War in Iran, and keeping cool in the Southwest.

I was all set to do a 100 percent nonpolitical, totally educational post this week about how I'm not gonna die because of the lack of air conditioning in my condo. And then yesterday, Trump went and dropped a bunch of BOMBS on Iran. (His quirky capitalization, not mine.)

In some respects, we all should have seen this coming. The guy's been itching to play with our arsenal since his first term, when he asked whether nuking a hurricane would work. (Spoiler: No. And also, WTF?)

He also probably thinks he's brilliant for misdirecting his critics with his never-gonna-happen "two weeks" excuse and then striking almost right away. 

Here's what I know: No matter what anybody in the Trump regime claims, it is way too early to know how badly, or even whether, Iran's nuclear capability was damaged. Third-party inspectors would need to be granted access to the bombing sites to evaluate the damage, and good luck getting the Iranians to agree to that now. (I'm feeling echoes of Bush the Younger's bombing runs on Iraqi targets that were supposed to be chemical weapons sites; one may have been a baby-milk factory, but it definitely wasn't a munitions plant.)

Here's what else I know: The Iranians will retaliate. We don't know how yet, but they will. 

As a commenter on some article I read somewhere observed, the United States is now Japan in 1941. And we all know how that turned out for Japan.

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Anyway. I refuse to let Trump derail my original plan. So here's an explainer about my A/C-free condo.

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I have always had a hard time equalizing the indoor temperature in this place. I'm not in an end unit, so I only have windows on the north and south sides. The south side has four ginormous solar windows that don't open - I have often referred to them as the fabulous wall o' windows -- and a door to the deck. There's also a mysterious circular thing that looks like a fan cover in a side wall at the top of the solar windows. On the north side of the house, there are three smaller casement windows, two in the bedroom and one in the office/craft room. This window placement is the classic arrangement for passive solar design. The idea is to capture the heat from the sun in the building's materials (including the brick floor in my living/dining room) on the south side of the house and let it keep the house warm all night long. That works great in the winter. And it did work pretty well in the summer, here at 7,000 feet and almost 40 years ago, until climate change started giving us warmer summers. Today, for me, the living/dining room has been ten degrees warmer than the back of the house in every season.

Of course, you can regulate the sun's intensity by putting a shade on any window. And my solar windows did have shades on them -- dark brown shadecloth-type fabric that you had to pull up from the bottom, even though (as I've explained to several window-shade sellers) the sun, which you're trying to block, comes in at the top. (There's also an exterior roller shade, also in a dark brown shadecloth-type fabric, that I leave down all summer.) The living/dining room temperature can easily exceed 85 degrees on a summer day without any intervention.

Here's my first line of defense: an evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

The bottom part is a water tank. There's a submersible pump inside that pumps water to the top of the unit and sends it trickling down over a honeycomb-cardboard pad that's maybe two inches thick in the back of the unit. The water saturates the pad; the fan in the front pulls hot air through the wet pad and sends it out into the room, where the water in it evaporates, cooling the room. It's a stupid simple technology that has been around at least since the time of the pharaohs. It's also cheap compared to air conditioning. The tank holds about four gallons of water, which lasts for about four hours. A ten-minute shower uses about 20 gallons of water, or about five refills of this device. As for electrical usage, it's just like running a fan.

Note, though, that a swamp cooler only works in dry climates. If you tried running one of these in the humid mid-Atlantic, it wouldn't work -- the air there is already saturated with moisture. You'd just make yourself more miserable.

Okay, but what about a mini-split? I had a guy come out to the house a couple of months ago to advise me about that, and he suggested that I get the exhaust fan at the top of the solar windows (for so the mysterious circular thing has turned out to be) hooked up again. So I did that, and it's helping a lot. The exhaust fan not only pulls out the hot air that gets trapped at the top of those windows, but it also pulls the cooler air through from the back of the house. For the first time since I moved in, the bedroom temperature is within a degree or two of the living/dining room temperature.

I've made one more adjustment: I got rid of the dark brown interior shades and had fancy light-colored honeycomb shades installed in their place. It turns out that those dark shades were actually soaking up heat and holding it in the room; lighter-colored shades reflect heat. That should have been obvious to me, but it wasn't. It also should have been obvious to whichever previous owner had them installed -- but my money is on it being the same genius who had the exhaust fan unhooked.

Anyhow, as I write this on Sunday at 2:30 pm, it's 82 degrees outside with 15 percent humidity. I've got the shades drawn and the exhaust fan and the swamp cooler running. Just for fun, I put a thermometer in front of the swamp cooler. They're about 30 inches apart.

Lynne Cantwell 2025

TL;DR: I'll be fine.

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The swamp cooler covers about 500 square feet. My condo is about 1,000 square feet, so I have two -- one in the living/dining room and one in the bedroom. You can hook them up to a garden hose, eliminating the need to refill the tank manually, but you're advised to only do that outside -- if you overfill the unit, the water will leak out the back and all over your floor (ask me know I know).

You can get bigger portable swamp coolers, and even whole-house units. The bigger portable units only cover more square footage, though -- they run through the water tank in about the same amount of time. And a whole-house swamp cooler might be harder to manage in a condo building. But if this setup starts to fail, I'll look into alternatives again.

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I splurged on the shades and got the motorized kind. The old shades were a mess -- the original pulley mechanism at the top had broken off and been replaced with an eyebolt drilled through the top edge. To raise and lower the shades, you used a jury-rigged pole with a bolt assembly sticking at a right angle through the end.

As I watched the installation crew testing the motors on the new blinds, I pointed out the pole to them. One asked if I would like for them to throw it away with my old blinds. 

"Yes, please," I said. 

Tigs is somewhat gobsmacked by the new blinds.
Lynne Cantwell 2025

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These moments of comfortable blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!

No Kings Day was a success. Now what?

The visuals from yesterday, juxtaposed against one another, were striking: sparse crowds lining Constitution Avenue NW in the muggy heat of Washington, DC, to watch a parade honoring the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army and also Trump's 79th birthday; and millions of Americans turning out in thousands of cities around the country to protest the policies of Trump's regime. 

The point could not possibly have been lost on him that way more people wanted to rally against him than to party with him. In nearly all the photos I've seen of him from the event, he looks dour. In one video, it looks like he may have dozed a bit. (I can almost forgive him for nodding off. Not only is he old and possibly not in the best of health, but it was 81 degrees in DC, with 80 percent humidity, when the parade kicked off. The best word to describe that sort of weather is vile. I have lived through those summers; I moved to Santa Fe to avoid experiencing any more of them.) 

I'm waiting to see how his press office spins this morose event tomorrow. Maybe somebody will break out a Sharpie.

In contrast, it was pretty much all sweetness and light around the rest of the country -- even in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where rally organizers canceled their event after a man posing as a police officer shot and killed a state representative and her husband and wounded another state representative and his wife. Despite the cancellation, 80,000 people showed up.

This protest was too big for the traditional media to ignore. Few outlets went with the "tens of thousands" dodge this time; some even admitted to six million people attending. The Alt National Park Service account on Facebook gave the final attendance figure as 12.1 million people -- and as I've said here before, the National Park Service knows how to count a crowd of people because they have been in charge of it for decades, even though they don't do it for public release anymore. At the same time, the media have a habit of lowballing such figures so as not to be accused of lying. 

In 2019, Harvard political science researcher Erica Chenowith published a study she had done that showed nonviolent protest is better than violent protest at effecting change, and that if 3.5 percent of the population actively participates in such protests, change is virtually assured. From the BBC article I linked to a second ago: "'There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,' says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the '3.5% rule'."

Mama Google tells me that the population of the United States (2024 estimate) is 340.1 million. Three-and-a-half percent of that is 11.9 million. If Alt National Park Service is right, and I think they are, then we've hit the tipping point. 

Which brings me to my favorite sign of the day from yesterday's events. 

Stolen from Facebook. If you know the photographer, let me know.

None of this means we can rest on our laurels. Trump and his minions aren't going to give up that easily. So what's next? 

More protests, I would imagine. This cannot be a one-and-done. The more despised this regime appears to be, the more it will encourage folks on the fringes to defect. It may also influence those in office to act more boldly against Trump -- and I'm not just talking about the Democrats. Trump will die at some point (we all will, as Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has helpfully pointed out), and Republican office holders would be idiots to believe they can ride his coattails forever. No one else in the party even remotely has his star power.

I'm not expecting immediate change -- not from the bunch currently in Washington. But as they say, things happen slowly, and then all at once.

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Happy Father's Day to everybody who is, was, has, or had a father, perfect or im-, and including those with offspring who are or were persons of the nonhuman persuasion.

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These moments of calculating blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there, y'all.

Another day, another scary headline.

I rushed out the door this morning to my volunteer gig at El Rancho de las Golondrinas and almost missed the scary headlines coming out of Los Angeles: ICE personnel conducting raids around the city to round up "illegal immigrants", ordinary Americans mobilizing on the spot to peacefully push back against ICE, ICE throwing flash-bang grenades at reporters who clearly identified themselves as members of the media, and on and on. My reaction mirrored that of a lot of us, I think: 

ibrandify | Deposit Photos

Now Trump has ordered the mobilization of two thousand National Guard troops to "restore order", even though LA Mayor Karen Bass hasn't asked for help, and even though California Governor Gavin Newsom has asked Trump to stand down. As we learned a few summers ago, when Trump ordered peaceful protestors chased out of Lafayette Park in DC so he could walk a block to hold up a Bible for a photo op in front of a church, he's just itching for any excuse to call out the military on US soil.

It's not martial law yet, according to legal experts I follow on social media, but it feels damn close. 

The Brennan Center said in 2020 that the president doesn't have the authority to declare martial law, and even if he did, Congress would have to agree. But that's not as encouraging as it might otherwise be, considering Republicans have control of both houses of Congress right now and Trump has proven himself willing to do whatever the hell he wants, legal or not.

This is a developing story, as they say, and to be honest, I don't know what else to say about it right now. My reporter instincts are to just try to keep up with the facts as they unfold and leave any analysis for later.

One thing did occur to me, though: This action in LA is giving Trump and his minions footage of "American carnage" that actually happened here in the US and not in some other country.

Not to mention that we've all forgotten about the Trump-Musk breakup.

Stay tuned, as they say. And as Dan Rather has been known to say: Courage. 

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Why the emoji illustration? Because I didn't want give the impression that the reaction was limited to only certain people, whether immigrants or Black people or whatever. I hope we're all shocked, and scared, by what's going on in LA.

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These moments of disquieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Courage.

Neoliberalism, or: I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Here's another post that doesn't have anything to do with writing/publishing -- but it's not exactly political, either. It's based on an email* I got this week about a post Robert Reich published on his Substack that's called "The Tragic History of Neoliberalism". In it, he's refuting comments made by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who now claims to be a moderate, even though he has, in fact, been a conservative forever.

Reich, whose decades-long career in the federal government includes a stint as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, starts his rebuttal with this chart, which I have unapologetically lifted from his Substack. (He lifted it from the Economic Policy Institute, so I don't feel bad about stealing it. The chart might be easier to read at the EPI link, plus it's interactive there.) 

What it shows is that along about, oh, the late 1970s, the gap between worker productivity and worker compensation began to widen, to the point where, since 1979, worker-bee productivity has increased 86 percent, while worker-bee pay has increased just 27%.

I canceled my NYT subscription quite some time ago, so I haven't actually read the David Brooks column that sparked Reich's post. So I'm going by what Reich has to say about it, which is that what Brooks wrote is an apologetic for neoliberalism. Brooks claims that while wages stagnated in the 1970s and '80s, they began to increase in the early 1990s and, along with productivity, have continued to increase. Brooks says that's the result of neoliberal economic policies, and we should go back to them.

Reich rightfully points out that while wages have trended upward a little bit, the rise in productivity has far outstripped it, and that's due to an imbalance of power caused by those neoliberal economic policies that has basically stolen money from the pockets of the worker bees and put it in the pockets of the fabulously well-to-do.

He doesn't actually use the terms "worker bee" and "fabulously well-to-do", but that's the gist of it.

As I read Reich's post, the refrain of a song kept playing in my head. The song is called "My Back Pages", and I've made that refrain the title of this post. My earworm was the 1967 version by the Byrds: 

I never knew the name of the song until I looked it up this week. I also didn't know that it was written by Bob Dylan, although it made perfect sense when I found that out. Dylan was 23 when he wrote "My Back Pages"; it was his declaration that he was stepping away from writing protest songs because he'd begun to realize that right and wrong, good and evil, weren't as clearly defined as he'd thought they were. He was maturing away from his youthful certainty.

I was interested to see Robert Reich out-and-out say he was questioning neoliberalism, because he was part of the administration that instituted it. Bill Clinton was a Democrat elected in 1992 after 12 years of Republican rule -- first Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush. Clinton ran as an antidote to the GOP's pro-business, anti-worker-bee policies. (In 1981, Reagan fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers, leading to the near-collapse of the union movement in America and facilitating that widening gap between wages and productivity in the chart up top.) 

Clinton ran on bringing the New Deal back, to make life easier for American workers. But then -- ah, then -- he continued and expanded the policies begun under Reagan and Bush the Elder that favored free-market capitalism, deregulation, and a reduction in government spending (as long as military spending wasn't cut), and called it neoliberalism.

I enthusiastically voted for Clinton twice. I thought neoliberalism made sense. I believed in capitalism and thought Clinton's success in balancing the federal budget was terrific. I didn't even mind when he instituted "workfare" to force folks on welfare to get a job, thereby cutting -- all together now -- waste, fraud, and abuse.

What I didn't understand was what those policies were doing to my own earnings. I started out in the working world in 1979 -- right about the time when the wage gap really began to widen. 

I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

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Reich closes out his post by saying, "Neoliberalism should not and cannot be rehabilitated." Going down that road, he says, will just bring us more of the same: suppressed wages, more profit going to the rich, even less help for those who need it, and more and more Trumps.

He's pushing for a progressive populist movement. I'm leery of labeling anything populism, given that far-right populists, aka MAGA, helped to elect Trump. But I agree that we cannot keep going down the road we're on and hope to continue to call ourselves a first-world nation.

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"Fabulously well-to-do" is from Breakfast of Champions, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that was published in 1973: 

Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.

Vonnegut, like George Carlin, saw it all coming. I miss them both.

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*Is it just me, or are we all getting inundated with daily long-form emails we feel obliged to read since social media has been throttling organic reach?

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Ironically, I need to lengthen this already lengthy post by updating you on this: My former employer, WilmerHale, won a court case against Trump this past week. To summarize the backstory, Trump has been mad at WilmerHale ever since Bob Mueller, who was a partner at the firm, was appointed as a special counsel to investigate accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. So in March, Trump issued an executive order that was clearly designed to put WilmerHale out of business. It wasn't the only big law firm that Trump targeted in this way, and the management at some firms agreed to settle by providing free legal work to the administration in exchange for having the executive orders against them lifted. But WilmerHale (and two others) chose to fight.

This past week, that strategy paid off. D.C. District Judge Richard Leon blocked Trump's executive order. In a blistering opinion containing 27 exclamation points, Judge Leon agreed with the firm. In part, he said: "I have concluded that this order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!"

No word so far on whether Trump will appeal. I suspect he won't; the sturm und drang is what he was after. So this ought to be the end of it.

Kudos to the judge. And congrats to WilmerHale on being on the right side of history once again.

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These moments of bloggy reverse aging have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.