scrutinized from every angle, so I can make up my own mind.

     Elsewhere, Congresspeople are getting themselves in trouble of the slept-with-the-wrong-person or took-money-they-shouldn't've type.  You can look up the various scandals, not all of which have been to court, for yourself.  It's too tawdry to list.  This is why you need every shade of reporter looking at them.

     At this point, there are plenty of trailer parks in the U.S. with fewer outrageous and/or or illegal activities going on than there are among the elected officials of the Federal government, and among the wildest offenders you will find many of the same people who have been presuming to lecture us Great Unwashed about our bad behavior.  Y'know, there's no honest path to the moral high ground from waking up in bed with an employee or someone else's spouse (or someone other than your own), dead drunk and violating the U. S. Constitution and I'm sick of the politicians, most of the Press and a whole lot of the rest of us acting as if there were.

     Politicians, appointees?  Fix you own hearts and whatever vestiges of a soul or conscience you've got before you come after the rest of us.

A Staggering Own-Goal

     Through misadventure, misjudgement and incompetence, the United States has led the way to a global shortage of diesel fuel.  Prices have skyrocketed -- and there are service stations in the U. S. where you can't buy it at all: they're out.

     This is bad when you go to top up the VW Golf and approaches catastrophic when the Super Duty pickup has run nearly dry, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Every single item on the shelf at the grocery store and the five and dime, every drug in the pharmacy and most children in the schools got there by diesel.  The box and tractor-trailer trucks and farm machinery all run on it.  The trains run on it.  The river barges are moved by tugs burning it.  Most school buses burn it.  The electrical peaking plants that keep the grid up on especially hot or cold days?  Diesel.  And speaking of cold days, fuel oil still runs many furnaces, and it's the next thing to diesel; if refineries adjust to make more truck fuel now, there'll be less heating fuel as winter comes in.  Jet fuel's another cousin (though even closer to kerosene), so close that hospitals and TV stations that fly helicopters sometimes get the emergency generators set up to run on the same fuel, sharing their supply.  And there have already been rolling jet fuel shortages.

     Big ships still run on thick bunker oil, which is pretty much at the bottom of the stuff refineries distill, what's left after they pour the diesel off -- but wait, some of them switch to clean-burning diesel as they approach port.

     Bottom line?  Everything you buy is going to get more expensive, and will stay that way as long as diesel fuel remains scarce and costly (and probably long after, until inventories turn over).

     The problem here is not Orange Man Bad.  Sure, he is, but we've had absolute bastards in the Presidency before (Jackson, Wilson, Nixon...); it's not actually a disqualification.  Nope, the problem is Orange Man Dumb and Orange Man Have Poor Impulse Control. Not to mention Orange Man Not Listen To Qualified Experts, of which his administration has vanishingly few anyway.  We're all going to pay the price for it -- all of us who are not high-and-mighty Federal officials and politicians, anyway.  They're still tucking into nice steaks and rick, thick Senate Bean Soup,* the ingredients for which were carried to the Capitol by train and/or truck, and paid for with your and my tax dollars.

     They've shot themselves in the foot, but we're doing the bleeding for them.
_____________________
* Apparently, it's not all that great.  My own 15-bean soup is undoubtedly better, though I rarely have time to make it. It's based on the Hurst packaged beans but uses a different recipe and is served with raw chopped onions and celery for toppings, and generous amounts of fresh cornbread.  And you'd never guess what fuel brought all that wonderful stuff to the grocer's.

This Timeline Is Deeply Wrong

     "Lay down with dogs, get up with a job at the FBI," shouldn't be a thing, but here we are.  2026 is the gift that keeps on taking.

That Whole Charlie Kirk Anniversary Thing

     Not the terrible thing that was done to him.  I wrote at the time and I'll say it again: nobody has that coming.  Certainly not a guy whose shtick was showing college students that if you go arguing with a man in a venue he controls, where he sets the ground rules and picks the issues, you're going to lose.  It may even be a valuable lesson or two: the grown-up world does not play fair.  You cannot reason someone out of a position he holds on faith.

     I disagreed with most and maybe even all of his positions.  Nevertheless, the violence that was committed against him was absolutely inexcusable and should be condemned by every decent person.

     But I don't quite get why all the media outlets made a point of noting the anniversary of his murder.  What are they after?  They've been covering the trial of the man accused of killing him, and that's appropriate, but this is someone who didn't hold public office, and whose fame was based on employing his rhetorical gifts in remarkably uneven debates.  Big fun if you agreed with him, I suppose, but he wasn't otherwise notable.  The organizations he founded have faltered as cultural forces without him, and many people on the far Right have drifted towards even more extreme figures.  That's not great -- but it's likely those individuals were already headed in that direction.  He wasn't a moderating influence.  I'm sorry for the loss to his family and friends.

     We've got too damn much political violence in this country, and we're too easily chivvied into "Us vs. Them" conflicts that pit working people...against other working people.  Meanwhile, the rich get richer, no matter what their politics happen to be -- and their politics have often been shown to be remarkably flexible, depending on which party is in power and what they they think it can do for them.  Against that, making killers famous, marking the date of their crimes and shedding performative tears over their victims is an utterly cynical sideshow.

It's A Kind Of Genius

     Oh, it's crude.  And it's not possible, not to mention illegal.  But it's absolutely an example of how the man works: the President of the United States has promised to pay each and every American* a middling-large sum of money if his party retains control of Congress.  He's made similar payoff promises before, which somehow never materialize.

     It's the same appeal as a one-armed bandit, only with far less chance of a payoff: pull lever, get money.  And there's a group of voters, ranging from low-information to so deep in the fantasy they'll take it on faith, who will be moved by it.  Is the size of that group decisively large?  Is greed a stronger motivation than high prices for everything and stagnant wages?  Stronger than the reaction to an increasingly authoritarian Federal government whose masked secret-police thugs act with impunity?

     I don't know.

     The truth is, the money's not his to spend; it's Congress's.  And Congress doesn't have it; the payout would run to more than 1.3 trillion dollars and they're already deeply in the red funding his don't-call-it-a-war with Iran, the same one that's driving up the price of oil, fuel, and everything that relies on oil-derived stuff to be made or grown and transported.  I suppose they could just have the Mint print it -- that's what the Left calls "Modern Monetary Theory" and the Right mocks (so does the center); it's inherently inflationary, meaning by the time you get your money, it'll buy fast-food dinner for two and a daily newspaper as long as it's not the Sunday edition.  And it's illegal in the U.S. to pay people for votes, not that illegality is much of a deterrent.  (And it's the actual paying for votes part that is illegal -- candidates and everyone else can talk about it all they like.)

     It's money no American will ever receive, no matter who they vote for.

     Politicians have been selling pie in the sky for years; Mencken called elections a kind of advance auction of stolen goods, but the modern, jet-propelled GOP version auctions off the stolen goods -- and then keeps them.

     I beg people to choose a better class of crook.  I have no faith left that they will.

     Update: The "dividend" headlined every TV and radio newscast I saw or heard today.  It'll never be paid -- but using it as a lure is indeed a kind of genius.  Flim-flam genius we should be ashamed of falling for, and yet....
___________________
* Citizens, presumably, given his party's positions, not resident non-citizens.

Wow

     It's harder and harder to jump back in the hopper of the daily grind.  I'm not sure if I'm more hopeful or more worried about November's elections and whatever follows.  I suppose if all that happens is an economic crash, we'll be getting out easy, but man, do I loathe interesting times.

It's Labor Day

     Anymore, I'm not all that sure what we mean by "labor," and to what extent a Federal holiday to celebrate it means anything.  Sure, sure, both big political parties will tell you they're the party of the working man (and, occasionally, woman) and the other guys are the party of the "elites," moneyed and/or intellectual.  Socialists and Communists and Labor -- and far-Right -- parties overseas will make similar claims (usually around May first in most countries, and you can ask the Communists to explain that one).

     But as a species, we don't actually like work all that much, and given a chance in literature or art to side with a sweat-of-his-brow farmer or the barbarian who shows up to steal from him or worse, a lot of people prefer Conan to the plodder behind the plow -- and we admire Tom Sawyer, half-covertly, and think the peers he gulls into doing his fence-painting are saps.  We keep coming up with ways to dodge even intellectual work; Socrates was none too sure about literacy and writing things down, fearing it would weaken memory and devalue being present in the moment, and we've kept on cheating -- log tables, printing presses with moveable type, typewriters, word processors, abacuses, slide rules, calculators, photography, computers, and now A.I.: forget tractors, why do the heavy gray-matter lifting when you can build a machine to do it for you?

     And yet -- we do still have gardeners, farmers, stonemasons, poets, singers, miners, men and women toiling in the kitchen or on the assembly line.  One of them might be able to do the work of ten of Socrates' students (or their wives or servants), but work they do.  (Alas, genius still resists force-multipliers; we don't get ten Greek philosophers of the price of one).

     Labor still matters.  It shouldn't be disparaged, not scrubbing floors or unpacking the mysteries of subatomic physics.  We must, still, work, and it's probably built right into our genes, long-haul hunter-gathers who stumbled out of Africa, ganging up to harvest tasty megafauna and sweet, sweet berries, singing before they went and telling each other stories about it afterward.

The Man Who Mugged Analogy

     Tam and I watch the Sunday political talk shows.  I wouldn't say we like watching them, but it's not a hate-watch either.  The programs are the lowest common denominator of American political discourse, available to the widest cross-section of the gen. pop., and because the big networks do have to keep their advertisers, viewers, the FCC and a smattering of basement lunatics* reasonably happy, they're as close to a big-picture look at the current scene as can be had.

     Today's snapshot comes from NBC.  Kristen Welker was interviewing Republican Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana, a politician who could out-awshucks Foghorn Leghorn or his inspiration even spotting them three "Ma'ams," one "I say," and a wilted magnolia.  Asked about the economy and specifically inflation, he had this to say:
     "I’m labor. I’m not management. I don’t run the show."

     He -- a U. S. Senator -- would have us believe he just works there.  To continue the parallel with business, that is as if a member of the Board of Directors pretended to have no more influence over how a company is run than some hourly person on the assembly line.  This is not the position of a member of the United States Congress, it's a neat summary of a Senator's job in Imperial Rome.  He's asking us to believe he's just a-watching the whole train run off the trestle, caboose over boiler, as he sweeps the floor in the railroad station waiting room, powerless, thinking if only: "...[W]e’d be on this issue like a hobo on a ham sandwich. We would be all over inflation passing bills."

     If he was my Senator, I'd be asking for my nickle back.

     The interview is a marvel of a man with money, power, influence and authority claiming he's just a little fellow caught up in the gears, a-doing whatever he can, which is nothing at all.  If that was true, why d'ya suppose he even bothered to appear on TV, or the TV people bothered to invite him?  You can find the whole thing here.  Don't eat first..
___________________
* I'd like to be able to tell you that one "side" or the other, out at the fringes of our two-party system, has a definitive lead over the other when it comes to political violence.  But even though it's often more one than the other at any given time, metaphorical meteorologists blowing up Federal buildings or supposed law'n'order fetishists bushwhacking a talk-show host (or vice-versa), the truth is they're usually so far off the Left/Right horseshoe that their political "philosophies" are largely horseshit, and viewed as a whole over history, they're as likely to have gone galloping off from one end of the horseshoe as the other.

Worse Than Crooks

     Lying and cheating is kind of expected of politicians -- but they're not supposed to embezzle millions; they're supposed to keep their lies small and personal, and stop at merely shading the truth about big things.  They're supposed to have some respect for the government of which they are a part, or at least to fake it in a convincing manner.

     The Trump administration's egregious nonsense about voting, and especially voting by mail, is far outside even these lax norms.  Their proposed "fix" for the non-existent problem appears to be designed to create chaos and disenfranchise the greatest number of legitimate mail-in voters.  It imposes a "zero error" requirement on outgoing ballots, in which a single mistake on one envelope would result in the rejection of an entire batch of thousands of them.  At least 24 states have pushed back, including some controlled by Republicans -- and even though pending court cases only blocked mandatory compliance with the proposed USPS mail voting requirements, not a single state has chosen to voluntarily comply and many report that they simply cannot.  Nevertheless, the administration has gone to the U. S. Supreme Court to ask for a ruling that will allow the scheme to proceed, even as the first states prepare to send out ballots within days.

     It's a huge, dirty Federal thumb on the scales of a balance the individual states are supposed to be looking after -- and they have done so from the first days of our republic.  No entity has ever produced evidence of statistically significant vote-by-mail fraud, despite a great deal of very diligent searching for it.  At this point, even a nursing-home worker helping the frailest of the people in their care fill out ballots must surely be aware that the slightest fudging will come under the microscope.

     Stealing from campaign funds for nice dinners and limo service, sending Federal business to your son-in-law's uncle's firm, ignoring constituent complaints while swapping votes with colleagues -- sure, we voters don't like it, but it's not unexpected.  Election interference largely aimed at the most helpless or isolated voters is far worse than ordinary crookedness.  It's a slow-motion, low-key coup attempt, an autogolpe under the thinnest veneer of pretended concern.

     You can help stop 'em.  No, I doubt the Supremes listen to anything but the ringing in their own ears these days, and the only thing the Trump administration listens to are its own worst members and the whims of the man at the top, but you can get out there and vote in November, in person if possible, and vote hard against the undermining of American democracy.  You might end up with a few farther-out Democrats than you'd prefer, but the Dems have demonstrated a willingness to accept being voted out, and voters can always remove the most egregious in the next cycle.  Mr. Trump's Republicans, especially the man himself, have repeatedly refused to accept defeat in fair and honest elections: vote 'em in one time too many and you may be stuck forever.  Consider the stakes.  It's not a safe gamble.

Nightmare Logic

     Watching national and world events is like having a front-row seat to someone else's nightmare: not only does it not make sense, even the emotional resonances are off.  Jarring.  Or perhaps it's like a badly edited movie,* in which the storyline never quite gels and the various elements undercut one another.

     International affairs are askew at best; domestic politics seem to be headed for something wretched as the November elections approach.  Will there be fireworks or a damp squib?  Troops at the polling places or just the usual confusion of overworked volunteers?†  Will the outcome be rout or a coup?  Something muddled, leaving the House and Senate on an even closer balance?  (A divided legislature is often a silent legislature -- and silence, as Plato observed and Robert's Rules of Order reminds us, is consent.)  All I know for sure is that anyone who says they do know is talking through their hat.

     It's all sliding downhill and right towards us, like an avalanche viewed from the valley floor, and while it might seem slow or even graceful, it's moving a lot faster than appears and it's carrying chaos with it.
___________________
* We've been watching Ride Or Die, a generally delightful series that can't quite make up its mind whether it's a spy spoof or a serious tale of friendship and international intrigue; but the acting, sets and photography are first-rate, and the editing is often brilliant -- especially the frequent and varied "match cuts" when going from one location to another.
 
† A reminder that almost everyone you interact with when you vote is either a volunteer or a low-paid temporary worker.  Whatever is going on, whatever party is in power in your precinct, whatever thuggish nitwittery is afoot on election day, Left, Right or lunacy, they didn't create it and they likely wish even more than you that it would just go away.  Please be courteous to the voter-facing poll workers, no matter your political affiliation or what you suspect to be theirs.  They're not nefarious villains.

Distraction Screens

     It's no secret that I don't think much of Mr. Trump, or of how he and his gang of Republicans are running the federal government, ringing up unprecedented debt, yanking the rug out from under the poor at home and abroad, handing out tax breaks to their ultra-wealthy pals who do not pay it back in the form of increasing employment* and engaging in wars of choice with murky and/or immoral victory conditions.

     But I do try to limit myself to substantive criticism about issues of importance.  I might think the way he combs his hair looks stupid, but so what?  That hairstyle isn't picking anyone's pocket or breaking their leg, and in the course of a busy day, you can find five or six more at least as dumb.

     So the recent fuss about sneaking the President out of Turkey in the wake of a credible threat (and leaving the Press as sitting ducks -- the very same sitting ducks they'd be if they were sharing the plane with him) or an aide who appears to have an unhealthy devotion to the President (as have many, to many Presidents, and it's never a good sign) strikes me as silly-season distractions, running while there are at least two and half wars on, and our country is well involved with all of them, and while the economy continues to teeter dangerously.

     This August isn't a slow-news month.  There's plenty of real stuff to report on, none of it reflecting any glory on the clod infesting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
____________________
* The thing about trickle-down economics is, something's got to be trickling down for it to make sense, and I don't mean job cuts.  Otherwise, it's just a trick.

Radium Water! Now -- With Vitamins!

      The thing about "A.I." is that there's a lot of smoke over very little fire -- and every coat-tail riding grifter and half-baked amateur futurist is emitting their own clouds, huddled over the flames and seeing the Promised Land (or at least a fat bank account) in their glow.

     The latest comes from the very top: the current administration in Washington, DC* is pushing a "golden age of science" built around applying A.I. to, well, everything.  Exactly how anyone is supposed to do actual science -- which is based on working out the actual facts about actual things and ideas -- using a tool that has a great and apparently inherent tendency to just make up plausible bullshit, no one can say.  In practice, it hasn't worked out, and the scientific journals have the same problem with specious A.I-generated article as fiction publishers do with A.I. dross that falls short of human efforts (and takes several pages to do so†), and the same problem with made-up A.I. citations as the legal profession.

     A.I. doesn't create new stuff; it uses the old stuff we already knew to create patterns of plausible stuff.  It may be able to pick out patterns in data that elude humans, too; but those results must be evaluated very carefully by subject-matter experts to determine what's real and what is only another "hallucination."  A.I. fools us in much the same way we fool ourselves, so it's not a simple task.

     Poorly understood by most people, with characteristics even the people who work developing it are struggling to understand, A.I. today occupies the same cultural space that radium (and radioactivity in general) did over a century ago, or vitamins a few year later.  The radium thing did not turn out so very well; vitamins did better.  The hype and hoopla‡ lingered, as the hype and hoopla from A.I. is now.

     Maybe let's not be in such a hurry to gulp it down by the gallon.
________________________
* Here's a question for later: if the District of Colombia ever achieves statehood, will we start calling the Pacific coastal state "Washington, AC," or "Washington, OG?"  Or something else?  Yeah, yeah, the new state would be called something like District of Colombia, or maybe just Capitol District (for all those Hunger Games fans out there), but the city is Washington and you know we'll keep on using the old, familiar synecdoche.
 
† The problem is not so much that the writing is lousy -- Sturgeon's Law predicts 95% of all unsolicited fiction people send in is unpublishable -- as it is the sheer volume.  Typewriters let us write faster than we can think, and word processors let us edit so quickly that getting it right in the first draft no longer matters, but A.I. churns out fiction in greater volume than any collection of editors and assistants can manage to read.  There are gems in the slushpile, and 5% of the total was a sufficiently productive return at the pittance paid "first readers" to sort through it.  0.5% is not, and if A.I. was capable of recognizing the flaws well enough to sort through it, it wouldn't be creating so much unusable work.
 
‡ Even for vitamins: for awhile, every breakfast cereal advertised itself as so packed with vitamins that between them and the sugar, there couldn't have been much room left for grain.

We Aten't Ded

     Despite rising floodwaters, Tam and I are, so far, nearly untouched.  Roseholme Cottage is about a mile away from the White River to the north and west; the river makes a kind of drain-trap bend to our north around Broad Ripple (and the old town of Wellington, long absorbed into the city).  It will peak early tonight, and we're probably going to be sufficiently protected by the levee finished a few years ago, and by our neighborhood's slight elevation above the flood plain.

     Spare a thought for the Broad Ripple Art Center, its grounds and outbuildings being on the river side of the levee along with a few residences and an apartment building; and for Ravenswood, upstream and low-lying (that neighborhood floods at the drop of the hat, and we're in a fumble-fingered milliner's convention), and for Rocky Ripple, the not-quite-an-island (and independent municipality) downstream, across from Butler University, between the river and the canal and also, in a cost-saving compromise that avoided removing multiple houses along the old river levee, on the wet side of the new levee.  Homes in those places are already awash or worse.

     Welcome to a hundred-year flood, after thousand-year rainfall levels.

"Primary Results Muddled"

     That's the occasional headline: "Unclear Primary Results For Dems" is the most common version, but in fact, the Republicans are inconsistent, too -- sometimes Trump-endorsed candidates win, sometimes more old-school GOP politicians who are at some distance from Trumpism.

     And, oh gosh, it's true.  In some counties, cities or districts, DSA-affiliated or adjacent hopefuls are doing well; other places, it's your aunt's Democrat, with pictures of FDR, LBJ and Joe Biden on the mantle.  There are locales where the Christian Nationalist Republicans come out on top in primaries, and others where, well, Mike Lindell is firmly convinced some kind of skullduggerous Deep State made him lose by over 11 percent.*

     If you think of primary voters as some solid block of Party identity across the country, from sea to shining sea, majestic purple mountains and amber waves of grain (or is that floodwaters?) included, it does look pretty muddled.

     But it isn't.  Two big-tent parties dominate American politics and, under various names and historical shadings, they always have.  You might not like sharing your particular tent with the more wild-eyed candidates and their voters, yet there they are and there are some places where they do well, especially in primaries.  Rural Americans like hardcore conservatives, and a lot of 'em aren't any too sure about foreign people with foreign accents and foreign religions.  The details have varied over the years, but that stereotype exists for a reason.  Likewise, people crammed into big cities or enmeshed in a daily struggle against harsh climates often value highly organized cooperation, and see government as a natural way to create it.  You're going to get Lefty, socialist-leaning All-Cops-Are-Bastards candidates in giant metroplexes and parts of the Upper Midwest; you're going to get various kinds of Right-wing, xenophobic Christian Nationalist candidates in the vast swath of agricultural and ranch lands where the towns are small and widely spaced.  And you're going to get more "purple," center-leaning candidates in the industrialized places that draw population from these extremes.

     People, even people that look pretty loony to you or me or that dude over there and hold some far-out views, deserve a fair chance to select representatives, mayors, governors and so on that reflect their community.  I don't very much like Indiana's current Lieutenant Governor, a religious nutjob who thinks the Earth (and the Universe) is a little over six thousand years old (and that's one of his less objectionable notions), but his party put him on the Republican ballot for a reason, and I hope the Governor, state legislature and courts can keep a lid on the crazy little guy.

     While the Unitary Executive excesses of the Trump administration are not, in my opinion, at all normal or proper, running and sometimes electing a very mixed bag of elected officials is normal, and if you want to keep them within more reasonable limits, that power is in your hands: go vote in primary elections!  You can count on the extremists showing up; they've got an axe to grind and the ballot box is their whetstone.  You can make it more of a grindstone, and help hold the noses of our politicians to it, simply by showing up and making an informed choice.
_______________
*  It did, in fact, not.  This would not be the first time Mr. Lindell has been plagued by imaginary spiders or the like, and in my opinion, it will not be the last.

Shell Game

     I guess it appeals to a certain kind of mindset: the so-called "mass deportation rally" that was going to be in Fishers....wasn't in Fishers, just north of Marion County.  Instead, the $50-a-head would-be mass-deporters were sent to a parking lot in Greenfield, off to the east of the metro, and from there to a secret location in Boone County, to the northwest.  (After all, fuel is so cheap, what's another hour's drive in the rain?)

     This fancy double-shuffle was apparently because there was a march of about a thousand people in Fishers in support of immigrants.  And I'm not going to condemn anyone for conflict avoidance.  I'd rather have 'em dodging than fighting.  It's way less messy for everyone else.

     But the whole thing seems kind of skeezy, and prerecorded addresses by Micah Beckwith, our religious oddball Lieutenant Governor, and by the always opportunistic more-MAGA-than-thou Attorney General Todd Rokita did nothing to change the impression that the event was mostly a way to separate the credulous from their cash with minimal effort for the people collecting the take.  A lot of skulking around, self-directed Nacht und Nebel to enhance the experience.

     Press coverage was relatively thin, too -- here's the most complete story I have found.

Sociology? History?

      It'll be a PhD thesis subject some day, I'm just not sure in which department: Is Republican rage at Dr. Anthony Fauci primarily driven by his refusal to validate quackery during the Covid pandemic, or by his earlier work in helping find effective treatments for HIV/AIDS?

     There's a certain subset of the Right, especially the Religious Right, that was delighted they could cast gay sex as a death sentence, and Dr. Fauci played a huge part in taking that away.  He was a low-key villain for the nutjob Right ever after, and the more widespread craziness over Covid opened the door to spreading that loathing.

     Now they're promising to get him behind bars, one way or another -- for doing what was at the time his job.

     Sorry, horse dewormer is still not a miracle cure for viral illness.  Vaccination is an effective tool in stopping the spread of disease.  AIDS was not the wrath of God.  You can stick your fingers in your ears and chant, "No, no, no," all you like, but it's still true.

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.