Models Of Leadership

     Vice President James David Vance is a weirdo who believes UFOs are demons.   He's right up there with Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, though he appears to be slightly less bloody-minded than our local talent.

     Look, I get the GOP's hangup with wanting Executive Branch leaders in the general mold of a stern paterfamilias/grouchy grampa, some of whom will even try to run interference for their junior partners.  In a party bending to authoritarianism, "hetman" principle is inevitable.  But where do they get this string of freakish thinkers for the Number Two spot?

     It used to be the great weakness of the GOP was that they stank on ice at mentorship.  Presidents, Governors, even Senators tended to pick "safe" seconds and helpers, Party-line fools or sycophants who could be counted on to be no threat to the guy with the big desk.  But they were rarely way out there -- they left that to the Democrats on one side and the John Birchers on the other (and the Dems tended to marginalize their whackiest, too).

     Anymore, the kids are letting their freak flags fly, and heaven help the Union.  It's for sure they won't.

You Want The Truth?

     Me, I'd just as soon have my MGB fixed and get to wear a shiny hat.  The truth doesn't change anything. 

     But the truth about the Epstein files is, the people with the most power -- not necessarily in the files themselves and possibly entirely unconnected from that sort of wrongdoing (or maybe in the thick of it) -- are busy, in a kind of jostling and organic way, picking out patsys from the next ranks down, most of whom will have been up to some kind of Epstein-related lawbreaking anyway.  They'll throw 'em to the wolves, er, public (and courts) and those malefactors will get whatever they get, based mostly on how good their lawyers are.

     That's it.  That's what will happen.  No matter what's in there or how damning it is.  The highest and mightiest will not be felled, unless there is also some enormous national-security stuff involving the U.S. and/or the UK and Europe, or staggeringly huge sums of money.  Because none of these politicians -- not one! -- gives a single, solitary gosh-darn-it over what happened to a bunch of cute girls at the hands of creepy, wealthy men.  They all know in their grisliest viscera that's just the way of the world: girls and young women are a consumable commodity to the wealthiest people.

     I'd like to tell you different.  I'd like to, but I can't.

He Said What?

      Look, if you're going to put your political party forward as the party of moral probity and traditional virtues, admitting (or even claiming) you have snorted cocaine from the seat of a toilet should be an absolute bar to holding any public office, ever.  Period.

     And yet....


     I don't think we should cut politicians much slack for having smoked pot; it remains Federally illegal and it was against most or all state laws when our known pot smokers did so, even if they were only smoking it for the articles didn't inhale.  Drinking to excess is reprehensible, especially while in office.  But these are now vices at the outer edge of social acceptability, legal in many places under the proper circumstances.  Using cocaine...is not.  Snorting Bolivian Marching Powder off the seat of a commode previously used for its intended purposes is way beyond the pale.  Even joking about it (and make no mistake, that will be the face-saving retcon, despite the story having been told in utter seriousness) indicates a marked degeneracy.

     Many people in the current Administration make my skin crawl, and none more than our Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Bad Managers

     During the first Trump administration, I observed -- and remarked more than once -- that the President and many of his Cabinet members behaved like the concentrated essence of every bad small-market radio station general manager I had ever worked for.  They appeared to believe they knew better than any subject-matter expert, that their own genius outweighed all the education and experience of anyone else -- and that it was much better to be feared than respected.

     Those small-market GMs had an excuse: the most common path to the job was through Sales (the only other suit-wearing job at small stations), and after years of schmoozing with local car-dealers, Savings & Loans functionaries, small businesses and big national accounts, a group with a large number of second- or third-generation owners, fast-talkers on the way up or down, and self-important blowhards, they were suddenly in charge of a very mixed bag of employees who shared few of their values, and responsible to far wealthier owners who wanted the money to keep rolling in with a minimum of bother.  No amount of sales experience prepared them for it, and they either grew into the job quickly -- or became obnoxious assholes (sometimes, both, and many of those guys eventually grew out of the "jerk" phase).

     Aside from "I know everything because I'm in charge," a common feature of such managers was the Dreaded Unspecified Meeting.  It would be announced a week or a month in advance, with no agenda, and rumor would run wild.  "Mandatory all-station meeting next Wednesday at 10:00!"  It might be a pending sale, a format change, a new Program Director; maybe someone you worked with was getting promoted, or maybe they were putting in an automation system and everyone was going to be fired.  Maybe the station had lost their lease, and there was going to be an all-hands-on-deck effort to relocate over a day or two.  You never knew, and that was just how they liked it.  Even the people who worked overnights and weekends were expected to attend.

     So when Secretary of Defense* Pete Hegseth, a man of limited command experience, announced an in-person meeting in Quantico of some eight hundred top officers with no real hint of topic and let rumors fly however they would, I recognized the game.  News reporters and social media pundits have piled on -- will he be trimming down the upper ranks?  Imposing new grooming standards (no, really, that's out there)?  Requiring an oath of personal loyalty to the President (yes, also out there, though I expect most officers would recognize that Rubicon without dipping a toe in)?  Nobody knows.  Supposedly it will be recorded and the recordings will be made public -- but it'll leak like a sieve long before the video's out.  You can count on it.

     Pete and his peers are not growing into their jobs.  It was predictable; their boss never has, and one of the sure and certain characteristics of the bad small-town GM was that they'd never hire or promote anyone who showed the slightest hint of having any more managerial talent they themselves possessed, and they usually had none at all.

     The generals and admirals know crap when they smell it, and they didn't get where they are without knowing how to grit their teeth and make the best of a bad situation.  Expect carefully measured statements -- and read between the lines.
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* I feel no particular necessity to use his position's nickname, quite different to the one assigned by statute.  If it makes him feel tougher, he needs to convince Congress to change it.

A Reminder

      It's "Move fast and break things," not "Move fast and break people."

"Robin Hoodie" Was Never Going To Be A Folk Hero

     It wasn't in the cards.  The UHC CEO assassin wasn't going to be a folk hero or even a comic-book (graphic novel!) vigilante.  Sane people, good people, don't shoot another person in the back unless that person presents an imminent threat to human life.

     Americans kill one another quite often, and on little provocation.  We're doing so less these days -- but we're still doing it.  And if it seems even a little justified -- how many stats have I seen about insurance claim denial rates in the last few days, with United Health Care heading the list -- a lot of us will chime in, or at least nod, or maybe just shrug.

     The fact remains that you've got to be seriously off-axis to commit that kind of murder; in fact, being some kind of nut (not to get too technical) appears to improve the odds of success, as I have written about before when discussing political assassination attempts.

     Did the killer's actions hold up a distorting mirror to the feelings of many Americans about the health-insurance industry?  Undeniably.  Just don't confuse the myth/legend/story with the facts.

     Murder is wrong.

     Running your business in such a way that a plurality (at least) of the people who hear about your murder express positive or neutral feelings about the crime is wrong, too.  It doesn't justify the murder -- but it ought to be food for thought.

Dishwasher Safe, Hand Wash Preferred

     Storage-solutions company Tupperware has filed for bankruptcy.  A group of creditors have proposed a novel approach to resolution, in which the company's assets would be placed under an air-tight seal, burped, and left in the back of a cold-storage warehouse until almost everyone has forgotten about them.

     (Seriously people -- we broke Tupperware?  I went looking for a sealable  32-ounce beverage container last weekend, preferably an unbreakable plastic one with graduations down the side like Tupperware made for decades, and there was nothing of the sort at our nearest big-box retailer, not even an imported clone.  I ended up buying a fancy metal thermal water (etc.) bottle, kin to the Stanley mugs that had their day not too long ago.  The future is awkward.)

You Don't Get To Choose Your Flakes

     If you start running with conspiracy theorists on one topic -- vaccines, UFOs, flat Earth, elections -- you throw open the door to all of 'em.  The "conspiracy mindset" rarely goes for just one thing.  Few people embrace every far-out notion, but the overlap between, say, people who think the Moon landings were fake and people who believe in Bigfoot is pretty large.

     Unfortunately, this includes people who are dangerous as well as the merely eccentric.  There have now been two attempts on a Presidential candidate, and in each case, the malefactor has not been a cold-eyed fanatic -- nope, they've been flakes.  People whose politics are all over the map, people who dream of fame and glory but lack the talent or dedication to achieve it.  The Secret Service is rational, cautious, methodical (and have been known to take a little too much for granted -- look for that to change, and fast).  And that means erratic people, people who are unmoored from reality, have an advantage.  Every attack after Lincoln that has done harm or come close has been perpetrated by someone who was behaving irrationally.

     That's a problem.  Unpredictability is an asset.  And the more a campaign has catered to the unmoored, the more it has been unwilling to turn away the fringe, the greater the risk.

     Normal people don't do this kind of thing -- no matter who they vote for.  Yes, your loudmouth Republican uncle and your bleeding-heart Democrat niece are normal Americans.  They might be annoying but they're not out for blood, no matter how awful their choices of politicians, policies and positions.

     But when you open the door to crazy, you open the door to all the crazy.  Expect the Secret Service to wield an even heavier hand around all the candidates from here on in.

I Could, But Why?

     Some of the wilder claims made by a major political candidate about people getting into the U.S. cry out for debunking, but why bother?  It's been done.  Done, and the people who most need to hear it are not listening.  When that same candidate promises that removing these largely imaginary invading hordes will be "...a bloody story," his fans cheer.

     What am I supposed to do, against people who cheer for bloodletting?  I know who will bleed, and it won't be a fantasy cadre of wild-eyed, border crossing ax murderers; it'll be powerless schmucks who can't get out of the way.  It won't be anyone with cash to burn, ill-gotten or otherwise.

     Populism ends in blood, or at least in bloodlust.  In this country, it often wraps itself in religion.  Looking up background for this piece, I started out investigating what Huey Long had promised.  It was more than potted chickens -- and a little surprising.  His "Share Our Wealth" plan called for sharply progressive taxes ("progressive" in context means the more money you make, the larger a percentage of it the Feds take -- which did happen, though not as steeply), plus caps on maximum income ($23 million in 2024 dollars), inheritance ($118 million likewise) and private wealth (1.2 billion, 2024) that, while vast, are barely a patch on their one-percenter counterparts today.  He was also pressing for a shorter work week, free higher education, free medical care and old age pensions.  "Why, that's socialism," you may exclaim.  Socialists in Long's day (then a sizable third party) disagreed and debated against it.

     So that's Huey Long, and it's pretty standard populist fare for his time, with a world mired in economic depression and autocrats on the rise.  He managed to get himself shot, ending whatever might have come of his efforts; some of his ideas were massaged by the Roosevelt administration and showed up, unattributed, in the Second New Deal.  But what caught my eye was the Long acolyte who tried to step up afterward: Gerald L. K. Smith.

     More experienced politicians forced him out of Louisiana politics in short order.  But Smith, chaplain of the American Federation of Labor, was a fan of autocrats.  Labor involvement, deep into Share Our Wealth; a modern eye might expect he was looking to the Soviets, but far from it.  No, by 1935, Smith had gotten in with pension advocate Francis Townsend (whose "Townsend Plan" was something of an ancestor to Social Security) and had convinced him to join with Father Charles Coughlin in backing a third-party Presidential candidate opposed to "the communistic policies of the Roosevelt administration."  Smith admired Hitler and was an avowed racist and antisemite; you can look up his own words and actions on those things.

     Smith went on to found the America First Party after failing to ally with the America First Committee; he joined the Silver Shirts and after America's involvement in WW II discredited isolationist and explicitly fascist organizations, went on to start the Christian Nationalist Crusade.

     His efforts only gained traction among the nuttier extremes of the far Right.  As his star faded in later years, Gerald L. K. Smith was better known as the man who masterminded construction of Christ of the Ozarks and the associated passion play.

     And there he is, history's lesson, ostensibly conservative populism fueled by racism, clutching a cross and wrapping itself in the flag -- but rejecting charity, compassion, brotherly love and the American tradition of equality before the law.

     We have seen the current movie before; the only difference is that it has got a much bigger screen now and a louder PA system.  What it doesn't have is any better a philosophy than it has ever had.  It runs on envy, exclusionism and hate.

Clearing Up Confusion

     Blogs attract comments, at least they do if you make it possible for people to leave them.  Even after politics heated up to hatred, I didn't want to give up comments altogether, so I've been moderating them.  Sometimes things don't make it through moderation, and sometimes that bears mention.

     For the helpful person who left a comment consisting entirely of information cut and pasted from the hot pepper list at Pepperscale.com: thank you very much and it's good stuff, but we don't just take content from a site.  That's "scraping," and is frequently a copyright violation.  Nevertheless, it's a great link, which I am happy to share: Pepperscale.

     Another commenter was...not so helpful.  Addressing my pointing out that former Vice President (and arch-Republican) Dick Cheney will be voting for Democrat and current Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming Presidential election, he wrote darkly (and illiterately) about "Globalist" government and America's "managed" democracy.  These terms are, in fact, antisemitic dogwhistles, and when someone uses them, he's revealing a great deal about himself while telling you nothing accurate about the world.  While it's a handy way to identify members of the covert hooky-cross crowd, the claims are hateful blather.  Let the record show that Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney is a United Methodist, about as mainstream a version of Protestantism as you could find.  There is no Jewish conspiracy pulling the strings of world government; the one government in the world that is dominated by Jewish people has got its hands full right now trying to keep their own electorate from shutting Israel down.  This ancient nonsense remains the same nonsense it has been all along, and is always used to manipulate people and gain power for demagogues -- who never have any coherent plan themselves, only a lust for power and a desire to beat up the weak.

     Commenters, I will check your links and references.  Hostile or threatening comments will not be published, nor will comments supporting Trumpism,* which I consider to be a dangerous political movement with plenty of its own loud megaphones.  I will look up terms and claims and if you are too vague or obscure, your comment will not be published, simply because I don't know what you're talking about and prefer to err on the side of caution.
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* The leaves me open to charges of "You just hate Trump."  But you know, I don't.  I think he's a very sad man, an aging and desperate example of the kind of prejudiced, not very clever asshole managers I have worked for in a few jobs, men who didn't quite have what it took and inflated themselves with bullshit while lording it over the underlings who were doing their best to keep the bad boss propped up.  They did so because if he fell, it was going to rain crap on everyone under him.  I didn't like the situation and those guys would always get worse and worse as time went on.  Sometimes their bosses removed them before things came to a head, much as voters did in 2020.  Sometimes they failed spectacularly, and anyone near them when it happened took damage.  I think the United States of America, its government and citizens, deserves better than that.

Whatever You Know About Middle-East Conflict Is Probably Wrong

     But you're not alone in that.  Whatever I know is probably wrong, too.  As near as I can tell, whatever anyone knows about the big picture or the deep (or even recent) history is likely to be wrong, incomplete or biased.

     Fewer dead noncombatants would be an improvement.  Fewer people traumatized, hungry, thirsty and homeless would be an improvement.

     More dead people would not be an improvement.  Anyone calling for wiping out this side or that side isn't really wanting to make the situation better.

     The dead have no national identity.  Corpses have no religion.  History stopped for them when their life ended.

     I can't fix it.  I don't have any clever suggestions.  But the news pains me.  And it pains me even more that while one side looks better to me than another, the governments, would-be governments and militant groups, from the best to the worst, are all standing in and shedding far more blood than is sane.  When the best hope isn't much of a hope at all, it's difficult to believe anything will ever get better -- and easy to understand how the people in the middle of it fall into nihilism and destruction.

The U. S. Senate, Red In Tooth And Claw?

     It's been all over the news, all over social media -- junior Senator for Oklahoma Markwayne Mullin offering to fight Teamsters President Sean O'Brien in the course of a Senate committee hearing.  He was chided by his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders, a man never overly concerned with decorum, practicality or even reality, which ought to have been humbling but probably wasn't.

     Senator Mullin and Teamsters boss O'Brien have been sniping at one another for months; I don't expect them to be great pals, not the former owner of a big, open-shop plumbing company* and union guy, not a Republican Senator and a labor boss: they're natural antagonists.  However, politics is the tool we invented so we don't have sort matters out by knocking one another over the head, and I do expect a United States Senator and the President of a national union to avoid actual physical conflict, even while being about as lousy to one another as they can manage.

     The Teamsters are proud of their roughneck image -- but even they have had to admit that might doesn't necessarily make right.  I damned well expect a U. S. Senator to understand it.  Tolerating this sort of behavior is a very poor sign for the present course of the GOP.  Senator Mullin citing as precedent pro-slavery Representative Preston Brooks beating anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a cane after Sumner had spoken harshly of slave owners in 1856 does not speak well of him -- the incident is generally understood as the one of the precursors to the Civil War.  The Senator also mentioned President Andrew Jackson's overly-pugnacious behavior, which is shaky ground indeed; Jackson's legacy is at best, mixed, and his temper is more infamous than admired.

     I don't expect Senators -- or even U. S. Representatives -- to engage in hand-to-hand combat or feats of strength.  That's not what I'm paying them to do; it's what I am paying them to avoid, and to manage the conflicts that would otherwise lead to violence.

     This bully-boy nonsense is strictly for the funny papers.  Or the history books, brown/silver/black shirts and all.  (Can you name the countries where each group sullied the public streets?)
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* The plumber's union is a big one, one of the surviving 19th Century American Federation of Labor craft unions,† and historically, they're known to be quite touchy about jurisdiction.
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† In contrast to the younger, scrappier Congress of Industrial Organizations unions.  They're long merged now, but while an AF of L craft union organized workers in skilled trades, the CIO (splintering from AFL in 1935) organized entire establishments, from the sweepers to the top of the hourly pay scale.  There was no love lost between craft unions and industrial unions for twenty years, but by the mid-1950s, they remembered they had a common enemy and got back together.

World War Three

     The Third World War.*  It's a buzzphrase, especially popular just now with the farther fringes of the Right and Left, but -- let's face it -- becoming ever more mainstream.

     We've certainly got the classic ingredients for the early stage: an expansionist power moving to take territory by force of arms, a coalition united in opposition but hesitant to engage directly, while at least one small nation is being hacked to bits.  The West may yet be drawn into active conflict.

     This is far from the first time such a prospect has loomed.  It's not even the first time an emboldened Russia has looked westward; but Stalin had other problems, and we ended up with a Cold War instead of a hot one.

     But in 1951, the ambitious editors of Collier's magazine wondered what it would look like if the world again fell into war [PDF] and imagined a situation in which the Soviet Union might try to launch a short, victorious war against a smaller and uncooperating nation.  They chose Tito's Yugoslavia as the flash point, and posited an unsuccessful assassination attempt followed by land invasion.

     Tito, surviving, calls on the UN for help and the NATO responds; after a string of initial successes, the invasion by the USSR (and satellites) grinds to a halt.

     To that point, it sounds familiar, doesn't it?  In Collier's projection -- told as if looking backwards from 1960, five years after the war had drawn to a close, leaving national capitols in ruins -- the UN gives the USSR an ultimatum, which is ignored; the Soviet invasion into Europe falters under a campaign of conventional and fission bombing that escalates after the USSR hits London, then cities and war-production sites in the continental U.S.  The near-destruction of Washington D. C. is followed by a daring raid on Moscow, as the tide of the war turns--

     The magazine's collection of writers, everyone from reporters and columnists to politicians, fiction writers and labor leaders, were envisioning global war at a time before fusion bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, before "one missile, one city," before Nuclear Winter.  Their WW III included only a limited nuclear exchange, horrific though it is.  Bombs grew more quickly than they imagined.

     The issue was praised as a solemn warning and condemned as little more than nihilistic disaster-porn.  It's worth taking a look at, to see how much -- and how little -- has changed.

     Ambitious autocrats have always been a threat to peace, to the ordinary lives of ordinary people.  And it is the ordinary people who bear the cost of bringing aggressive powers to heel.  History is too often the story of "great men," larger-than life heroes and villains, but the real story is the ruin the worst of men bring about and the effort it takes to stop them, by everyone from the noblest philosopher and most clever strategist to the simplest foot soldier and Home Front worker.

     Like it or not, and I don't, we're in it again.  Maybe everything will work out, Russia will grind to a halt in the snow and mud, and the war will end at the negotiating table sooner rather than later.  A look at history -- or a back issue of Collier's -- suggests otherwise.
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* Some historians dispute the count, pointing out the global scope of the Seven Year's War in the 18th Century and the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th, along with others.  The numbers of fallen in those wars are not changed by the designation, nor any borders changed, and about the only conclusion is that as a species, our wars are as wide-ranging as our means of travel allow.

Too Much Awfulness

      Look, there are all kinds of deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic arguments to be had over definitions, over if a street-gang drive-by is the same as a nutjob/racist opening fire in a crowded place or a robbery that goes off the rails with the assailant killing multiple people, if a politically motivated nutter is the same as or different to a plain old nutty nutter.--  Yeah, all of that.

      But the fact is that we have too many, and the fact is that the media -- and our own horrified fascination -- keeps making the perpetrators famous, keeps analyzing their social media presence and poring over whatever written screeds or video rants they had left behind.  Then everybody circles back to their previously-held position, "too many guns" or "not enough police," "insufficient and underfunded mental health resources" or "these people aren't getting physically disciplined enough in childhood" or "nobody voted enough for my guy/my ballot initiative in the last election," or whatever. 

      Yeah, yeah, whatever.  But what we've been doing -- and we've been doing all of it, in various states and cities -- is not working.  There seems to be a rise recently in people willing to step up and take action -- heroic, personally dangerous action -- and maybe that will help.  We need to accept that in a country where civilian firearm ownership is both a protected right and a centuries-old tradition, the supply of guns isn't going to change much no matter what laws are passed; in a country where health care is not a government-run gimme and where we're not in the habit of clapping the merely strange into mental institutions, we're not going to stop many of the dangerously crazed or habitually violent ahead of time.  We can stop making them famous; we can stop dwelling on them and start mocking them.  Detestation and horror are normal reactions, but there are plenty of abnormal people who admire the ability to elicit them and the Internet has made it possible for such people to find one another.

      Mockery seems like a frail tool compared to sending out squads of cops or even teams of kindly mental health professionals.  Mockery doesn't advance anyone's political agenda or work towards the wildly varying outcomes we have, severally and each, decided we'd like to achieve.  But it makes 'em look like fools and losers.

      Other than an immediate -- and by definition, at least slightly late -- reaction to the perpetrator of such violence as it happens, mockery is really all we've got.  All the other tools in the box have shown themselves to be useless for the job.  Thoughts and prayers do nothing.  Strict gun laws in California and New York City don't stop it.  Widespread firearm ownership and carry in Texas and Michigan doesn't keep it from happening.  Where individuals have been willing -- and able -- to step up, the carnage has been limited, but it's got to start before anyone can stop it.  The people who kill en masse want to be big.  They want to be famous, respected, to have a name among their peers whoever they are (or think they are).  Take that away.  Make them small.  Make them not merely contemptible but risibly contemptible.

      Mass k-llers are punks and losers before they take action; if we're going to keep on splattering their crimes across the media, make it clear that when they do harm, they become even worse losers and even more craven punks.

Missed 'Em

      Having little or no taste for televised sporting events, I did not watch the Superb Owl.  This means I missed all the cute commercials (drat!) and whatever culture-war fallout followed.  I'm happy to avoid the fussing.

      Apparently envious of the attention to be gathered by public swooning or histrionic expressions of disdain, the American Right has followed the Left into a morass of shocked outrage, moral panic and apparently uncontrollable triggering* over the antics of public figures, mostly entertainers.

      A lot of entertainers work hard at their craft; the burnout level is high and you need some degree of genuine talent to accompany the relentless self-promotion.  On the other hand, these are exactly the kids who spent their school years charging around with a pencil up each nostril, making animal sounds.  To this very day, most of them would eat a bug on live TV if the price was right, though many would insist on the bug being a designer brand, venomous and/or sustainably sourced.  Getting and holding your attention is what they do, being "edgy" is one of the simplest shortcuts to that, and freaking out about it is simply getting sucked into the game.

      There's a clue there, or there ought to be.  You know what other group thrives on public attention and withers without it?  Politicians.  And behind their over-the-top reaction to over-the-top silly entertainment are two things: a desire to hitch a ride on whatever coattails are flapping by, plus a deep and abiding resentment of the competition from entertainers trying to work the same patch.  For or against, bemoaning the awfulness or rallying staunchly to the defense, it's all just theater -- and they want to chivvy you into buying ticket after ticket for more of the same.

      Are you sure that's what you want to spend your time and money on? 
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* Some people have PSTD so severe that external events can push them into truly wretched mental states.  Cheapening the idea of "triggering" to apply to any minor upset we feel trivializes their struggle.

Basic Civilization

      A routine traffic stop should not be a death sentence.  Even if the detainee panics.  (Yes, there is the rare low-probability stop of a fugitive bank robber or someone with a trunkload of high-value contraband that goes violently sideways).  And traffic stops probably shouldn't be fishing expeditions for police, because the skewed expectations on both sides that creates increase the odds of a bad outcome.

      There's a certain amount of victim-blaming going around over the Tyre Nichols killing, and it's pernicious.  In a police stop, one party* has essentially pledged to be the adult, and it's the sworn officer.  We should be able to reasonably expect that police will exercise mature judgement; once they have detained an individual, the officer is responsible for their welfare.  Nobody's got a beat-down coming from the police: punishment is the purview of the courts.  Even if the detainee freaks out and runs away, despite the degree of restraint and judgement this calls for on the part of the police.

      Too high a bar?  Tough.  That's the job, along with a belt-load of equipment, a radio to call for backup, the support of their fellow offers and qualified immunity -- in fact, because of all those things, because they walk among us with the backing of government, carrying all levels of force up to lethal with a remarkable degree of assurance it can be wielded with impunity, we expect police to behave with restraint.  When they do not, it is entirely proper that justice is swift and fair.

      Nobody has a beating coming from the police -- not the most innocent of drivers pulled over on vague suspicion or the worst violent offender caught bloody-handed.  Nobody should ever fear getting kicked by an arresting officer while his peers hold them down.  The police are not a street gang and shouldn't get away with acting like one.   In Memphis, they haven't.

      It saddens me to encounter a pro-police-beating contingent online.  Perhaps I should have expected them; too many people are missing the "good old days," when a man could beat his wife and police could dispense "street justice" with hardly an eye batted.  Those days were anything but good for many Americans, and we're not going back to them.

      (Update: I'm still getting comments about how Tyre Nichols deserved what he got, from online "experts" who apparently know more than the police chief or prosecutor, who think they know more about the man's injuries from a bit of video than the doctors who examined him in person.  Here's a tip: you don't.  If you want to get published here, you're going to have to come up with something more insightful than the same old tired excuses.)
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* "Party" in this context has nothing to do with political parties.  It simply means the people involved, like "parties" to a contract or conversation.  The parties to an arrest are, at a minimum, the arresting officer(s) and the arrestee(s). I'm amazed to have to explain this, but see comments.

I'd Love To Post Something

     But mostly I just look at the news and wonder, "What next?" 

     Yeah, I have opinions about a lot of it, but so does everyone else.

Why Do We Have Two Words For Bear?

      In fact, we have three words for bear, which holds part of the story: bear, bruin, and (when speaking of things pertaining or similar to bears) ursine.

     The last word goes back to the Indo-European root word, and versions of it show up in the languages of European countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea: places that are not, generally, bear country.  Go wandering through Northern Europe and towards Russia and the words they use are euphemisms, most of which mean either "brown" or (if you're speaking a Slavic language), "honey-eater."  Both of the common English words trace back to "brown," though by different paths.

     How come?  Up in bear country, places where the animals fatten up before winter and emerge ravenous in the spring, bears are a particular and well-known terror, far more so back when humanity had only spears, knives and axes to use against them.  An animal like that, you don't want to use its right name: it might show up when called.

     A powerful superstition back when fire and chipped flint were high technology.  These days, we've made it real.

     A friend I won't name on a social media platform I won't name came up with a cutting insight into a well-known and polarizing figure (not a politician).  A very well-known commentator with a lot of followers shared my friend's analysis -- at which point my friend suggested to me that a pile-on was inevitable.  The nature of social media is such that to mention a well-known figure by name is to summon them, along with their fans.

     We've made our own bears, dangerous creatures -- and we've given them the magical power they were only feared to have back when social media consisted of telling stories around the fire in the dark of night.

What Happened Saturday

      So, Saturday, I had plans: laundry (every Saturday), a class, with SF writer Mary Robinette Kowal (the Lady Astronaut series) and a nice grilled steak dinner afterward.

      The day started out well, the class was good, and laundry was ongoing as I readied the grill and cooked the steak, potatoes and mushrooms.  Just about the time I was going to start microwaving fresh Brussels sprouts, I went to the basement to move clothes to the dryer.

      There was water all over the floor around the water heater!  It was dripping down from above.  A push-on elbow fitting in the copper pipe had failed.  It never had looked great; there are three connections that I've been keeping an eye on, but that one hadn't been the most worrying.  It was dribbling water now, though.

      I started groping my way to the main water shutoff, yelling for Tam to bring a flashlight.  The shutoff is in a dark section of the basement, past the furnace and water heater.  It's a ball valve, so it only takes a ninety-degree turn to close.  My first try was the wrong direction, but I had it off by the time Tam showed up.

      We used the flashlight to check the damage, then wiped up the worst of the water.  I wanted to try a quick fix, so I got the boxes of plumbing tools and parts, found my one spare elbow, got out the tong-type release tool for the fitting, and--  The badly chipped plastic collar you push on to release the fitting wouldn't cooperate.  It just spun around.  I gave up, checked to see if the pilot light was lit -- yes -- and let the problem sit until later.

      Meanwhile, the steaks were about done.  I loaded the laundry into the dryer and started it, helped Tam mop up as much of the remaining water as we could get and stashed the steaks on plates on the bottom of the gas oven.  That kept them warm while the Brussels sprouts cooked and I brought in the potatoes and mushrooms. 

      We had dinner and watched an episode of Life Below Zero while we ate.  The relatively inexpensive, grass-fed steaks were not very good; grass-fed beef has a gamier flavor that I usually like, but these were apparently a bit old.  There was plenty else to eat after a few bites of our steaks.

      And so, with some worried thoughts about the possible aftereffects of our steaks, we returned to the basement.  The other release tool for push-on fittings is a kind of C-shaped collar, and it was able to engage enough of one side of ninety to release it.  The other side was kind of stuck and when it came free, the body of the fitting came off, leaving a toothy spring-steel ring and the broken parts of the plastic collar still on the pipe.  Needlenose pliers took care of that and I checked the pipe ends.

      My introduction to push-on fittings came when a plumber in a hurry used them to repair the hot-water pipes over a decade ago.  These would be those pipes.  You have to deburr the ends of the pipes before you assemble the connections -- the rubber O-ring that seals the connection can be cut or the plastic parts damaged if you don't.  It doesn't have to be pretty; it just has to be sufficient.  Someone who does plumbing all day, every day usually has a good sense of just how much deburring is enough and they don't spend extra time at it.  Usually--  There was a short, nasty burr on one of the pipes.  I'm not a plumber; I carefully smoothed both pipe ends, cleaned them, wiped them dry and pushed the new fitting into place.  I was a little worried about it; I had to wiggle the pipe ends around to get the new fitting in place and about a foot past the ninety, there's a tee that I have been watching.  I didn't want to stress it.

      The ninety appeared to pop into place all right.  I gave both sides another push for luck and had Tam watch it while I turned the water back on.  It didn't leak.  We were back in the hot-water business.

      The fittings have been holding ever since.  And the steaks didn't have any dire effects later.  Apparently the meat just wasn't very good -- disappointing, at the prices for even cheap steaks these days, but it could have been worse.

      I need to pick up some more push-on fittings.  It's a lot handier to already have them when you need them. 

Y'know...

      I'm not sure I was ever a child.  More and more, it just seems like a rumor, or something I made up to account for having been a layabout in the 1960s and '70s.  "Um, sure, I didn't do much back then, because I was a, a, child, y'see?  That's why."

      The thing is, I can remember remembering having a childhood, but it's like something I read, or a very vivid dream.  Did it really happen?  Couldn't say.  Maybe.  Maybe not.