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.

Okay, Still Not Real Happy

      But here's where we are: I expect World War Three has already started.  Nobody's called it yet and we're just at the "one nation attempts expansion by warfare" stage.  It's still getting itself sorted out into teams and who knows?  It might yet fizzle.

      Past history tells me that's not the way to bet.  Leaders of violently expansionist nations don't get what Nero got as often as we might wish, if ever.

      We're in a time of choosing sides.  Readers of history would do well to remember Charles Lindbergh and the older "America First" movement he was associated with.  To be sure, "Lucky Lindy" eventually saw the light -- but he was not allowed to enlist, never permitted anywhere near the European Theater of Operations and only saw air combat in the Pacific by arriving as a consultant and doing some of his consulting from the pilot's seat.

      The Lusitania is nowhere near leaving port, let alone being sunk; there's nothing ominous droning towards Pearl Harbor.  But water runs downhill and it eventually reaches the bottom.

      I hope we're lucky this time.  Dam lucky.

How To Read The War News

      "The first casualty of war is truth," the many-sourced epigram holds.  Whoever first said it, and however they meant it, it's true.  In the battle, no one knows the entire picture.  While the "fog of war" is a lot less foggy for modern generals thanks to advanced technology, for ordinary troops, regular citizens and journalists things are as murky as ever, if not more so: social media is the latest extension of the battlefield, strafed with rumor and strewn with Photoshop landmines and poisonous memes.

      Reports of large-scale movement are likely to be approximately correct.  Everyone has spy satellites these days and while NRO-or-whoever is unlikely to show their cards, commercial imagery is widely available.  On the other hand, NATO is unlikely to be flying anything at all over Ukraine and bordering non-NATO nations (or at least anything but thoroughly anonymized drones, which of course belong to no one, no one at all) and if they did, they wouldn't tell Fox or CNN what they were seeing.

      From the Russian government,* we'll get bullshit and bravado; from the Ukrainian government, we'll get bravado and bullshit.  A lot of the "amateur reporting" supposedly from Ukraine has been shown to be faked.  Is some real? Certainly; but only the crudest fakes are easy to spot.

      One of the major products of war is dead people.  Count on it.  Not just soldiers; grandparents, babies, schoolchildren, grumpy bastards and nice young people have already died and more are going to die.  No sane person cheers for that.  But we can't stop it.

      Various sanctions have been implemented, more will be, and most of the complaining about this or that not having been done is based on profound misunderstandings of who runs what.  Take SWIFT, a secure financial-exchange communications system: it's owned by the member banks, all across the world.  It takes some doing to get them to agree to pull the plug on member banks.  The President of the U.S. can't order them to.  It's a pretty sure bet that NSA reads all of SWIFT's mail, too, and that can be a valuable source of intelligence info.  That's one tiny corner of the complicated picture, and it's all that knotted, or worse. 

      Most of the big-picture reporting will be reasonably accurate; most of the live coverage in-zone from major news organizations will be a mixture of official news releases (generally serving a specific end), whatever they can find out themselves or from locals (eyewitness testimony, which can be of variable trustworthiness) and live pictures (what's in-frame is real, and what's out of frame is unknown).  The heart-wrenching human-interest stuff?  Who can say.  War is terrible.  It's also chaotic.  We're always being told to "remember the Maine!"  We're rarely encouraged to find out what actually happened to the Maine.

      Be compassionate.  Follow the news as closely as you care to.  But don't be a sap (MIT has some hints) -- and don't cheer for the aggressor.  That'd be the side that sent tanks clanking towards the capitol city.
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* Which includes nearly all Russian media and they're working on the holdouts.  Ukraine is better off for press freedom, with independent press and both official government-run and independent radio and TV broadcasters.  But they're trying to report and run their transmitters, webservers  and printing presses from inside a war zone, so....

Dead Archduke Time

      And time, yet again, for tanks rolling into Poland, er, Ukraine on the thinnest of lies.

      This will be on History tests, eventually -- presuming there's anyone around and current events don't eventually poke a hole in history big enough to throw a Dark Ages through.

      The Republican-aligned punditry are still talking about what a great fellow Mr. Putin is, as mechanized armor clanks in and the missiles fly.  Meanwhile, no few of the socially-conservative, limited-democracy, ex-Warsaw Pact nations so admired by the talking-head Right are turning to NATO and the EU, away from Gospodin Putin's smothering Russia.  Viktor Orban's for Ukraine sovereignty (wasn't it just last month he was cuddling up to dear old Rodina's muscle-boy for reactors and heating gas?).  Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia have triggered the NATO bat-signal  -- okay, "urgent Article 4 consultations" -- over the Russian invasion.  Suddenly, those (well-armed) "decadent Western nations" of the EU and North America are looking a lot better to them than borscht and culture-war orthodoxy.

      It will be interesting to see how that plays out domestically.  Especially along the Trumpian MAGA axis. (Though watching the traditionally antiwar Left generate spin will be another fine show for one of the smaller rings in the media's Big Top.  It's all clowns, jackasses and elephants these days.)

      On the world stage?  My bet is that Mr. Putin still thinks he can have a nice, neat, well-contained war, pick up as  much of Ukraine as he cares to and break the remainder to saddle without the free world doing anything worse to him than weak economic sanctions and strongly-worded objections.  Is he right?  I don't know.  These things have a way of getting out of hand, one way or another.

      Europe was due for another war.  I wish they weren't.

Veterans Day/Armistice Day

      Today is the day we honor veterans -- anyone who has served in our armed forces.

      The choice of day is instructive. It's not the day of a famous battle, of a great victory or a hard-fought defeat.  Strictly speaking, it's not even the day an enemy surrendered.  It's the day the combatants stopped shooting one another.

      As a civilian, I suppose I have always thought the main job of servicemen and women was to kill the enemy.  But the day we picked to honor them was the day they didn't have to.

      Just wars are not fought for blood or even glory.  They have clear goals, foremost among them the resumption of peace.  That's the job of soldiers, sailors and aircrew; war is simply how they get there.

      "Si vis pacem, para bellum." "If you would have peace, prepare for war."

      To all of those who served, to all of those who prepared for wars and all those who fought wars, my profound thanks.

Palpable Ignorance

     Sometimes we don't know what we don't know.  Sometimes we don't want to.

     The fatal shooting on the set of the film Rust has provided a long train of examples of this.  They fall into two categories:

     One is obvious to anyone who has much experience with firearms at more than the most casual level: a lot of people in the film, news and related businesses have no clear idea of how firearms function, what the various parts of a revolver are called, and what they do.  From reporters who don't know enough to ask enlightening questions to pundit who launch off on tangents to an Assistant Director who apparently called a gun cold when he didn't even know the name of the spinny thing where the cartridges go, there's a lot of ignorance, much of it masquerading and knowledge.

     That lack of knowledge is one of the ways tragic accidents are enabled.  If you don't know how the thing works, you have zero business handling it in real life -- or telling other people how it ought to be handled.

     The other flavor of ignorance is about acting and the visual recording* of fiction.  Acting is a form of play, akin to the impromptu scenes and scenarios that children create with a few toys and costumes, with toy vehicles or dolls.  It's not "for real," but it can be very serious -- and a professional actor has to make it look real.  There's a lot of trust involved; the stereotypical acting exercise has one person deliberately falling backwards into the arms of one or more people who they cannot see, and relying on those people to catch them before they come to harm.

     Actors stage blood-soaked, deadly scenes -- and then the shout comes, "Cut!" and all the casualties get up and swarm to the Craft Services table for a snack, joking and gossiping.  The bottle broken over an actor's head is safe(ish) sugar "glass" or (more likely) a modern safe-breaking plastic; the baseball bat one actress bashes another with is painted foam rubber.  Nobody dies dead on a movie set.  Actors expect that.  And "actor time" is expensive; everyone else can be replaced, but once a part has been cast and there are scenes in the can, the production needs that face, that body, that way of moving.  You want the main actors in their role and concentrating on it, not bored, tired or cranky (or, heavens forbid, stoned).  You really don't want them injured -- especially since scenes are often shot out of narrative order, all the shots at one set or location get done before moving on to the next.  So the leads are pampered; lighting and camera angles are set up using same-size stand-ins with the same complexion and hair color as the actor.  This is not because those actors are inherently special, it's because they're costly if not impossible to replace.  It's a rare movie star who does much in the way of setup or even stunt work.

     Actors come to the set expecting everything will be laid out ready for safe play.  They expect everyone will go home safe after the day's production is done.  They are, in fact, about as responsible as kids with cap guns, dolls and toy trucks.  Every day, actors on stages, sets and locations do things that would get them or others arrested, injured or killed if done in the real world -- and they expect to do them safely.  They can't flinch or balk.  They are expected to trust.

     Add those two (or is it three?) kinds of ignorance together, plop in a generous dollop of distaste for the actor involved, and you get to where we are today, or where I was this morning, watching an online interview in which a reporter who didn't know what questions to ask was interviewing attorneys who were not present at the scene about precisely what happened, and getting replies as muddled at her questions while scurrilous comments about the actor, director, armorer, politicians and Hollywood in general scrolled alongside.

     You can't fake a working revolver that has to have the parts moving; you can fake the cartridges when the camera is looking into the muzzle, but whatever you use for that has got to provide the projectiles nestled in their chambers in the cylinders.  The simplest way is to load real bullets into empty brass, with either discharged primers or none at all -- and the only way to check for safety is with a close, detailed, intelligent inspection of every cartridge in the cylinder.  It's a job for a specialist -- the set armorer or gun wrangler.  If you're not a "gun person," professionally or on a hobby basis, you won't have the least idea what to look for.  Most actors are not shooters; there are a handful of exceptions but in general, they're about as likely to have detailed knowledge about guns as a demographically-comparable group of plumbers or accountants.  Sure, in a film with guns in it, their job is to look like they know what they are doing; and in a film about nuclear physics, the actors have to look like they understand that, too.  Nevertheless, they can't help with the Manhattan project.

     It's easy to sneer at people or classes of objects you don't like.  It's easy to dream up reasons why they are despicable.  It's a lot more difficult to realize that bad outcomes are not always a direct result of inherent badness or dislikability.

     We know who pulled the trigger, but past that?  Someone brought live rounds onto a movie set.  Someone loaded a live round into the revolver.  Someone who was responsible for checking did not check it properly.  Who are those someones?  I don't know, but I have confidence that local law enforcement will find out, if anyone can.
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* A lot of people still say "filming" and a lot of productions do go to film in the first generation.  Others spool right to digital storage.  I'm hoping nobody is shooting on videotape these days, but it's not impossible.  But at some point between the set and your screen, these days it is stored and transmitted as bits.  So I'm going to use the generic term "visual recording."  Sound may come along, or it may get dubbed in later; sets and locations are full of extraneous noises and we'd probably all be surprised at how much dialog is looped in later, along with all the Foley work, other effects and music.

Power Outage

      A little after 9:00 last night, our power went out.

      I had gone to bed early.  Tam was up, reading a book on her iPad.  So when the power went out, it didn't make much difference.  She always carries a flashlight.  I always have one where I can put hands on it -- on my nightstand, in this situation, and not hidden in a drawer but right on top, between the phone  and the clock/radio (probably a sure mark of a Boomer).

      As the minutes ticked on, Tam deployed lightsticks (to aid in navigation and give the home that "there's someone in here" look) and I put a high-efficiency battery lantern on the towel shelf in the washroom.

      Trying to get to our power company's website with my smartphone to check on the outage, service was weak and creepingly slow.  Tam reported the same on a different carrier.  Out the front and back windows, the city was dark as far as we could see.  There was decent sky glow from the direction of downtown but not so much to the east, north or west.

      The closest cellular tower is at a substation several blocks away.  From the evidence, there was a problem there or on the incoming feed to it.

      My smartphone eventually got a connection and pulled in the map.  The power company uses symbols -- green discs for small outages, orange squares for larger ones, yellow triangles for small neighborhoods and black diamonds for power interruptions that hit 2,000 or more customers.  We had a full set: a scattering of green, an orange square over on Keystone Avenue, and a funny symbol near the substation.  Zooming in eventually showed it was a black diamond over a yellow triangle.  At least 2,500 customers out.  It was big.

      Power stayed off off the next two and a half hours.  Holden Wu decided to guard the doors, going from front to back and flopping down in "draft excluder" mode in front of of whichever door Tam or I was near. Huck kept watch in my room, peering out the window.

      This morning, local TV reported someone had crashed their car and taken out a pole for a major power line along Keystone Avenue, knocking out power to more than 14,000 homes and businesses.

      Do you know where your flashlights are?  

It Was Never Going To End Well

      Take a part of the Old World that lies between practically every empire that ever was (and has occasionally set up its own), a place that has lots of hills and valleys, a place that has had cities wiped out by invaders and has fallen back to stubborn farmers and herders only to rise again, a territory that has been a battlefield as far back as anyone can trace, and send in an army of outsiders.

      We did it.  The Russians had; the British had; one local tribe did it to the rest of the country at least once.  Before them, the Uzbeks stomped in, and before them, Genghis Khan's forces smashed cities and destroyed civil society -- and before that, waves of Islamic invaders had re-civilized the country, shoving aside the already civilized Buddhists and Hindus who had previously brought their faith to the region at swordpoint.  On and on it goes, as far back as anyone can find records to read and archeological remains to figure out.

      So the United States went there.  Did we expect a different outcome?  The Russians were sent packing; the Brits barely got in.  Alexander the Great (had I left him out?) marched through, charmed and/or intimidated the locals, and left a ruler in place whose successors eventually swapped the bothersome border province to an emerging Indian empire for vows of chumship and a player to be named later, and that's about the best exit anybody ever managed.  History, geography and luck for good and ill has been breeding cantankerous and tenacious people in Afghanistan since before there was any history there.

      Staying was hard but we stayed for twenty years, doing what we thought best.  Better (and better-informed) pundits than I have analyzed those polices and strategies, and none of them are very impressed.

      Leaving is harder, and harder still on those who worked with us.  The Taliban's taken most of the country as I write, succeeding in part because we were propping up the existing government more than we realized.  Any local who worked with, or worse, for us and who hasn't got out is effectively dead as soon as the Taliban finds them; people with essential skills may last longer but don't count on it.  Every time I see or hear a reporter live from Kabul, I want to tell them to get out immediately, especially the women.  The news media in-country is treating this as a spectator event.  The Taliban don't believe in spectators.

      There's a lot of domestic political hay being made over this; that's politics-as-normal.  Take it with a grain of salt: both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump promised during the 2020 campaign that they were going to bring the troops home ASAP, possibly as early as May.  It was never going to end well.  There's no good path through this maze.  Once you have reached the point where the occupied country's ruler has fled, presumably with whatever he could grab, the mess is non-recoverable: the exit not a cause, it's a symptom.

      And so here we are.  There are moral debts to pay but the price may be too high.  The price of not paying them may be even higher.

Dirty Pool

     Recently, an ad agency working for a gun-control advocacy group tricked former NRA President David Keene and firearms-rights author/researcher John R. Lott into giving a graduation speech to 3,044 empty chairs, a number chosen to represent students killed by firearms who would have been graduating -- a stunt being reported in glowing terms in the advertising community.

     While I am very much in favor of people having their own opinions and beliefs, and being free to promote them (as long as they do not advocate harming others) even when I strongly disagree with their position, this is shoddy behavior.  Disagreement is normal, acceptable; deciding those with whom you disagree are fair game for dirty tricks is not.  Cheering on such behavior is reprehensible.

     This con job is right down there with the selective editing and trick questions used by "Project Veritas" to push their agenda.  It's not honest, nor is it effective debate.  It's not right, no matter who is doing it or how noble they believe their cause to be.

     The ends do not justify the means.  Period.*
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* This is very much of a piece with my strong belief that persons who have been arrested, even for heinous crimes, ought not be treated any more harshly than any other prisoner while awaiting trial.  Dealing fairly and squarely with people is a measure of your morality, not of your opinion of theirs.