Coyote Blog

There is generally no good way to run large scale A/B political experiments.  Which is why, at least until the current college generation, we all thought the study of history was so important.  What happens when we slam on high new tariffs?  There is a lot of theory, but we don't have to entirely rely on theory because we have hundreds of years of adding and subtracting tariffs that we can study.  In the same way, we can discuss in theory why socialism does not work (incentives, knowledge limitations on central planning, the free rider problem, the incentives for fraud and abuses, etc) -- but we don't have to trust that.  We can look at history and see what happened when Communism or hard-core socialism was tried in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Venezuela, Eastern Europe, Argentina, and most of the countries in Africa at one time or another.

Incredibly the historical experience is absolutely clear -- communism leads to poverty and loss of individual liberty.  Every time.  It's like 0 for 65.  It's failure is the greatest betting lock in the world.

But here we go again in NYC, the home of all the people who consider themselves more sophisticated than you and I, with yet another love affair with communism.  The blindness on display is really disheartening.  Polls show that a number of groups including Blacks and young people have a very positive view of socialism.  It would be fascinating to get a few in a room for a focus group to see how they even understand that term, or how much they know about socialism over history.   And don't even get me started on the "Queers for Gaza" crowd -- these are people with $60,000 a year educations who know absolutely nothing.

Today on social media I saw a lot of posts from NYC folks telling the world happily they were proudly voting for Mamdani.   So much so someone was circulating a picture of two women celebrating Khomeini's revolution in Iran who ended up respectively killed and exiled [I cannot vouch for the authenticity].  There certainly were many celebrating in those early days of the Iranian Revolution.  Unfortunately, as it turned out, as bad as the Shah may have been he was also the single greatest friend of women of the time in the Middle East (which had a lot to do with why the Islamic groups hated him) and his flawed but fairly western nation would be replaced by the gender apartheid they have today.  Today there are folks on the Left who seem ready to uncritically support any revolution as long as it gets rid of Trump, a flawed man but also one who is miles short of the Shah (or Hitler of course, or Syngman Rhee).

Somehow, people cannot put this all together from numerous historical examples, but have to find out for themselves by dragging all of us yet again into the abyss.  I am pretty sure if you went in a year later you would find a lot of people devastated by the transition and their participation in it, but by then of course it is too late -- these folks have no voices any more.

Eventually people and nations sometime emerge and re-enter the free world.  Eastern Europe did in the early 1990s.  The Vietnamese people eventually became exhausted with the worst excesses of communism and have opened up some, as have China and Russia.  But in many of these cases two generations had passed, or in the case of Russia even more.  Folks who emerged from Communism and finally had a voice were not hesitant to describe the horrors.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it became fashionable among American academics (who else?) to downplay the problems with communism in general and with Stalin and the Soviet Union in specific.  A consensus of sort had developed in these academic circles that the Soviet Union was not that bad.  This consensus was at least temporarily blown apart after 1989, when intellectuals of the newly freed Eastern European states joined the academic conversation and made it very clear just how bad things were on any number of dimensions.

But there is actually one historical exception where a nation whose people originally ranged from communism-curious to overtly communist actually experienced hard core totalitarian communism for 3-4 months, and then were freed -- South Korea in the second half of 1950.  What we call the Korean War started when Kim Il-Sung's totalitarian communist regime in North Korea invaded South Korea in mid-1950.  The initial assault was wildly successful, and eventually the US-backed (technically UN-backed but let's be real) South Korean army was clobbered, giving up the capital Seoul in days and retreated until they were holding just a tiny sliver of the country.  Late in the year a US amphibious invasion at Inchon caught the North Koreans totally by surprise and quickly liberated the South (though the war would go on for much longer due mostly to McArthur's antics.

Many South Koreans initially welcomed, even celebrated, the North Korean invasion.  The US in its 1945-1950 occupation had been even more ham-handed than usual in Korea, and blew up many formative democratic institutions out of fear that they were somehow communist puppets (and employed a lot of really bad Koreans who had collaborated with and tortured for the Japanese).  Koreans were tired of their leader Syngman Rhee, a strong man and US puppet in the mold of the Iranian Shah, who abused, imprisoned, and even killed opponents.  In a move that will surprise few today, the teachers and professors of Seoul almost 100% enthusiastically welcomed the North Koreans and pledged loyalty to their cause.

But as in Iran after the Shah, people looking for change were not very careful in evaluating exactly what that "change" was going to be.  Very quickly Kim Il-Sung and his forces initiated efforts that would be very familiar later in Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia -- struggle sessions and endless interrogations where enormous classes of people were outright executed for the crime of, say, having a father who was a landholder.  Soon, even passionate folks on the South Korean Left started to see that the communists were far worse than what they had before.

And then, unlike Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, etc -- the people of South Korea were liberated after four or five months.  The survivors of this period thus had a unique perspective that few in the free world would possess -- they survived a brief sample of communism from the inside.  The result was complicated -- a country that became a bastion of anti-communism for decades but also was probably all too accepting of dictatorial leaders who would promise to be strongly anti-communist.  I will summarize it this way -- I am not an expert on Korea but both the books I have read on this period came to the same conclusion -- it is impossible to overstate the importance of this five month period on the subsequent history and outlook of the South Korean people.  Today, the two Koreas offer perhaps the best A/B test ever for communism vs (sort of) capitalism.

Fortunately, New Yorkers can still move to Florida. Though this is by no means guaranteed.  California on several occasions has proposed a steep exit tax on the assets of rich people trying to escape the state.

Postscript #1:  A small bit of historical irony:  Many progressives see abortion availability as the single most important litmus test of a free society.  Ask them why they don't vote for a more reasonable candidate of the other party, they are likely going to say "because Republicans all enslave women by banning abortion."   While I hold a pretty centrist position on abortion (legal and easy at conception+1 day, highly restricted at birth-1 day), this litmus test is pretty ironic as you could not get a car or a TV or enough food but the one thing you could get in the Soviet Union was an abortion -- in fact the Soviet Union may have had the highest abortion rate in history, driven by the miserable conditions their citizens lived in.

Postscript #2: I could paste in about 200 memes here but here are some of the most relevant:

El Gato Malo (@boriquagato) wrote a piece the other day about modern pop/rock music, saying in part:

there is nothing because music is product.

it became pure product, produced by product managers with hand picked performers chosen to dance and vamp and papered over with autotune and post-production. it’s music by committee and front folks by casting call.

damn near all of them are just stage performers. all the money is in concert tours now. it’s about flying over the crowd on your fairy chariot and packing in the kids.

it’s fricking disney.

and rock and roll that ain’t.

it’s also hideously uncreative, arch-conservative, play-it-safe marketing as lacking in gritty realism as it is in fun.

it starts to take on the repetitive aspects of a compulsory floor routine.

I don't really disagree, but normally I would have just passed over it as another generational rant -- yada yada autotune yada yada etc.  But three things grabbed my attention.

One is that his conclusion for what to do about it is subtle but kind of awesome.  It really struck me the more I thought about it.  I won't ruin it, you will have to hear it from him by clicking through.

The second reason this grabbed my attention is that I had just watched a bit of the Netflix series Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE about the creation of kpop group from scratch, in a totally synthetic manner that goes even beyond Gato's rant.  I could only watch so much, because there was not really anyone likeable on the show and it is produced in the totally irritating fake reality show format where you know everything is semi-scripted because who the f*ck acts normally with a camera following them around all day?  Every dance move down to that signature kpop girl band wink is scripted and rehearsed endlessly.  It is a synthetic reality show about the creation of a totally synthetic band.

The third reason that this piece got me thinking is that I had just watched Kpop Demon Hunters, a wildly successful animated movie improbably about a kpop girl group who are also demon hunters fighting off a soft of apocalypse.  And you know what?  Despite the animated movie being as synthetic as it possibly could be, it was far more enjoyable and the characters more endearing than anything in Pop Star Academy.  At least in Kpop Demon Hunters, they were using the synthetic nature of the animated medium to explore creative new ideas, vs. the case of KATSEYE working to deliver the absolutely expected.

I am not a music expert to go much deeper on this, but I will refer you to another aging white guy who is a music expert: Rick Beato, who has built a second or third career as an internet teacher and critic.  He has many videos on the topic of modern pop music but this one addresses roughly the same issues discussed above about the hugely synthetic nature of modern pop.

You can see from the comments that a lot of folks hate such observations.  Perhaps it is simply a different aesthetic generationally,  I have often made the observation that when I was in high school, a party that had a DJ rather than a live band was considered by all to suck.  When my kids were in high school, the preference reversed, with kids greatly favoring a DJ to a live band.   I have always chalked this up to a preference among modern kids for high production values -- they want to hear the carefully produced original, maybe even further produced by the DJ, rather than a cover by some local garage band.   I personally think that live music in a small venue has a raw energy that almost always trumps studio production, but it is not crazy for someone to disagree.

However, it does leave one wondering about creativity and radical new frontiers in music.  If all the competition is in production values, then you get higher and higher levels of production values aiming at the expected rather than anything really new.   You can't just have a great singer, you have to have a great singer who is attractive and can dance and is backed by a world class song-writing, production, and PR team.  Its hard to figure out after watching Pop Star Academy where this can go from here.

It is in this context that I think Gato's suggestion for improvement is surprisingly apt.

Postscript:  I will somewhat counter my own thesis -- the 1960s also saw a real competition on the production end of music -- Phil Specter waking everyone up to the production end, followed by Brian Wilson who tried to outdo Specter with Pet Sounds, and then the Beatles crafted the masterpiece Sergeant Pepper in specific response to Pet Sounds.   Later in the decade producers like Alan Parsons on Dark Side of the Moon further pushed the envelope.  But perhaps it is just my age bias, but this all felt like it was pushing boundaries into new things, rather than more reliably delivering the expected.

Via the WSJ (free link here)

The U.S. will impose an additional 10% tariff on Canada, President Trump said on Saturday, a punitive measure in response to an ad campaign that he said misrepresented comments by former President Ronald Reagan.

“Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Saturday.

The ad campaign, released by the Canadian province of Ontario, uses audio from a 1987 radio address delivered by Reagan, in which he explains that despite putting tariffs on Japanese semiconductors that year, he was committed to free-trade policies. While tariffs can look patriotic, Reagan said, “over the long run such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” lead to “fierce trade wars” and result in lost jobs.

The hostages appear to have been released from Gaza, which is a huge step forward after 2 years of violence.  Not only is this a joy for their families, but it also likely makes ongoing violence in Gaza much harder for both parties.  I had initially thought Trump was making progress by being the "crazy man" in the negotiation who might do anything (sort of like trying to play poker with a 16-year-old).   And a lot of the Left is likely to continue to treat it that way.  But from everything I have read in the last few days, Trump's team did a lot of hard diplomacy all over the Arab world, carefully corralling every potential Hamas supporter and getting them all to tell Hamas it was time to settle (here and here for example).

This should not be surprising -- Trump showed a similar facility with negotiating in the Arab world in his first term with the Abraham Accords and really did not get enough credit for it.

So tomorrow Trump will likely tick me off again but for today he should be thanked for his work on this deal.

Postscript: and no, great work negotiating this peace deal does not convince me he has some super-brain master plan behind the tariffs

I don't know who this is, but this X post by Cynical Publius has been quoted by a number of Conservative sites.  This represents a VERY common attitude among Conservatives and deserves to be quoted in depth.  In regards to the prosecution of Letitia James he writes:

You see, for many years now Democrats have believed that they could do basically whatever they wanted to Republicans, whilst Republicans were still bound by the Old Rules of comity and respect.

Those were the New Rules. (Hat tip, Kurt Schlichter.). They thought we would never adopt the New Rules.

We did.

The James indictment says to Democrats: “You no longer can assume that we will let you do whatever you want to us. We will do to you what you did to us. And we will be merciless until you prove you will never do it again.”

The particular beauty of the James indictment is that she brought the most scurrilous and ridiculous of charges against Trump, while the record shows that James clearly committed the basic federal crimes she has been charged with.

Here’s the other thing. Federal laws are so complex and capacious that pretty much every one of us breaks a federal law every few months without knowing that we did. There has long been a tacit understanding in this regard that politicians would not take advantage of this with regard to mere “footfaults” on nonsense laws. But Democrats decide to abandon that too. New Rules. That we now follow. Suck on it, Democrats. You get what you paid for.

(But to repeat; James charged Trump with nonsense; Trump charged James with a verifiable crime.)

That last part is likely true, though it is not clear that very many people are prosecuted for it.  It is certainly NOT true for the Comey prosecution, which as currently charged is a total crock [update:  this is not to say that Comey is guilty of abuse of power charges -- it is simply to say that the current charges are cr*p].

Whatever the case, Mr. Publius appears to be working from the assumption that getting tough on the Left with actions like this is the only way to de-escalate all the lawfare -- I suppose the logic being that bullies back down when challenged and forced to face accountability.  This is clearer in some of the comments to the post:

This is the FAFO (f*ck around, find out) stance being taken by many Republicans, reflecting the decision-making rules of playground and bar fights. But for all that we overuse fight analogies when referring to politics, the correct behaviors in a Constitutional Republic which emphasizes the rule of law are different than in a bar fight.  Precedents really do matter, and even more so precedents that are repeated and reinforced by the political opposition get set in stone.  Mr. Publius is correct in saying that any person is likely guilty of something given the web of detailed, illogical, and self-contradictory Federal and state laws and regulations.  That is all the more reason to avoid degenerating into tit for tat lawfare as this legal environment makes lawfare all too easy -- against most anyone.  Our out of control regulatory state creates an environment like a dry overgrown southern California ravine on a hot day during a drought.  The Biden administration started some fires but ultimately they were contained -- Republicans should remember that despite everything (maybe because of all the lawfare end the sympathy and anger it engendered) their guy was elected.  The response now should be to exercise great care until the fire danger is reduced.  Instead, Republicans want to whip out the flamethrower.

I get called a simp or a cuck or worse for wishing turn back the clock on lawfare.  But historically we revere people who did just that.  The best examples of this occurring are from the early history of the US, such as in the election of 1800 when Jefferson just edged out Aaron Burr in a contentious election.  I am sure the Federalists were mighty pissed at Mr. Jefferson -- hell, their anger still resonates today in an extremely popular modern Broadway musical -- but they honorably turned over power to their hated rival. Looking farther back into history, Mr. Publius has adopted a nom de plume presumably from on interest in Roman civilization, or at least in how our founders admired the Roman republic.  But he needs to go back and re-study how the Roman republic died, a victim of 150 years of steadily escalating precedents that eroded the norms of the old republic.  I suggested in the online comments he might want to change his online name to "Graccus" to acknowledge the similar path he is pointing towards in this country.

Or perhaps even better historical examples are the famous blood feuds like between the Hatfields and the McCoys.  At what point in this feud do you think that retaliation and escalation by one party "taught the other a lesson" or caused the other to back down and de-escalate?   Never, which is why such feuds ended only when everyone was dead.

But an even better way to refute this Mr. Publius's position is to, for a moment, accept the author's premises about the Democrats.   There is an old political joke that goes like this:

This is sort of funny, but there is actually a better meta joke associated with this I will come back to in the postscript.  But I think we can confidently ascribe this position to the author Publius and to many other Republicans.  They are convinced that the Democrats are evil and that Republicans are well-intended but stupid because they always let Democrats get away with everything and are always to civilized to really fight back.  Just read the comment thread above.

But let's assume this is true for the moment.  If the Democrats are really always historically evil and law-breaking, what the hell makes one think that being more bare-knuckled is going to change them?  If they are evil, are you really expecting them to say "hey, you got me, we went too far, let's dial it back" or are they just going to respond by going to 11 the next time?  The author's strategy fails based on his own assumptions.  Unless his strategy is to turn the US into a banana republic.

Postscript:  The meta joke embedded in the joke quoted above is that believing this statement is one of the few bipartisan political beliefs that exist.  Republicans and Democrats BOTH will agree to this statement with a smile ... with the one small difference that Democrats will assume it was written by one of their own and thus that Republicans are the evil party and Democrats are the stupid party that play the game too genteelly.  And both the Republican and the Democrat presented with this passage would be shocked and outraged that their opposition would believe its the other way around.

Which brings us back to the case in question.  Let's generalize the last line in the Publius post above as "the charges against our guy were a politically-motivated crock, while our charges against their guy are just and fair."  Both R's and D's believe this absolutely from their perspective right now.  Their lawfare is righteous, the other guy's is evil.  So how is escalation of the lawfare going to achieve anything except a degeneration into banana republic politics?

Postscript #2:  I am not a Republican so I am probably not an appropriate source of advice to them.  But the Republican opportunity in my mind is to drive a wedge between mainstream traditional Democrats and the increasingly crazy, sometimes violent far-Left progressives.  This is something Trump seems pretty good at, when he can avoid chasing some new squirrel.  But I can tell you that one thing mainstream traditional Diane-Rehm-listening Democrats are NOT going to like is anything that feels like undermining the rule of law.  Republican bare-knuckle lawfare is not going to sit well, and is going to drive them into the arms of the crazies, no matter whether the Republicans think Democrats "started it" or not.  Republicans are actually winning the PR battle on the shutdown (first time in my whole life that has happened) and Trump has been pretty good at painting Democrats into defending extreme positions on 80-20 issues.  Taking immigration as an example -- where I am a strong supporter of increasing immigration limits so this is frustrating to me -- Progressives have made the whole immigration cause about protecting a few named, obvious felons from deportation.  And thus losing the PR battle.

Against this backdrop of Progressive own-goals, arresting violent rioters and serial felons will likely get grudging approval even among some Democrats; putting Comey in jail for contempt of Congress is only going to feel good to Republicans and can do nothing but hurt their popularity in the middle.

Currently, most Americans seem to be largely carrying on as normal during the Federal government shutdown.  I know I am able to pretty much completely ignore it.  Looking at front pages of sites like the WSJ and CNN, stories on the shutdown are still there but are certainly not the lead, center pieces.  This is the government employee's nightmare, where they effectively go on strike and no one notices.

So where will enough public pain come from to force concessions on one or the other party in Congress? The game used to be closing high visibility public parks to tick the citizens off, but a lot of parks are still open today under private management (I know, my company operates hundreds of them).  Want to see the volcano erupting in Hawaii?  The Volcano House we operate in the National Park is still open.

My new hypothesis came from my wife, who was worrying the other day whether we would be able to make some critical flights in early November.  I initially scoffed, but thinking about it more, I think the TSA and more particularly the FAA may be the key to this shutdown.  Already this year, antiquated systems from years of government mal-investment combined with understaffing and poor training have led to manpower shortages and sick-outs in certain locations, particularly Newark.  Now, the FAA is apparently working unpaid. If they were walking out when they were being paid, things can only get worse with them not being paid.  I can easily imagine rising flight cancellations that will get great play in the media -- TV news is very experienced at showing masses of people camped out at the airport due to cancelled flights and interviewing people with heartbreaking stories about weddings and such missed.  Three or four days of that kind of mess leading the news each night and the R's and D's will quickly find some sort of accommodation.

This is all ironic, and somewhat infuriating to this libertarian, as the FAA and TSA should have been privatized years ago, and such privatization works just fine in Canada.  This issue of privatizing the FAA actually came up last April during the bad Newark slowdowns but the Trump Administration passed on the opportunity.  If the FAA is the entity that generates the most pain in the shutdown, these discussions might get restarted.

I am not sure I remember too much from my high school philosophy class, other than the lesson that I probably would not be actively pursuing a career in philosophy.  But I remember one discussion about displaying one's rebellious nature by doing the exact opposite of whatever an unfavored person said.  The teacher made the point that if you always did the exact opposite of what person X says, then you are just as much ruled by X as any of X's most cultish followers.  In such a case you have completely abdicated your agency to X.

I took the lesson from that, which I still try to follow to this day, that you have to process people's actions and ideas one by one.  Certainly this is not to say that there is no room for trust and reputation.  If  I have found myself agreeing with someone historically and they have been proved right on certain topics time and again, I am going to give their next statement a lot of credence -- but I am still going to mentally challenge it to some extent.  And for individuals, this sort of reputational trust can vary by topic.  If my wife gives me a read on a person, I am going to assume she is correct; if she opines on navigation issues when we are walking around an unfamiliar city, I am going to treat that with a lot more skepticism.

Most will have guessed where I am going with this -- the opposition to Trump has reached this point of zero agency.   Smart people I know will mock everything Trump says, even if it is something they would normally agree with or at least entertain.  People who are extraordinarily skeptical of all medication suddenly think that concerns about Tylenol during pregnancy are totally absurd.  The whole Tylenol story is actually pretty interesting -- a Harvard dean's imprimatur seems to tick the credentialism box that was so prominent in COVID, but a look at the quality of the research and the money involved tends to make one very skeptical.  And of course a lot of what RFK says makes me skeptical.  The whole story is a really interesting, including appeals-to-authority issues we had during COVID, only with the parties reversed.  But no one really looks because if Trump said it, it must be mocked.

This tendency of the Left to throw away all agency when it comes to evaluating policy during this Administration is a target of great mockery on the Right.  Memes such as the one below are everywhere.

I have been thinking about all this because I have been trying to figure out why I have zero energy to blog of late.  Every time I sit down to the keyboard, I am exhausted in advance.  And I think the reason is (for me) the immense effort to parse current politics on a case-by-case basis and communicate it in a way that people will read rather than going ballistic because I didn't pass a belief conformity test in the first paragraph.  I once told someone that I feel like the last person in America who can opine on Trump's actions case-by-base, though of course that is an exaggeration (and something of an affectation I admit).

You can read through these pages and see that I have written that Trump's trade policy is dead wrong, his attempted expansions of Presidential power are dangerous as hell, his need for petty revenge and his love of trolling the media online are beneath the dignity of a President.  But write one thing like, "The Russian collusion charges ... turned out to be complete inventions of the opposition party" and all the agency-less litmus testers ask me why I am always defending the guy.  Crazy.  By the way, I will say it and be done with it -- the Russian collusion story was BS, it smelled like BS from the beginning, and was actually a scandal in that it was clearly engineered by the opposition party.  And it likely had more to do with Trump's 2024 election than any other single factor [other than Biden's dementia] because the unfairness of it energized his supporters.  Russia collusion was Wile E Coyote Acme rocket of political issues, reliably blowing up in Democrat's faces.

For me, the worst manifestation of all this is seeing people actively cheering setbacks in Trump-led peace processes (eg Ukraine, Gaza).  Are you guys f*cking crazy?  I understand being skeptical of Trump's international actions, though to be honest I have not seen him do much internationally that is better or worse than other recent Presidents.  For example, yes he lawlessly blew up that suspected drug ship (to absolutely no benefit that I can see) but Obama and Bush droned Middle Easterners over and over.  Be that as it may, if someone can stop the killing on reasonable terms in either of these areas, they have my total support.

Apparently the Trump Administration is going full Tammany Hall:

The administration also seems keen to rescind federal funds awarded under President Joe Biden, like the billions of dollars in clean energy grants to states in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

This would be a good idea, if it were applied smartly. Instead, the administration seems to prefer dinging members of the opposing political tribe rather than effecting any sort of across-the-board changes.

"Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled," OMB Director Russell Vought wrote Wednesday in a post on X. While there is not yet an official announcement, he added that there would be "more info to come" from the Department of Energy. Vought said the newly rescinded funds would come from terminating projects in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.

If it feels like those 16 states have something in common, it's true: All voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump's opponent, in the 2024 election. In fact, other than Maine, Rhode Island, and Virginia, Vought's list includes every single state that didn't go for Trump.

Trump would be justified in wanting to rescind all such grants. Instead, he's apparently content to let states who voted for him keep the cash. This naked partisanship is unseemly, but unfortunately par for the course under Trump. It's also particularly ironic, since red states were much bigger beneficiaries of Biden-era grants.

The article goes on to explain that most of the large payments went to Red states under the law, so rescinding them only from blue states takes some explicit effort. Look, the IRA was clearly a big enormous pork barrel waste of money from the very beginning.  I would not be surprised if every dollar in it were political payoffs.  But this use of the money as a partisan bludgeon as if Trump were a modern-day Tom Shanahan is outrageous.

Postscript:  In fact, Republicans missed a perfectly justified and in my mind acceptable way to bludgeon blue states:  Elimination of the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction on federal income taxes.  There is zero justification for having citizens of low-tax states forced to subsidize more profligate states via their Federal taxes.  And no economic reason why the Federal tax code should give special breaks for state income taxes but not for state and local sales taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, etc.  In Trump's first term Congress capped the SALT deduction, impacting mostly high tax blue states, and I had zero problem with that.  But Republicans in the most recent BBB walked away from that by substantially raising this cap.

My first playfield replacement and complete overhaul of a pinball machine is complete (video below is lame because it is hard to play both flippers and hold a camera at the same time).  The flippers need their position adjusted a bit and I want to work on the sensitivity of the pop bumpers, but otherwise I think everything is working as it should.  All the LED lighting looks great -- that is why the one bumper up front looks brighter as I am testing a new LED in that as well.  All the mechanical parts including the flippers and drop targets we completely taken apart and cleaned, and a lot of the switches were replaced.  My next hurdle is I want to repin the circuit board connectors in the back box and work on the exterior paint job.