My Blog Is Not Your Debate Club

     This is my blog, where I hold forth on my opinions.  You get to read them for free, paying exactly what they are worth -- same value as any other opinions.

     While I publish some comments, especially if they offer cogent, interesting, amusing and/or original points (even if they differ from my own notions), I don't publish every comment.  If all you have to offer are reheated partisan bumper-stickers or anger, don't expect to get through the filter.  All-caps lectures?  Knock yourself out, but the very first "YOU'RE STUPID..." results in it being deleted with the remainder unread.  Getting yelled at is no better than an echo chamber.  This blog is neither.  It's a megaphone, and a pretty small one.

     Don't like it?  Make your own blog.  I hear Substack's got lots of extra capacity these days.

Doesn't Work That Way

     Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, to the U. S. Federal government, over their access to the border: "You don't need to be here."

     Nope.  Exactly backwards.  Whether they are doing a great job or a terrible job of controlling the borders of the U.S., the national border is very much within the purview of the Federal government.  It's a core job of national governments everywhere.  In that part of our country, it has worked that way since 19 February, 1846.  Starting in April of that year, the state government of Texas was damn happy to have Federal troops bleeding and dying on their behalf, and apart from the few years they spent under the ultimately less-sheltering wing of a different federation, that's how it's been.

     It's a bit late to change their minds now.  In fact, there was a war over it.  Texas was on the losing side.

     There's a bill in Congress at present that would give the border hawks everything they've been asking for.  It's got many of the more-liberal Democrats fuming -- and so are the large Trumpian wing of Congressional Republicans.  The Dems are angry because they think it's too harsh.  Mr. Trump's fellow-travelers are not as clear about why they dislike it, but it seems to be based on their presumptive Presidential candidate not liking it: he doesn't want to lose such a great issue to campaign on!

     Yes, there you have it: the fellow who is griping about a flood of informal, illegal and/or refuge-seeking migrants pouring over the border wants them to keep on coming, hurried masses yearning to breathe free,* until the November election.  It's a crisis, he tells the cheering crowds, they've got to be stopped!  --But not quite yet.  At least not for another nine months.

     'Splain me that.  Lt. Gov. Patrick, you can go first.
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* Texas has not yet implemented air tolls for non-residents, though they may be working it.

Rescament Planning

     Ever since I crossed the magic threshold by turning 65,* I keep getting invitations to "planning seminars" and "complimentary dinners" (plus a mandatory presentation, and it's an easy bet which comes first) about my glorious golden years.

     The joke's on me -- and on them, too: I have a little money.  Effectively a pittance, coverage for emergencies and unplanned expenses like needing replacement appliances or major repairs, and that's it.  There's no nest egg to "invest" in one of their schemes.  There's barely enough for me and not a bit left for them to rake off the top.  (Oh, I'm sure it's all aboveboard by the letter of the law, but the Indiana Secretary of State has his doubts.)  Plus Social Security.  If that falls short, it's hemlock for afternoon tea.  But I'll be damned if I'll let some grifter vampire off my declining years. 

     No safe investment turns around quickly enough for a person with only modest retirement savings, if they start with it at 65 or older -- and IMO, nobody with plenty in their retirement account needs to go moving it around near the end of the game, either.  All that happens for certain is that some clever outfit gets a slice from your pie, and that's not a winning bet.
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* Which demonstrates these fools are too greedy to keep track: I can't get full Social Security until I'm well past 66.  People in my age range have been seeing the limit slowly ramp up.  It's currently set to top out at age 67 for people born in 1960 or later, but I wouldn't count on it staying there.  If you wanted to kick back younger, you should have been born earlier or become a millionaire.

Dead People Aren't A Math Problem

     Soldiers, civilians and every version of combatant in between from the most innocent of persons to the worst of terrorists aren't counters in a game.  They're people.

     Any time you try to do math with them, you end up pursuing morally repugnant lines of thought.  "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" at least pursues balance, albeit bloodily; ten, or a hundred or a thousand of the other side for one of your own does not, and cannot.  It's a crime to murder one; it's a crime to murder millions, and pseudoStalinesque cynicism aside, turning it from a tragedy into a statistic doesn't actually change what it is.  One killing doesn't magically make another one or thousands more okay, though it may be necessary in order to stop the process from continuing, a matter which is only clear after the fact.

     The usual pundits and online self-appointed experts are holding forth on the interim ruling of the International Court of Justice in regard to South Africa's (essentially a proxy for Palestine) charges of genocide against Israel's military actions in the Gaza Strip.  To them, it either went too far or didn't go far enough, and never mind that the ICJ is toothless: nations accept or ignore its rulings voluntarily, so the World Court tends to not issue orders that it knows will not be obeyed.

     I'd love to have a real strong opinion on the conflict and share it with you, but I keep getting distracted by the piles of bodies and the plight of the survivors, and by the festering emotions on all sides that the present action will not relieve, no more than any of the previous ones have.  I don't have any answers.  All I know is that human suffering isn't a math problem.  The solutions to it may be, but we're not close to knowing how to set up those equations, let alone how to solve them.

What A Relief

      The voicemail from my zoologist friend was rushed, so I'm pleased to find out that while he is indeed now working in the motion picture industry, his title is definitely not "Bee Strangler."

Tuesday Primary

     The New Hampshire primary didn't rate a comment yesterday because it was predictable -- on the GOP side, the former Governor did well against the former President but didn't win, just as the most sensible pundits predicted.  The national-level Dems kind of sat out their own primary, not even bothering to enter the current President because they want the South Carolina primary to be their first of the season.  (Nevada's in there, too, but it's complicated, a primary-caucus thing that straddles voting in SC.)  Nevertheless, he won as a write-in.

     So there you have it: we went in with a November rematch between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden likely, and it still is.  We're probably not going to have any surprises in later primaries.

Medical Marvel

     What's worse, yawning at a medical miracle or denying it?  Either way is a vote for ignorance, superstition, barbarism.  It's unsurprising that some of the biggest vaccine skeptics and the most blase are to be found in well-off, highly advanced countries: living in a bubble, it's easy to believe they're not a big deal, or even bad.

     Not everyone has that luxury.  Malaria, for example, kill over six hundred thousand people every year -- mostly children -- and sickens millions.  Tropical countries are hardest hit.  There's finally a working vaccine, and yesterday Cameroon joined a list of African countries rolling it out with routine childhood vaccinations.

     Humans have been using some form of vaccination for centuries; variolation against smallpox arrived in North America over 40 years before the American Revolution. 

     And the U. S. appears to be having more frequent outbreaks of measles these days, thanks to people dodging vaccinations for their children.  This is significant because measles, uniquely as far as I can find out, wipes the slate clean for your immune system, knocking out all of the cells that "remember" how to fight every other virus you've had.  Getting a case of the measles is no big deal in and of itself for most people with access to modern medicine -- but they'll be getting a lot of other things all over again afterward, some of which are a very big deal to catch as an adult.

     Vaccines work.  They're making life better for billions of people.

What A Day

     The Governor of Florida has dropped out.  I had not expected further changes in the roster of GOP Presidential hopefuls until after New Hampshire's primary, but there he went.

     While supporters of Governor DeSantis are disappointed, and many of his foes both within and without his party are making clever and/or cruel cracks, I'm wondering if this means there will be any debates between the remaining two leading Republican contenders.  Probably not.

     The November matchup pundits keep telling me hardly anyone wants is looking more and more inevitable.

     Unrelated, I see Geritol is still on the market.  Sadly, they took the alcohol out of it a long time ago.

V-1, V-2, V-3...

     No, I am not collecting WW II terror weapons.  I have somehow acquired a few ribbon microphones made by Electro-Voice and I've never had them all together in the same place until today.  I thought I had one of their first and smallest (V-1) and a couple of V-2s, but it turns out I have three different models. 

     At least one of the later examples has been crudely "repaired" by bolting in a dynamic element, which has not aged gracefully.  Electro-Voice did this after they stopped making new ribbon microphones; building and assembling the transducer is finicky, specialized work and once those skills are gone, you can't count of getting a good result even if you kept a stock of spare parts.  The good news is that while E-V's ribbon "motors" are held in somewhat mixed regard, there are at least four different drop-in replacements, (one kit and three fully assembled), all of which sell for far less than the price of a classic ribbon microphone.  Are they any good?  I don't know, but the creators haven't been pilloried in print yet, which in the picky world of pro and semi-pro audio is a very good sign.  Certainly even an average-sounding replacement is better than a paperweight.

     Also, it looks like I'm going to need a V-4 to have a good start on completing the set, and there appear to be a couple different V-2 and V-3 versions....

     At this point, I am well on the way to equipping the studios of a radio station in about 1937.

When A Squirrel Gets In

     We had some excitement at the work location I call "The North Campus" awhile back.  Normally unstaffed, it is divided into four main rooms and a very large garage, with the washroom and a kitchenette.  The two largest rooms are equipment rooms, with fire-rated walls and doors, one at the front of the building and one at the back.  They don't share ventilation systems and have no intentional connections.

     The back room is mostly minor and out-of-service stuff these days.  I'm not in there a lot.  One fine day, I opened the door to find...chaos.  Insanity.  The floor (and many elevated flat surfaces) was uniformly scattered with...stuff.  Black shreds.  Green pellets.  Blotches of liquid.  And poison-bait mousetraps, badly chewed up and opened.  It looked deliberate and malicious.

     Nothing was stirring.  I stepped around cautiously and the mess was everywhere.  I thought we had rats and I called our Building Maintenance supervisor to let him know we needed an exterminator, badly, and soon.

     He was on site with the hour.  He wages an unrelenting battle against vermin at the main campus, especially every variety of rodent, and it took him about thirty seconds to know the enemy: "You've got a squirrel."

     Yes, a squirrel.  A cute little fuzzy woodland creature, amusing as they bounce busily around, gathering, eating and hiding nuts and berries, chasing and playing....  Indoors, they're not so cute.  While hand-raised squirrels were once popular pets, wild ones don't cope well with being indoors.  It makes them panicky.  And it turns out that what kills a mouse mostly intoxicates a squirrel.  We had one regular-sized squirrel.  It made a king-sized mess.

     There's a lesson there.  Take a thing out of its normal environment, let it run loose, and you may get outsized effects.  Damaging ones.

     Take a sleazy, attention-craving real estate promoter with a long history of litigation and stiffing contractors and put him into a powerful position in national politics and you get chaos.  Insanity.  You get Donald Trump.  The Authoritarian Playbook: 2025 has a well-researched report on what that particular fuzzy little woodland creature is promising and it's bad news.  Perhaps you found his antics amusing in his natural environment, but the Presidency ain't it.

     The squirrel we had at the North Campus was live-trapped and set free among trees, far from homes and businesses.  It's time to do the same on the national level, and if the courts only intoxicate the pest, there's always the ballot box.  Before he makes an even bigger mess.

Down For The Count

     My right knee is swollen and there are things grinding and popping when I flex the joint.  It's running warm.  It just feels like bad machinery.  My left knee has been sore for the past three weeks, after a couple of stupid falls and a bruise or blown-out capillary has caused a big discolored patch.  (I'm still pretty good at falling, thanks to a lifetime of nearsighted clumsiness, but it leaves a mark even when you do it right.)

     I worked off a ladder for several hours over the past couple of days, and did so last week as well.  If I'm not careful, I will stress my right knee doing that -- turning while it's got weight on it, or worse yet, letting that leg dangle, making the knee joint open up.  The extreme cold hasn't helped; the North Campus facility, designed around heat-producing equipment long superseded, only has working supplemental heat in one room and in this weather, the rest of the building varies between the low 60s and mid 40s, depending on the room.

     My knees were bad last evening and a night's rest only made it worse.  I have managed to limp from bedroom to kitchen to office to washroom, but that's it.  Either of my usual work locations involves much longer walks and that's not happening.

     Rest and analgesics can only go so far.  I'm coming up on another session with the ice pack and dreading it.

We'll Miss The DeSantis - DeSantis Debate

     As the Republican race heats up (something between "chilly" and "tepid") going into New Hampshire, Governor Nikki Haley has announced she will only participate in a debate if ex-President Donald Trump also takes part.  He won't, which would have left Governor Ron DeSantis debating himself.

     With Mr. Trump a little occupied with court cases and Ms. Haley sitting it out, I'd think Mr. DeSantis would have been fully capable of contesting the issues with himself -- perhaps the "less government interference" Ron vs. the Ron who did his best to stick it to Disney over political speech by a corporation (Hey, who remembers Citizens United, kids?  Fun times!).  Or he could take on both sides over State interference with parental rights, with which he has lots of real-life experience.

     Ms. Haley is considerably less awkward and about thirty percent less culture warrior than her foe for the second-place spot, so I guess we'll see which one a minority of Granite State Republicans prefer.  The Iowa caucuses didn't quite bring out fifteen percent (15%) of that state's registered GOP voters, about 7.7% of whom preferred Mr. Trump, leaving 7.3% in a slightly uneven split between the two Governors.  These are not numbers indicative of screaming landslide levels of support for any of them.  (Not that the Democrats look to be any more excited about their guy, either.)

     So far, 2024 is looking like the cold oatmeal of Presidential elections.  It's a pity Pat Paulsen isn't around to bring his level of enthusiasm to join the third-party candidates; he'd fit right in.  I can see it now: "Paulsen in '24: we've upped our expectations, now up yours."