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machination.org

DC

This says nothing about me (except to significantly explain my stint of SAHD duty in the latter case), but I am proud to know people directly involved in each of these efforts:

I don’t have to let go of my broader and deeper political critiques to appreciate some of this progress.

A lot of security in my neighborhood (or the adjacent one, anyway), including out of town police known for instigating violence with demonstrators, to protect a war criminal running out on a international warrant for his arrest.

Everyone else's ego running my world

I still cannot claim genuine and deep sports-ball fandom, but today was a day where I was glad to have a couple of sports to distract me for most of the day.

On very light reflection, I see the age-old (can it even be) irony in that I traded hating the decisions of couple of egocentric competitive madmen on the national and world stage for getting entertainment out of a particular one in a fast car and another couple-three that were on bikes.

War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young

We (the United States) have a war culture. We’ve been at war, one way or another, at substantial expense, my entire life, and longer, and most of the time, really. That, and my being politically aware and anti-war on most fronts (with a couple of exceptions that have their own equivocation) for 25 years (ugh), means this resonates with me: “War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young." Also, I used to work for IPA.

I’ve been knocked on my ass a bit this week, and it’d probably be better for my mental and physical health to not consume SOTU coverage, but, bless the anti-genocide demonstrators who seemed to force a motorcade detour on the way to the Capitol tonight. It barely counts as close, but this is the closest I’ve seen since demonstrators disrupted George W. Bush’s inaugural motorcade … a quarter century ago?

Dragging myself ... forward.

I was short with my father on the phone today. I couldn’t take his fatalist “it will get worse,” (and he’s a Trump voter) point of view. It may seem ironic to some who know me, because I also can say “It will get worse” — before it gets better. I think I am still not fatalistic, but my hoarder, prepper, some-kind-of-Republican father, who doesn’t even think Trump will fix things, is. It enrages me.

Then, I learn about five-year-olds telling aide workers they’d rather die and aide workers having to invent abbreviations like WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family), and active duty USAF airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolating outside the Israeli embassy, and general awareness of so much more horror in the world, in this country, in this city and just local dysfunction making itself manifest as personal injustices and barriers and becoming whatever excuses… and it overwhelms me. (I didn’t even get to crimes of ecocide and climate inaction.)

So I’m heartbroken, hoping, crushed, dragging myself forward, just trying to be a present father for my own pre-k son, saving my rage and despair for private moments.

Who are we?

A sigh of relief. I think I have a backlog of something on the order of 15,000 suspended sighs of relief—that is, breaths held—but I let that one rip. And gulped in a new one for the Supreme Court appeal to come.

First day of school blues

Today is the first day of school in Washington, D.C.

Every year this heralds a spike in traffic across our neighborhoods: School zones have an active impact on traffic flow again, more people walking and in crosswalks at intersections, parents who use cars to drop off kids and commute are suddenly out on the road at the same time, the few school buses D.C. uses for specific purposes are now on the road, etc. (I’ll save the digression on how the city’s public transportation doesn’t seem reliable for many or entirely safe for a lot of school students).

This is all as expected. It’d be great to get more of those cars off the road but in lieu of that…

How about not putting more road crews out this same morning? While the fairer months are the time for road improvements and projects that ultimately end with road repair, this actually seemed like an easily avoidable conflict for today.

I encountered more excavators, loaders, equipment trailers, traffic cones, closed-off streets and street sweepers this specific morning (not to mention, in our particular neighborhood it was also a trash collection day) than I have any morning in doing drop-offs and running errands all summer. As the “household majordomo” I’ve been making these runs frequently and with comparable timing — this was exceptional. It seemed as if all these crews were trying to get their summer homework done before homeroom after slacking off all summer.

The sudden burst in road work seemed to have a disproportionately powerful compounding effect and I think it would have made a notable positive difference (in chaos, safety, emissions, time saving) to pause or delay permits for all that activity by a day or two as the city settled back into its school year routine.

Or you know, make public transportation work (and in the long run, reduce how much that road work has to happen because of that too).

I couldn’t take much of the Republican debate (there was already bile pooling in my mouth just after it began) after I heard the sui-eco-cidal answers to the climate crisis question.

Dave and Art did enough damage.

…the least we can do is take their money and run. Or something.

Today was the first day in a while without structured plans and without starting out with a steaming hot morning en route to a 90F high, only to feel even hotter.

So my son and I got on the bike and went to our town’s free museums… yes, the Smithsonian Institution. We’re lucky to have this and I try to remember that and make use of them, for my own benefit, but especially for my toddler’s. That said, I glaze over portions I think I know sometimes… and sometimes I discover something that might’ve been on display for years because I was finally paying attention. Among the nuggets today was a little bit of locking on to a couple of the big donor names behind some of the exhibits, and the politics of those names still being on plaques or carved in stone, despite disgrace or challenging content.

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (my son calls it the “Dinosaur Museum,") and its Hall of Fossils doesn’t seem to shy away from Climate Change education. I say that because it is the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils and that pig fucker spent a lot more of his money to stop society from understanding and confronting the climate crisis. Either the Smithsonian didn’t agree to any dictates on the substance of exhibits (Koch’s name is also all over a massive human evolution exhibit which seems both accessible and solid, as far as I can tell), or they said “fuck you, Dave,” after he died. I assume the former.

Meanwhile, across the Mall, at the National Museum of Asian Art, once more prominently known as the Freer & Sackler Galleries they’ve changed the emphasis, but have apologized for having to technically keep the Sackler name on the gallery. Apparently, they’d have to give up a bunch of their stuff.

I don’t know the true how and why behind all this, but it sure seems that one museum was better at negotiating a donation and its conditions than the other.

Over at the American History Museum, in General Motors Hall of Transportation, also paid for by ExxonMobil, among others, the electric car does get a mention, as does Ralph Nader… but you kind of have to know the current state of the art and some of the history to appreciate the effort made to get that technology (and its long history!) and, separately, Ralph (a friend, a former boss), included in this exhibit.

Bad air

For the second day in a row, I am explaining to my 3-year-old why we’re not going to the playground. Hauling out the weather app, showing him the AQI map, and saying “Do you remember when you said the air was smoky? You were right - the air is bad right now.”

A photograph of the National Mall, facing West from Third Street NW. The Washington Monument, usually dominating this view is almost imperceptible in the haze.

He and his peers are not the first toddlers to have air pollution explained to them (or just have had to deal with it), in fact we have more than enough code orange days around here that systematically impact others more than us, but the intensity, range, and reason is still a shame.

If we were doing everything we could, it might get a little better later in his lifetime. Sure, it might be notably better tomorrow or Saturday but it’ll happen again and again….

Listening to behind-the-scenes tales of the incoming demise of the debt ceiling negotiations. Democrats playing to lose, as always. Doesn’t matter how bad it gets.

(Edited for clarity: what was intended was the demise of things in the course of debt ceiling negotiations. All lose, no win on the part of the Dems. The negotiations themselves continued and its participants wouldn’t recognize a demise.)

“Propellers are louder over ground.” This study seems to state the obvious, but I am sure I didn’t read the article closely enough to understand what was novel. That said, it also seems to be speaking to its relevance in a near future urban environment with more VTOL air taxis and ubiquitous drones. But I am going to imagine it bears directly on present-day Washington, D.C. which seems to be increasingly (over the past twenty years of living here in three of the four quadrants) plagued by helicopters, seemingly flying lower too. So much so that our non-voting Congresswoman has made repeat protest actions that in yet another way, mark the failure of the Congress to be a steward of the city. (There’s no change that bill will be acted on.)

Mike Gravel would’ve been 93 today. Before the ‘08 election he took me to lunch on the recommendation from Ralph Nader’s camp, hoping I’d join his campaign. I was flattered but passed. I don’t regret it, but even with how I saw things go, I think it was a bigger opportunity than I understood.