February 13

 Sunny today and the temperatures should be well over freezing. It is still cold enough overnight to leave frost on the roofs. Much of the snow pack on the parking slips is much reduced and I hope it will be gone by Monday when we have an appointment. For much of the last month the snow made it impossible for Mom to leave the house. She needs her walker but navigating through that mess was dangerous. Even a wheelchair, which she really doesn't need now, wouldn't have made any difference. Right now we are waiting for an Instacart order. It should arrive shortly.

In the interim I am going through my e-mail and listening/watching BBC. We have already seen the early news/commentary on a U.S. site. Evidently only two really significant stories were covered: the new announcement that the Minnesota ICE operation is over and its thugs will be withdrawn (according to Tom Homan), and no agreement has been reached on funding for Homeland Security so that part of the government will technically shut down. 

However, Homeland Security (and ICE) were given a massive infusion of cash in the last budget which made ICE the LARGEST "law enforcement" agency in the government--bigger than the FBI, SECRET SERVICE with other agencies thrown in combined. And Kristi Noem is sitting on billions of dollars that should have been distributed to various states as directed by the Congress.

Stray thought: listening to the news that the Administration has decided to reject the climate science that previous administrations used to control greenhouse gas emissions. As  you may know I have a magpie mind that skips from one thing to another and I thought of the law an early 20th century Indiana legislature passed to define the value of pi as 3. As most of us know the actual value is 3.14159+and unknown number of other digits. The law, even signed by the then governor, didn't make any difference in the mathematical fact or in the geometry math taught to students. Ignoring the science underlying the greenhouse effects won't change the facts.

While reading the segment on ICE leaving Minnesota (depends on how you define "leaving") I wondered where those 2300 ICE people (left in place after Homan "drew down" 700 thugs) would go. This article on CROOKS&LIARS draws on other news sources to detail leases ICE has signed for new concentration camps (I refuse to call them "detention centers which sound far more innocuous that the reality) sited near large cities. We have only heard about the areas where major local disapproval caused either ICE or local politicians to cancel the plans. Evidently others don't mind our incipient police state.

Another stray thought: I didn't see much of Pam Bondi's testimony before that Congressional Committee. What I did see reminded me of something I heard, maybe, forty years ago. Democrats believed government could work and tried to make it better (however you want to define "work" and "better") but Republicans don't think government can work and tried to limit it as much as possible (again depending on your definition of "work" and "limit"). Most of the problem with the definition of work is what you want to work toward, who you think should benefit from the work, and at what cost. Over the years the whole issue has become somewhat fuzzy for Democrats and the Republicans have been laser focused on, as one of their patron saints said, reducing the size of government to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. That says there is nothing positive that comes from government but that begs the question of "for whom." And it is increasingly clear that unless government actions is only valuable if it benefits the top 1% of the economic ladder. And benefit means increasing their wealth and influence.