Collusion

I'm about halfway through the book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, by Luke Harding. Along with events from the title, Harding presents a bio of Christopher Steele, the man who prepared the famous dossier. For me it's interesting to read that Steele's father had been a weather forecaster, and his grandfather a coal miner.
The book's sixth chapter is, among other things, about Paul Manafort's relationship with the Russian aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska. There is a quote from a Manafort email to an intermediary on July 7, 2016, in which the campaign manager offered to provide the aluminum oligarch with private briefings about the campaign. (The book expands on close ties to Putin.)
Whenever I have been hearing aluminum oligarch in connection with the ongoing investigations, I have been thinking about the Trump campaign appearance in Monessen, Pennsylvania, last year. Comedians at the time had fun with the bizarre scene of Trump standing amid bales of scrap aluminum prepared for recycling. A day after that event I commented in a post (mostly workplace memories from a long ago summer). Unsure if I remembered correctly the exact date, I later found an online news story, dateline MONESSEN (KDKA/AP). The Monessen speech was on Tuesday, June 28, 2016.
According to the news story, the appearance was a policy speech on free trade, where Trump outlined a seven-point plan to restore America's trade position. I don't recall or see in the news story any points of a plan, just the usual platitudes. In my earlier comment, I thought it odd to be celebrating bundling scrap for shipment to somewhere else. There were 200 invited guests according to the news story, with another 100 outside, half of them protesters (some of them from my hometown). The town of Monessen itself is not a Trump stronghold. In fact the mayor, who acknowledged inviting Trump to Monessen, was defeated for re-election this year.
There are so many odd things about that appearance in Monessen. It was as if the campaign manager's main objective was to have the candidate seen in a photo op with the bales of scrap aluminum. Perhaps that visual message was intended for a certain foreign country.

Candidates For 2nd Congressional District

Last Thursday evening Represent Me Arizona sponsored a forum for the five Democrats seeking to replace Martha McSally.

Seated left to right are Billy Kovacs, Mary S. Matiella, Matt Heinz, Ann Kirkpatrick and Bruce Wheeler. (Individual pictures/biographies/etc. are on the Represent Me Arizona website.)

I will be enthusiastically supporting whichever one of the five wins the primary. Each one brings special strengths to the fight. Hopefully the eventual winner will be able to channel the strengths of the other four, and the supporters of the other four will be able to quickly transfer their passions to the winner of the primary. Arizona's primary is late, the Tuesday before Labor Day, which makes Labor Day unity rallies critical. A clear front runner will probably emerge well before primary day (some might say that she already has). It will be essential for supporters of the other four not to feel like they have been railroaded. I believe that Represent Me Arizona will be adept in keeping everyone focused on the prize. For now, I really hope that all five primary candidates will have a good chance right up until the polls close on August 28.

If Martha McSally does decide to jump over to the senate primary race, going on a suicide mission to save the Republican party from its Kelli Ward nightmare, it will be because McSally decided that her CD2 re-election was already a lost cause.

Coding Can Be Fun Too

For almost 30 years, ever since Hypercard became available on the original Mac, I've relied on my own personal checkbook balancing program. Through the years, staying ahead of obsolesence, the little program eventually moved to an Xcode/Core Data/Objective-C version, and then recently it was upgraded to use Swift code.
Strictly speaking, the original was not my own program. Someone else had written a freely available Checking Hypercard Stack, and that stack ran inside the Hypercard shell. But you could tear apart a Hypercard stack to see how it worked, then put the pieces back together to suit your own desires and needs. It was fun to have complete control of the user interface.
My latest version is at github, in case anyone wants to tear it apart.

Monsoon Is Here; and Why It's Fun to Watch

Last evening around 6:30 I got several big drops with just a little thunder. A second round of storms mostly fizzled before 9 pm as it came across the mountains out of the northeast. Finally after 10 pm a light rain barely wetted the ground at my place. The 10:30 radar depicted that the second round had developed new convective life after it reached I-10; the brief stratiform rain at my place appeared to have built back from that slight rejuvenation. The same radar showed a few short lines persisting about 50 miles upstream. I went to bed. The third round came through about 1:30 am, preceded and followed by over an hour of loud thunder reverberating off the mountains and everything else. (Fortunately anguish about confident all over for tonight forecasts is well behind me, and it will be easy to fit in a nap today. The local media had mixed messages on their 10 pm newscasts, apparently depending on whether they had noticed the 9:55 pm NWS discussion.) It must have rained off and on for much of the rest of the night. I got 0.65 of an inch.
Ealier, between rounds one and two, at about 7:30 a radio alert announced that a severe warning had been issued for an area centered on the intersection of Alvernon-Drexel, 12 miles south-southeast of me. I went out to take a look, and spent several minutes jealously admiring a rain shaft intense enough to produce a bright rainbow even in the setting sun.

By the time I went inside to get my iphone, the rainbow had faded to what can be seen above. The Alvernon-Drexel intersection is to the right of the rainbow and about twice as far out. There was occasional-to-frequent lightning in that cloud to the right; none of my shots captured it.
A short time later overhead the setting sun was putting high contrast on mammatus under a mostly dissipated anvil.

Snowden Square Park

My old hometown has a new park, which includes an outdoor performance stage.

Students at Brownsville Area High School over the past six years spearheaded development of the park. The students' names are listed on a plaque to the right of the stage. The park is a very pleasant, level area to walk around, which may be part of the reason why the UPMC Health Plan is listed as a contributor. Among other contributors are the Heinz Endowments and the Benedum Foundation. (all the new Pittsburgh) At this location there did not appear to be anything going on when I visited recently; there were Pike Days activities that weekend at other, traditional venues in the area.
The buildings on the left are on the south (far) side of Bank Street, as is the tall building far behind the stage. As a kid, I thought that Bank Street had been named for Gallatin Bank, which had a cavernous lobby that spanned the ground floor of the tall building. Back then, from that intersection extending in all four directions the streets were lined continuously with buildings on both sides. So it was hard to appreciate what connection Bank Street had to Dunlap Creek. Now with an entire block cleared, it's easy to see from this perspective the original thinking of the town fathers on that side of the creek. They established Bank Street along the south (far) side of the creek, straight and perpendicular to the Monongahela River, but giving a wide berth to the low, flood-prone creek bottom land.
The near (north) side had been mostly bottom land, until a little over a hundred years ago. Then Mr. Snowd[o/e]n used fill to create new retail space. His fill is now covered in part by level grass. I realize that it is not an even comparison, but the new park in Brownsville is a bit like the Marina Green public space in San Francisco: both resting on fill, both near water with boats and high bridges, and both with a panorama of buildings steeply climbing multiple nearby hills.

McSally Doesn't Represent Me

Tuesday night was the second rally that I attended this year. The Rally To Stop Trumpcare featured Phoenix-area Congressman Ruben Gallego, who I found to be a good stem-winder speaker. Congressman Gallego stepped out from his own district to come speak in this, Martha McSally's, district. The stated reason was that he had to come here to answer questions for McSally since she is (as caricatured below by a rally attendee) afraid to face Tucson voters.

The rally was held in the auditorium of Rincon High School, which is on the east side of town, about three miles from where I used to live when in the Air Force here. Many times over the last forty years I had caught a distant view of the airplane-hanger-like structure on the north side of the school grounds. But this was the first time inside. I got there early enough to grab an aisle seat only about 1/4 of the way back. Later it looked like the back rows were as packed as those up front, and there were also a lot of people standing along the walls. So I would say attendance was easily 700 or more.

On the way in:

Unfortunately I forget the name of this group of lady singers. They have been a political fixture in Tucson for years. The man who has briefly joined them is Bruce Wheeler. He is an experienced state legislator who announced his candidacy to oppose McSally next year. I spent much of the time in the auditorium admiring his skill and persistence at working the room informally. I was surprised not to see other announced/potential candidates doing the same.

The title of this post is from a sticker that I picked up at the rally, and that is now on my bumper.

Rally For Refugees in Tucson

There have been other resistance rallies in Tucson over the past few weeks, but yesterday's was the first one that I attended. I was happy to see and hear Tucson's RC Bishop Gerald Kicanus speak at the event.

The Bishop's admonition about fear (he was of course preaching to the choir) could have been written by FDR. The other faith-leader speaker at the event was a local rabbi, who can be seen seated in the middle of the back row. To the rabbi's right is a young man who arrived as a refugee from the Middle East about six months ago.

The rally was organized by a local grassroots group called "We The People." They do facebook, which I don't do, so it's fortunate that they also gathered contact information the old-fashioned way. Being the tall guy in back I was among the first to reach the sign up sheets. Many others were in line behind me.

Although the event itself was apolitical, I can't resist some local, national and international political observations. First, there is Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, who is seen in the top picture standing in the background with hand on hip. He was elected eight years ago as a Republican, benefitting from that party's venomous attack ads against an incumbent for whom I had knocked on a lot of doors in midtown Tucson four years earlier. Since then Steve had a "Road to Damascus" conversion. So technically, his support of the rally was as an Independent. Republican watchers of the Supreme Court might consider Kozachik to be Tucson's David Souter.

Secondly, as a "hanging on by a thread Catholic," I blame the Catholic Church in America for Donald Trump's election. There are a lot of good, strong Catholics like Bishop Kicanas, but they make up minorities: among the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in the pulpits and in the pews. The majority simply tune out the minority, instead chanting the talking points of the church of Fox News and Bannon. The rabbi at yesterday's event, in quoting Jeremiah's faith in God caring about migrants, did not feel he needed to add "but we need to consider other viewpoints."

Still, the situation with the Catholic hierarchy and the news media in the United States is not as dire as in Hungary. Since my grandparents were immigrants from Hungary, I regularly read Hungarian Spectrum, Hungarian Free Press and Budapest Beacon. A priest in Hungary advocating for migrants, in opposition to government propaganda, received a severe admonition from his Bishop. Interestingly it seems that although many people in Hungary who are disenchanted with their government have also lost faith in traditional opposition political parties, there is still spontaneous enthusiasm there about issues. It will be interesting to see if the issue enthusiasms can break through, in Hungary and in the United States.

Coming Spring Wildflowers

Repeated rainfalls this winter (e.g., tonight, more next weekend) could make for abundant spring wildflowers in March. I took this picture out near Kitt Peak when my parents were visiting way back in 1978.

This year since October 24 I've received a little over 3 inches. That total is nothing to get excited about; in most winters most of that would have fallen in just two or three big events. But this year's rain (so far, not counting tonight or next weekend) has been spread across 13 distinct events, each no more than half an inch. Between events there have been many very dewy mornings. Last year up to this point was similar, except for the dewy mornings, and except that last year's three-inch-plus total for the same period was concentrated in just two big events. As I recall last year, unlike this year, there were several windy airmasses that thoroughly dried things out between events. Also last year the rain mostly shut down after early January; between January 7 and March 7 there were only two events, which produced a total of 0.15 inch. This year's mid-to-late January will certainly be better. Just hope the seeds did not all get a false start last year.