What Day Is It?

      It's Star Trek day, among other things, the day the first episode of the series aired on NBC, the first step in a long cultural arc that took science fiction from being that crazy stuff your parents razzed you for watching and your English teacher despaired of you reading* to a cherished institution featuring Star Wars day every May and Star Trek day as summer comes to an end.

     Fun stuff, but it's a reminder that every day is History Day.†  I was reminded of that more forcefully while listening to a radio news piece from Kyiv this morning, covering the Russian drone strikes in that city.  The reporter had been awakened in the night by the sound of incoming Sahed drones and recorded parts of her story with the engines of the weapons throbbing in the background.  It's an eerie sound, and reminds me of Edward R. Murrow of CBS, broadcasting live from a London rooftop during the Blitz.‡  Or, much later in that war, the guttural buzz and sudden halt of an incoming V-1.

     We're in the run-up to World War III, or at least to a wider European War.  This time, America First holds the White House and Congress; Zelenskyy is no Churchill, nor is Putin Hitler: history does not repeat.  But it does rhyme, and the present verses carry a familiar rhythm.

     I hope I'm wrong, but there's a chill in my bones that freezes optimism.
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*Not quite a decade later, my high school offered a class on "Science Fiction."  But the English department was pretty desperate, in that huge Sports, Shop and (slightly) Math-heavy high school.  My Dad, on the other hand, never stopped regarding it as silly stuff, unworthy of adult interest.  He preferred Westerns.
 
† Is there a history Day?  Well, yes and no.  It's not just one day.
 
‡ At first, BBC didn't want him up there, and refused use of the roof of their main studio location, Broadcast House, fearing Germans might use the sound to fine-tune their bombing.  Eventually, someone realized the value of broadcasting live coverage of the attacks, and British resolve in the face of them, to the then-neutral United States.

Filtering History

     It's best to let historians do their own fighting; they'll do so at the drop of a hat, and discuss the hat's provenance, origins and cultural connections on the way down.  We're best off when we have a lot of them and they're all under some sort of "publish or perish" pressure: they'll fight their way to accuracy, by the jealous pointing of the mistakes of their predecessors and peers if nothing else.

     You know what's not a good idea?  Rewriting history to suit an agenda.  From the Soviets airbrushing purged Party members out of photographs and twisting history books around to suit their own ends to Parson Weems' well-intentioned fable about a young George Washington ruining a cherry tree (but not his untrammeled honesty) or the White House and the Press concealing President Roosevelt's inability to walk unaided, distorting history is harmful.  If you don't have a clear idea where you've been, you're not going to understand where you're going.  Meddling with the presentation of history is literally Orwellian: it's Winston Smith's job in 1984.

     So when the President of the United States tells the Smithsonian Institution -- he is not their boss, by the way -- they're to start combing through their museums and culling any commentary and exhibits that don't jibe with his notion of a positive portrayal of American history, historians are right to object.  The venerable Organization of American Historians is looking out for the rest of us.

Cease Fi-- Incoming!

     In the wake of the U.S. bombing of several nuclear-work sites in Iran, there was supposed to be a cease-fire between Iran and Israel.  The President of the U.S. said so.

     Their militaries don't appear to have gotten the message.  I don't know if their governments have.  Each is accusing the other of going back on the agreement.

     I'm not chortling at Mr. Trump's disappointment (he was chiding the Israelis on social media not long ago).  I'm certainly not cheering on the conflict; it is messy, with missiles, bombs and drones striking civilians along with their (presumed) military targets, in a region already filled with tragedy.

     Who ever calmed a hornet's nest by shaking it?

Playing Their Game

     Outrage -- reaction.  Shock -- reaction.  Blow past limits -- reaction.

     That's the game.  Every day, a new bad thing -- or three, or four.  Even ostensible errors work for them.  And anyone invested in norms, in stability, in lawful, orderly liberty is left off-balance, struggling to keep up.

     I could write about one of the most recent, a harebrained scheme to essentially flash-migrate the Social Security Administration's vast codebase (and the database it manipulates) off ancient, crusty COBOL and the machines it runs on over to something newer, sleeker and supposedly better, but I don't know if I can share just how big a nightmare it is, especially since DOGE code kiddies have already demonstrated hat they don''t even begin to understand COBOL and all the tricks and cruft it takes to make it work.  Informed speculation claims they're going to use AI to get it done -- you know, the same AI that still can't get the right number of fingers on pictures of people.

     But it's only one shock among many, and that is the point: shock and awe.  Blitzkrieg.  Storm in, tear stuff up high, wide and mighty, leave it screwed up until people don't think it it will ever work again, then patch together some cheapjack mess that kind of runs and claim to have saved the day -- though we're nowhere near the "slap up a crappy replacement and play for applause" stage yet, and there's always the risk the trick won't actually work.

     And through it all, attention, attention, attention.  The newsies say the President's name hundreds of times a day, all the nations of the world watch to see where his (and his staff's) whim will fall next, a planned tariff there, a proposed annexation elsewhere....  It'll make your head spin, and it's supposed to.  It's supposed to keep you so off guard you don't notice rights and freedoms ebbing away -- people are grabbed off the street by masked law enforcement, held without recourse to counsel, jailed without trial.  Law firms are being made to bend the knee to the Executive Branch, officials dismissed without following Congressionally-required procedures, and everywhere, the heavy hand of authoritarianism is descending.

     This isn't the America I learned about in Civics class.  And it's not like we weren't warned.

Loosely Translated

     "Boys throw rocks at frogs in fun, but the frogs die for real."
     --Bion of Borystenthes

Saturday Dinner, Sunday Brunch

      Saturday, we watched another episode of Rogue Heroes* and enjoyed a pork roast.  A four-pound Boston Butt, in fact, which I floured, browned and simmered for more than four hours over Tom Yum Chicken Bone Broth, adding chunks of peeled Granny Smith apple early and then potatoes, parsnips, carrots, celery, white onion and Portobello mushrooms.  It was falling-apart tender -- and I have leftovers for two more meals.  The broth is an excellent match for pork with apple.  The TV series is an excellent match for anyone who enjoys well-told WW II history with a touch of informed imagination.

     This morning, another experiment: I have had a packet of microwaveable "Organic Super Grains, Smoky Southwest: sorghum, quinoa, amaranth, and pearl millet" on the shelf for some time.  With a buildup like that, it was going to either be amazing or inedible, and I am very pleased to say it is amazing.  I diced and browned a half-sized can of Spam with some chopped-up orange grape tomatoes (enjoy them while you can: "Bahama Bombs" are a Canadian import), put just a dash or McCormick's curry powder† and a little smoked paprika on it, and stirred in the just-microwaved grains.  When it was time, I pushed it all to the sides and scrambled a couple of eggs, mixing it all together and adding some cilantro (be sure you like it first!) and parsley.  This is as good a breakfast bowl as anyone could wish for, flavorful but not hot.

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* This BBC series, SAS: Rogue Heroes in the home market, tells the story of the formation and early years of the Special Air Service, which requires very little dramatic invention: the men involved were brilliant and a bit off-center, the kinds of men who flourish in wartime and ferment when idle.  Remarkably well-acted and well-cast, after we watched the first episode, I turned to Tamara and remarked, "They made a TV series for you!" The early SAS, along with the Long Range Desert Group, was one of the inspirations behind the TV series Rat Patrol -- but the reality is more incredible than any sanitized (and highly Americanized) 1960s TV program.
 
† I will point out,  as I have in the past, that "curry powder" is not, strictly speaking, an Indian condiment; it's a British or Anglo-Indian mixture of Indian-type spices, and varies widely from one brand to another.  It's good stuff, especially for those of us who don't have ready access to (or knowledge of) the full array of Indian spices, but get to know how hot/sweet/piquant your local varieties are, and understand it for what it is.  McCormick's works well with U. S. Southwestern flavors, so I was confident in using a little of it here.  One thing you will not find in most kinds of curry powder is salt -- which makes it ideal for anything that's already salty.

"Robin Hoodie" Was Never Going To Be A Folk Hero

     It wasn't in the cards.  The UHC CEO assassin wasn't going to be a folk hero or even a comic-book (graphic novel!) vigilante.  Sane people, good people, don't shoot another person in the back unless that person presents an imminent threat to human life.

     Americans kill one another quite often, and on little provocation.  We're doing so less these days -- but we're still doing it.  And if it seems even a little justified -- how many stats have I seen about insurance claim denial rates in the last few days, with United Health Care heading the list -- a lot of us will chime in, or at least nod, or maybe just shrug.

     The fact remains that you've got to be seriously off-axis to commit that kind of murder; in fact, being some kind of nut (not to get too technical) appears to improve the odds of success, as I have written about before when discussing political assassination attempts.

     Did the killer's actions hold up a distorting mirror to the feelings of many Americans about the health-insurance industry?  Undeniably.  Just don't confuse the myth/legend/story with the facts.

     Murder is wrong.

     Running your business in such a way that a plurality (at least) of the people who hear about your murder express positive or neutral feelings about the crime is wrong, too.  It doesn't justify the murder -- but it ought to be food for thought.

One Down, 87 To Go

     It depends on how you count them, but there were almost 90 autocratic governments on Earth yesterday, and today there's one less: Assad isn't running Syria any more.  (Present whereabouts unknown; a plane carrying him may have gone down, and no one is looking very hard.  Update: The Russians say he's been granted asylum in Moscow.  He was their boy in the Middle East for a long time, so it's not unlikely. )

     What comes next?  It's hard to say.  What newscasts are calling "Syrian rebels" is a a polyglot bunch, and the largest bloc, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has palled around with both the "Islamic State" and al-Qaida in the past.  They haven't run with either since 2016; guessing if that was a matter of wanting less crazy or more is an exercise for pundits and intel professionals.  Junior partner is the Syrian National Army, a collection of at least twenty-eight groups;* some sources say at least twenty-one of them have received U. S. assistance in the past, against IS and related threats, but we've been known to hand out goodies to almost anyone who'd smile and promise to fight Communists, Islamic extremists and the like.†  Some of SNA's roots go back to the "Free Syrian Army," and Turkey has been one of their main sources of support, despite the occasional armed squabble.

     You can tie yourself up in knots trying to sort all this out, and by the time you have, the situation will have changed.  None of them liked Assad, or the way he was running the country, and it appears that became a strong enough motivation that they were able to work together.

     It's an open question if they'll be able to continue working together, but we can at least hope.  If you're expecting the Syrian James Madison will come running down from the hinterlands, waving a draft Constitution well-suited to the people of that nation, don't hold your breath.  They might -- and it would be good news if they can -- manage to cobble something together that will hold long enough to make serious inroads against the starvation and misery that part of the world has become famous for.

     It says something about our species that the very cradle of human civilization has become a nightmare of failed states and warlordism, with refugees as the prime regional export.  It says something about us, and it's nothing pleasant.
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* At this point, the better-informed might be wondering, "What of the Kurds?"  They're wondering that, too.  They appear to have very little presence in the SNA.  Kurds are about ten percent of Syrian population and are likely to get what they usually get: short shrift.  The French, the British, the various Allied and UN powers, the local potentates and so on all overlooked them when they drew lines on maps, and it's one more smoldering problem in a place that has an oversupply of tragedies.
 
† And that's nothing new -- go read some early 19th-Century Letters of Marque issued by Congress for examples. A proxy war is a cheap war for everyone except the proxies.

The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month

     It's Veteran's Day -- and I do thank you for your service.  It was Armistice Day to begin with, the end of a war that left a scar twisting across the face of Europe.  Some of the WW I battlefield is still uninhabitable.

     Someone who was my age when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour in 1918 would have had clear memories of the U. S. Civil war.  That includes some of the soldiers and sailors.  One officer is known to have served during both wars -- and the ones in between.  And the scars from the Civil War remain, too, not as dead or as deadly as France's Red Zones but they're still there, etched across the land, scrawled across history, written on gravestones and in family histories.  War extracts a terrible price and it falls most heavily on the young and strong.  Even in peacetime, most military service consists of long hours of hard work for low pay.

     Those people in uniform are us.  Just like you, your neighbors, the people you work with and the kids you went to school with.  They're a mixed bag -- smart, dumb, short, tall, liberals, conservatives and people who just don't care about politics.  They grew up poor, middle-class and wealthy.  They're every color and all the same color -- green or Navy blue or whatever.  What they have in common is they stepped up.  They are doing -- or they have done -- the job, often far from home, frequently in terrible weather, and, at times, with the understanding there are other people not too far away who intend to kill them.

     I try not to be too glib with, "Thank you for your service."  That service is not something you can nod at acknowledging one day a year and call it good enough.

In The Interest Of Fairness

     Since I did write a single piece on former President Trump's recent trial and conviction, I'd better give the trial and conviction of Hunter Biden (not a former or current President and has never held elected office) the same.

     He lied on a BATFE 4473 form and got caught; it went to trial, the prosecution presented the facts and he was held guilty.  Simple as that.  The surprising thing that he was found out and prosecuted; skylined by having a President for a father and addicted to a particularly stigmatizing drug, his odds of skating by were worse than most.  In a country where 38 of 50 states have legalized a Federally illegal drug (marijuana), 24 of them for recreational use, there must be stacks and stacks of 4473s with entries constituting a felony, just ticking away -- something it would be reasonable for a jury to expect a man with a law degree like, oh, Hunter Biden, to understand.  It's not as if BATFE made it a trick question:
     "21. f. Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?
Warning: The use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where you reside."

     While the Feds periodically update the form (it now includes a tickbox for "Non-Binary" in the answers for question 14, which makes sense given that they want ethnicity, race, height, weight, hair and eye color, too, all so they can pick you out of a crowd) they've wanted to know if you were breaking Federal drug laws for as long as I've been filling out those forms, and they ask because Uncle Sam has decided drug users shouldn't be owning guns.  You don't even have to be an addict to get the downcheck.

     So the bottom line is, if you're smoking the Devil's cabbage (et illegal cetera), don't go buying guns.  It's a Federal crime to lie on the 4473 form and it's a Federal crime to possess the firearm.  If they can do it to Hunter Biden -- and they most certainly did -- they can do it to you, too, and you're probably not an attorney nor especially rich, and it's a cinch your Dad isn't President.*  Sure, maybe they'll overlook you (it usually takes an arrest for something else first), but I wouldn't count on it.
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* Even if he was, he'd probably do the same thing Joe Biden has done, and refuse to pardon you.  Call it a strong moral stance or call it a cynical ploy, the result is the same.

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.
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* 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....

Television Has Not Always Been Here

     "Kids today..."  Thanks to the Web (what you know as "the Internet" is mostly the World Wide Web, and we had an Internet long before that), thanks to streaming, thanks to handheld devices from smartphones to pads, it seems as if instant visual media has always been a thing.

     It hasn't.  I'm old enough to remember when TV told us about the big stories at six p.m., and added "film at eleven" for most of them; behind the scenes, a continuous-process developer was running at full speed and photojournalists were splicing the still-damp film, betting the edits would get though the projector without coming apart.  Live remote broadcasts were few and usually scheduled far in advance, microwave (or Bell Telephone) technical magic requiring engineers at both ends just to get the connection running.

     In 1945, few American cities had a TV station.  A couple had two or three, and stations in Philadelphia, New York City and Schenectady had linked up via Bell Telephone coaxial cable to present live coverage of the 1940 Republican Convention; the Democrats held their convention in Chicago that year and the video lines didn't go that far.  (In 1944, both parties held their conventions in Chicago, away from the coasts -- and any possibility of widespread TV coverage.)  Going into WW II, TV set sales had been disappointingly low: they were monumentally expensive, and most people lived outside the range of the existing stations.  Once the war began, manufacturing of consumer TVs was shut down for the duration.

     So when I had podcasts playing for background noise this morning and NPR's Ari Shapiro opened Consider This by telling me, "On August 6, 1945, a stone-faced President Harry Truman appeared on television and told Americans about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima," I was....puzzled.

     There was a TV station in the nation's capitol in 1945: Dumont's W3XWT got on the air that May, running a test pattern and a recording asking viewers to call the station.  No one had done so until Japan surrendered in August,* when Dumont's Thomas Goldsmith wrote "War is over" on a slide that replaced the test pattern, and the U. S. Navy picked up the phone to ask what all this TV stuff was about.

     Sorry, Ari; that video of a grim-faced President Truman telling Americans about the atomic bomb is from a newsreel, and most people didn't see it until they were at the movies, days or weeks after the bomb was dropped, by which time they'd already heard the news on the radio or read it in the newspaper.

     You -- and I -- grew up in a world of television. of images from all around the globe that have steadily become more immediate and vivid.  I could make a live video call to Tasmania or Mumbai right now, as easily as I'm typing this blog post, and it's no big deal.  But it wasn't always that way.  There was a time when hardly anyone had a glowing screen in their home (let alone their hand!) and the few who did, didn't get much over it.  And it was only a long lifetime ago.

     The NPR piece is about the descendants of the people who were downwind (and unwarned) of the Trinity test, families with long histories of cancer -- and zero compensation from the government.  They deserve better than to have their stories undermined by a lack of attention to detail.
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*  Announced on 15 August, though not formally signed until 2 September.

"Getting Hit On The Head Lessons"

     I replaced the Amazon Fire Stick streaming device on my bedroom TV last month.  The old one was struggling to keep up.  The slightly different menu structure of the new one led me to discover Prime Video offered Mannix in their free programs.

     The series takes heat for the number of times the lead character gets hit over the head.  I didn't remember much about it, but I thought it might be instructive to watch, since I'm writing a little PI fiction these days.

     It's instructive, all right.  While Mike Conners as "Joe Mannix" does get hit on the head enough in the first few episodes to lead to a lifetime of career-ending traumatic brain injury trouble (and takes bad beatings all over, too), that's not the only lesson to learn.  The first season writing is remarkably lazy.  It's not incompetent; story continuity's good, the characters aren't especially thin for 1960s - 70s TV.  And the actors are okay; Conners can carry off the role well even in hokey scenes, sets that wouldn't have been out of place in the campy TV Batman and contrived fight sequences (why do groups of bad guys always attack one at a time?).  But major plot points turn on coincidence and blind luck; normal police procedure is waved off when the hero and his associates even bother to wait around for law enforcement after leaving dead bodies on the scene; somehow, Mannix knows every mid-level mobster and small-time crook in LA, in depth and detail.  There's a little support for the last item, given that the first season has him working for "Intertect," a highly-computerized PI firm...in a time long before centralized, interconnected databases and high-tech piracy made the kind of snooping and probing the company apparently does even possible.  Later seasons have him striking out on his own, which is likely given the amount of grief he causes his tolerant boss at Intertect and the way his methods clash with theirs.

     The series is pulpy stuff, even by the standards of the time, and Season 1 was shot on a budget that leads to repeated use of the same interior sets, redressed (all LA apartments appear to have the same layout), but the plot holes big enough to back his various custom cars through are the real problem.  Action  and acting skills can only go so far in covering for them, and it's a real lesson in how not to keep the audience engaged when you tell a story.  Serendipity happens -- but nobody can make a living relying on it and any detective worthy of the title views it with extreme skepticism.  Just ask Philip Marlow or Sam Spade, who were working that coast long before Joe Mannix first got bopped behind the ear with a length of pipe.  Or Harry "Get off your ass and go knock on doors" Bosch, who is a lot more careful about who he lets sneak up behind him.

     Still, the jazzy theme music and fast-moving plots do have their appeal; but it's junk food, filling but not nourishing.

11 November

     The current received wisdom is that veterans are a bit irked by pro forma thank-you-for-your-service recognition of the day -- and of their service.

     These are, by and large, lousy jobs.  Difficult jobs, between danger, boredom, physical effort and long, grinding workdays.  While it is true that officers at all but the smallest bases enjoy access to amenities nearly as nice as the country club in any county seat served by two different railroads, none of 'em signed up for the golf.  And ditto for the somewhat more limited perks available to enlisted personnel.  I'm darned glad people are willing to do the work and impressed by how many of them thrive.  It rates more than a stock phrase and a once-a-year discount at fast-food joints.

     Our choice of date is instructive: America chose not the date of a famous battle, or even a famous victory, but the day the guns fell silent.  Our armed forces exist not to make wars but to end them.  Quite often, that means fighting them all the way through; but there is a "through."  There is an end point.  Unbroken peace may not be something humans can manage, but we're not doomed to eternal war, either.  A few of us step up and work directly to that end; it's not an easy job and sometimes it doesn't get much respect -- but it should.  One day to mark it seems barely enough.

Know The Law

     When you got your driver's license -- and in some states, when you renewed it* -- you had to pass a test to show you understood the rules of the road.  It might have have been a written test, a hands-on driving test or both.  When you drive, it is your responsibility to know and follow the law.

     The same thing applies to firearms.  While I expect you already know and follow the Four Rules, there's more to owning or carrying guns than the basics of safety.

     Wherever you live, there are laws that govern how and where you may carry.  There may be laws about storage of guns or ammunition, laws about preventing access by unsupervised minors, and so on.  You may have been required to get training and pass a test to get a carry permit, or you may have had to undergo a background check, or your state might one of the many like Indiana, where no permit is required to carry a handgun.†  Nevertheless, you must know and follow the law.  My state has very few limits -- but your employer can ban firearms on their premises under state law (lock it up in your car and the law protects you; take it out and you're on your own).

     The state of New York has strict gun laws and New York City's are even more so.  When a New York City Councilperson showed up at a pro-Palestine rally‡ on the grounds of Brooklyn College, she was breaking two or three laws: the state doesn't allow open carry, the city has designated educational institutions among "sensitive spaces" where carry is banned, and they don't allow guns at "public demonstrations and rallies."  Inna Vernikov got what you'd expect a serving politician to get: she had to hand over her carry permit (and presumably her gun) and will have to appear in court in a few weeks. It's about like a traffic ticket.  Most people in her situation would have been arrested and jailed pending initial arrangements.  She's still unlikely to walk away unscathed; the charges are a low-level felony.

     You may disagree with the laws of New York and the ordinances of NYC -- but neither disagreement nor ignorance excuses violating them.  The Councilperson (Ms. Vernikov is also an attorney) may have not not known them, or have disagreed with them, but she'll answer for it all the same.

     Know the law.  Follow it at least as well as you follow the rules of the road: you may speed from time to time, but you're unlikely to do so in a school zone when children are beginning or ending their day.
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* When I was first driving, Indiana required passing a written test when renewing a driver's license.  It wasn't a difficult test but it was more than pro forma.  Study guides were sold at news stands, drug stores and grocery stores.
 
† Indiana does still issue a License To Carry Handgun in order to maintain reciprocal agreements with states that still require permits, and if you're going to carry a sidearm, I think it's a good idea to get the license.
 
‡ Most news stories report she was at a rally in support of Palestine.  Others say there were "dueling rallies" on opposite sides of the same public space and the other one was in support of Israel.  Which one drew her attention and which one she spent the most time at is immaterial with respect to the law.

Oh, Look, Here's A Lesson

     You know what's going on in Israel right now.  You probably know what had been going on in Israel: deeply divisive politics, in which a hard-Right government sought to remove a check on its power.

     Don't look for me to analyze internal Israeli politics; I have trouble enough keeping up with who's on what side in my own country, and what that might imply for the future.  Suffice to say the government was distracted.  The citizenry were distracted.  And for a country with plenty of enemies, many of whom can walk right up to the border on their lunch break, that was enough.

     Israel was distracted.  Politics had ceased to be the usual debate and compromise, the normal small victories and small setbacks that people could ignore, confident whatever needed doing would get done.  Terrorists struck -- and made horrific progress before a response could be coordinated.

     The run-up to recent attacks might find a parallel or two in the United States, where a government riven by internal conflict is busy tying itself up in knots.  These kinds of fights play out in plain sight -- and the world is watching, some of it through unfriendly eyes.

New Lies, Old Lies, Melting Clocks

      I watched the event in real time.  6 January 2021, I was spending about half of each day working from home and that morning, I was running late.  Mr. Trump was still claiming he'd been snookered out of the Presidency and Congress was going to sit down and made an official count of the Electoral College vote.  I figured I'd stay home until the counting was done; surely even Donald Trump would accept the official result and politics could return to normal.  Memory persists.  Amid ongoing pandemic-related weirdness, that day marks the end of "normal" for me.

      TV coverage of the Trump-aligned rally on the Ellipse was ongoing.  Coming up on one p.m., then-President Trump told the attendees, "...And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down.  Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.  Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong...."*

      Things started to go off the rails about that time, as violence began to break out.  Live TV coverage of a large and growing crowd at the U. S. Capital climbing steps and walls, moving aside barricades with varying levels of conflict with police, beginning to force doors and break windows.

      Sergei Eisenstein has much to answer for with his dramatized version of the Soviet storming of the Winter Palace, all blood, thunder, explosions and smoke.  An armed and essentially military operation, the actual event was not nearly as exciting.  Nevertheless, the official Soviet version is what lingers in popular imagination, the foundation for what we think an insurrection or armed coup must look like.

      Once the January 6 mob was inside the Capitol, they did everything from break doors and clash with police to mill around in a more or less peaceful manner; camera shots available to the TV networks at the time showed the confusion.  Eisenstein it was not.  Pick the right set of images, ignore that the rioters had broken into a closed building and put Congress to flight and hey, there are periods in which they do look mostly like tourists, give or take flags, signs, a few helmets and other bits of military-looking or frankly bizarre kit.

      That does not change what happened.  Commentators on Fox can stitch together carefully selected snippets of video and show whatever they want, but the damage to people, institutions and the building remains.  The harm is real.  Intervals of peaceful-looking behavior once their intended victims are out of reach left a lot of scope for violence, and violence was indeed done.  Senators, Representatives, the Vice-President, their staffs, Secret Service and Capitol Police were threatened and some were harmed.  The process of Constitutional government was halted.

      At the time, I was concerned that the insurrection would spread, that this gang of yahoos and nitwits had managed to screw up Federal government so badly that some kind of civil war would follow.  I realized that I was on the side of the Federal government.  Despite all of its flaws and failings -- and they are many -- it's better than the alternative.  If you want to know what "Burn it all down" looks like, go look up how things were in Russia after the October Revolution, especially during the six years of civil war that followed.

      Let's not do that.  Especially let's not do so based on the efforts of a second-rate TV commentator to keep his ratings high, or so a spineless Speaker of the House can try to maintain flimsy control of a fickle, fractious and thin majority.
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* He was, in fact, not with them.  He's all over the place in the speech, everything from urging listeners to "peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard," to telling them, "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."  You can take from that anything you like, from a suggestion to have a lovely sit-in to exhortation for armed and violent riot.  And you can read the whole speech for yourself.

Too Much Awfulness

      Look, there are all kinds of deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic arguments to be had over definitions, over if a street-gang drive-by is the same as a nutjob/racist opening fire in a crowded place or a robbery that goes off the rails with the assailant killing multiple people, if a politically motivated nutter is the same as or different to a plain old nutty nutter.--  Yeah, all of that.

      But the fact is that we have too many, and the fact is that the media -- and our own horrified fascination -- keeps making the perpetrators famous, keeps analyzing their social media presence and poring over whatever written screeds or video rants they had left behind.  Then everybody circles back to their previously-held position, "too many guns" or "not enough police," "insufficient and underfunded mental health resources" or "these people aren't getting physically disciplined enough in childhood" or "nobody voted enough for my guy/my ballot initiative in the last election," or whatever. 

      Yeah, yeah, whatever.  But what we've been doing -- and we've been doing all of it, in various states and cities -- is not working.  There seems to be a rise recently in people willing to step up and take action -- heroic, personally dangerous action -- and maybe that will help.  We need to accept that in a country where civilian firearm ownership is both a protected right and a centuries-old tradition, the supply of guns isn't going to change much no matter what laws are passed; in a country where health care is not a government-run gimme and where we're not in the habit of clapping the merely strange into mental institutions, we're not going to stop many of the dangerously crazed or habitually violent ahead of time.  We can stop making them famous; we can stop dwelling on them and start mocking them.  Detestation and horror are normal reactions, but there are plenty of abnormal people who admire the ability to elicit them and the Internet has made it possible for such people to find one another.

      Mockery seems like a frail tool compared to sending out squads of cops or even teams of kindly mental health professionals.  Mockery doesn't advance anyone's political agenda or work towards the wildly varying outcomes we have, severally and each, decided we'd like to achieve.  But it makes 'em look like fools and losers.

      Other than an immediate -- and by definition, at least slightly late -- reaction to the perpetrator of such violence as it happens, mockery is really all we've got.  All the other tools in the box have shown themselves to be useless for the job.  Thoughts and prayers do nothing.  Strict gun laws in California and New York City don't stop it.  Widespread firearm ownership and carry in Texas and Michigan doesn't keep it from happening.  Where individuals have been willing -- and able -- to step up, the carnage has been limited, but it's got to start before anyone can stop it.  The people who kill en masse want to be big.  They want to be famous, respected, to have a name among their peers whoever they are (or think they are).  Take that away.  Make them small.  Make them not merely contemptible but risibly contemptible.

      Mass k-llers are punks and losers before they take action; if we're going to keep on splattering their crimes across the media, make it clear that when they do harm, they become even worse losers and even more craven punks.

Can, Worms, Some Assembly Required

      I keep seeing memes, comments and articles on the general theme of "The Framers and the first Congress never meant for the Second Amendment to apply to anything like an AR-15!"

      Like it or not -- and that's a whole other issue for debate -- the Second Amendment specifically describes "the people" "keeping and bearing arms" -- that'd be citizens owning and carrying guns, and presumably edged weapons as well, etc. -- along with the need for a "militia," i.e., a citizen army.  So at the very least, the people who wrote and approved the Second Amendment were quite comfortable with the idea of anyone who might be up for militia service (essentially the prospective voter pool at that time) owning and carrying military-grade weapons.

      Flintlock muskets and rifles might look quaint to us now, but they fire large, deadly bullets and were relatively fast for an experienced user to aim, fire and reload.  In a world where wind and water power were the biggest prime movers, and horses, mules and donkeys the only portable source of power besides humans and the occasional dog, they were astoundingly powerful and capable of causing great harm.

      I'm not telling you that you have to believe civilian firearm ownership is a good thing.  I'm certainly not claiming an AR-15 or similar rifle isn't a deadly instrument -- but so is any other rifle.  Center-fire rifle cartridges all have the capacity to do immense harm to people and the 5.56×45mm or similar .223 Remington cartridge a standard AR-15 fires is very far from the most powerful or largest caliber.  It's smaller than most hunting rounds.  But hunting-type rifles don't look as scary, are rarely marketed as super-manly guns for super-manly men and they aren't decried as horrors suitable only for mass killing.  The twisted losers who commit mass murders have TV sets and computers too, and they're going to gravitate to whatever they're told is the most awful of the awful.

      All firearms are dangerous.  Modern firearms are indeed more dangerous than older ones -- but the old ones were not safe or friendly.  A modern automobile is dangerous, too, but a horse or wagon can kill or terribly injure a pedestrian.  And while the 18th Century had plenty of house fires, they had zero domestic electrocutions or gas explosions.  We live in a dangerous world.  We always have and our fellow humans constitute one of the greatest dangers.

      "Original intent" or "historical context" might not be ideal yardsticks of legislative or Constitutional meaning, but they're what the present Supreme Court is using and they're logically justifiable, even when they lead to outcomes we may personally dislike.  You're not obliged to approve of the Court's decisions, but when you argue against them you must still use logic and reason.  Describing some or all of the Justices as terrible people who make terrible decisions does not contribute to the debate, no matter how heartfelt your opinion or even how accurate history may hold your evaluation.

Just Sad

      Watching the war news and reading speculation -- it's sad.  Overwhelming.  And it's still mostly pawn moves at this point.

      If things keep on as they have, Russia -- Putin -- is going to get frustrated and do something especially ugly.  Just what, I don't know.  His options are limited.  And that's more worrying than if he did have working precision bombs suited to high-altitude drops, or significantly more and better artillery.

      Ukraine's defense has been remarkably successful, considering the lopsided numbers.  But the clock is ticking and if "war" is a given, the opposite of a "short victorious war" is a long, nasty quagmire, not a protracted peace.