Of (prime) ministers and moggies

After completely misjudging the whole Brexit thing last month and resigning as prime minister, David Cameron found himself having to move out of the official residence at 10 Downing Street sooner than he’d expected. That’s because the process of choosing his successor went a lot faster than anticipated—like a couple of weeks instead of a couple of months. Britain gets only the second female prime minister of its history.

Cameron left Number Ten yesterday after tendering his resignation to the Queen, who thereupon “invited” Theresa May to form a government.

(Can I just ask: this photo was taken in Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s home; why is she carrying a handbag? Why am I the only person asking this?)

May moved in and immediately started making very interesting cabinet appointments, including Boris Johnson as foreign secretary. BoJo was one of the leaders of the drive to exit the EU, and May’s putting him in charge of foreign policy. He can’t even manage his own hair.

She’s also proclaimed her intention to fight for those I imagine she thinks of as “the little people” (and I don’t mean the leipreachán). Looking with a studiously sincere face into news cameras she declared, “The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you. When it comes to taxes we’ll prioritize not the wealthy but you.”

First of all, coming from the ex-Home Secretary who gutted the UK’s first responder infrastructure and who has repeatedly voted in Parliament to favor corporate interests, this represents quite the turnabout in her philosophy. Second, when she talks about giving people “more control” over their lives, I’m thinking that means “we’re cutting social services even more than we’ve done in recent years, so you’re on your own, losers.”

And as for turning a deaf ear to the mighty, and not prioritizing the interests of the wealthy when it comes to taxes—pull the other one, Terri, it’s got bells on.

Well, May’s the second female prime minister in British history and she’s a Tory. She’s got to prove herself tougher than Margaret Thatcher; there’s no escaping it. She could have been Mother Teresa instead of Theresa May, and she’d still be measured against the Maggatolah.

Meanwhile, although she’s replaced Cameron’s team in the cabinet and cleared out his kids’ toys or whatever (he and his family, apparently are temporarily homeless, as their private house was leased in the expectation they’d be in official digs for a good while longer), May has to share 10 Downing Street with the resident feline.

Larry the Cat was brought in from a shelter five years ago because there was a four-legged vermin problem at Number Ten. While it turns out that Larry isn’t much of a mouser—but has a bit of a rep for mixing it up with various other political cats and police dogs—he does go a long way towards making the human occupants look more, well, human.

(Tweeted officially by Cameron. Honestly.)

However, like Thatcher, May does not strike me as the sort of woman who intends to share the stage with any creature capable of grabbing the spotlight, including cute kitties. I think the RSPCA should keep eyes on Larry, and if he doesn’t show up every couple of days, they should check the back garden for newly turned-over patches of dirt.

And I'm starting a new Twitter trend: #PrayForLarry.

Good guys?

I confess that I’ve tried to avoid much of the reportage about the major gun deaths last week. By “major”, I’m referring to the events in Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Minn., and Dallas; not the however-many other murders, suicides and deaths by misadventure in which firearms were involved during that period.

And by “avoided”, I mean I tried to limit my consumption to one time around for each substantial development, instead of getting it over and over again from different outlets.

But this report, via the New York Times, got my attention. Because, as I understand it, when the shooting started last Thursday night in Dallas, the police were initially trying to sort out who was actually firing from among the score or so of idiots at the march who were carrying assault rifles.

No, I swear I am not making this up. Twenty or 30 Texans showed up at the protest march with AR-15s slung over their shoulders and, according to Dallas police chief David O. Brown, “They were wearing gas masks. They were wearing bulletproof vests and camo fatigues, for effect, for whatever reason.” Because it’s legal to do this in Texas.

But—and this is the part that just…well, I don’t know what it does, but here: when the shooting started, these Kevlar-clad, gas-masked warriors-in-their-own-minds...they ran. They hightailed it into the crowd, and the cops had to work out on the fly who was actually killing people and who was just figuratively engaged in willie waving .

I don’t have a take on whether having to sort out the genuine trigger-squeezing rifleman from the poseurs delayed locating the shooter, or whether one or more of the deaths can be chalked up to this confusion. But I would like to know, in light of the NRA’s standard argument that the solution to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns, why they’re not explaining what the actual fuck happened here.

Because their poster boys for good guys with assault rifles (and Kevlar, cammies and gas masks) did not stand and shoot back when the bad guy opened up, they ran. 

They ran. 

They ran.

So tell me again, NRA: how is this good-guys-with-guns thing supposed to work?

Last chance

This email appeared in my queue last week. You may not find it as amusing as I do, but here are the parts that are interesting to me.

I cancelled my sustaining membership payments in December on account of moving out of KQED’s catchment area. I was a supporter of KQED-FM, but I’m sure it went into the whole NPR-PBS pot. In exchange for that recurring payment, I occasionally got email notifications of members-only activities (like a party for Downton Abbey, which you’d have to pay me to attend), but mostly it was other invitations to contribute more than I already was.

Anyhow, it’s interesting to me that it took Marianne six months to realize she was missing my contribution. The regretful suspension of my “benefits” is a nice touch, but they were more features more than benefits in my case. I admire her restraint inasmuch as this was the first and (so she promises) the last reminder, but, no, I am not still enjoying KQED TV and radio shows.

However, the one element that prompted me to save the email and write about it was the Unsubscribe link at the bottom. If Marianne and KQED truly meant it when she said this is my final reminder, I shouldn’t have to unsubscribe from their emails, should I?

Gratitude Monday: Reborn beauty

Last week was a slice. From the appalling events in Baton Rouge, suburban Minneapolis and Dallas; and in Dhaka and Baghdad and I don’t know where-all; to crushing crowds on Metro, five days of 90-degree temperature plus 90%-humidity and a directive to cough up out of nothing an event sometime in the next four months that will give the prospective customers not what they need, but what we have (and, BTW, the research we have done indicates that we can’t make our costs back on such an event, much less build a substantial, sustainable revenue stream)—because the CEO has a flea in his ear…

Well, basically from the macro to the micro, I’ve been looking around this weekend wondering what, exactly, the point of pretty much everything is. I feel like the widening gyre has me in a permanent state of vertigo—never exactly sure whether I’m putting my foot onto solid ground, if such a thing as solid ground exists any more.

Yeah, that’s it—it’s like that moment in an earthquake where you sense the concrete pavement beneath you has turned liquid, and you hold your breath waiting for it to stop and re-solidify.

Only these days, I’m not sure there’s an end in sight to the shock waves.

And that can make it hard to latch onto a focus for gratitude. But when you’re completely worn out, that’s when you really need that focus the most.

So, as I was vacuuming the living room yesterday (it doesn’t get as dusty as my place in the Valley They Call Silicon, but it needs a good sweep at least once a week—and that’s with all the windows and doors closed), I seized upon one of the Christmas packages my friend gave me the weekend before. (Long story, but I’m inclined to let Christmas and birthdays be somewhat fluid in my celebrations.)

I knew I was in for something good when I pulled off the wrapping and saw the Appalachian Spring box, and then I opened it and found this beautiful Fire and Light bowl.

(Fire and Light products are made entirely from recycled glass; crushed, molten and hand-pressed into beautiful dishes, vases, glasses and other things.)

My friend has a tradition of giving me a F&L wine glass from Appalachian Spring for Christmas. Whenever I move, I hold one of them out for my last drink in my old place, then I hand-carry it with me to have my first drink at my new place. Bellevue (twice), Seattle, San José, Sunnyvale, DC and NoVa. (So far.) Doesn’t matter what the contents are, just that I’m using one of the glasses.

I also get finger monsters. (One of them hid out in my handbag when I interviewed for my present job.)

So, okay—today I’m grateful that, no matter how utterly ghastly a particular day is on any level, I can come into my flat, close away the outside world, and have something beautiful in front of me to focus on—once discarded, crushed, molten and reforged as something beautiful.

I’m also grateful for a friend who opened this world of beauty to me.

Both of these will help me as I start work this week on carrying out the directive to put on an event that no one but the CEO thinks is a good idea.

Nordic raids

I caught a kind of a range war on Twitter as it was whizzing past my feed, when one of the people I follow volunteered to be part of a Viking sperm bank. Ish.

So I clicked on the conversation and discovered a war of wits between Sweden and Denmark, with both combatants equally well armed.

You might have thought that the official Twitter accounts of two upright and responsible modern nations would limit themselves to touting tourism and engaging in the occasional damage control for pols going off the rails.

But take a look at Sweden’s account:

You know something’s up.

(Well, I do wonder how the moose masters a keyboard with hoofs, especially if it’s using a smartphone. But perhaps it just dictates its bons mots? After all, Bronx Zoo's Cobra manages pretty well without any appendages at all.)

At any rate, here are a couple of my favorite points in the exchange:

And the one that brought in the berserker I follow:

I definitely have to go to these countries. As long as they don’t make me eat lutefisk.

Riding the rails

The Metrorail system in the DC area is undergoing a year’s worth of repairs to its infrastructure, which they call SafeTrack. (On account of they’re hoping to get the tracks in good enough condition that they stop setting trains on fire and killing passengers.) This involves periodic cutting or choking of services along different lines, which they are unaccountably referring to as “surge” times. And no matter where, exactly, the break or single-tracking actually occurs, there’s a knock-on effect throughout the system.

The past two weeks there was no service between Eastern Market and Minnesota Avenue in the District, a stretch of track shared by three lines, Orange, Silver and Blue. Metro management therefore decided that they would only run Blue Line trains between Alexandria and Arlington National Cemetery, not into the District. That meant that the only rail option for residents of Alexandria and South Arlington was the Yellow Line. And Metro increased neither the number of trains they ran nor the number of cars per train, because: Metro.

(It also meant that if you wanted to get to Arlington National Cemetery, normally accomplished fairly easily on the BL, you had a rather convoluted journey. Unless you were coming from Alexandria or South Arlington, whatever line you started on you had to transfer to a YL train, get off at Pentagon, then get on a BL train and go one stop more.)

The surge this week involves complete closure of YL and BL service between Braddock Road in Alexandria and National Airport. (And next week they’ll shut down the lines between National Airport and Pentagon City.) Metro purports to have free shuttle buses taking passengers across that gap, but let me just suggest the image to you of a Chinese fire drill.

Once again, they are not running trains more frequently; they’ve just begged people to find alternatives to riding Metro. And the commute home yesterday was quite the slice. L’Enfant Plaza, the last transfer point in the District for Virginia-bound YL trains, looked a little like a war zone; apparently an earlier train had broken down, with the predictable knock-on chaos and sense of despair. This isn’t actual footage of the station, but it could be:

And you know it’s bad when your train driver gets on the PA system to tell the passengers, “Yes, things aren’t working as well as people thought they would. Yesterday I was driving a train that broke down, too.”

Possibly UNLAWFUL

Considering the commoditization of professional work in technical fields, with geography-challenged recruiters scurrying about in a numbers chase to fill positions in tech giants regardless of the requirements of the hiring company and the qualifications of the candidates (their one standard for success is filling the highest number of positions at the lowest possible hourly rate—to the worker), it should not surprise you that I’m still getting spam from bodyshops touting “great opportunity” for jobs I cannot do in parts of the country where I am not located.

What these emails very often lack (in addition to standard English usage) is—as per the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003—is a clearly-visible means of getting off their spam list. These guys are strictly playing a numbers game; they must think that—regardless of how often they send completely irrelevant “opportunities” to a candidate—sooner or later something will stick. That would be all they care about.

It’s like people who use dynamite to catch fish.

You come to expect that from the approximately 173,466 IT-recruitment companies in South Asia, but it’s very interesting when you get that from a company in the low three-digits of the Fortune 500 ranking. Viz.:

You’ll notice all the legal strictures on the victim to the effect that if you’re not the party to whom they are speaking, you must delete it from your email, shred any hard copy and erase your brain. Taking any other course is STRICTLY PROHIBITED and may even be UNLAWFUL.

No mention whatsoever of a way to unsubscribe from their PRIVILEGED, CONFIDENTIAL, possibly COPYRIGHTED and definitely UNWANTED email list. And I’ve consequently received many such solicitations from them.

Let me reiterate, this isn’t some Bangalore bodyshop, it’s a division of a company that claims $19 billion in 2015 global revenues and touts its position on the Ethisphere Institute’s “prestigious list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies”.

Apparently one of the world’s most ethical companies doesn’t give a toss about obeying Federal law.

Old Outlook

As I’ve mentioned before, I am not enchanted by Windows 10, or its Office365 iteration. I disliked it when I first experienced it and it has not improved in the intervening months.

One of its more annoying proclivities is forcibly pushing you into “optimizing” your experience—for example, every time I go to save a file it defaults to Microsoft’s cloud storage site, OneDrive. And for all it attempts to appear to have the coolness of a web app, it never freaking learns that I’m never going to save to OneDrive.

There’s also the “because we’re Microsoft” approach to mandatory updates, along with the periodic reboot of your PC. I really do not like software that makes the user continually adapt to it instead of the other way around.

As for the updates, here’s their idea of something worth calling your attention to when the machine reboots and you reopen the software:

I’d so much prefer to have an interface that clearly distinguishes email threads than a calendar in Persian.

Gratitude Monday: The air of independence

In this exceptionally ugly and moronic presidential election year, I feel like a fish out of water. Not in the sense of a cute plot device for a movie starring Tom Hanks, but in the sense that I am up to my gills in the toxic output of candidates and their followers all up and down the food chain, and I’m gasping for some air that’s actually capable of getting oxygen to my blood. So let’s focus on something good about America.

Know what I love about Independence Day?

Well, naturally I love revisiting the Declaration of Independence, that exquisitely beautiful document that sets out the legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England. I’ve written about this before, and it never grows stale.

And I love the notion of the Founding Fathers weighing all their options and agreeing that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Well, damn—can’t see that happening in any political body around the world today. Can you? Certainly the onliest pledges our pols care about are the campaign contribution variety. And they no more possess honor of any stripe than they possess the ability to squirt cider out of their ears.

And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally imagine is an oxymoron of the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.

And beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might take.

(Yes, a lot of stuff has been happening in the past decade, in all three of the branches of government. And the evil that men do does indeed live after their terms in office or on the bench. But I have to believe that this is more of a cha-cha than a straightforward and inexorable march in any direction. Those Founding Fathers, man—they had soul.)

But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final surrender.

It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals or the corporations; those were the days, huh?) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.

Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the ground and work with it. July 4^th was, as they say, close enough for government work.

And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.

The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can.

And I’m grateful that we’ve made it this far, despite all the missteps along the way.

High-water mark of the Confederacy

The first day of the Somme, bloodiest day in British military history, commenced a mere 53 years after another watershed battle, the bloodiest in the history of the United States. July seems to attract cataclysms.

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee was taking the war into the North. Up until June of that year, nothing significant had happened in the East above the Mason-Dixon line. Lee wanted to change that for a number of reasons.

For one, all the slogging around Virginia was wreaking havoc on vital agriculture. He hoped that a swoop through Pennsylvania might give the Old Dominion a rest. At the same time, in the time-honored custom of armies everywhere, he expected to pick up a few things to keep the Army of Northern Virginia going. (There was a shoe factory in nearby Chambersburg, for example.)

Finally, he hoped to convince Northern pols that fighting to keep the South in the union wasn’t an economically or politically viable proposition. Invading Harrisburg or even Philadelphia would give a lot of people pause to think.

And from his experiences with the Army of the Potomac and its various commanders, he reckoned he had a reasonable chance of making that happen.

Well, except he was operating under a couple of handicaps: his most gifted general, Thomas J. Jackson (known as Stonewall from his performance at the first battle of Manassas), had died of wounds inflicted by his own troops at Chancellorsville in May. Lee had considered Jackson his right arm and it was a grievous loss.

The second drawback was that his cavalry commander, J.E.B. Stuart (James Ewell Brown, if you’re asking) had basically disappeared up his own behind. One of the main functions of cavalry was to gather intelligence about the enemy’s movements. After making big splashes in the Peninsula and Maryland campaigns of 1862 by dashing around the Army of the Potomac, he separated his unit from Lee’s main force in late June, leaving Lee with no reliable data on the Army of the Potomac’s whereabouts.

Lee found them, under the command of George G. Meade (of whom it might be said that at least he wasn’t Joe Hooker. Or George B. McClellan. Or Ambrose Burnside), at Gettysburg, a small town with a theological seminary and interesting topography, on 1 July.

The two armies maneuvered some and fought for three days in July heat that you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. Thanks to the actions of cavalry Brigadier General John Buford at the first meeting, Union forces held the high ground, but it can’t have felt like much of an advantage to those who were there.

To a certain extent fighting blindly (Stuart showed up on 2 July, but didn’t have much in the way of intel to share), Lee issued uncharacteristically ambiguous orders to Lt. General James Longstreet on the 2^nd, and then sent Maj. General George Pickett’s division up Cemetery Ridge on the 3^rd, resulting in utter carnage.

(In Ken Burns’ seminal documentary, The Civil War, historian Shelby Foote made a comment on Pickett’s charge that has stuck with me. It was something to the effect that, if he’d been a soldier given the order to cross that open space and run up the hill in the face of massed Yankee fire, he’d have said, “Lieutenant—I don’t think so.” That comment came back to me when I stood at Colleville-sur-Mer and looked down from the cliff onto Omaha Beach. I don’t know how either the Georgians or the GIs of the 29^th Infantry Division took those steps.)

After three days of this, the armies faced each other in heavy rain on the 4^th; then Lee withdrew. Meade did not pursue. The Union held the ground, but the Army of Northern Virginia (what was left of it) was able to return to Virginia and regroup.

Up until then, Lee had believed in the invincibility of his army—he’d asked it to do impossible things so many times, and it had. Not this time. At Gettysburg, he was heard to repeat, “It is all my fault.”

Combined with the surrender on 4 July of Vicksburg to U.S. Grant (breaking the lines of communication for the Confederacy in the West), Gettysburg basically was the point at which it became clear that the North was never going to quit, and the South was never going to win.

But the war would continue for another 22 months, with Grant taking command of the Army of the Potomac steadily grinding down Lee’s armies, and Sherman implementing the concept of total war through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Gettysburg was the tipping point, 153 years ago today.