The Men Who Built The Torment Nexus*

     It's a trope from The Onion and like a lot of satire, it's realer than real.  The essay linked below explains how zillionaire techbros have looted science fiction for settings and widgets while discarding the philosophy and warnings to rot.  Is the future not what you were promised?  Yeah, me, too, and here's one big reason why.
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* Title riffed from Alfred Bester's short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which you should read if you haven't.  It's almost reassuring.  Or is it? 

Blindly "Edgy?" Disgruntled Employee? What?

      Not to be too vague about it, but the online official swag store of a certain auto-racing sanctioning group briefly offered a T-shirt design so offensive that I won't post it here.

     There's also the fact that they memory-holed it shortly after the image started making the rounds on social media.  Sure, the page got archived; but provenance is a bit tricky when all you've got is a big stack of HTML that anyone with the skills could write, having grabbed the code from a different page of the same site.  I saw it myself, so I think it was indeed real; doubting the initial reports, I had done a search on their site to find it and had the page up for about thirty minutes before hitting "refresh" and pulling a 404. 

     The design in question featured a race-car driver in full kit -- helmet, fireproof union suit, gloves and so on -- seated in a throne-type chair modeled on the one the statue of Lincoln sits in at the Lincoln Memorial, fasces and all.*  Vertical red and white stripes in the proportion of the ones on our flag fill space behind and above the seated figure.  It was apparently in promotion of an automobile race in Washington, D.C. that is part of the celebrations for our country's 250th anniversary.

     The image itself is not the offensive part; it's a little tone-deaf to unseat Lincoln, but decades of zany Presidents' Day-themed ads show that general kind of thing isn't uncommon.  Nope, the problem was the text: Above the driver, "ONE NATION."  Below him, between five-pointed stars, "ONE RACE."

     It's not a cute pun. It's not a dogwhistle.  It's an air-raid siren.  To their credit, the page selling that shirt was taken down shortly after it started getting general attention; to their detriment, somebody made the decision to create and post it in the first place.
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* There's a tendency in various corners of the Internet to point at such representations of rods bundled around an axe in various government buildings, documents, coins, etc. and sagely intone, "That proves it! It's a fascist government!" It proves nothing of the sort; our government was established by men LARPing the Roman Republic (with a touch of Ancient Greek democracy) and for Rome, fasces were a symbol of the power to dispense high and low justice.  Mussolini co-opted it, but he was way late to the table, and was thinking more of Imperial Rome.  And yes, Republic or Empire, the Romans were a bloody-handed bunch, and there are better ways to symbolize government than implied beatings and beheadings.  It's a pretty good reminder of the need for checks and balances, and that justice had better be tempered with wisdom and mercy; but artistic and symbolic use in the U.S. is rarely that nuanced, either.  It's just one more bit of semiotic shorthand to say that government is still in charge of all levels of justice, right up there with the eagle clutching arrows in one claw and olive branches in the other.

Critique Group

     The critique group I chair met this morning, and I continue to enjoy the level of talent the members have, both natural gifts and a willingness to put in the hard work of turning a string of interesting ideas into an engaging story.  There's a fair amount of skull sweat involved, and like the lovely swan gliding across the smooth surface of a pond, there's considerably more thrashing around taking place under the surface than you'd ever expect.

     The members of the group are putting in the effort and their stories and chapters show it.  Going over their manuscripts with an eye open for what works and what needs work is an education in and of itself.

Reading List

     While Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth's supposedly butched-up military machine is stumbling its way through a war of choice in the Middle East, incompetently led and sometimes reluctantly (but competently) served, it might be time for a touch of perspective on current events.  So here are some suggested readings:

     "The Screwfly Solution," by Racoona Sheldon (Alice Sheldon, more famous as "James Tiptree, Jr.")
     The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
     Practically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin -- I'm presently enjoying The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a 2002 collection of her short fiction.

     All of them examine power, and how things break, and how helpless so many people are willing to be while it happens, and (in some cases), how it might begin to heal.  We're presently oversupplied with boys who like the sound of smashing altogether too well -- social norms, people's lives, economies, edifices, anything that looks even a little fragile.  But there is a season for all things, and they mustn't be allowed to pursue ruin forever.

Spooky Season

     No, not goblins and ghosts and things that go bump in the night -- spy stuff.  Intel stuff, open-source and covert, military and political.  Come to think of it, some of that stuff might go bump in the night, or possibly ka-blam.

     There's a new podcast out, from a source that seems unlikely at first sight, and they're doing good work, serious work, talking to newsmakers a little but mostly to people who avoid headlines, about things that sometimes make headlines.  Sources & Methods is not the usual fare, and in its best moments, is as fascinating as a good spy novel.

Utter Nutjobbery

     In a piece of propaganda better suited to Joe McCarthy's Red Scare or worse, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is vowing to go after "Leftist terrorists" in a news release almost too unhinged to be believed.  But it's as real as any of Stalin's purges, and you do have to wonder just how far he and men like him are willing to go.

     Here in the real world, almost every one of these political assassins and mass killers are lone wolves,* most of them espousing incoherent notions that barely fit any category of political ideology.  In recent years, a preponderance have leaned more Right than Left, but in either direction, their notions are a far cry from any Republican or Democrat platform.  Their ideas are generally, well, unhinged.  And if AG Paxton was merely one nut chasing after a whole sackful of them, I'd ignore his release as unworthy of adult attention; but he's got the entire might and credence of the state of Texas behind him, and woe betide any loudmouthed fools who come to his attention.

     This is going to come to blood, by and by, and I think the forces of Trumpism, of American authoritarianism, are longing for it.  It does not take two willing participants for that particular tango and so here we are, with the Sword of Damocles one hand of a steadily ticking clock.

     I wish I had not been born into such times.
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* I have written about this before: murderous madmen have an advantage.  Most people who struggle with sanity are harmless; most of the violently-inclined are more dangerous to themselves than anyone else. But the sober, serious men and women who work to protect at-risk individuals and society as a whole are focused on predictable threats, not someone who kills over harsh words, perceived slights or because they got up on the wrong side of the bed.  And while all conspiracies leak, an individual acting alone is difficult to spot before they strike.

Jawboning

     "Jawboning" is not just rustic-sounding slang for idle talk; it's a term of art.  Specifically, it's when a person in a position of government power uses that power to lean on citizens.  It's considered an abuse of office and can even be a violation of the law.

     Jawboning is what FCC Chair Brendan Carr did to ABC over (intemperate at best and possibly tasteless) comments by comedian Jimmy Kimmel.  The precise comments don't matter.  You can go look them up, and depending on your politics, they may make your blood boil or elicit a shrug.  They're not especially funny, but that's how it goes with topical satire: not every bit lands.

     The FCC doesn't regulate networks.  They regulate individual TV and radio stations, most of which are owned by a handful of very large corporations -- large and hoping to get larger.  For them to grow any further, they're going to need FCC approval.  There are limits -- "ownership caps" -- on how many stations in a given market may be owned by a single company.  Nexstar, one of the largest, is in the middle of a huge merger with another big owner, and they'll need a new, higher cap.

     So when Brendan Carr went on a podcast and said, "This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead," Nexstar was listening.  They announced the ABC stations they own weren't going to carry Kimmel's late-night talk show.  Sinclair, another big group owner, followed suit.  ABC responded by dropping Kimmel.

     ABC can do that.  They're his employer; if they don't want his show, they can (within contractual limits, and we can be sure attorneys for everyone involved are very, very busy right now) pull the plug.  Likewise, network affiliates are not necessarily required to carry every show the network shoves down the pipe (though, yet again, contacts and lawyers are involved).  The entity who crossed the line was the FCC Chairman, who was essentially saying, "Nice TV stations.  Be a shame if something happened to them," to individual ABC affiliates.  FCC regulations are many and complex; dig deep, and everyone's got something that might not be quite right.  "Give me the man and I'll give you the crime," or give him the station, in this case.

     It was jawboning.  In the Bible, mighty Samson beat a thousand men to death with the jawbone of an ass; here, a single ass is jawboning the giants of broadcasting to their knees over misfiring political humor.

     Is that really a good outcome?  And how will the next FCC Chairman use that power, if it goes unchallenged?   Even Brendan Carr once thought it was a problem, before he got control.

Prediction

     I continue to condemn violence against people -- even ones who ideas I despise -- who are running their mouth and otherwise engaging in normal, peaceful political activity.  In a contest of ideas within a free democracy, violence has no place.

     The most recent assailant, when they catch him, may claim political motivation, but he (or she, or they) will most likely turn out to be like the vast majority of these killers, a person obsessed with high-profile murderers, and their primary purpose will have been to make themselves famous.  They'll be someone who lives in the borderlands between sanity and insanity.  Such people -- and the half-baked notions they espouse -- don't deserve serious consideration as anything but criminals.

     Politicians often seek to exploit these crimes (or more accurately, the public's reaction) to further their own interests.  They will seek to boost whatever cause or program they were already favoring.  Others will express sincere sympathy, and I trust them a little more than their opportunistic peers.  Both the sincere and self-serving/cause-serving reactions can be found all across the political spectrum.

     Less universally, for every high-profile death, there are barbarians who will express glee.  It's unseemly.  Ungracious.  You can dislike or disagree with a man's ideas -- or even the man himself -- without dancing in his blood when he is killed.

     When the most recent attacker is hunted down, he (etc.) is going to be one more warped flake hyped on nihilistic fame, just like the vast majority of similar murderers. 

     Update: the killer is still not found, and my in-house subject-matter expert reminds me that the late Charlie Kirk had critics to the Right as well as to the Left, many of them extremists who decried his lack of antisemitism.  So the killer's screed -- of which there will probably be one -- is as likely to lean that way as the other; the "No enemy to the (Left or Right, depending on the speaker)," types should bear in mind that most shades of political opinion have foes who are even farther in their own direction; the only ones who don't are so far out that they're off the map.
     The other point that merits bearing in mind is that a 200-yard rifle shot is not, in fact, all that far or difficult; hunters and U. S. Marines routinely do this with stock AR-15s and hunting rifles, however James Bond it sounds to you or me.  It's a chilling reality.

Nehemiah Scudder, Is That You?

     Indiana Governor Mike Braun, about as four-square a Trumpian politician as could be, a businessman with strong roots in traditional Indiana conservative Republicanism, didn't want him.  The state party insisted, and Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith was on the ticket in 2024.

     Mr. Beckwith is an unabashed Christian nationalist; as far as he's concerned, the rules of the Bible -- his faith's version of the Bible -- ought to be the laws of the land.*  And there he is, one notch away from the state's top executive office.

     When you get one of these fanatical fellows in high office, there's not a lot to be done other than watch them closely and sue if they get over the line.  They've got a tendency to overestimate the popularity of their positions and to overreach.

     In Indiana, there's a pretty good watchdog, and they publish what they observe.

     And Nehemiah Scudder?  He's always lurking.
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* Although, shockingly, that doesn't include just about all of the Old Testament stuff about what foods one should eat and how they should be prepared, or details like the prohibition on wearing cloth woven from two kinds of fiber.  Shrimp cocktail and polyester blends are still on the menu, boys!  Women making their own decisions, not so much.  The picking and choosing can be quite selective, and the end result has more in common with a fictionalized far-Right version of 19th-Century or 1950s America than Bible times.

About Those Frogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Was An Insurrection

     Quick reminder: January 6, 2021 was an insurrection.  It wasn't a successful one; it wasn't well-coordinated.  Vice-President Mike Pence's stiff neck impeded a critical step and he sacrificed a political career that he'd compromised a lot to advance, in order to preserve the orderly and lawful function of our system of government and prevent an autogolpe.

     I watched live and near-live coverage of the assault on the U. S. Capitol as it happened and it was not a "day of love."  It was a violent, poorly-organized attack on the building and on Congress.  We came within minutes and feet of serious harm to the Senators and Representatives, and multiple police and citizens were injured.  One rioter was killed while charging at law enforcement personnel through a just-broken window in a door with a raging mob behind her.

     There's a real push on the Right to retcon these events as some kind of overly-enthusiastic hijinks at worst; after all, there were lulls in the fighting (as there are in any such conflict.  Sorry, Hollywood tends to skip over the dull parts) and there's plenty of video of that, too.  But men (and a few women), many armed with clubs and more, scaled walls, burst through barricades, smashed windows, broke down doors and put Congress to flight.

     It was an ugly day.  There may be more ugly days ahead.

The FCC And The PEBCAK POTUS

     The structure of the actual commission that runs the Federal Communications Commission is simple: there are five Commissioners, no more than three of whom can be from the same party, and they serve five year terms that can be informally extended to seven and a half years if they aren't replaced.  The President appoints them, the Senate confirms them (or doesn't, though it's rare), and the President gets to pick which one gets the Chairman's seat.

     For over-the-air stuff, the Commission's basic mandate is to regulate the operation of actual transmitters, those devices that fill up the limited RF spectrum with signals.  It's different for every service, from the few remaining Non-Directional Beacons and maritime services down below the end of the AM band -- remember AM radio? It's kind of still there, barely --  up through amateur radio and shortwave broadcasting, low-band communications, FM and television broadcasting, VHF and UHF comms, cell phones, terrestrial relay services (mostly digital stuff), satellite radio and TV and so on.  When it comes to broadcasting, the FCC licenses individual radio and TV stations, not networks or group owners.  Each spot on the dial in each location comes with a license -- or a big old Federal fine.

     President-elect Trump's incoming FCC Chair has big plans -- or at least big talk -- about knocking "the networks" into line, but he's got less direct power over them than his sponsor appears to believe.  The FCC can be expensive and annoying to the stations the networks own directly.  Those are relatively few, though in the biggest cities -- think New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Boston and so on.  But they're not the biggest owners; that would be Hearst, E. W. Scripps Company, Sinclair (probably the largest, avowedly conservative and has the greatest number of ABC stations) and Tegna, Inc.  None of these companies own only stations affiliated with just one network; Tegna's got the biggest block of NBC stations (22), but owns ABC, CBS and Fox stations as well; each of them owns stations that carry the four largest TV networks -- so it's tricky for the entity that licenses stations to go after a network: networks are not, themselves, licensed by the FCC.  Each and every one of these very large companies (think billions, not millions) has lawyers by the barrel-full; they have all formed in the course of long strings of acquisitions, mergers and divestments.  Legal sparring with the FCC (and other regulators) isn't just a thing they do, it's a part of what they are.

     Most of these station-owning companies avoid overt politics and editorialized content, other than Sinclair, and even Sinclair is careful where they tread: they're all in the business to make money, and they will follow the money remorselessly, wherever it leads.  The FCC may be able to cost them a few bucks, if they do something the new Chairman deems worthy of reproof  -- but most of their attorneys are already on the payroll, and enjoy an opportunity to keep busy.

The Problem

     Okay, this one's kind of political.

     The one tiny little caveat to Jeff Bezos's claim that his decision to have the Washington Post refrain from endorsing a Presidential candidate had nothing at all to do with any worries about antagonizing former President Trump is that the two men had already crossed swords in the past.  There's plenty of reason to believe Amazon lost out in a big cloud computing contract with DoD during the Trump administration due to personal enmity between the two men.

     It's happened before.  If Mr. Trump wins in November, who could say it won't happen again?  Mr. Bezos has a lot to gain if his paper sits this one out -- and nothing to lose if Vice-President Harris wins.

     From a business standpoint, it's a no-brainer, and that holds no matter what high-minded justifications he puts forth.

     Newspapers often make candidate endorsements, and I doubt those endorsements move a lot of voters; it's usually pretty obvious where a paper's editors stand.  It's just an honest choosing of sides for the opinion pages.  Staying officially neutral is unusual.  We expect the front page to be neutral.  The opinion page has got to stand for something, even if it's something half the readers don't like.  (They'll probably find something on the op-ed page.)

     The Washington Post -- and the Los Angeles Times -- have chosen to stand for not getting beat up if the bully hits the big time again.  It's a choice, and one that gives readers valuable information about their papers: they're owned by spineless men.

Hey, Remember The Taliban?

     A socially-conservative religious movement that started small and gained influence over a modern country, using war and instability to establish themselves as the loudest minority among factions with only the loosest of common goals?  Destroyers of cultural artifacts, oppressors of women and foes to modernity in all its forms -- except, perhaps, weaponry.

     Their methods are not without admirers on what used to be the far and crazy Right -- and it keeps trying to "sanewash" itself.  They're still nutjobs, out of touch with the wide center of American culture and always looking for ways to ooze in.

     These kinds of movements often get a sort of "piety exception" from people in the culture around them: "I don't agree with everything they say, but they sure are sincere in their faith!"  Don't be fooled.  They reject the notion of tolerance and freedom of conscience.  They want to run your life by their rules, down to the smallest of details.  Our homegrown version is hostile to the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights.

Just In Time For Christmas

     I've got it: the hot new toy.  It's a Tesla Cybertruck in the style of the "Transformers" toys, only when you transform it, it's a dumpster, complete with flames shooting out the top!

     Yeah, that thing isn't being welcomed with open arms by anyone anywhere besides the fanniest of fanboys; it's coming up short in terms of styling, fit and finish, and the basic necessary functions of a working truck, and that's before you consider the seething sociopolitical mess the lad at the top keeps dipping himself into.

     I miss the days of geeks who stuck to geekery and business types who immersed themselves in the accumulation of wealth while avoiding visible involvement in politics and most scandals.  You can point out it was often plenty rotten under the surface, and you'd be right; but at least there was a surface over the worst of it.

"Don't Know Much About History..."

     The United States Senate is supposed to be the "senior body," the place where wise legislators serving long terms weigh new laws and debate their decisions carefully, with due attention to history, science and culture.

     When a Senator votes, it's a well-considered choice -- or so a dozen years of Social Studies, U. S. History and U. S. Government classes led me to believe.  When the Senate voted to confirm General Charles Q. Brown, a former fighter pilot, as the new Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Senator Thomas H. "Tommy" Tuberville of Alabama voted Nay.

     Ah, but he's a U.S. Senator; surely his reasoning is sound even if one might disagree with his conclusion, right?

     Judge for yourself.  The senior Senator was concerned the USAF fighter pilot might be too "woke," telling an interviewer, "Our military is not an equal opportunity employer, it is a military that is here to protect American citizens."  You can look up the video for yourself, but the quote is not out of context.

     And it's a hundred percent wrong.  Ever since 1948, when President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, it has been explicit U. S. policy "...that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin."

     The military is, in plain fact, an equal opportunity employer.  They don't promise equality of outcome; not everyone makes it through Basic Training and of the ones who do, some will never qualify for anything especially challenging.  But if you've got the ability, Uncle Sam doesn't care about your hue, what (if any) deities you worship or where you came from.  These days, he doesn't even care who you sleep with or if you're a boy, a girl or a mystery.  The military cares about what you can do.  That's not "wokeism;" it's kind of harsh -- service in the toughest, most elite units is based on reality-tested individual accomplishment, both alone and as part of a team.  Them as can't, wash out, period.  That's not going to change.

     The Senator, I'm not so sure what he cares about.  Looking stuff up doesn't appear to be on his list.

World War Three

     The Third World War.*  It's a buzzphrase, especially popular just now with the farther fringes of the Right and Left, but -- let's face it -- becoming ever more mainstream.

     We've certainly got the classic ingredients for the early stage: an expansionist power moving to take territory by force of arms, a coalition united in opposition but hesitant to engage directly, while at least one small nation is being hacked to bits.  The West may yet be drawn into active conflict.

     This is far from the first time such a prospect has loomed.  It's not even the first time an emboldened Russia has looked westward; but Stalin had other problems, and we ended up with a Cold War instead of a hot one.

     But in 1951, the ambitious editors of Collier's magazine wondered what it would look like if the world again fell into war [PDF] and imagined a situation in which the Soviet Union might try to launch a short, victorious war against a smaller and uncooperating nation.  They chose Tito's Yugoslavia as the flash point, and posited an unsuccessful assassination attempt followed by land invasion.

     Tito, surviving, calls on the UN for help and the NATO responds; after a string of initial successes, the invasion by the USSR (and satellites) grinds to a halt.

     To that point, it sounds familiar, doesn't it?  In Collier's projection -- told as if looking backwards from 1960, five years after the war had drawn to a close, leaving national capitols in ruins -- the UN gives the USSR an ultimatum, which is ignored; the Soviet invasion into Europe falters under a campaign of conventional and fission bombing that escalates after the USSR hits London, then cities and war-production sites in the continental U.S.  The near-destruction of Washington D. C. is followed by a daring raid on Moscow, as the tide of the war turns--

     The magazine's collection of writers, everyone from reporters and columnists to politicians, fiction writers and labor leaders, were envisioning global war at a time before fusion bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, before "one missile, one city," before Nuclear Winter.  Their WW III included only a limited nuclear exchange, horrific though it is.  Bombs grew more quickly than they imagined.

     The issue was praised as a solemn warning and condemned as little more than nihilistic disaster-porn.  It's worth taking a look at, to see how much -- and how little -- has changed.

     Ambitious autocrats have always been a threat to peace, to the ordinary lives of ordinary people.  And it is the ordinary people who bear the cost of bringing aggressive powers to heel.  History is too often the story of "great men," larger-than life heroes and villains, but the real story is the ruin the worst of men bring about and the effort it takes to stop them, by everyone from the noblest philosopher and most clever strategist to the simplest foot soldier and Home Front worker.

     Like it or not, and I don't, we're in it again.  Maybe everything will work out, Russia will grind to a halt in the snow and mud, and the war will end at the negotiating table sooner rather than later.  A look at history -- or a back issue of Collier's -- suggests otherwise.
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* Some historians dispute the count, pointing out the global scope of the Seven Year's War in the 18th Century and the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th, along with others.  The numbers of fallen in those wars are not changed by the designation, nor any borders changed, and about the only conclusion is that as a species, our wars are as wide-ranging as our means of travel allow.

Weekend Read

     I admit it: I underestimated U. S. Senator Lindsey Graham.  I took him for an earnest striver, a perpetual "B" student struggling to keep up with the cool kids, always a few steps behind and short of breath.  I was wrong.  To his credit, his academic credentials are solid and he's put in years of good work as an Air Force lawyer.  On the other side of the ledger, he's got piles of the kind of ambition that Senators are made of, and he is more than willing to strain at gnats while swallowing camels whole in pursuit of partisan politics.

     A man like that can be made -- or unmade -- by circumstances, and Senator Graham managed to be right there in the fray as Donald J. Trump entered Republican politics and made it -- and, eventually, the Senator -- his own.

     Will Saletan of The Bulwark has done a deep, deep dive into Lindsey Graham's political arc, following him step by step from 2105 to the present and it's sobering reading.

     One vital takeaway: Trumpism is not conservatism. It's authoritarianism.  Mr. Trump's fans at home and abroad like to paint all of his critics as "liberals," usually with a touch of insulting embroidery around the edges.*  The Bulwark is quite emphatically not a liberal website; the staff consists of conservatives, neo-cons, non-Trump Republicans and an occasional libertarian-leaning type, and you'll sniff about in vain for a whiff of New Deal/Great Society/Clintonian/Obamaesque folks there.
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* Hoping, I suppose, for a steam-out-the-ears reaction, which they're not going to get from me.  I'm an old-fashioned libertarian: while I'm perfectly happy if gun-toting drag queens get married and smoke pot, if knuckle-dragging Neanderthals stand up a stone circle and howl away at the solstice or if  Joe Sixpack and family enjoy an ordinary church-on-Sunday life in the suburbs, and so on, I don't think it should be state-subsidized. If that happens to make steam come out of your ears, well, it's a free country -- steam away!

Pasty, Pudgy, Ill-Nourished

      The problem with what passes for "news media" these days is the same kind of thing as the problem with snacks.

      You could have an apple or an orange, a handful of nuts, even some plain popcorn -- but the shelves are full of chips and candy bars and pastries with an amazingly-long shelf life, all nicely wrapped up and ready to go.  Why mess around rinsing off a kumquat or peeling a tangelo when there's Sugary Goodness™ just waiting?

      Likewise, the news used to be readily available in columns of dry text with the occasional map, chart or monochrome picture, thrown on your doorstep with the ink still damp every morning (and evening, in the larger towns and cities).  Or you could get it in five-minute chunks at the top or bottom of the hour, read by a professional with one eye on a stopwatch and the other on the entire world, a few concise lines for war, flood, fire and pestilence with a heartwarming "kicker" at the end unless they ran out of time.

      Mostly, what you got was news, because they had neither time nor the column-inches to deliver much else.  Oh, there was editorial content as well, on its own page or in its own time slot and clearly marked.  That's not to say the news content was entirely unbiased; the providers had to fit it into the available room, they had to pick what would lead off the newscast or the front page, and everyone involved was human: every news story is a story and every story has a point of view.  They had to stick to the facts; lies took too much effort and the competition would pick them apart.

      But it was fresh fruit and vegetables, and no ranch dressing.  The rise of 24-hour news stations, first on radio and then on cable TV, meant there were vast amounts of time to fill.  The Internet made for unlimited "pages" of newspapers -- and as newspapers put themselves behind paywalls to make up for lost revenue, plenty of new websites emerged to fill the gap, free for nothing but a mish-mash of weird ads onscreen.  And a lot of it was the junk food of news.

      I loved the "newswheel" format, a never-ending succession of newscasts, stories updated as they happened, but it was labor-intensive and the ratings plateau at "meh" unless there's a war or worse going on; newsreaders don't build a strong following the way "news personalities" can, nor does a quick look at what's going on in the country and around the world bring out strong emotion in the manner that hammering away at a few hot topical issues will.  And if that necessarily erodes the distinction between news content and opinion content?  Too bad -- look how well it sells soap and cars and so on!

      And so now we have channel after channel, website after website of attractively-packaged fluff with a long shelf-life, loaded with addictive notions, filling but not nutritious.

      Eat too much junk food and you get fat.  Consume too much junk news and you'll get fat-headed.

Language As Resistance

      It wasn't very long ago that a lot of Ukrainians spoke Russian.  Even after independence from the former Soviet Union, many families spoke Russian at home.

      Russia's invasion has changed that.

      Y'know, if you go to a part of the world where the people are notable for their stubbornness and start pushing them around, you shouldn't be surprised when they start pushing back.