About Those Frogs

     In a move that is more rock-throwing than frog-boiling, FCC head Brendan Carr has started an inquiry into KCBS in San Francisco, a radio station that had the audacity to -- gasp -- report on real-time events in public view as they were happening!

     Commissioner Carr says the station has been sent a letter of inquiry, pending "...a formal investigation[...], and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public-interest obligations."

     Indeed, the radio spectrum has limited space for stations, which are charged with operating in the "public interest, convenience and necessity."  We've also got the First Amendment, the relevant sections of which read, "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press [...]."  The FCC has their own read on how those principles interact.

     The old Photography Is Not A Crime website was built around the fact that in the United States, it's not a crime to take or to share pictures of anything in public view.  If you ever wondered why the government kept extending the fences and "No Trespassing" areas around Area 51, now you know.  And if you can photograph it, you can report on it.  Simple as that.*

     Then-candidate Donald Trump was very open about his plans for Federal forces to round up and deport illegal immigrants if he won the Presidency.  He did and they have begun, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)† doing most of the work.  So the Press knew well in advance and looked for activity.  When ICE acted in the San Francisco area, KCBS covered it, who-what-when-where-why, live as events went down.  "What" included ICE raids in East San José ("where"); "who" involved uniformed agents in unmarked vehicles.  It's not a secret: anyone could see what was going on.  Commissioner Carr is nevertheless unhappy.  (The Völkischer Beobachter, er, New York Post seems worried about "rootless cosmopolitan" involvement -- but having been there, I can tell you the distance between corporate shareholders and a field reporter is impossibly vast.  Not only do the shareholders not tell 'em what to do, they don't even know who they are.)

     Elsewhere, there's unhappiness all around in Denver, where ICE covered up a home-security camera while knocking on doors.  Border "Czar" Tom Homan wants an investigation -- not into the illegal interference with video recording, but into how local news reporters found out about the raids that, this past October before he'd even got the job, he had promised were coming.  9News reporter Chris Vanderbeen has the skinny on that (BlueSky thread):
      "As a local news operation, it's routine for various people to tell us [...] when a boatload of federal agents are amassing in a parking lot [...]  A number of our crews went to these staging areas and then -- mostly this is because it's what journalists do -- they followed the teams when they went out on the raids. [...] Keep in mind, the ICE presence was OBVIOUS to anyone nearby too"
     His thread is accompanied by multiple pictures of uniformed ICE agents in marked vehicles.  A crew from the Fox News Network was embedded with at least one ICE squad in the area during the raids.  These were not covert operations.

     This isn't a new administration finding their way, unsure of the rules and customs; the principles of press freedom and "in public view" are very well established.  And, yes, there is always some tension between what the Press wants to drag into the light and what governments want to keep quiet.  That's normal.  In the United States, our Constitution and legal tradition favors truth and daylight over night and fog --  or Nacht und Nebel, if you'd prefer it in the original.
__________________
* Interestingly enough, if you're in the military or working for Uncle Sam or a government contractor, there may be things in public view that you, personally, cannot talk about or share images of.  But that's a you and your employer issue.
 
† You'll recognize them in the field by their vests and jackets that say "POLICE ICE" in letters at least six inches tall.  They are indeed ICE, Federal Agents, but they're not, strictly speaking, police; it's there to keep other kinds of law enforcement from making embarrassing mistakes with firearms, etc.

Speaking Of Broadcasting

      I have long preferred to listen to radio news in the morning while I catch up on dishes,* make breakfast and rearrange the kitchen clutter.  These days, there's not a lot of news on the radio in Indianapolis, so it's the local NPR station† or nothing, unless I dig out a shortwave receiver and go hunting.

     This morning, closing a long story about an Olympic field hockey player who had part of a broken finger amputated rather than repaired so he could make it to the Paris Olympics, NPR played nearly all of what sounded like the John Williams arrangement of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream," the inspiring fanfare used for most U. S. network TV coverage of the Olympics since 1964, across two different networks.  The TV networks are protective of it; NBC was a few years getting the rights to the music after they wrestled Olympic coverage away from ABC and if you decide it'd be a great accompaniment to your "Olympics tire sale" commercial, better lawyer up and buckle in for a bumpy ride that will end in a crash.  Public radio sometimes gets a pass, on a "You wouldn't hit a skinny kid with glasses, would you?" basis and a tenuous extension of Fair Use: even big corporations don't like to get caught looking like a bully.  Or they may have worked something out with NBC, which is effectively out of the radio network business these days.

     One thing for sure: every time I hear those big kettledrums lead into that uplifting theme from the brasses, it chokes me up.  And I'm not even much of a sports fan. (Here's an interesting piece on music for the Olympics, with plenty of examples.)
__________________________
* Judge me if you must, but several dropped ceramic mugs, drinking glasses and nice plates back, I decided that if I was sleepy, I wasn't going to do the dishes after dinner, just scrape them, rinse them and let them soak until morning.  It was the trying to sort out razor-sharp shards from slippery, soapy silverware while sleepy that convinced me.
 
† They've got a local news department as least as good as the best county-seat AMs had forty years ago, which counts as pretty darned good these days. Without a subscription to the crumbling, tattered remains of the local newspaper, how else would I find out about scandals involving city government officials?

Living In A Glass House

     There's limited room on the airwaves.  Digital TV made it easier to get more signals into the same channels -- and the FCC promptly stacked stations closer together to make more room for police radio and commercial users.*  Mostly-analog FM and AM† is even more pressed for space, with an array of technological fixes helping to find and fill in available slots anywhere there's enough of an audience to turn a profit.

     Radio and TV spectrum is a limited resource.  You can run out of it.  It's not like newspapers (just print more!) or cable TV (filled up one wire?  Run another -- or use fiber-optic for more bandwidth) or the Internet (make more webpages, run fatter data pipes!).  So the government regulates it via the FCC and one of the things they have required since early on is transparency: stations have to ID themselves with every transmission and you've always been able to go look up which owners go with what call letters. 

     Broadcasting is a big megaphone, and broadcast stations have to prove they're of some use to their community.  The way that happens is by a thing called a "Public File."  It used to be an actual file at the studios that anyone could show up during business hours and leaf through; now it's an electronic file, accessible through the stations website and the FCC's as well.  In it you'll find the current license (including ownership information) and any applications pending with the FCC, agreements the station has made with citizens (usually advocacy groups), contracts, complaints, details of political broadcasts, a copy of the FCC's guidebook The Public and Broadcasting, a list of issues and of programs that address them (including children's programming), and so on.  "And so on" has for years included EEO requirements: equal opportunity in employment.  There aren't any hiring quotas, but the FCC wants stations to make sure they're reaching out to all qualified applicants when they have job openings.  And they used to require stations keep track of staff demographics, and post that information in their public file.  Twenty years ago, that requirement was dropped (at least for radio stations) due to a court case, but time marches on and they were able to reinstate it recently.

     Of course a station owner objected.  Remember, there aren't any quotas; the FCC just wants that data out there so the general public can see it, along with all the other information about how the station has addressed matters of public interest and who's running the place.  But that's too much for the folks who run "theDove" and they've filed suit to block it.  The NAB loathes the notion, too, and have filed their own lawsuit. 

     I don't know.  Over-the-air radio and TV stations are using a scarce resource, and nobody's keeping them from making money; but since they're getting to use the public's airwaves (and at a pretty cheap price, too), the public deserves to get some direct benefit, and the public ought to be able to check how the sausage is made, too.   It doesn't seem out of line to include demographic data not linked to names.  NAB suggests it may enable doxxing individuals, and I will leave it to readers to decide if that's a genuine concern or a legal stratagem.

     Radio and TV stations are allowed a disproportionately-loud voice, and subjecting them to a greater degree of scrutiny in return is about as close to fair as we're going to get.
____________________________
* Yes, it's true.  UHF TV, which used to end at channel 83, now stops at channel 36, just shy of the channel 37 spot that was never used: radio astronomy finds 608 - 614 MHz useful and above that, it's all cops, military, Feds, fire departments, ambulances, phones and so on.
 
† There is, kind of, available room on the AM band these days, but it's more like vacant buildings than wide open spaces -- and decrepit buildings, at that.  An AM radio station is a big pile of sunk costs, especially the antenna tower(s) and ground system, costly to build, expensive to maintain and vulnerable to theft.  But AM listenership has been declining for years and advertising revenue has followed.  If you ever wanted to own an AM radio station, now's the time; but the way to make a small fortune with an AM station is to start out with a large fortune and be very, very frugal.

Bricking Up A Non-Existent Loophole

     The "Gun Show Loophole," as commonly understood, doesn't exist.  If you have a Federal Firearms License (FFL), you've got to run a federal background check and keep proper records no matter where you're doing the selling.  It doesn't make an iota of difference if you're selling them across the counter at a brick and mortar store or off a folding table at a gun show.

     If you are buying and selling firearms as a business, you've got to have an FFL, period.*  The BATFE has long had considerable discretion in deciding just who is trading in arms as a source of income and who's a hobbyist, swapping or selling the occasional firearm.  The Feds rarely go after the guy at a gunshow with a table full of uncommon or specialized examples unless his behavior is particularly egregious; it's a bit arbitrary but in recent years, this has worked without excessive friction.  (The person selling guns out of their trunk on a streetcorner [etc.] is a whole other thing, and deliberate edge cases like 80% receivers -- so-called "ghost guns" -- operate in an area of considerable legal jeopardy and contention.)

     Gun sales are regulated.  They have been probably all of your life; the Federal Firearms Act of 1938 introduced the requirement for dealers to be licensed and the system was revised and made more stringent under the Gun Control Act of 1968.  The NICS "instant check" began in 1998.  You may dislike these laws, or question the constitutionality of some or even all of their provisions, but they're what we've got and if you own guns, you have almost certainly filled out a 4473 form and had a background check run.  Like it or not, it's routine.

     All that background is explaining why I was looking sideways at the radio this morning when a newscaster said the Biden administration had "fixed the gun show loophole."

     Yeah, no.  That's how it's being sold to low-information audiences, which I am sorry to say includes a lot of news coverage.  That's not what it is.  Like most such things, you can go look in the horse's mouth, and what's in there are...horseteeth.

     The fact sheet linked above explains the long-standing reality I covered in my first paragraph: location doesn't matter, the rules apply, and it's been that way all along.  The remainder of it takes the "considerable discretion" BATFE already had and gets more specific about just what constitutes acting as a dealer and not a hobbyist, what differentiates selling some items from a collection from being a dealer, and so on.  It appears they're going to be looking very narrowly at the ability of a former FFL to sell off their last inventory, which was already legally messy, and it concludes with some press-release talk about other efforts to enforce existing law and exhorts Congress to do more.

     It's not a nothingburger, but if you were looking for red meat, you'll have to look pretty hard.  It's a self-goal for an election year and no doubt I'll be getting glossy ads from the usual suspects about "gun-grabbers" from one side and "keeping our kids safe" from the other.  These changes do neither.  They're minor, and the main people who will be affected are the non-FFL traders with a gunshow table full of semi-random assortments of guns, show after show after show; and I've got to tell you, probably half of those folks were already on the hook with BATFE, serving as bait to catch far worse offenders.

     I suppose in a world where the political Right is peeing all over their shoes with craziness about abortion (and contraception, et Comstock cetera) that is mostly going to motivate voters to push back, cosmic balance requires the political Left to find an issue that only plays well in their own echo chambers.  This is certainly one, but there's far less to it than shows up in the headlines.
______________________
* Hobbyists who collect odd, unusual or historical firearms that the law defines as "Curio & Relic" guns are eligible for their own special FFL; they are not dealers, but the license lets them buy, sell and swap their collectibles with other "C&R" licensees without running afoul of Federal regulations.  The record-keeping is somewhat onerous -- but a serious collector is already keeping track, so....

2023 Waltzes Away

     The year is ending in waltz time.  Have a look at the calendar: today is 123123.  Can't say this year's got much to dance over, other than the COVID-19 pandemic receding to a persistent hazard, especially for those still avoiding the vaccine.  We're a lot better off now, with effective treatments, but the damnable virus is here to stay, right next to the flu.

*  *  *
     Politics remains a worry.  Gone are the days when I could poke fun at the tail-chasing ineffectiveness and occasional dangers of the Federal government, secure in the knowledge that it would all work out in the end, while keeping legislators, the Executive branch and a wide array of bureaucrats busy and out of worse trouble.  Nope, they've managed to screw that up and now I watch 'em warily, waiting for them to find a new next shoe to drop.  It turns out they have as many as a centipede, and the current crop of office-holders hurls them with heedless abandon.

     I'm not impressed.  All systems of government are bad, compromises we make to avoid the necessity of having to go to war with the next city over, or those awful people down the street, but some are a lot worse than others.  Ours has been one of the least bad for a long time, and a good many people appeared to be trying to make it even less bad.  A lot of them have given up; some of them (ahem, Republicans, mostly, though the Dems have still got a Senatorial Menendez to yeet) have decided they'd prefer it to be even more bad.

     It's got me voting regularly -- voting against crummy candidates and incumbents, mostly, rather than for, but I'm certainly not going to pass up the opportunity to chime in when so many people are pushing for autocracy and the mailed fist.

*  *  *
     With all this talk of waltzes and hard times, the Boswell Sisters offer something different, close harmony and a willingness to fiddle with tempo and key that reminds me our country -- our fellow citizens -- can manage chaos pretty well.  Sometimes brilliantly.  We may get through this yet.

     See there? Some good things have come from Louisiana. It's not all Kingfishing.

Update

     The cold is still receding -- and my lungs and sinuses are still emptying.  It's not fun.

     I don't have much to say about current events.  Things are generally awful and working on getting more so.  Is there any good end in sight?  I don't know, but optimists are likely to be disappointed.  Accelerationists are assholes, who don't give a darn about you, your family or the future, and if you run with them or just wink at their nonsense and allow it to stand, you are in the same position as a civilian in the Gaza Strip: you're an ablative meat shield. 

     I have been doing a lot of writing, mostly on a PI series I'm not going to detail.  I did turn out a short story based on an idea I liked: what if there'd been a roadhouse run by a member of the New Jersey Mob* across the country lane from the Wilmuth farm when Orson Welles landed invading Martians there on October 31, 1937?  I don't think a well-connected gangster would have had much patience with the Martians, or been as cautious as the New Jersey State Patrol and the U. S. Army were in the radio drama.  I'm hoping to place the story, though if so, publication might have to wait until next Halloween.
_________________________
* Members of what I will call, for the sake of brevity, the actual Mafia did provide useful assistance to the government's war efforts during WW II -- and why not?  They liked living here too!  So perhaps that part of the story isn't so far-fetched.  The Howard E. Koch radio script took several liberties, notably compressing the time scale of travel from Mars to Earth and of the Martian invasion, but between his gradually accelerating storyline and the dramatic skills of Mr. Welles and company, audiences barely noticed.  (Howard Koch was among the Mercury Theatre of the Air staffers who headed to Hollywood shortly afterward, but Welles already had a film script.  So he bounced around, picking up work, and was eventually handed a mess of a script for a movie already in production, in the hopes he could salvage something.  He did indeed; the film was Casablanca.)

The Thing About Mattresses

     Mattresses, pillows -- sleep hardware (plushware?) of that sort is at a high level of development, but here's the thing: with the possible exception of the air pump and controller in those "pick your firmness" mattresses, there's not much to them.  The pieces and parts are basic: fabric or plastic, cotton batting or various kinds of plastic or latex foam, and spring wire.  Valves, fittings and heaters for waterbed mattresses, pumps and filters for air-support.

     Every five dollars you pay for a mattress buys perhaps five cents of materials, 25 cents of labor* and fifty cents of know-how and advertising.  Don't underestimate the cleverness and innovation that goes into designing a modern mattress: good ones are very good and even the cheap ones are well above what you could get a hundred years ago.  And don't ignore the salesmanship, either: a mattress or a pillow is a pedestrian necessity, and yet it rates specialist shops and plenty of advertising, usually with comfort highlighted and most often an engaging spokesperson.

     I was listening to NPR news while doing the dishes the other day -- actual news doesn't vary that much from BBC to Fox and Alexa's got a good bundle of NPR newscast, local weather and some in-depth reporting, usually "Up First" or "Planet Money" -- and they do run ads, of the restrained, talky, public radio type.  Lo and behold, they've got a sponsor hawking mattresses, with a positive-talking company owner extolling the product's virtues.  I snickered.  Yes, NPR has their own version of the My Pillow guy, probably in a tweet sports jacket with patches on the elbows.

     I'm not here to run down either of their product lines.  You get what you pay for, and while we probably pay more than most mattresses and pillows are worth, pricing is linked to quality and tends to be affordable.  (I still miss the factory-direct outfit I bought from when I lived in a college town. Their sales volume was enormous and prices were accordingly low.†)   But it is a business that relies more on sizzle than steak to get you to pick their brand.  There aren't that many ways to get a comfortable night's sleep.

     So when a mattress guy or a pillow guy starts talking politics, trying to sell you on a point of view?  Take it with a big, fat grain of salt.  He's a master of salesmanship, so good he sells himself on whatever he's pushing.  You're not going to come away from that transaction with anything to sleep on, no matter what channel or network he's on.  If there's a nickel's worth of substance in whatever politics he wants you to spend five bucks on, look out the window for flying pigs.
_____________________________
* If it was made in the U. S.  Elsewhere, the work doesn't pay as well.
 
† I may miss being able to buy an actual futon even more.  That's the thick, simple Japanese-style mattress, not the frame it sits on. A futon works well in the home-made platform bed I sleep on, and at a price that let me replace them every couple of years.  But they've just about vanished around here, other than low-end ones sold with the couch-convertible frames.

Clark Savage, Jr. The Third?

     A few days ago, I learned to my delight that a couple of the original adventures of 1930 pulp hero Doc Savage were turned into a series of radio plays on NPR in the mid-1980s.  I hunted them down online, and a couple of episodes in, they're pretty good.  Producer Roger Rittner has a genuine feel for classic radio drama.  He and modern-day pulp writer Will Murray did a fine job with the scripts and the casting was good.

     Doc (Clark Savage, Jr.) was a remarkable example of physical fitness and agility, but he was also a "general specialist,*" holding degrees in (and practicing) medicine, mathematics and all of the "hard sciences."  There was nothing he didn't do well -- except, perhaps, deal with emotion.  The combination worked better than you might expect.

     I was doing dishes yesterday and wanted something to listen to.  I'd already run through a couple of newscasts, so I asked the robot, "Alexa, play Doc Savage."

     She -- it -- responded with "PLAYING MUSIC BY DOC SAVAGE," and launched into some heavy-beat electronic music.  The first was instrumental; the next one added some futuristic rap lyrics.

     Apparently, Alexa can't find the radio plays. 

     I went looking for the artist who recorded the music this morning and there's not a sign of him or them.  A folkish UK act appears to have used the name, too.

     So I'm left wondering.  WTH, Clark?  Got bored with fighting crime?  Decided to pick up one more career?

     I'll be superamalgamated if I know.
_________________________
* Doc's creator, ex-telegrapher Lester Dent, was a bit larger than life himself.  Well over six feet tall, as his career progressed, he became a ham radio operator, private pilot, yachtsman, photographer, amateur chemist, gadgeteer, inventor and all-around Robert A. Heinlein hero.

History Hits The Chorus Again

      Let's see -- an expansionist autocrat is waging war to "take back" territory to which his country has a far less tenable claim than the people who, you know, actually live there, while out-of-power politicians and pundits in the U.S. make excuses for him and dabble in anti-Semitism?

      Haven't we been here already, and wasn't it pretty terrible the last time?  Let's not replay it.  And let's stop the war machine before it hits the English Channel this time, too.

Listening

      Some time back, I started listening to the original Dragnet radio program, Jack Webb's first take on a "based on real cases" police show and far less preachy than the later TV version.  I reached the last one and went looking for something else.

      X Minus One is a good science fiction series that presented some real classics -- Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air," Robert A. Heinlein's "Requiem" and the remarkably prescient "A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster, to name a few -- but there aren't a lot of surviving episodes and it can be overwhelming.

      There's another gem that ran for years: the original Gunsmoke, with William Conrad (trust me, he plays much leaner on the radio) as Marshall Matt Dillon.  Darker and grittier than the long-running TV series, the production values are remarkable and the stories are fully-formed and well-told.  I've been drifting off to sleep with tales of Dodge City in my ears for about a week now.