Can't Even? Not Even!

     It's exhausting, but the unceasing churn of the news cycle bears watching, mostly to see who they're after now.  It's basically a Junior High School slumber party, with AP presently on the outs and the mean girl who's playing hostess talking smack about 'em, but there are whole cliques of insiders, outsiders, wannabees and news orgs trying to get their hair and outfit to match the prevailing style, and it's all--

     Bullshit.  It's all bullshit.  I want the President -- any President -- and Congress -- all of 'em -- to be covered by the widest possible variety of news outfits, from toadies to skeptics, from liberals to conservatives, from budget hawks and war hawks to pacifists and save-everybody socialists.  I want 'em singing praises and digging through trash to find evidence of malfeasance, I want 'em doing deep-dive backgrounders, chirpy puff pieces and viewing with alarm.  I want all of it -- because I am paying for that damn fed.gov, I am subject to its benefits and laws, and when they get hinky, I am sure to be screwed over.

     I don't think the White House ought to be picking and choosing exactly who gets to sit in on their news conferences and events, and who gets left out.  Limited number of seats available, okay, got it -- but the Press has done an okay job of sorting that out among themselves, and the pols and their flacks could then seek out special pals and sneer at best enemies among those ranks, just as they have always done.

     No matter who is in power or what party they belong to, they should be under a microscope, warts and all.  Especially the warts.  --And we need all of the Press there, not just to watch the gummint but to be watching one another.

     Evil fears the light.  So does incompetence.

Forget It

     I admit it: I have lost all hope for the immediate future.  Things will continue to get worse, not better, and the most we can hope for is a valiant rearguard action against a rising tide of not just authoritarianism, but ignorant, meme-level authoritarianism.

     The future is here and it is staggeringly stupid.

     At 66, I may not live to see the end of it, especially if the current Administration crashes the economy or stumbles into a world war.  Even if all they manage to do is hose Social Security, Medicare and ACA-driven insurance markets, they'll do me real harm.

     This is not to say our Federal bureaucracy is a model of perfection; it's messy.  It's slow.  It is undoubtedly wasteful -- but you don't fix that with a handful of 20-something software engineers and deep, uninformed cuts.

     Every government that has prided itself on "efficiency" has been heedless of human cost, indifferent to human suffering, injurious to individual freedom and dignity.  The Trump Administration's unwarranted vandalism to USAID has already cost lives and will cost many more.  They're dinking with the military, with the VA, with Education, and they're lurching towards a Constitutional crisis with the potential to do immense harm.

     And some of you are still cheering for this.

     Me, I'm resigned to hanging on with no prospect of a better life and scant odds it will stay even as good as it is.

     You wanted King Stork.  Well, you got him.

Reading For Our Times

     While many people have read and enjoyed the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, his "Space Travel Trilogy" is less well known.

     The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is, at first sight, a straightforward space adventure of its day: our hero stumbles into a secretive mission departing for the planet Mars and is abducted.  Arriving at Mars, he and his captors are separated, have various adventures and are reunited.  --But all is not as it seems.  Like the Narnia books, there is considerable Christian allegory at work.  It's entertaining fiction, and is probably the most widely read book of the trilogy.

     The next two are...different.  Perelandra is a fairly overt struggle between Good and Evil, in which Lewis treats in some detail the banality and pettiness of evil.  I was reminded of it when I read Adam Serwer's 2018 essay "The Cruelty is the Point" in The Atlantic.  While C. S. Lewis devotes considerably more wordage to the topic and addresses it within an explicitly Christian context, the parallels are indeed striking. Professor Weston, the villain of both Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, has many counterparts in current politics, willing and even eager to commit cruelties both great and small, allegedly for the greater good but in fact, largely for their own sake, artifacts of a corroded soul.

     The third book, That Hideous Strength, is a cautionary tale and one the years have brought into ever sharper outline.  Combining elements of Arthurian legend with the mythos established by the preceding two books, it investigates both the risks of reducing of the human experience to a series of algorithms and the perils of AI simulating human behavior.  You do not need to share the religious spin Lewis gives these themes to follow along -- and the entire story is set within the exciting tales of a young academic who is drawn into and the ultimately rejects the machinations of the antagonists.  I won't spoil the story with too many details, but it's well worth the read, full of tension and excitement.

     Lewis saw trends well in advance of his time.  He filtered his impressions through his own education and religious beliefs, but his unwavering belief in the value of the dignity of the human soul shines through his work in a way impossible to ignore.

     Those three books offer a perspective sorely lacking at present.

"Run The Government Like A Business"

     I have worked for small to medium-sized companies all my life, with a short stint at a big multinational decades ago.

     The medium and smaller outfits are often bought and sold, at which point you get a new set of managers, new procedures, new policies and new goals.  Sometimes it goes smoothly, especially if the place was making money before the sale.  More often, it was a mess; either there was a long, slow march though the departments, the heads being inexorably replaced one by one, no matter how hard they tried to adapt -- or the new owners would sweep everyone away as quickly as possible.  The new acquisition would often be used as a kind of "lab," where new ideas would be tried, and quite often a new boss brought along all his old friends and family members.  (One of the most duplicitous bosses I worked for was famous company-wide not for skill, but for marrying the daughter of a majority stockholder.)

     You didn't always end up with the best and the brightest.  What you got was the best-connected.

     Governments are not companies.  They've generally got hedges against cronyism and sudden changes, which help to protect citizens (and markets!) against uncertainty and the whims of new elected officials -- and their pals and relations.  They have Constitutions, laws, court decisions and customs, a framework that members of the government abide by, a kind of contract with the people.  They have competitive examinations for civil service jobs.

     The United States appear to have elected a government that wants to break the contract.  It has handed over the keys to the President's buddies,  people who were not elected, not officially appointed and not confirmed by Congress and they are moving fast and breaking things with little regard for the human cost.

     They say they want to slash the Federal workforce.  But they're trying to chase away the people who process tax refunds and Social Security payments, veterans benefits and disaster relief.  Is that what you voted for?  Is this an experiment you want to be subjected to?

Played, Part 1

     The makers of China's Deep Seek AI announced Monday they got the AI up and running for six million dollars -- pocket change in the AI world.  U.S. AI firms spend that much just furnishing their boardrooms, espresso machines and all.

     Stock markets plunged, especially AI-related stocks.  Chip-maker Nvidia, whose top-of-the-line chips were unavailable to Deep Seek, was hit especially hard: if you can run top-end AI on much cheaper second-tier processors, why would you ever pay top dollar?

     Two facts emerged:
     First, Deep Seek was a subsidiary not of some high-tech development company but a hedge fund.
     Second, and much later, they might have been a teensy bit wrong about the price tag.  It wasn't $6,000,000.00  It was at least $1,300.000,000.00 -- over 200 times as much.  It's like ordering a fancy $5.00 cup of coffee and finding out the real cost is $1,000.00: they lied

     Hedge funds are very, very smart about investing and financial markets.  From Wikipedia: "A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that holds liquid assets and that makes use of complex trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and insulate returns from market risk. Among these portfolio techniques are short selling [...].

     Short selling?  Ahem, Wikipedia again: "In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the market value of the asset falls."

     It doesn't require a genius-level investor to know that a drastically cheaper AI using drastically cheaper hardware would yank the rug out from under the big names in AI, some of whom are publicly traded.  With a big pool of funds to take advantage of that knowledge, hey, presto, Chinese hedge fund makes a nice tidy sum, Chinese government gets a week of financial instability in U.S. (and other Western-aligned) markets.

     We got played.

     And meanwhile, the giant, energy-sucking plagiarism machines still don't have a sustainable use case other than listening in on your Zoom conference and writing a more-or-less accurate summary of it.  You could hire a professional administrative assistant to do that without needing to boil Niagara Falls to power her, and she'd probably even make coffee, too, if you asked nicely.

     But you do you.  Just try to not do in everything and everyone else in the process, maybe?

The Next Four Years

     I'm going to do blog posts on things that catch my eye, and not follow all the various helmet-fire freakouts or unseemly celebrations.  These are going to be contentious times, as anyone who remembers the years between November 2016 and the Spring of 2020 could predict.  People will get burnt out on politics, and I don't intend to be one of 'em.

     Individuals will be physically hurt as politics play out in the real world and the only advice I have to offer is to try to zig when the bad stuff zags.  Protests and rallies carry a small risk if you're going with the flow, but the various kinds and intensities of riot absolutely do not care what your politics are or if you and all your friends think you are a good person: get in the way and you will come to harm.  Understand both the odds and the stakes.  Don't go doing stupid things in stupid places with stupid people.

     Mind the trolling and poking.  As the Cynic philosopher warned, "Boys throw stones at frogs in jest, but the frogs die in earnest."  And remember that while gentle persuasion sometimes works, screaming at people will never change their minds.  It just encourages them to yell back.  After a while, everyone is yelling and nothing gets done.

The Retcon Brigade

     I'm still getting a few comments from people who claim the events at the U. S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021 could not possibly have been an attempted coup or insurrection because "they had no weapons."

     This assertion is risible.  January 6 rioters using clubs (both actual club-type clubs and stout posts from protest signs) and pepper spray can be seen in video of the day, along with improvised weapons that include police helmets and shields and sections of barricade fencing.  A number of rioters were credibly charged with bringing firearms onto Capitol grounds, and reported non-gun weapons included bats, crutches, flagpoles, skateboards and fire extinguishers.

     Aside from all that, a force of roughly 10,000 people is a weapon in and of itself.  At least 2000 made it inside the building, significantly outnumbering law enforcement.  Around 150 of the defenders were injured; I guess you could go argue the semantics of riot vs. insurrection vs. attempted coup with them, but your prospects will not be improved by claiming it was a "day of love" or a "peaceful protest."

     We came very close to losing elected officials to mob violence that day; pretending otherwise is like a cat trying to cover up a mess on a bare tile floor.

     I do not and will not whitewash political violence by any individual or group.  I try to sort out plain old regular protest, as American as apple pie, from "direct action" violence or riots, and from looting.  They're different things.  An enraged, shouting crowd -- like the people listening to then-President Trump and others earlier on January 6 who did not proceed to storm the Capitol, or a pissed-off BLM gathering marching up Meridian Street here in Indianapolis -- is not the same as rioters trashing government offices; nor is either of those two the same as opportunistic looters emptying a store amidst political unrest.  Conflating them is sloppy thinking; pretending the ones whose notions you more-or-less agree with are ever-pure blameless angels and those whose opinion you dislike are entirely malign destroyers is disingenuous doublethink.  Actions matter more than intentions or what banner the perpetrators wave.

     I am sick and tired of smarmy partisan bullshit.  I'm not going to publish it in comments and I'm not going to pretend it has any intellectual standing.  Straining at gnats and swallowing camels whole isn't a good habit to take up, even when a lot of the other kids are doing it.

Skipped A Day

     I skipped posting yesterday.  The attempt to get across the scale of the mess in Los Angeles is depressing.  And people who think the dueling boasts and threats of politicians somehow outweigh FEMA's guidelines and limits for aid annoy me beyond measure.

     Nothing stops fires pushed down dry mountains and hills by winds in excess of sixty miles an hour.  Nothing much prevents them starting; southern California is a tinderbox in the dry season and LA county is vast, a megacity bigger than Delaware or Rhode Island, containing more people than the individual populations of all but ten U. S. States.*  Sparks are inevitable.

     The people who lose their homes will get the same help as the people who lost their homes to natural disaster in the Southeast: FEMA covers their hotel bill or rental and a few other things.  The Federal agency doesn't play favors because it cannot; it's not a rich man's whim or a politician's pork handout but a fairly hidebound Federal agency, one in which (for example) it took a determined band of worried bureaucrats over a decade to make minor reforms in the way the national-level EAS system functions.  Congress can (and may) come up with extra funding; the Executive Branch can tinker a little with what goes where, but the stuff that makes an actual difference to J. Average Citizen is cut and dried, and involves filling out forms.

     Anyone claiming the LA Fire Chief is a "DEI hire" can go look up her record, including written and physical tests.  She's been fighting fires for a long, long time, mostly in jobs where the inability to fight fires or to lead groups doing the work would result in termination for cause.  If you're still worried about some chick running a 3000-plus person fire department, step up and shake hands with Anthony C. Marrone, Fire Chief of the 3000-plus member LA County Fire Department, working side-by-side with the city (and every helper they can get from within the U.S., Mexico and Canada).  There is no shortage of competent bosses, and the only limitation on front-line firefighters is logistics.

     It's a fire (well, several fires).  Just like storms, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, it hasn't got any politics, and no decent person checks the party membership of the victims before deciding if they'll help.
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* How does Greater LA compare to Indianapolis/Marion County?  The population density is about the same, between 2400 and 2500 people per square mile -- but the 400 square miles of Indianapolis is a tenth of LA County's 4000 square miles.  We lose some land area to lakes and rivers; LA loses a lot more to slopes too steep to build on.

Oh, That Reasoned Debate!

     I can, in fact, be convinced by logical argument supported by verifiable facts.  It's kind of a thing with me.

     On the other hand, if your idea of refutation is this comment: "Damn you're stupid" then all you have done is show me you're a member of the might-makes-right team, nothing more than a brute authoritarian, and you have neither facts nor logic on your side.  Sorry, ol' jackboot, but being quoted to mock is as close to published as your comment will get.

     Another would-be commenter linked to an oily article arguing that tired old trope, that the January 6, 2021 riot (and behind-the-scenes Administration machinations) couldn't possibly have been an insurrection because it was a grabastic soup sandwich, and because the action at the Capitol was not one hundred percent violent chaos.  Nope, sorry, won't wash.  The plotters were pretty clearly counting on Vice-President Pence playing along, at which point the riot would have been mostly window-dressing.  Muddled lines of command, control and communication are an excellent route to plausible deniability.  But a few periods of relative calm in some areas of the Capitol do not negate the violence of the break-in, nor the internal hammering-down of doors and windows, assaults on persons and facilities, vandalism and theft committed in the course of that day.  Smug commentators in comfortable offices can smirk and retcon all they like, but it doesn't change the events recorded on video that day, many of which I watched in real time.

     Trump supporters and fellow travelers would not be trying to rewrite history so desperately hard if they were not embarrassed by their side's actions on that day.  It's hard to claim you Back the Blue when your side is beating up cops, isn't it?

     So go on, keep up the name-calling, keep up the handwaving bullshit.  It doesn't change what actually happened.  It doesn't change what Team Trump tried to do.  And it doesn't change what you are: thugs.  Thugs without respect for democracy, decency or the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights.  From the crowned heads of 18th-Century Europe to the Know-Nothings, from the Confederacy to the Klan to the fascist movements of Europe and their less-successful American counterparts, the Trumpian Right is part of a terrible tradition that believes power is its own justification and that some men are -- and should be -- more equal than others.  But that is a damnable lie; it is and has always been a self-evident truth that all men are created equal.  All of 'em.  Even women.  Even people who are darker than you are, who are poorer than you are, who don't follow the same religion, even the ones who don't share your political opinions.

     This country is headed down a bad path for the next four years.  I expect a reaction at the midterms.  I have no idea what to expect in the intervening two years, but when I look back at Mr. Trump's first term and hear his wild talk now, I can see it won't be anything good.  Oh, and if you were expecting eggs to get cheaper?  Don't bet on it.

Fracture Lines

     Who would have thought the techbros and the populists would split over H-1B visas?

     One of the worst downsides to "move fast and break things" culture is that it often breaks people; as soon as computer software (and, earlier, hardware) moved from labor-of-love people who slept under their desks* to a profit-making venture, hard-crunch work with long days and no time off was more rule than exception.  It was expected.  At the best employers, it came with perks: outstanding and well-stocked break rooms, comfy "decompression areas," a tolerance for eccentricity that went way, way out.  But it does break people, and one of the reasons for the proliferation of tech firms in early/middle computers and software was people just getting up and leaving, to-hell-with-this-I'll-work-at-my-own-pace.  You can see it now in commercial rocketry/space exploration: the big core firms emit a constant churn of engineers, scientists, technicians and managers who have been ridden too hard for too long and bail out, taking their overlooked or lost in the scrimmage ideas with them.

     And to support that kind of turnover, you need a constant influx of talented, educated people willing -- happy! -- to work twenty-hour days and sleep under their desks.  Not all of them are from here, and it could be that a cozy sleeping bag under a desk looks better from Tashkent, Nairobi or Mumbai than it does from MIT.

     So the techbros are all about the H-1B visa and how it allows them "to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability." (Hint: they're probably not hiring fashion models.)  The populists, on the other hand, are not so happy about the folks from faraway places with strange accents, unfamiliar religions, unexpected complexions and unusual foods.  Besides, they themselves could have been rocket engineers or code hackers (et geeky cetera), if only it wasn't for the long hours, tricky mathematics and need to hyperfocus; it isn't fair!  --Their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers stuffed the first generation of NASA nerds and card-tricking IBM-machine hackers into lockers, and gave suspicious looks to the likes of Feynman and Oppenheimer ("not our sort," you know), but never mind all that.

     There's big mad from the populists and snotty condescension from the techbros, while the nerds doing the actual work keep on doing the actual work.  They'd get a lot more done if their bosses weren't assholes and the locals didn't keep treating them like nerds.  I know what they'll do: sleep under their desks and put in long hours, doing the work; some of them will bail out, by and by, and hang up their own shingle, and some of them will be the basis for the next generation of people who get things done, probably becoming asshole bosses in the process.  I have no idea what the various factions and personalities of MAGAworld will do next, but I fully intend to pop myself some popcorn while I watch.
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* I use "sleep under their desk" as shorthand for the kind of ludicrous devotion to the task at hand that goes way beyond any paycheck: you're doing it because you love it, you love the process and you want to see how it turns out.  BTDT, and the thing is, the task does not love you back, your boss has no real grasp of the nature of your devotion and finds it weird, and once it's done, it's not yours.  You've spent months or years at it and now it's someone else's; you have nothing to fall back on while you look for the next thing.

Touched By Time

     There was a visitor to Roseholme Cottage yesterday, someone I had not seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic, the man I refer to here as the Data Viking.  We went to High School together.

     For years, he has lived in the far north of Indiana, driving down to Indianapolis to visit and go to the big gun shows.  Most of that went by the wayside while everything was screwed up.  We kept in touch via e-mail and I was looking forward to resuming our old routine.

     It's not going to happen.  A month and a half ago, his e-mails stopped arriving.  I've been increasingly busy at work and assumed he was, too.  Instead, he had an adverse health event that necessitated an abrupt retirement and relocation halfway across the country to live near his adult son.  He's in generally good health but his vision was affected.

     Three weeks ago, I got a short, "Call me at..." e-mail from him with an unfamiliar area code and thought, "Uh-oh, my old friend's e-mail has been hacked."  I called anyway, using my employer's firewalled, computer-based phone system: they've got super-duper antivirus, after all.  But it was indeed my old friend, who explained his changed circumstances.

     A death in his ex-wife's family brought him back through Indy with his son over this weekend, and they had a few hours to spare, so he arranged to be dropped off and we spent several hours getting caught up.

     It may be the last time I see my friend.  We'll stay in touch by telephone, though neither of us is much for long phone calls.

     For my generation, there is considerably more sand in the bottom of hourglass than in the top.  There is a lot I still want to do, and no better time than the present to start doing it.

Third Time Winner

     I still think the process would go better if the light, heat, air-conditioning and water shut off in the Capitol and all the House and Senate office buildings any time the lack of a budget resulted in a fed.gov shutdown.  It would give Congress a positive incentive.

     Nevertheless, they did manage to cobble together a continuing resolution that keeps things running, while including almost none of the sparkly stuff Representatives, Senators and President-elect Trump wanted.  What was left out included plenty of items that will be fodder for opionators on both sides of the aisle, from children's cancer research funding to scrapping the debt limit.  The process exposed fracture lines in the GOP coalition, and they can be sure their pals across the aisle were taking notes.  Nevertheless, the CR received commanding majorities in both House (366 - 34 - 1, with all 34 noes from the Republicans) and Senate (85 - 11).  With 15 Republicans and 14 Democrats out in the House, Jasmine Crockett of Texas voted "present" and balanced the scales.  Likewise, the four missing or not-voting Senators were split.  The absent wouldn't have tipped the vote anyway.

     It's a hell of a way to run a railroad, but the feather-ruffling is at least evenly distributed, and they can all scamper off to holiday celebrations, secure in the knowledge that they managed to kick the can far enough down the road that the incoming Congress won't have to take it up again until springtime, at which point it will once again be a sudden and wholly unanticipated emergency, because Congress has the memory of a goldfish when it comes to the fiddlin' details of paying the piper, and they think you do, too.

Dog Catches Car

     Dog catches car, realizes he cannot drive: I don't admire Speaker Mike Johnson; he's got a tendency to smirk when he's putting the screws to political opponents that grates on me.  But I'm feeling sincerely sorry for him this morning: he put together a continuing resolution that would keep the lights on in Washington, one that didn't entirely suit him but that he -- and, he thought, his party -- could accept, and one that could even bring a few Democrats on board in the House and get through the Senate.  And then President-elect Trump and his new advisor Elon Musk pulled the rug out from under it.  Ouch!

     It's happened before -- remember the compromise deal on border issues Mr. Trump had them pull the plug on after it was all but done?  Mike Johnson soldiers on.  This time he set to work and turned out a new, slimmed-down continuing resolution he thought could still get enough votes while not displeasing the incoming administration.

     The new, slimmer CR tanked.  174 for, 235 against, 1 abstention, 5 empty seats -- and another 20 out sick, playing hooky or too hung over to show up.  38 Republicans joined 197 Democrats in voting no, in a chamber where the majority party can't give up five votes if the opposition isn't going along.  The reasons for the noes varied, but it doesn't matter: this continuing resolution is a goner and Mike Johnson has got to relight his candle and sit back down at his desk next to Bob Cratchit to put together another try.

     You can work out who's playing Scrooge yourself.  It looks like Social Security and Medicare will keep sending out checks, but if you're in the process of signing up for benefits (etc.), that could be delayed.  Air traffic controllers (and other government workers) won't get paychecks, but they're still supposed to show up for work (Uncle Sam typically makes it good later, but how would it work out for you if several paychecks in a row were held up?  Same for them).  Often the fun stuff gets shuttered -- national parks and monuments.  And, for some reason, nutritional aid programs, food for mothers with babies, has about a month to run before the larder becomes empty once the Federal government shuts down.  I guess it's real hard to hear hungry babies in the House and Senate offices, and unlike retirees, they don't vote, call or write letters.

     This was just a stopgap to keep the lights on.  Come the next Congress, the GOP's House majority will be even smaller; they'll have the Senate by a margin almost as precarious as the present Democrat (plus Independent) majority.  If they're still stuck trying to pass a continuing resolution, it's not going to be any easier.  Mr. Trump thinks he's got a mandate, winning the popular vote by less than two percent.  You can argue that one out with him, bringing in the Electoral Collage (or not) as suits you, but nobody got a mandate in Congress; they're going to have to find compromises if they want to do anything at all.

     Hey, you know who else doesn't get paid when the Feds shut down?  The Feds who work the border!  You'd think that would matter to the party that has put such an emphasis on border security.  I guess not.

Normalizing The Abnormal

     FBI Director -- and, incidentally, Republican -- Christopher Wray says he's resigning for the very best reasons:  "I've decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down. My goal is to keep the focus on our mission [...]."

     I'm calling BS.  President-elect Donald Trump wants his extreme loyalist Kash Patel running the FBI and Wray is ducking out before he gets splattered with the weirdness.  A lot of others in the Federal government are doing the same.  Maybe they're hoping to be around to pick up the pieces after it all goes smash; maybe they just don't want to get any of it on them.  Possibly they're hoping it's only four years, the norms and guardrails will hold, and afterward, things will go on much as they have.

     Hey, could be.  I'd be delighted if that was the outcome.  I'd even be happy if the incoming Trump administration wrought their promised land of milk and honey, though my happiness will be greatly tempered if they implement their more Draconian proposals in the doing.

     But neither one of those is the cautious bet.  Maybe trying to sit it out is workable, if you have money in the bank and a place in the country, but for us more or less average types, it's a scary ride.  I'm coming up on retirement, and while I never expected it to be a mainstay, I've counted on receiving a steady pittance from Social Security when the time comes -- a pittance the GOP wants to take an axe to, and even if they don't, their tax reductions for the hyper-rich will inevitably result in benefit reductions for Social Security recipients a few years later.  It's baked right into the law.  Oops.

     It's one thing to stick good Party members in key roles -- of course incoming Presidents do that, and there's a certain amount of quid-pro-quo for some of the sinecures.  But most of the appointees are competent, even if you or I or the person across the aisle doesn't think much of their politics, and the rest know when to shut up and let their staff do the work.  That's not the vibe I'm getting from Mr. Trump's choices; they're a grab-bag of partisan loudmouths, TV hosts, big donors, family members and hangers-on, largely without high-level experience (if any) in the divisions, departments, bureaus and embassies they're being installed to run.

     This is a recipe for chaos.  The only good side is that things are likely to be too fouled up for the new Administration to do as much deliberate harm as Mr. Trump and his sidemen have promised.  Unfortunately, the inadvertent harm will probably be at least as bad.

     I don't like making dire predictions; I'd rather wait and see, and call it out when the mess is obvious.  But a whole lot of people in a position to see further ahead are bailing out, and that's not a good sign.  Especially if you haven't got a parachute.

"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.

He's Doing It Again

     In a recent TV interview, his first since winning election to the Presidency, Donald Trump opined that the members of the House January 6 Committee ought to be in jail for "what they did."  When pressed, he accused them of destroying evidence.

     That would indeed be awful and potentially unlawful behavior -- if they had done so.  In fact, they did not.  You can go browse most it for yourself.

     Some things are under review and may be redacted -- in addition to the public spaces, the U. S. Capitol building is a warren of back corridors, unobvious private offices, hidey-holes, connecting tunnels and so on, including the places where members of Congress and staffers took refuge on January 6, 2021.  There are obvious security concerns with publishing specific data.  Many people still don't realize how close we came to having a Congressperson, staff member or even the Vice President beaten up or strung up that day, but there's nothing to be gained and much to be lost by providing a map for the next attempt.

     Pardoning the rioters is undeniably one of the powers of the office of the President.  I think it would be regrettable, but it wouldn't be illegal.  Going after then-members of the U. S. House of Representatives for doing something well within the powers and purview of their branch of the Federal government is a very different matter.  You may find the J6 Committee infuriating, heroic or boring, but it wasn't illegal.  They didn't kick down any doors, break any windows or take a steaming dump on a House member's desk.  None of them assaulted Capitol police.  The J6 rioters did that, at the instigation, if not the direct behest, of Donald Trump, who was at the time President of the United States of America.

     Pretending otherwise is a fool's game.

One Down, 87 To Go

     It depends on how you count them, but there were almost 90 autocratic governments on Earth yesterday, and today there's one less: Assad isn't running Syria any more.  (Present whereabouts unknown; a plane carrying him may have gone down, and no one is looking very hard.  Update: The Russians say he's been granted asylum in Moscow.  He was their boy in the Middle East for a long time, so it's not unlikely. )

     What comes next?  It's hard to say.  What newscasts are calling "Syrian rebels" is a a polyglot bunch, and the largest bloc, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has palled around with both the "Islamic State" and al-Qaida in the past.  They haven't run with either since 2016; guessing if that was a matter of wanting less crazy or more is an exercise for pundits and intel professionals.  Junior partner is the Syrian National Army, a collection of at least twenty-eight groups;* some sources say at least twenty-one of them have received U. S. assistance in the past, against IS and related threats, but we've been known to hand out goodies to almost anyone who'd smile and promise to fight Communists, Islamic extremists and the like.†  Some of SNA's roots go back to the "Free Syrian Army," and Turkey has been one of their main sources of support, despite the occasional armed squabble.

     You can tie yourself up in knots trying to sort all this out, and by the time you have, the situation will have changed.  None of them liked Assad, or the way he was running the country, and it appears that became a strong enough motivation that they were able to work together.

     It's an open question if they'll be able to continue working together, but we can at least hope.  If you're expecting the Syrian James Madison will come running down from the hinterlands, waving a draft Constitution well-suited to the people of that nation, don't hold your breath.  They might -- and it would be good news if they can -- manage to cobble something together that will hold long enough to make serious inroads against the starvation and misery that part of the world has become famous for.

     It says something about our species that the very cradle of human civilization has become a nightmare of failed states and warlordism, with refugees as the prime regional export.  It says something about us, and it's nothing pleasant.
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* At this point, the better-informed might be wondering, "What of the Kurds?"  They're wondering that, too.  They appear to have very little presence in the SNA.  Kurds are about ten percent of Syrian population and are likely to get what they usually get: short shrift.  The French, the British, the various Allied and UN powers, the local potentates and so on all overlooked them when they drew lines on maps, and it's one more smoldering problem in a place that has an oversupply of tragedies.
 
† And that's nothing new -- go read some early 19th-Century Letters of Marque issued by Congress for examples. A proxy war is a cheap war for everyone except the proxies.

So, About These Picks...?

     Is it just me, or is the incoming Administration largely a government of drunken (etc.) frat boys?  The Press keeps telling me they're "loyalists," or "Trump conservatives," but the real unifying factor appears to be a willingness to drink heavily, and to disregard social norms as applied to themselves while being harsh enforcers of conventionality for everyone around them (at least until they make unwanted advances on women, at which point all notions of modesty and fidelity cease to apply).

     This is a crew that gives every sign of believing Eddie Haskell was the real hero of Leave It To Beaver.

     Look, you may find elitist technocrats and nose-in-the-air PolySci wonks offputting, but a large proportion of them are earnest strivers, who put in a full day's work, a little overtime and keep thinking about the job on their commute home and all through dinner.  They're morally consistent.  When your staff has to carry your inebriated self back to your hotel room, fending off your pawing hands all the way, you're probably not Cabinet material -- in fact, you're probably not Assistant Manager at the corner store material.

     I guess we'll find out how things work with leering, "beer o'clock," C students at the helm.  P. J. O'Rourke tried to warn us.

Politicommentary

     You probably think I have something trenchant and/or pithy to say about Mr. Trump's picks or Mr. Biden's pardons, but here's the thing: it's all sideshow.

     These things don't have anything to do with the day to day running of the country right now, and even the parts that could affect it in the future are only possibilities.  I could probably start a nice helmet fire about all or part of it, but what good would that do?

     Time enough for the Senate to show me how they're going to react.  Time enough to find out who's going to pardon whom and how that's going to work out.

     Right now, the House needs to start looking under the Federal sofa cushions for spare change before the current piggy bank goes dry.  They've got to get it done before Christmas, or they're going to be sending out cards to their constituents in the dark.  I'm pretty sure the Pentagon has a back-up plan before they have to start working by candlelight, and I'm hoping the over-the-horizon radars and earth stations for the DOD spy satellites have all got fat UPSs on standby.  But you'd never know to watch the news: it's all clowns and animal acts.

We Invented Our Way Out Of It

     Humans are clever primates.  Faced with a problem, we invent our way out.  As hunter-gatherers, we lived in small bands, with everyone a general specialist.  When we learned more things, we started figuring out some people were better at chipping flint, others at hunting, collecting edible plants, building shelter, cooking or guarding our homes through the long night.

     We befriended dogs and they befriended us.  We invented cities and agriculture not quite side-by side: many hands make light work.  Cats showed up, hunting the mice in our granaries.  We learned to preserve leather, spin thread, to knit and weave.  We developed pottery.  We started working metal: copper for tools and utensils, humble and dangerous lead, rare silver and gold,* useful bronze, brass and iron.

     And we learned about plumbing and sewers -- not once, but over and over again.  We learned about illness and epidemics, too: a bug that would wipe out a mostly-isolated hunter-gatherer band and stop, stymied by a lack of hosts, could smolder and flare in our cities, sweeping through like a wildfire.  We invented isolation, harsh and fairly effective.  We learned about cross-contamination the hard way (yet again!) and the lesson didn't stick.

     Eventually, we invented vaccines.  Vaccines are how you stuff a few hundred thousand, or a million, or millions of clever primates in a tight-packed city and avoid -- or at least control -- epidemics.  Ever since the first smallpox immunizations, some people have been skeptical.  It was gross, they cried; or it smacked of magic; or who knew what else might happen...?

     We know.  We've been running the experiment at scale, over and over, since the 19th Century.  We know what happens with communicable diseases we don't have vaccines for (epidemics), we know what happens when a sizeable segment of the population doesn't get vaccinated (outbreaks), we know the side-effects of vaccines, and they are evaluated and re-evaluated for safety and effectiveness.  Don't take my word for it, and don't follow internet memes and rumors, either -- you can go look this stuff up on Wikipedia, in the abstracts (summaries) of articles in reputable scientific journals or full articles in mass-market science magazines.  This is not a matter of debate except out at the weirdo fringe: vaccines work.  They're safe.

     Putting a "vaccine skeptic" in charge of this country's Federal health infrastructure is insane.
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* Speaking of humble and dangerous, and of gold: the ancient Egyptians apparently worked out the use of mercury and fire in refining gold, a job with such grave consequences for the people doing it that it was usually assigned to slaves taken in war.  "Mad as a hatter" (also the result of working with mercury) had nothing on an Egyptian gold-smelter.  Eventually we invented our way around that, too.