"We’re building a rocket ship as we fly it."

Said Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Governor of New Mexico, quoted in "One year into free child care in New Mexico, too many kids and not enough slots/In a first-in-the-nation experiment with universal child care, demand is outpacing availability and costs are soaring" (WaPo).

Last September, Lujan Grisham took the final step, announcing that New Mexico would be the first to open its subsidized day care to any family, a move estimated to save families $13,000 a year per child.... The announcement was met with applause and cheers, but behind the scenes, state legislators — who said they had not been informed that the program would become universal — were confounded, along with some members of the department’s own staff.

“We were all shocked,” said state Sen. George Muñoz, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “Nobody knew about it until the day it was in the paper. All of a sudden we were all calling each other, saying, ‘Where did this come from?’ ‘Did anybody from the governor’s office talk to you about it?’ Nope, we were all in the dark.”...

The White House is taunting.

pic.twitter.com/Jh3DHXnflT

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 6, 2026

"Two blazes that grew into New Mexico's largest ever wildfire were both started by the U.S. Forest Service..."

"... the agency said on Friday.... Forest Service investigators determined the Calf Canyon Fire was caused by a 'burn pile' of branches that the agency thought was out but reignited.... That blaze on April 22 merged with the Hermits Peak Fire, which the USFS started with a controlled burn that went out of control on April 6, the agency previously reported.... Blazing a more than 40-mile-long... path up the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the fire has destroyed watersheds and forests used for centuries by Indo-Hispano farming villages and Native American communities."

Reuters reports. 

A disaster and a metaphor. What is presented by the government as "controlled" goes wildly out of control.

"I recognize this request is unusual and constitutes a drastic measure, and the emergency powers set out under the Riot Control Act should be invoked sparingly.

"However, the COVID-19 outbreak in the city of Gallup is a crisis of the highest order. Immediate action is necessary," wrote Mayor Louis Bonaguidi,  quoted in "Roads closed into New Mexico city to mitigate 'uninhibited spread of Covid-19'" (CNN).

Under the Riot Control Act, anyone who fails to comply with restrictions imposed under the act is guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction of a second or subsequent offense is guilty of a fourth-degree felony....

"The spread of this virus in McKinley County is frightful," Lujan Grisham said. "And it shows that physical distancing has not occurred and is not occurring. The virus is running amok there. It must be stopped, and stricter measures are necessary."

I was only familiar with Gallup, New Mexico from the song "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66" — "You see Amarillo/Gallup, New Mexico/Flagstaff, Arizona/Don't forget Winona..." — but I'm reading about it now. Wikipedia:

Gallup (Navajo: Naʼnízhoozhí /nɑ̀ʔnɪ́ʒòːʒɪ́/; Zuni: Kalabwakin) is a city in McKinley County, New Mexico, United States, with a population of 21,678 as of the 2010 census. A substantial percentage of its population is Native American, with residents from the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni tribes. Gallup is the county seat of McKinley County and the most populous city between Flagstaff and Albuquerque, along the historic U.S. Route 66.

The city was founded in 1881 as a railhead for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, and named after David Gallup, a paymaster for the railroad. It is on the Trails of the Ancients Byway, one of the designated New Mexico Scenic Byways. Because of the nearby rugged terrain, it was a popular location in the 1940s and 1950s for Hollywood Westerns....

Gallup is known as the "Heart of Indian Country" or "The Heart of Indians" because it is on the edge of the Navajo reservation and is home to members of many other tribes as well.

"Those horrible pink hats': midterms divide women in era of #MeToo."

A nicely done, nicely balanced little film, from The Guardian. Watch the whole thing. I love the low-key, steadfast demeanor of the filmmaker, Paul Lewis:

"Democratic secretary of state in heavily Democratic state unilaterally changes voting rule in a way that favors Democrats (and punishes Libertarians). Republicans say they’ll sue."

Reason reports.

Nice of the Republicans to do the suing to help Gary, but it's in their interest to keep a Democrat from winning a Senate race.

In a sudden move with suspicious timing, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, an elected Democrat, announced today that voters in November will once again be able to vote for every candidate of a political party on the ballot by filling in just one blank. The option, known as the "straight-party" device, gives obvious advantage to parties with high voter-registration totals, while erecting roadblocks to otherwise over-performing candidates from third parties.

Like, say, Libertarian Senate candidate Gary Johnson.

We've had this option in Wisconsin, and I'd never thought of it as a special problem. But adopting it so specifically to fight off one candidate seems like such obvious corruption of the office of Secretary of State that it deserves a legal challenge and it should be usable as a neatly packaged political issue for Johnson. The state is "heavily Democratic," so why the temptation to depart from winning fair and square? I can only think that the sense of entitlement is so strong, they forget not to show it.

"Suggesting that New Mexico voters don't want to take the time to actually indicate their preferences for each office is ridiculous," [Gary Johnson] wrote in an email. "Pushing voters toward straight ticket voting is a worn-out staple of major party incumbents, and flies in the face of the reality that the great majority of voters are independent-minded and don't need or appreciate a ballot that provides a short-cut to partisanship."...

States have repealed straight ticket devices in the past fifty years are Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas (effective 2019), and Wisconsin.

I'm surprised to see Wisconsin on that list. I didn't notice the repeal (which, I see elsewhere, happened in 2011).

Michigan repealed its device in 2016, but a U.S. District Court recently struck down the Michigan repeal.

 On what basis? Race discrimination?

Besides Michigan and New Mexico, the only states that still have straight-ticket devices are Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Utah.

It is hard to read straight-ticket voting as anything but representatives from the two major parties blunting third-party competition and cementing their own incumbency, regardless of voters' growing disaffection with party membership and loyalty over time.

So it's a great issue to have coming to the forefront in this time of creative destruction.

After writing everything you see above, I looked up the Michigan case, and my guess was right. The court found it racially discriminatory! Reuters reported on August 1st:

The ruling permanently blocks what U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain called a politically motivated move by the Republican-controlled state legislature in a state that backed President Donald Trump in 2016 after twice choosing Democratic former President Barack Obama....

Drain cited research finding African-American voters are more likely than voters of other races to cast a straight-ticket ballot and are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. “The goal of ending the Democratic Party’s success with straight-ticket voters, therefore, was achieved at the expense of African-Americans’ access to the ballot,” Drain wrote in a 103-page ruling....

I wonder, did the New Mexico Secretary of State present her action in terms of protecting racial minorities. The quote from her in Reason is:

"The more options people have, the easier it is for more eligible voters to participate—and participation is the key to our democratic process," she said in her statement. "As Secretary of State, I am committed to making it easier—not harder—for New Mexicans to vote….From moms juggling work and kids to elderly veterans who find it hard to stand for long, straight-party voting provides an option for voters that allows their voices to be heard while cutting in half the time it takes them to cast their ballot."

She used juggling "moms" and "elderly veterans." They're the ones she invites you to picture struggling to get through a long ballot. She didn't use the idea in the Michigan case, and I can see why. It's insulting!

"In New Mexico... [t]he high desert is normally the color of baked pie crust; now, it's emerald."

"We now have this green carpet covering all the mesas, the lowlands... And we're just not used to seeing a pistachio-green color in the landscape out here. It's very, very unusual."

Landfill archeology: The search for "E.T." — the video game so bad, Atari threw 728,000 copies into a dump and sealed them under concrete.

The badness of the game and the "Atari grave" had become the stuff of legend, and they're making a movie about the finding and opening the grave — a film to be released on Microsoft's Xbox.

The trash became a treasure precisely because it was trash from the start. It arrived on the market "practically broken," with "E.T. falling into traps that were almost impossible to escape and would appear constantly and unpredictably." The man who designed the game, Howard Scott Warshaw, says Atari only gave him 5 weeks, because it needed to be ready for Christmas shoppers, so it could be opened by kids who were, presumably, tormented by their ugly little hero's propensity to drop into unpredictable, unescapable traps.

Alamogordo, the location of the dump, gets to keep most of the games the film crew found. Not only does the city plan to sell the games, but the mayor expresses hope of attracting tourists to the town that is now the most significant archeological site in the history of video games.

I often wonder why people travel. It is a mystery that is little examined, perhaps because most people do not even see it as mystery. But I say it's a mystery. And within that mystery there are all the different reasons why people travel. One reason is to visit historical sites within a field of interest. For some, it seems, the field is video games. Alamogordo is on a list with... what else?

The video game travelers, arriving in Alamogordo, can interact with the Christian artifact replica travelers, who stop by The Shroud Exhibit And Museum, and the sand dune aficionados, come to gaze upon The White Sands National Monument. I like to think of these 3 sets of travelers, trekking the face of the earth and all converging one day in Alamogordo and experiencing a cosmic convergence.

The geeks who love their games and their creature from another world, the religious folk who want to get close to the corporeal form of Christ through what is reputed to be his burial sheet (even if it's only a replica, a replica of a fake), and the lovers of the beauty of Earth in its greatest extreme of dry desolation — in my mind's eye I see them out there, in a million separate rooms, packing suitcases, readying themselves for... A Voyage to Alamogordo.