Progress

     I'm probably done editing the short story that was recently accepted for an anthology.  The editors were kind to it, except for one change that was -- how shall I put it? -- based on a misunderstanding of Indiana law.

     We straightened it out without friction, which is a great relief.  I sent in the author bio and some background material and that's that. 

Year After Year

     Birthdays hit me hard.  They have done so for years.  I had one not too long ago and I'm in a funk I can't shake.

     Economic and political uncertainty has bollixed my retirement plans.  Better now than once I'm out the door, but I'm not happy about it.  I had started some non-work involvements, on the idea that while I was a little overstressed now, things would ease up when I had fewer responsibilities.

     That day will probably never come.  As things stand, I'm very likely going to have to keep working as long as I can work, at a job that is considerably less fun than it once was; I'm just one of a dwindling number of good gray techies in a vast corporation, doing whatever good (or bad; the corporation doesn't care) gray work comes along.

     So I need to think about cutting excess, probably starting with writing fiction and being in writer's clubs.  The writing is fun, but unless you're Stephen King or one of a very few others, it doesn't pay.  The clubs are stressful for me, but are a partial substitute for the companionship my work no longer provides.  Thing is, I don't actually need it, and the kind of friends you have to pay money to hang around with are not, in fact, actual friends.  They're just fellow customers.

     This mood will probably pass, but the feeling of being about to go over Niagara Falls in a woefully underequipped barrel will not.  I'm starting to see what Twain and Mencken were getting at.

The Former Voice Of What Still Calls Itself America Is Winding Down

     If you were a radio-minded kid in the 1970s -- and I certainly was -- the shortwave presence of the Voice of America was impossible to miss.  Impartial but patriotic, the government-run (but largely independent) international broadcaster was a massive operation and you could scarcely spin the dial without tuning across their powerful signals on multiple frequencies.

     The VOA newsroom was first-rate.  They tended to report positive stories, without shying away from uncomfortable truths.  VOA reporters were respected throughout the free world, feared and hated by autocrats.

     In recent years, shortwave broadcasting has scaled back nearly everywhere, and VOA was no exception, transitioning to Internet delivery and, in countries where it was permitted, local FM stations.  The Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station in North Carolina was the last transmitter site VOA owned and operated. It was shut down this past March and the nature of big shortwave transmitters is such that if they are sitting cold, all the way off, it will be a major effort to ever make the site operational again.

     There are still plenty of shortwave transmitting installations around the world, and many of them are for hire; the loss of transmitter sites is hardly the end.  The heart of the Voice of America is their newsroom, which has been laboring under budget cuts.  The most recent were the most drastic; some 700 employees remain on the payroll and they are now waiting for the ax to fall.

     US Agency for Global Media (the Federal agency that oversees VOA) Special Advisor Kari Lake -- yes, that Kari Lake -- has floated plans to source news from the right-wing One America News Network for distribution through VOA's online network.

     The damage being done to our country -- and our country's international influence -- is generational.  It will not be repaired quickly, if it ever is.

     This is typical of the Trump administration; you can take the part for the whole, and be assured that as Trumpism runs its course, our country will be left impoverished, morally, culturally, intellectually and financially.  Many of the perpetrators will move on afterward, untouched and wealthy almost beyond measure, leaving a corporal's guard of saps and patsys to take the blame.  Kari Lake will probably be among them, but she is much more symptom than cause.

Three Branches

     Oh, that James Madison, how he did worry about the ways in which a government could get out of control:
     "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
     You'll find that gem in The Federalist Papers No. 47, in which Madison fisks theories of democratic government as put into practice in some detail, with particular attention to the separation of powers.

     The History Channel has a quicker read on the subject, with only a little handwavium.

     Either way, it's worth a review, especially against the backdrop of a President who claimed to West Point's graduating class, "We won everything.  [...]*  We had a great mandate and it gives us the right to do what we wanna do to make our country great again."

     Presidents do not, in fact, have the right to whatever they want to do, no matter their motive; the powers of the President of the United States, like the powers of our national legislature and of our Federal courts, are circumscribed by our Constitution and each is balanced against the powers of the other two branches.  That's how it works.  Those are the rules, and if you kick over the table, what you are left with is not the United States as created by the American Revolution and codified by our Constitution, but some other thing, an illegitimate and malformed accumulation of powers, "the very definition of tyranny."
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* I left something out: he said, "We won 2,750 districts against 505, 2,750 against 505."  It's a number from thin air.  That's not how Presidential election results are tallied.  Yes, he won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, but this number is neither of them, and the total does not square with the number of counties and their equivalent in the U.S.

About Those Tariffs...

     The U.S. Court of International Trade is saying "Whoa, Nellie!" to nearly all of President Trump's Executive impositions of tariffs; the trade court says that power is not actually within any President's remit, at least not under the present circumstances.  (Presidents do still get to impose tariffs on imported cars, steel and aluminum, thanks to a different piece of legislation.)

     It's a safe bet the decision will be appealed, and I'm not sure where it goes from here, Federal Appeals Court or right to the U. S. Supreme Court, but it will go, and so the matter is still far from resolved. (Update: it goes to an appeals court, barring a request to skip steps.)

     I didn't see this one coming.  Like perhaps many of you, I didn't even know we had a Court of International Trade.  But the plaintiffs knew it was there.  It was their ox being gored, and that's how it works: you files your lawsuit and you takes your chances.  I'm not entirely satisfied with AP story I linked to; it's a little shallow.  But it has links to more info, and you don't have to register or pay to read it.

     Note, too, the the White House has hinted it might be spoiling for a showdown with the Judicial Branch.  This ruling by an obscure court on a matter that has been in the news for weeks might fill the bill.  In that case, all bets are off.

They Blew Up Another One

     SpaceX has a lousy record so far with their Starship rockets.  They keep blowing up.  They do appear to be blowing up in a different way each time, so that's something.

     On social media, it's easy to find people fretting over the damage these huge machines must be causing every time they fail, and wondering who is footing the bill for that harm.  The answer isn't simple, but it breaks down into two parts:
     1. Launch damage: This is the most predictable (assuming the rocket doesn't blow up on the pad or shortly after launch) and does a lot of harm -- especially the first launch, done before the water-deluge system had been installed, a self-own by Mr. Musk that remains largely inexplicable and which rained chunks of concrete and more across the launch area.  Payment was mostly via Federal fines and "on lawsuit" for everyone, at least until Elon Musk buddied up with the present boss of the FAA, EPA and other alphabet agencies; now, well, good luck in court.
     2. Re-entry damage: once again, payment on lawsuit, though in what court?  The good news is that there's very little in the way of exotic materials in those rockets, other than carbon-fiber wrappings around high-pressure tanks. It's mostly stainless steel, oxygen and methane, and the primary danger is if big pieces fall on persons or property.  SpaceX is a little more careful about launch and flight trajectories than the People's Republic of China, who let expended boosters and expired satellites fall where they may, and the American company's LOX and methane is considerably more safe than the damn near nerve gas of UMDH and nitrogen tetroxide the PRC uses.  Nevertheless, pieces fall unpredictably when rockets fail and it's difficult to shrug off as the price of progress if you happen to be underneath them.

     These big rockets are not quite Cyril Kornbluth's The Rocket of 1955, and I find myself less and less of a fan of Mr. Musk based on his abrasive personality and extreme politics, but they are fundamentally different to the Saturn series of boosters they superficially resemble: NASA put men on the Moon by hand-tightening every mine-to-installation-tracked bolt with teams of engineers and scientists checking each step, and then triple-checking the checks.  Dogged by the tragedy of "Apollo 1," well aware that failure could hand Moon-race victory to the Soviet Union, no expense was spared -- and they still nearly lost Apollo 13 after a string of successes.  Compared to every element of a Saturn, the Starship is a passenger car -- or a commercial airliner: built on assembly line, in volume, and intended to be a "big, dumb booster" supporting a high launch rate.  It's a giveaway calendar* with 4-color process decorative scenes for every month, up against NASA's old hand-painted masterpieces -- and SpaceX is essentially the model for every other company making launchers in the U. S., including NASA's current subcontractors.  Nobody can afford the kind of painstaking effort that went into the first series of Moon rockets; it's unsustainable.

     Starships are going to keep on blowing up until they get them right or Elon Musk and his investors run out of money, politics and personalities bedamned.

     Update: On the other hand, maybe Starship is The Rocket of 1955, only scaled for maximum return.  I don't have enough design development background to evaluate this article, but it doesn't look great.  Infuriating if true.  There was supposed to be a Lunar base by now, something on the order of an Antarctic research station and instead, what have we got?  Plagiarism robots that tell lies and make bad art?  Pfui! 
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* Who remembers those?

It's Memorial Day

     It's a day to remember fallen military personnel.  Many of them -- not all of them -- young, most of them -- not all of them -- male.

     War falls hardest on the most vulnerable.  We think of women, children and the elderly, but so, too are the "tip of the spear," the ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen sent or swept into battle.  Presidents and Generals make their plans far removed from the fighting (and for good reason).  Those who fight and those who die are nearly always from the lower ranks, the bulk of them not career military; the man next door, the kid from across the street.  They may not have a deep grasp of the issues at hand in the conflict, and even if they did, nobody's asking their opinion.  They served.  They fought.  Some of them didn't come back.

     Don't forget them.  Don't lose sight of the ideals they fought and died for.  They could have been you, your father, your brother, your child.

I Don't Want To Do That Again

     The plan was simple: get up an hour early, head downtown to work early, snag one of the "privacy rooms" on the second floor (rarely in use on a weekend) and use Guest Wi-Fi to do my critique group meeting (this is allowed) before clocking in.

     Because of the parade, I needed to come in from the west and talk my way past a police barricade to get into the parking lot, same as every parade day.  Thanks to the sprawling Methodist/IU hospital complex, the interstate and the river, there aren't a lot of southbound options west of Meridian Street -- Capitol Avenue is the only one that really works.

     I was running late. Capital was unexpectedly closed north of 16th St.  I weaved around, got into a construction dead end and had to double back to Capitol.  The police car near work was unoccupied, and I sneaked past it, into the parking lot, gathered my stuff, hurried upstairs and set up.  Comes nine o'clock and there's nobody.  Uh-oh.

     Opened my personal email to find several notes from group members asking after the meeting link.  I had carefully scheduled the virtual meeting and saved the invitation in a text file, a week ago Wednesday, then sent out a group message with the deadline for manuscripts.

     Unfortunately, I had failed to include the saved invitation with that message and never checked the copy I send to myself specifically for making such checks.  I hurriedly sent the link out to everyone, and by 9:10, everyone had checked in.  But it made for a poor start and I was pretty rattled.  I managed to get through the meeting; it ran late, but I still had plenty of time before work.  I packed my stuff up, went downstairs and looked over the position where I thought I'd be working.

     There was no information about the task at hand.  Nothing in my work email.  I checked the setup for some other things -- all lined up, ready to go -- and sat there, wondering, until the phone rang.  My boss.

     "Um, boss, what exactly am I supposed to be doing?  There's nothing here."
     "Oh, right.  We're running it all from [a different area, with different hardware].  You'll need to get over there and I'll call you." (The same phone number rings at both locations.)

     I double-timed over and still didn't beat the next call.  He gave me a quick talk-though while I grabbed a notebook and wrote frantically.  I was basically a human "break glass in emergency:" if the connection failed, I was there to switch to a backup, using an unfamiliar interface.  There were a few other things to check and monitor, but that was the main job; the rest of it was run at the point of origin or by remote control from far away.

     Traffic was still heavy when the event wrapped up several hours latter.  I killed time until driving was easier, then went home and promptly fell asleep.

     Last year, this was almost as much a challenge.  Next year, I'm either rescheduling the critique group or having someone else chair the May meeting.

"It Only Gets Worse If You Pick At It"

     I don't know if the title statement is true when it comes to politics, but yesterday's news was depressing overall, with further government strongarming of universities; the United States Supreme Court strongly implying the independence of some Federal agencies explicitly set up by Congress as independent agencies might not, in fact, be all that free from Executive Branch meddling; Congress set to cut food assistance for poor families, Medicaid and Medicare; juvenile taunts from the Secretary of Homeland Security on social media over a serious court case; the President lending a ready ear (and a lovely dinner) to billionaire top buyers of his personal memecoin; on and on and on....  I want to look away but it's too worrisome to ignore.

     Picking at it doesn't fix it quickly and it's not as if this stuff was not playing out in the headlines and on video almost everywhere you look.  I understand that a certain percentage of my nominal peers still think it's all hilarious.  President Lyndon Johnson explained to a young Bill Moyers, when the latter wondered why so many white Southerners were willing to vote against what Moyers thought were their own best interests, "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you."

     The key concept there is not so much race, though that's an easy handle for politicians to grab, but the last part: "Give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."  Undocumented migrants, protesting students (especially if they're here on a visa) LGBTQ people (particularly if they stand out) and anyone who can be portrayed as a "DEI hire."*  All seen as lesser by many Trumpists in office and in voting booths.  All seen as people they can look down on, and there's nothing that makes a person feel tall like looking down.

     Eventually it comes home to roost.  Your unemployed cousin suddenly can't get food stamps, and shows up at your door with a new baby and three hungry toddlers.  Grandma's out-of-pocket costs for medical treatment go way up.  The Executive Branch pulls out the wrong Jenga piece and the economy takes a big tumble.  And maybe a significant number of voters will reappraise their choices when that happens.  On the other hand, maybe they'll decide all the things that have been happening simply haven't been enough, and doing more of the same, harder, is the cure.

     Picking at it won't make it better, but it's already certain to leave a scar.
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* I take that one personally.  I had a boss -- not the one who hired me and certainly not my present boss -- who loved implying the only reason I had my job was to improve the Engineering department's demographics on EEO reports.  In fact, I had been hired --- and they were glad to get me -- because the station couldn't keep its main transmitter on the air for more than week at a stretch and the 1950s backup transmitter was inoperable.  It had been a long, difficult slog of years of repairs and learning to get them to where the main was reliable and the all-tubes backup did, at least, work, and I damned well resented a man who hadn't even worked for the station at the time claiming I was only there because I had tits.  I still resent it.

Nope, Nope, Nope

     Looks like another thumb-headed goon is up for promotion; there's word that Trumpist hatchetman Emil Bove is being considered for appointment to Judgeship in a Federal Appeals Court.  He may be best known for stepping up to push through the deal with NYC Mayor Eric Adams that resulted in about a dozen DOJ lawyers connected to the case resigning over ethics concerns.  Most of the lawyers who bailed rather than playing along were old-school GOP conservatives, too.

     If there was ever a time for a home-state Senator to exercise the privilege of nixing a judicial nominee, this would be it.  This man should not be a Federal judge.

No Kings, No Masters

     I haven't written much about politics recently and it's not because I think it doesn't matter.  Politics can shove a stick in your spokes like nothing short of war or famine.  From your neighborhood association through the Feds, There Be Dragons.

     But the political dichotomy is a deep and possibly unbridgeable partisan divide.  You either think the President and his Administration are wise patriots out to save the country, or you think they're a pack of flakes, fools and crooks with authoritarian and often theocratic inclinations.  Whatever your opinion, it is deeply felt, and there's no reasoning a person out of an emotional conviction.

     Me, I'm skeptical of concentrations of power, no matter who holds it.  I'm skeptical of allowing narrowly-defined religious dogma to determine laws for civil society -- or allowing any other dogma to make the rules.  Government is a big tent; to work for all of us, it's got to have a lot of extra room and a certain degree of stretch.  An unpublished comment pointed to my quoting "What all men own, no man owns" as "the reason why communism doesn't work," but that's only a theoretical reason: that kind of communal-property communism has never been practiced past the scale of a self-selected commune, a few hundred people at most, chipping the good dinnerware, abusing tools and leaving the toilet unscrubbed.  At the nation-state level, communism fails because it gives individual men too much power and too little accountability -- Mao and Stalin might not have lived like kings, but they could wave their arm and set sweeping agricultural policy or put vast industrial efforts in motion; hunger and privation for ordinary folk usually followed.  The difference between them and Louis XVI or George III is little more than details of vocabulary, wardrobe and furniture.

     And the difference between that and the Wilsonian "Unitary Executive" our President and his people are implementing is only a little greater, especially as more and more of the Federal government is shoved willy-nilly under the unitary umbrella or smashed into irrelevance.   The non-department tagged "DOGE" has attempted to push its way into the Government Accountability Office, which is under the Legislative Branch, not the Executive; DOGE also tried to embed a team at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, established by Congress decades ago as an independent corporation outside of government control (including DOGE) -- Congress was wary of even the appearance of setting up a state-run broadcaster in the manner of some kingdom or "dictatorship of the proletariat."  Other Executive tentacles are still reaching out, seeking, grasping.

     No kings, please.  Not even kings in a plain uniform or a business suit.  We haven't needed one in nearly 250 years and we don't need one now.

Schedule Conflict

     Found out yesterday that I am scheduled to work Saturday morning, a shift starting about a half-hour after the online meeting of the critique group I chair ends.

     This wouldn't be much of a problem on a regular day -- but where I'll be working is inside the perimeter for the Indianapolis 500 Festival Parade!*  My employer's building is right there on Meridian St. and you have to sweet-talk your way past the police to traverse a closed side street in order to reach the parking lot.  Traffic is busy and I'd never get there in time.

     The answer, of course, is to go in early, having begged permission from the boss to borrow one of the "quiet rooms" set up for the open-office folks on the second floor.  This should get me past the officer on roadblock duty before he or she has quite reached the boiling point of frustration and might even provide a head start on a busy workday.

     Of course, I'll probably have to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get ready for work, make coffee, gather everything for the meeting, pack my lunch, etc. but I knew it would be extra effort when I volunteered.  Ah, the glamor of showbiz!  The glamor of the literary life!
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* It is one of the largest holiday parades in the U.S., after the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, CA.  Those two are huge and the numbers fall off rapidly for the remainder, but it's not small.