"Alexa, Get Out Of The Uncanny Valley."

     Amazon keeps sticking her in a hang glider and flying her into the Uncanny Valley, and I have to coax her back out again.  Alexa goes from useful and mildly entertaining to unnerving when the online giant turns her A.I. functionality back on.  They do so just about any time the software is upgraded.

     Like all of the big enterprises pushing so-called "Artificial Intelligence," they cannot conceive of anyone not enjoying a predictive text engine biased to suck up to the user.  This failure of imagination comes down from the top: the big-boss-and-owner class loves being catered to, and they don't care if there's any genuine respect or affection behind the tonguebath as long as they get the faithful appearance of deference.  There's nothing at all behind a large language model.  All it does is pick the most likely word or phrase that comes next, based on the prompt and context you and the setup have fed in.  You're talking back to the sounds your garbage disposal makes, not interacting with a creature like yourself -- or even a creature like a hamster, let alone a dog or a cat.

     It takes very little communication for Alexa's A.I. responses to become jarringly off; if you ask her if she and the HAL9000 are friends, instead of the old Easter-egg response, "I know him, but we haven't talked after what happened," the robot muses about HAL's "calm voice and cool demeanor," and wonders if she'd "be a bad influence on him," what with her being so chipper and all.  Never mind, I guess, that if we're treating HAL as an entity she might know, he has committed multiple murders and the bad influence is more likely to go the other way.

     We've got far too many organic sociopaths as it is, and nobody knows how to make 'em feel for others; we don't need to build new ones out of silicon and software.  That stuff is never going to have a theory of mind.

     A.I. is the The Wave Of Thirty Minutes Ago, and after the bubble pops and the economy crashes and recovers, spellcheck-on-steroids will be found to have only a few useful functions, including as a source of lowest-common-denominator entertainment and some non-critical agentic assistance, and it will otherwise be deader than optical disc recordings or analog audio on magnetic tape, as cringe as tailfins.  The unfixable problem is that it is empty at the core; it cannot love, it cannot feel pain or loss, and if a hiccup in the learning process has it considering turpentine a viable cocktail ingredient, it'll pour you a martini that can literally strip paint, without hesitation.  Bottoms up! 

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.

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.

Abite. Abscondas. Bellum.

     It looks better in Latin, though Tam points out it needs the imperative:* "Run.  Hide.  Fight."  This useful advice is getting more and more coverage in the wake of the latest outrage, a car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University that was originally reported as a mass shooting by over-eager mass media.

     As chastened as they ever get by this mistake, reporter after reporter has been standing outside of the nearest higher educational institutional building, solemnly telling me what I already knew: when the unexpected strikes, you have three choices: Get away, get out of sight, or put up your dukes.

     None of these well-groomed talking heads have yet managed to point out that you must make a choice: "Freeze where you are" is how you get killed.   Observe, Orient, Decide, Act -- and do so with alacrity.  The order is important: if you can get away, you'll buy time summon help and/or take the subsequent options, if necessary.  At OSU, one student reported that after the cellphone warning, "military people" who were fellow-students in her classroom shut the door, directed the other students to get well away from it, and arrayed themselves to ambush anyone entering.  Unable to flee, they hid and prepared to fight.

     "Be Prepared."  "Semper Paratus."  What'll you do?  Take a little while to think about it now, so you can decide more quickly later if trouble comes your way.
______________________________
* No Latin scholar, I get the too-verbose, "Oportet te currere. Tu oportet absconditus. Aut necesse est bellum," which I suspect (to the point of near certainty) makes a hash of the grammar.

Yeah, Well

     Didn't go anywhere or, really, do anything Monday.  I'd feel guilty about that but it appears to have been the right thing to do.

     Meanwhile, the world spun on: nitwit bombs in NYC and NJ, another nitwit with a knife in Minnesota (and shot dead by an off-duty policeman...who happened to be a firearms trainer), another hinky-looking* police shooting in Oklahoma, and so on and so forth.

     It's a violent world.  It has always been a violent world.  There was a time when living in the right neighborhood, having enough money or having made a good choice of grandparents would insulate a person from most kinds of violence.  Then we invented TV and the Internet, and put it right on your desktop; and on the desktop of violent people, some of whom go to the mall with a knife or a gun and ill intent, or make and plant bombs, or set an innocent man's gas station on fire with him inside, or shoot cops, or become bad cops....  You're not insulated.  I'm not insulated. Lots of people never were.

     And there's nothing much to be done, one on one, except to be decent and friendly to everyone you meet and always have a plan to protect yourself if they or circumstances turn ugly.  Smile and memorize the exits.

     Your ancestors knew this, in their bones and their scars and the churchyard graves.  Now it's our turn.  You can't hide from it; the government can't wrap you in cotton batting and make you safe by main force.  It's on you and me.
__________________________________
* You have some different opinion?  Great, there's all kinds of differing opinions and that's precisely why I call it "hinky."  If eighty percent of the people who saw the recording said it was one way or another, it probably wouldn't have ended up on the news. It'd be fun to pretend there's no problem, and almost as much fun to claim to to know just what the root problem is, let alone how to fix it.  The truth is, "it's complicated" is as close as anyone's got for a general answer.  Erosion of mutual trust?  That's just a symptom and a damned thin reed to hang so many deaths -- black, blue or just-wandered-through -- and so much rioting on.

"As Long As You Have Your Health--"

     Turns out the converse of the old saw works, too: get into health issues and other considerations drop by the wayside.  This is both good -- I have hardly even thought about the Presidential-election mudfight nor the Cuban clown show -- and bad: I gave the atrocity in Belgium short shrift.  The barbarian is at the gates but in this souped-up world, the "walls" are mere philosophical constructs and those who have no use for the many modern conveniences of 21st-century civilization can attack with impunity.  They need to start to be shot more often, and earlier in the attempts at their crimes.  It probably won't happen in Europe before the lights start going out.

     As for me, I'm off to the doc-in-a-box.  I'm better this morning but not, as it happens, all that much better.

Such A Long Way Back -- And Meanwhile

     Meanwhile, violent fanatics have blown up a whole bunch of innocents in Europe.  Short-term win for them; long-term?  The EU has been something of a self-caricature of European politics but the current wave of islamic terrorism bids fair to transform it into something closer to the warlike empires and alliances of the continent's past.

     I was pretty groggy yesterday morning when TV coverage of the horror hit full, lower-lip-quivering intensity.  It's easy to mistake this glurge for the official response, or to assume the pampered darlings on the screen somehow represent the feelings of an entire people.  Don't count on it.  Western Civilization will fight like a cornered rat once it has to -- and rarely even one second earlier.  The clock is ticking.  The ghosts of battles fought within living memory are stirring.

     (The clock is ticking on my cold, too.  I feel felt much better this morning that yesterday -- which only serves to remind me how far I have yet to go.  One step at a time!  ETA: One step back, maybe. Got in the shower -- and ran out of steam.  Sinuses overflowing, no energy, yeech.) 

Paris, Earth

     I don't have much to add to reactions to the horrific attacks in Paris.  You have the Internet, TV, radio.  You know as much as I do, probably more.

     ISIS, ISIL, whatever, they look pretty tough against unarmed civilians.  Against a real military?  Nope.  Unlike earlier Islamiod movements, they have a fixed, physical presence, a series of nice, fat targets -- and against a professional First-World military intent on winning, they're not tough at all.

     So go on, idiots, keep poking at The West.  See how that works out in the long run.  Learn what Kaiser Bill learned; find out what Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini found out: you can snicker at and pester the "soft, decadent, weak-willed" denizens of the most advanced civilization on this planet for a pretty long time; you can push them around a little -- but only so far.  Only so far, and then the bill comes due.

Forget Irony, This Is Lousy

     This city's one hundredth murder was committed yesterday on Centennial St.

     If the present rate continues, Indianapolis will meet or exceed last year's total of 137 murders.  Eleven a month, plus.  In comparison, the towns in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery or Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas don't seem to be getting such a bad deal.

     Wrong.  --There are significant differences, and not merely the worse odds of a one-in-three hundred chance Jackson's townsfolk get.  In both of those stories, everyone's complicit, even those who, in the LeGuin, leave, having done nothing.

     Real life isn't fiction; Indianapolis has a whole array of people doing something, from police trying to solve crimes (and possibly, every so often, catch trouble before it escalates to felony) to the preacher camping out in a hard-hit neighborhood.  A stunt?  Sure; but it gets attention on the problem.  It's better than doing nothing.

     If it were all bad guy-on-bad guy crime (it's not; robberies gone worse, stray shots and mistaken targets account for no few deaths), that might not be so awful -- except bad guys have families, too, families that are bent by the crime.  When killing someone is a legitimate -- or at least very possible -- way to resolve problems other than an imminent threat, don't be surprised when it spreads from generation to generation, brother to brother to friend.  And when the law creates underground markets, don't be surprised to find them run by the lawless.

     There's a theory that police exist not so much to protect society* directly as to protect criminals (including the merely suspected) from the rough justice that they would otherwise face from their fellow-citizens, and thereby protect society from its worst impulses.  It is nowhere more obvious than in those transactional spaces outside the law and the remedies sought by involved parties when goals conflict or deals go bad.  Those "remedies" tend to spill over; the blood gets tracked widely.  Ten dead a month -- how many of the criminal victims who comprise the majority would have "had it coming" in the justice system? 
_____________________________________
* They're not there to protect you personally -- ask the Supreme Court! Oh, they may do so in the normal course of their duties, but they are not obliged to.

11 September

     One is supposed, in the circles I frequent, to put up some kind of post marking the horrors perpetrated this day by a relatively small group of fanatics acting at the behest of a larger, loosely-organized group of more of the same.

     I suppose it is uncharitable of me to look back to 7 December, 1955.  Pearl Harbor was certainly not forgotten, but a soundly-beaten Japan was busily building civil, democratic society and government; the war in the Pacific was long past and with it, rationing, firebomb balloons and internment camps.  The Korean war-after-the-war  was two years past. The second Red Scare was winding down; Senator McCarthy had been censured by his peers a year earlier and while the McCarran Act was in its fifth year, the clock was ticking.  We had defeated the enemy and war-inspired incursions on liberty were fading.

     In 2015, the free world is still boxing with fog.  Governments offer lip service to freedom while they read our e-mail and tap our phones -- or (at least on paper) have their allies do so while we do the same for them, just to keep it "legal."  No matter what party is in the White House or holds a majority in Congress, the Feds are as transparent as clay-laden Hoosier mud.  But my, oh my, won't we hear about "9/11" all day today, and what kind of weirdo are you if you don't go along.  It is trotted out as justification for everything from walling up the borders to tapping everyone's telephones, restricting firearms sales and arresting reporters, secret courts and vast data-harvesting programs, all of it with barely a single public trial, under a vast umbrella agency that's supposed to be putting together the Big Picture but appears to define everything outside its own bureaucracy as The Enemy.  The most public charges have been not against terrorists but against whistle-blowers, the Press that's supposed to be, however idealistic and/or misguided, a bulwark of freedom.  Ah, but they're traitors now that they shine a light into dark corners!

     Yeah, well--  Win the damn war and kick the barbarians into at least the 20th Century if not the 21st, then get back to me.  More than 2,500 people were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the majority in uniform and we went on to fight and win a nasty war and a lasting peace; nearly 3,000 were murdered on 9/11, nearly all of them civilians, and what we got was a lot of rah-rah BS and unwinnable police actions that killed and maimed good men.  I mourn the deaths and condemn the sneak attacks that caused them -- but warping American society into some kind of smiley-faced fascism isn't going to prevent more of the same, nor does it address the problem at its root.

     A big chunk of the world is busy burning itself down right now, Reichstag fires writ large, holy wars, pogroms, civil wars, the kind of nightmare in which the brutal flourish and decent folk flee.  The free world appears to be hoping the conflagration will stop at our borders.  Don't count on it.

Paging Hector Bywater! Red Courtesy Phone, Please...

     Make that Red with some little gold stars.  Our buddies in Red China miss the Cold War, I guess, or at least would like to combine making cheap stuff for the world, U. S. especially, with the rankest sort of saber-rattling.

     How rank?  Here ya go:  the PLA taking Okinawa and knocking out a U. S. carrier group. Ain't they just sumpin'?

     "Si vis pacem, para bellum," the ancients remind us; but there's an important distinction between para bellum and outright bellicosity.  At present, this is largely fantasy, all but the Mach 10 missiles, about which hoping for poor QC may be the most effective defense presently available.

     Video -- and excellent discussion -- found at The Unwanted Blog, q.v.

     Oh, Hector Bywater?  He he was a journalist who wrote up the war in the Pacific between the U.S. and Japan -- in 1925.  Got most of it right, too, and died mysteriously as the real thing was warming up in the wings.

     World War Three: more a matter of "when" than "if."  Gather rosebuds while ye may.

Senator Scary-Go-Boom Rides Again

     Indiana State Senator Jim Merritt, who appears to be frightened of loud noises, is once again trying to restrict the sale of Tannerite, a high-stability binary explosive used to make reactive targets.*  --He's a Republican, so don't tell me any one party has a lock on wanting to be Nanny.

     Two years ago, the Senator went on a crusade to ban sales of the explosive to anyone under 18 -- despite the fact that you can't set Tannerite off with anything but a high-velocity rifle round, and guess who can't, per Fedral law, buy high-velocity rifles?  Yes, persons under 18.  His bill got, well, not exactly laughed out of committee, not in public, but it didn't make any progress, either.

     Like a quivering zombie with shot nerves, he's back with the same tired tales of foolish people doing foolish things and proving the flip side of Darwinism, about which There Ought To Be A Law.  This despite the fact that there already are laws about building bombs, as opposed to filling up a bag or cardboard box with something that will go "Ka-BLAM!" when you shoot it with an AK-15/AR-47.

     He'd also like to limit the amount that any one retailer could sell you at one go -- forgetting, I guess, that a person enamored of big booms could save the stuff up, or enlist the aid of a few few friends.

     Hey, kids: don't surround your reactive targets with shrapnel.  Get adult supervision if you want to blow up old refrigerators or junk cars and remember, the thing about an *explosion* is that using anything you can buy off the shelf, it goes in all directions -- including the desk of Nervous Nellie Jim Merritt.

     At present, the chairman of the committee looking over the bill isn't convinced.  He doesn't see the need -- and neither do I.  Senator Merritt's district sprawls across northeast Marion County (Lawrence Township and a tiny piece of Washington) and  southern Hamilton County (Fall Creek Township).  It might help lead him back to reality to hear from you.
___________________________
* Also to trigger avalanches and scare off birds.  So try not to avalanche yourself, either. 

Another Gun Store Robbed

     Last night, L. E. Firearms got the standard smash-and-grab, this time with a stolen van though the storefront.  But -- for once! -- the bad guys didn't get far.  The criminals managed to wreck a second vehicle, used for their getaway.  Five men were arrested and it appears many of the guns were recovered. 

     I don't know if this is the same bunch who've hit other gun stores over the past year or so, but one can hope.  The trick of running a stolen vehicle through the front of the store is a common method.

     (In other news, sales of heavy duty bollards have shown a surprising uptick....)

News, History, "Journalism"

     Tam is watching Today and chortling, "You've gotta see this!  Savannah [Guthrie] is finger-wagging at the Israeli ambassador about, 'You say you're not targeting civilians...'"

     I spoke directly to the ambassador on the TV screen, "Hit back!  Ask her about drones!"

     Tam: "Drones?  The anniversary of Hiroshima's only a week away!"

     Funny thing: war is Hell.  Tam knows it.  I know it. Polished and perfumed professional network journalist in NYC?  She doesn't know it.  A blue zillion history books and documentaries out there and I doubt she's even seen Hellcats Of The Navy.  In Savannah's world, WW II, concentration camps, aerial firebombings, death marches, atom bombs and all, was a kind of multi-year Boy Scout Jamboree with some spirited disagreements.

     When the next World War comes marchin' in -- as seems more likely with every passing day -- it'll have stunningly white teeth and near-total amnesia.

     (Talking to Tam, I remarked the Palestinians are now into what, the fourth and fifth generation of  "displaced persons/dispossessed refugees," even the ones living behind real walls and under a solid roof; it's soaked into their cultural memes and it's not going away.  And on the other side, with the only cards that'll trump that, a nation with thousands of years of the same general experience.  Anyone who thinks there's a fix for the mess -- on a timeline shorter than centuries -- that'll work happy-good for all involved is either dippy or doped up.)

The Government Wants To Help Veterans With PTSD -- By Putting Chips In Their Brains

     Massachussetts, still and always the cradle and grave of freedom!

     Who doesn't support stuffing circuitry inside people's skulls to ensure they only think Goodthink?  MIT's got a grant to dust off the 40-year-old research (PDF) and get it running.  From the horse's, er, whatever:

     Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist who directs Mass General’s division of neurotherapeutics, says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the amygdala—a part of the brain involved in emotional memories. But it can be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” says Dougherty.

     Where's that line to sign up?

     Also, consider,  “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” and ask yourself what other military applications there might be for fear-suppressing brain machinery.

     It's a helluva a world.  I may have another 30 or 40 years in it and I've stopped looking forward to them.  Fearless brain-wired solders are only one of the more obvious little clouds on the horizon.

You Know What Else You Can See From Outer Space?

     On the ISS, they don't need optics to see the sound of rears being covered at Guns & Ammo, where Dick "maybe a little more regulation?" Metcalfe has -- ahem -- moved on from the editorship and is presumably pursuing his inner Zumbo. (Some excepts from the original editorial, here.)

     Y'know, every time I go to the range, I see people who ought to shoot better -- and would, if they'd slow down and take some advice from the range officers.  In the event of emergency, I'm not sure how they'd do, though around 98 percent of them know to keep their fool finger off the go-bang hook until they're ready to make that happen.  99 percent of them know to keep the firearm pointed down range and the other one percent just got yelled at and know it now.  It'd be pretty kewl if I could wave a magic wand -- or a magic law -- and make them learn better, safer gun-handling and acquire good aim.

     But it doesn't work that way.  You can stick 'em in a class, and many will glumly tough it out; you can herd them out onto the firing line at the range and drill them sufficiently to drill a large target at Tueller-drill distances -- that day.  But you can't make 'em drill enough to inculcate habitual safe, accurate behavior; they'll either seek out more instruction and strive to practice good habits, or they won't.  They're free citizens and the safety record of shooting ranges in this country speaks to an adequate level of training -- but no more than that.  That's as good as it's going to get.

     Dick Metcalfe indulged in a little wishful thinking.  It backfired.  Badly.  "Be certain of your target and what's behind it," it says right here -- and he wasn't. 

Wanh Wanh WAHHHH

     [SFX: Sad, laughing trombone]

    Manchin-Toomey went down in flames -- okay, maybe not on fire, but it sank.  Seems there are at least 45 Senators who wanted to be re-elected and/or valued the basic human rights of free trade and self-defense.

     Hooray!

     --Just remember, the fight's not over yet and now all sides have had their hornet's nests whacked.  Celebrate, but keep your eyes open.

Background? Check.

     The more I think about, the more it makes sense to me that you ought to have to fill out a 4473 and pass a NICS check to become Commander-In-Chief.

     C'mon, Gramps has to do so to buy a .410 shotgunette at the Wal-Mart, why shouldn't the guy with his finger on the "blow up the world or just some guy" button have to?

     (Clearly riffed from Sarah Palin's CPAC speech; say what you will about her, she is still reliably making heads explode on the Left.)

Joe "Triangulator" Donnelly

     Ol' Joe has done spake.  He says he's foursquare against a new "assault weapons" ban.  Universal background checks, now that, he's kinda for.

     Oooo, C for effort pard, but you failed the course.  And thanks for playing.  Next! 

     I woke up thinking maybe I'd been a little harsh -- after all, he is a Democrat.  It's only fair to go to the Senator's own website and see what he has to say for himself.  Answer: not much.  Exactly zero on him opposing a new AWB and about background checks, this: "...the National Instant Criminal Background Check System,[...]. That system still does not work as well as it should and should be examined again in the coming weeks."  And he led that off with a wistful observation about how the two parties came together in the aftermath of the Virgina Tech shootings to beef up NICS.

     C'mon, Joe, you can do better.  Do you want to be the long-term Senator from Indiana, or another there-and-gone fluke?

It's On

     Between the SD police chief who figures he can disarm everybody "in a generation" and the Mayor of Chicago leaning on firearm manufacturers banks, it's pretty clear the antigunners are swinging for the fences this time.  (Speaking of strong antigun tactics, remember the New York newspaper's map of handgun permit holders?  It wasn't even accurate!)

     Tough.  You're not getting it.  You're sure as hell not getting my guns.  I stay outta D.C., NYC and Chi-town, and you stay the hell out of my safe.

     And I'm done listening to calls for "compromise."  The antis don't really want compromise.  They want whatever they can get now and they'll be back later for the rest of your firearms rights later -- followed by the rest of the Bill of Rights, already plenty nibbled-at.

     It's well past time to say "enough" -- and to keep on saying it, by whatever means it takes to get 'em to hear.