About Names

      A quick review of naming conventions: In this blog, I refrain from the use of nicknames, especially disparaging ones.  I follow the normal convention of Full Name or Mr./Mrs./Ms./Mx.*/Lastname.  If they hold or have held elected or appointed office or military rank, they get their title: Senator Name, General Othername.  (The convention is you get the highest title you ever held.).  After the first use, I will on occasion use the naked last name of a person.  Simple, easy, no looking up who gets called what by whom in what context.  (This is standard Press style; if you see a talking head using nicknames, they're offering opinion and not news -- caveat emptor.)

      Growing up, I had classmates with nicknames -- "Buzz" (named for his supershort hair, but he grew up to be a stoner), "Stinky," even "Doodoo."  Ha-ha, funny -- in grade school, which is where most of those names were applied and only a few stuck.

      We're all grown up now -- yes, even those serving in the U. S. House of Representatives, despite evidence to the contrary -- and I prefer to let people's accomplishments and failings speak for themselves.  Using someone's full name and title does not mean I like them.  I think most people are idiots and most politicians are worse, but when I mention them I'm damned well going to tell and show why instead of resorting to silly slurs like "Frankenstein's illegitimate son" or "commie cheerleader."  Being ugly or ditzy isn't the problem with with 'em, or at least it's only a problem for the poor sods who have to be around them.  It's their ideas and actions I take issue with.
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* Snicker all you like at the latest innovation in honorifics, but consider the arguments and awkwardness it avoids.  Most people, I'd just as soon not know anyway and now I don't gotta.  It's not like we're piping anyone aboard with a pink or blue flag as if they were visiting Admirals.  "Sailor, run up the gray flag!  And let's have two and a half sideboys..." Yeah, no.

The Dignity Index

      At a time when the campaign behavior of politicians, especially across party lines, is reaching for new lows in scurrilous invective and fear-mongering, a woman in Utah has set out to rate office-seekers on how well -- or badly -- they behave.  It's getting noticed.  And noticed.

      The Dignity Index rates politicians on how well they treat opponents.  Not on how splendidly they reach out to find areas of mutual agreement, oh, no; there's no hand-holding and singing songs.  Nope, just if they face off squarely and fight fair over issues and political philosophy, or resort to mud-slinging, personal slights and bizarre claims.  Call it an acting-like-an-adult measurement.

      Will it help?  I don't know.  But it can't hurt.  At the very least, it's one more angle on the people who run for office.  If it's not a very flattering one, well, there's some useful information right there.

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.

Not Even A Real Fraud

      Federal investigators have revealed that Congressman George Santos is not even a real grifter.  "George Santos" is actually Lena Jensen, a thirty-year-old graduate student from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, working on a doctoral thesis about the ease of acquiring dark money in U.S. elections, even for candidates with a questionable background.

      "It was never supposed to go this far," Jensen said, "But now that I'm in office, I feel obligated to serve George's constituents."

      [/SATIRE]

From Tent-Meetings To Smashing Windows

      There's a book I want to read, by a guy who started out as an Evangelical Christian and ended up as a college professor.  One of the news/opinion sites interviewed him recently and going by his own words, he's followed an interesting path.

      There are millions of religious people in the United States who are good, decent folks who believe in our representative democracy, in our conception of liberty as protected under the Bill of Rights, and who don't believe in committing acts of violence unless confronted with violence by others.  I don't have a bit of trouble with them.  In fact, I approve of 'em.

      Then you've got the people and organizations that Bradley B. Onishi covers in Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--and What Comes Next.  They're worrisome.  Many of them have given up on our form of government, preferring something along the line of Putin's Russia or Orbán's Hungary -- and they embody hardcore Old World authoritarianism, the kind of thing (give or take a crown) the Founders and Framers were directly opposing.  It's distinctly unAmerican, no matter how many flags they wave.

      At one time, basic Civics was an inoculation against this kind of stinkin' thinkin'.  Know-Nothings or White Caps or the sneaking Klan might rise and briefly prosper, but decent Americans, many of them church-going, would slap it down, sooner or later.  The Bill of Rights provides a framework that bars government from the kinds of meddling all authoritarians long to do -- from Communists to Christian Nationalists, they're about telling people how to live their lives, with prescriptions for what to think and how to think it.  That's not what we do here, and it makes no difference if the controlling impulse comes from the Right or the Left.  This is a country where you can ask people do things, and where you have (or should have) a reasonable expectation of being left to live your own life your own way as long as you're not using force or committing fraud, but you don't get to boss around unwilling others.  Striving towards fairness -- and good-faith arguments about what's fair and what isn't -- is part of the fabric of this country.  Religious dictatorship is not.

      I'm not sure how things got as screwed up as they appear to be at this particular moment.  I'm hoping Onishi can shed a little light.

Add To The List: Don't Carry Ladders

      At least don't carry ladders for a block and a half and back again.

      We had a contractor at the North Campus who didn't have his own ladder, and he needed access to the back of a steerable satellite dish about eighteen feet across.  The center of the dish is about twelve feet in the air and it's out in the middle of the large field at that location.  So I fetched a twenty-foot fiberglass extension ladder from the building, and took it back several hours later when he was done.  It's a long walk.  I was a little sore that afternoon, and maybe a little more so when Tam and I went for her birthday dinner.

      Overnight, my joints stiffened up and my back started to hurt.  Today, well, I can move around if I don't go too fast, but my knees and elbows are sore and glitchy.  My neck and back are aching.  I'm out of aspirin but I keep taking acetaminophen at the recommended intervals and it doesn't seem to be doing much.  And we're not even going to talk about my fingers, which have been problematic for several weeks already.

      So that's a job I'm going to have to be more careful about doing, and maybe not try to haul the thing the whole way at one go.

      Next on the list, retrieving the twelve-foot stepladder from the basement where some other contractors left it -- the basement with the ten-foot ceiling.  I'm not even going to ask.

Happy Birthday, Tamara

      Tam is [undisclosed] years old today!

      And remember, dear friend, a restaurant can have a senior discount even if they don't have a senior menu.

Skilled Villian

      Nope, this is not yet another item on the clown circus that is Congress, not even the over-top-characters who have managed to be too much even for the junior body, by design raucous, conflicted and experimental.

      Nope, it's about a far better man who played far worse men: Michael Dunn, best known as the marvelously scenery-chewing Dr. Miguelito Loveless on The Wild, Wild West.  He stood three feet ten inches and commanded the stage from that height.  And he did his own stunts!

      MeTV, an over-the-air network specializing in reruns, has brought back the TV series, leading off their Saturday Westerns.  Dunn shows up early and returns often, an ideal foil for James West's 19th Century 007.  He was a talented singer despite limited lung capacity, and about those stunts?  This was a man with lifelong osteoarthritis and a hip dysplasia that limited his range of motion.  You can notice the latter when he walks -- sometimes.  But every motion cost him a price in pain and he never shows it, reveling in the role of a mad scientist to end all mad scientists.

      Michael Dunn died in 1973 at the age of 38, leaving behind a body of work on stage, film and TV screen that most actors would envy.  He is reported to have put considerable time and effort into encouraging children with challenges similar to his own to pursue their own goals -- and is an example to anyone with big dreams.

      We'd be a lot better off with 435 Michael Dunns in the U. S. House of Representatives than the fakes, bad actors and blowhards we've got now.  We might even be better off with 435 clones of Dr. Miguelito Loveless, though I'm not altogether sure about that.

Well, Drat

      I lost the turnip lottery.




      ...This might require explanation.  Turnips have a long shelf life.  Long, but not infinite.  A good turnip, peeled and sliced, is a nice, uniform pale white, tending a little towards yellow or tan, with a slight but definite grain, and a bit damp.

      A not-so-good one looks just the same outside and can be quite firm, but inside, it's dry, discolored, even crumbly.  And I just got one of those.  Worse ones are soft and you can weed 'em out when shopping, but the occasional fooler gets through and then you lose the turnip lottery.

      Oh, well -- apple and carrot, celery and onion, potatoes and mushrooms and tomato sauce will just have to do with today's pork roast.  And a turnip next time.

Can, Worms, Some Assembly Required

      I keep seeing memes, comments and articles on the general theme of "The Framers and the first Congress never meant for the Second Amendment to apply to anything like an AR-15!"

      Like it or not -- and that's a whole other issue for debate -- the Second Amendment specifically describes "the people" "keeping and bearing arms" -- that'd be citizens owning and carrying guns, and presumably edged weapons as well, etc. -- along with the need for a "militia," i.e., a citizen army.  So at the very least, the people who wrote and approved the Second Amendment were quite comfortable with the idea of anyone who might be up for militia service (essentially the prospective voter pool at that time) owning and carrying military-grade weapons.

      Flintlock muskets and rifles might look quaint to us now, but they fire large, deadly bullets and were relatively fast for an experienced user to aim, fire and reload.  In a world where wind and water power were the biggest prime movers, and horses, mules and donkeys the only portable source of power besides humans and the occasional dog, they were astoundingly powerful and capable of causing great harm.

      I'm not telling you that you have to believe civilian firearm ownership is a good thing.  I'm certainly not claiming an AR-15 or similar rifle isn't a deadly instrument -- but so is any other rifle.  Center-fire rifle cartridges all have the capacity to do immense harm to people and the 5.56×45mm or similar .223 Remington cartridge a standard AR-15 fires is very far from the most powerful or largest caliber.  It's smaller than most hunting rounds.  But hunting-type rifles don't look as scary, are rarely marketed as super-manly guns for super-manly men and they aren't decried as horrors suitable only for mass killing.  The twisted losers who commit mass murders have TV sets and computers too, and they're going to gravitate to whatever they're told is the most awful of the awful.

      All firearms are dangerous.  Modern firearms are indeed more dangerous than older ones -- but the old ones were not safe or friendly.  A modern automobile is dangerous, too, but a horse or wagon can kill or terribly injure a pedestrian.  And while the 18th Century had plenty of house fires, they had zero domestic electrocutions or gas explosions.  We live in a dangerous world.  We always have and our fellow humans constitute one of the greatest dangers.

      "Original intent" or "historical context" might not be ideal yardsticks of legislative or Constitutional meaning, but they're what the present Supreme Court is using and they're logically justifiable, even when they lead to outcomes we may personally dislike.  You're not obliged to approve of the Court's decisions, but when you argue against them you must still use logic and reason.  Describing some or all of the Justices as terrible people who make terrible decisions does not contribute to the debate, no matter how heartfelt your opinion or even how accurate history may hold your evaluation.

Wait, There's A Real Blackadder?

      Fans of the Rowan Atkinson historical comedy Blackadder may be disconcerted -- or pleased -- to learn that there was a real Blackadder family, with a complicated, tragic history.  And a large estate, centered on Blackadder House along the Blackadder Water in Scotland, demolished after having been vandalized by troops quartered there during World War One.  Some of the outbuildings and traces of the garden remain, along with a few bridges.

      I happened across it by accident; I was looking up the history of polio epidemics, which led me to Sir Walter Scott.  He grew up at Sandyknowes, in the shadow of Smailholm Tower, the former family castle.  This linked to a whole list of Scottish castles, and thus to Blackadder House.

      I'm almost afraid to look up "Baldrick" as a family name now.  Art, life....

Politically Homeless

      For years, I disliked both big parties in American politics:  One was the party with plenty of room in their big tent for forthright loons, people who wanted to levitate the Pentagon for world peace, heal deep societal divisions through song, and had grand plans to fix the worst ills of modern life around the globe using my tax money, absolutely sure they'd be welcomed with open arms wherever they went.  Their top figures were firmly rooted in the New Deal and kept trying to come up with a Newer Deal.  The other party had a little room for people who were convinced rock music was just the most visible part of a huge communist plot and nobody deserved equal rights, but they kept 'em on a tight reign.  They took a hawkish, realistic view of foreign policy and they at least talked about fiscal responsibility and keeping taxes low.  They seemed like a party for adults -- a little dull, a little behind the times, but adults.

      Decades passed.  Government spending never went down.  My taxes never went down.  No matter how much free ice cream (etc.) the country handed out at home and abroad, some citizens still got a raw deal and some foreigners never seemed to love us; and no matter how many of them the government shot at, they never knuckled under, either.

      Still, for most of my life, one of the big parties spent a little less (or at least claimed to), taxed a little less and their dumbest initiatives were easier to get around.  When I bothered to vote, I usually didn't feel too bad about voting for their candidates if my usual third-party outsiders hadn't been able to drum up someone willing to lose nobly.  When I didn't vote, I didn't worry much; I could count on both big parties to argue one another to a virtual standstill, raise my taxes a bit and become part of the normal background noise.

      That changed.  The low-taxes hawks started to get a lot more receptive to their nuttier fellow-travelers; the flower power party grew up and started burning a little less incense and doing a little more math.

      At present, the old "adult party" has seated an outright con artist in Congress; they've got failed candidates claiming to be the rightful victors despite recounts and investigations proving otherwise and one of their losers appears to have been involved in drive-by shootings at the homes of his local election board.  It's not a good look.

      Most of my old third-party outsiders have gone clean over the edge.  It wasn't a big trip for them but it's disappointing.

      And I'm still not a fan of patchouli and wishful thinking.

      What happened to all the grown-ups?

      I go into elections these days with a carefully triangulated list of who to vote against.  I haven't found anyone to vote for in years.