What Are The Odds

     What, do you suppose, are the chances that a man who still denies he lost an election to the Presidency and incited a (dimwitted) insurrection to stop it after running through a great many legal-system gambits will try a rugpull on midterm elections that are likely to cost his party at least one house of the legislature and maybe both?

     This guy figures it's a likely bet.  He's probably right; losing will be somewhere between personally frustrating to catastrophic for the incumbent, who is not a man who will put up with that.  What form i will take and how well the effort is likely to succeed, that's another set of questions.

     We'll find out.

Not In The Job Parameters

     U.S forces, by Presidential directive, are stacking up within striking distance of Iran -- and look, he can do that, shuffle the U. S. military around on U.S. soil, the open sea and (by agreement) the territory of our allies.  The job includes "Commander in Chief," after all.

     What no President can do -- Republican, Democrat, Whig or George Washington standing clear of parties in disgust -- is start or declare a war.  That's up to Congress, the majority of whose members have to worry about re-election in the very near term, whose consensus contains the aggregate wisdom of 535 men and women (stop laughing).

     Of course you wouldn't know that from the way our current President is talking about it, as he opens the first meeting of his "Board of Peace."  Nope, he says we'll know his plans for using armed forces against Iran in a week or ten days.

     That ain't how it works.  I'm sure my comment filters will get a few "Nuh-unh, he can, too, and besides [other President] did it."  I don't care.  The ones who have pulled that kind of trick in the past were also in the wrong, and the incumbent has already broken the rules by kidnapping a foreign head of state in a military incursion.  It doesn't matter that the guy they grabbed was a bad guy; it doesn't matter if he was helping out drug smugglers, masterminding the whole drug-gang show or, despite being a bloody-handed autocrat busy running his country into the ground, had stood well clear of the whole dope thing: other countries still aren't supposed to send soldiers in and grab him.  Ya don't do it.  There is -- well, there was -- a rules-based international order; there are ways to line up a criminal leader for arrest and trial (and yes, they're pretty toothless as long as he or she is careful where they go visiting) but they do not include TV plots from Mission: Impossible or The A-Team.

     Russia, the smallest and weakest of what passes for a Great Power these days -- and they wouldn't even be one, without the nuke in their teeth and the mad gleam in their eye -- has been hacking away at the notion of having rules for the game ever since they grabbed the Crimean peninsula.  Red China would like to (little matter of Taiwan), but all their neighbors are watching.  Our President shouldn't be picking up an axe and joining in.

     But he has been and he still is.  In a better timeline, Congress would be straining at the reins, digging its heels like a mule.  This Congress is more like a Pomeranian purse-dog: yappy and occasionally it makes a smelly little mess in there, but mostly it's just riding along.

Discontinuity

     Ever bend a hard plastic rod?  Many plastics will go quite a ways, and then, all of a sudden--  They break. 

     Mr. Trump's Republican party is courting chaos like a lovestruck teenager.

     In Missouri, both sides were playing chess -- until one side pulled out a baseball bat.  The legislature passed a bill to rearrange Federal House districts, with a map that will flip one of the two usually-Democratic districts in favor of Republicans.  Opponents fought back, with a ballot-initiative petition drive to put the new map up for a statewide vote.  You can do that in Missouri, but it takes a pile of signatures, and they've got to come from at least six of the state's eight House districts. 

     In fact, it takes a tick over 100,000 signatures.  The petitioners have collected well over 300,000, from all eight districts.  So it'll almost certainly go on the ballot, and per established precedent, the law is frozen once enough signatures have been turned in, while Missourians wait until it is determined if the signature requirements have officially been met, and until they've had a chance to vote on it if the number beat the minimum.

     The Republican Secretary of State says no; even if there are enough signatures, he can just declare the referendum unconstitutional all by himself.  And if so, the whole thing goes off the courts to work out.  It's not how the Show Me state has dealt with similar referenda in the past.  The power to shout, "Allee, allee, oxen-free," and dump the process has never been asserted by the Missouri Secretary of State before.  It seems, well, not the way a proper Republic goes about such things.  It's high-handed.  Authoritarian.

     In a state whose citizens are nationally famous for mulishness, it might not be the course of action that a sober, cautious politician should choose.

     I guess we'll find out.  Bending, bending--  Whattaya think?  Snap, or will it stay bent?  And what gets that treatment next?

     It feels like the lights are about to start going out, like the walls are closing in.  There's a lot of ruin in a big, well-established country, but there's no damn requirement to test that proposition to destruction.

Bottom Line

     Events of the past week have made it clear: If you're still supporting Republican politicians at this point, you're in favor of authoritarianism and opposed to democracy.  There isn't any nuance left, and it's GOP politicians that have given it the old heave-ho.

     I'm not saying you've got to love Democrat politicians.  They're maintaining a very big tent, and depending on how you lean, you may find a few or many espousing policies you don't agree with.  But don't be running with the Republicans unless you think only one side should get a vote.

Nope

     A commenter recently suggested one of the online, black-market (masquerading as gray) digital archives as a source of the out-of-print Andre Norton books I had mentioned.  I'm not going to publish his comment, nor the name of the archive.

     While it's perfectly okay to share works in the public domain -- the Library of Congress has plenty -- and there's a (weak) argument to be made for doing the same with out of print books that are unlikely to be republished, those archives also host copyrighted works and it is, simply, theft to share them without payment to the copyright holder.  Just as bad, in my opinion, is that these lawless collections are used to train "AI," stealing from the writers now and using the input to create soulless crap afterward.

     I won't support them.  I encourage you to not support them, too.  The only thing that ought to be fed into "AI" engines is a wooden shoe.

     Writing pays starvation wages to most writers.  Don't make it worse.

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.

Not Gonna Do It

     In response to my post yesterday, pointing out that everyone involved in the current round campus protests and responses are more-or-less hapless boobs, coping as best as they can figure out, I got a couple of comments -- comments singling out one group or another as particularly pitiable or despicable.

     That wasn't my point.  It's not even close.  It's just about the opposite.  And I'm not going to debate it.

     Nobody involved is, in actual fact, in Israel or nearby, kicking in doors, taking hostages, breaking heads,* bombing people, animals or buildings, killing or being killed, maiming or being maimed.  The protesters think there should be less damage and killing (and are trying to ensure the institutions they are attending, working for or bothering are not enabling it) and, surprise, so do many of the university administrators and police, only not quite as strongly.  Their clash is over means, not ends.  Or maybe it's over whether you should watch the fire burn or try to put it out, however futile your efforts.

     Many of the people directly involved in the actual conflict think they can kill, maim, kidnap and bomb their way to a better tomorrow -- a plan that has piled up millennia of not working especially well in that part of the world, though who am I to tell 'em?

     I've got about as much right to do so as any random college student in this country.  Or as you.  They're probably not going to listen.
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* With the possible exception of yet another group (not students, college staff or police) in California, where it appears thugs attacked protestors at UCLA with blunt-force weapons.  Reports have not named any group taking responsibility, but does it matter?  Initiating force against people who have not done so to you is immoral and unacceptable. Wave your own damn signs all you like, but you don't get to hit the other sign-wavers over the head with clubs.

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.

And About Dammned Time, Too

     The news broke yesterday: Former President Donald Trump has been charged over his -- in my opinion, not to mention the grand jury's -- criminal actions in connection with his attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, including the 6 Jan 2021 insurrection.

     If you're a committed fan of Mr. Trump, this is a bell without a clapper.  You're going to ignore the details of the indictment and keep on sharing memes inappropriately comparing the ex-President to Moses, Jesus and heroic archetypes, depicting the elderly, overweight, small-handed and balding man as well-muscled and stalwart.  Never mind that the one time he was given a chance to stand up for his country, he mysteriously developed bone spurs and dodged mandatory military service, bone spurs which have never troubled him since.

     For everyone else, CNN has published an "annotated" version of the indictment, which reproduces all 45 pages of the charges against Mr. Trump with CNN's opinion of what they mean next to it (handily in a different font), so you can see if they're barking up the right tree.  Read the indictment, no matter what you think of the news network's notions.

     Is this prosecution politically motivated?  You're darned right it is -- like the Civil War was politically motivated.  As the indictment sets out in detail, Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators worked to undermine and destroy the Constitutional and legislative mechanisms by which the United States selects Presidents.  His is the kind of politics that shatters governments and wrecks countries, and he must be held to account for it.

     Will this change the course of the 2024 Presidential race?  I doubt it.  Donald Trump has a lock on the Republican nomination at this point and he would even if he was indisputably found guilty and locked away in the the deepest, dankest cell of the  Federal ADMAX prison in Florence, CO.  But I hope it will show that the price of playing games with the normal process of electing Presidents, of staging an autogolpe, is too high for another try.

     Of course, one possibility is that the various trials proceed, Mr. Trump is found guilty in one or more, finishes his campaign from prison, wins, manages to be sworn in behind bars and attempts to pardon himself.  That would probably end up before the Supreme Court and I'm not seeing any decision possible that doesn't lead to trouble.  More likely is that Mr. Trump will prolong his various court cases and appeal any losses, hoping to stay out of jail, win the Presidency and self-pardon; if he does, this leads back to the Supreme Court as before.  So those are ugly outcomes, long before any worries over his campaign promises of vengeance.

     Interesting times.  How I long for boredom.  But can boredom win elections?

What Is Happening In Russia

     No, seriously -- what is happening in Russia?  Mr. Putin seems to have gotten himself into a bit of a corner and some of the chaos he's been inflicting on Ukraine started to come home.

     At present, it appears the mess has stopped short of Moscow, which means it's not going to be very sweeping, at least not yet; but anyone who tells you they know what will happen next is taking through their hat.

     Interesting times.

Looking At The News

      I suppose I should be all over Donald Trump's arraignment today.  I'm not going to be hanging on every moment of it.  We don't even know what the precise charges are yet.  A well-off ex-President and long-time Manhattan businessman with some of the best lawyers money can buy is going to get through the process just fine, under the harsh glare of public scrutiny and the lenses and microphones of Press ranging from People's World* to OANN, with CNN, Fox, NPR and the legacy papers and networks all bunched up near the middle.  If there's anything even a little bit underhanded or askew in the process, one of them will jump on it and the rest will follow, like ducks clustering around an old lady with a pile of day-old bread.†  I don't have to monitor it; they'll all do so for free, in between trying to sell me pillows, luxury cars, toothpaste, the supposedly unsullied reputation of high-toned corporate underwriters and/or a chance to seize control of the means of production (no thanks, way too much work; and they can forget about the big car payments, too).

      Another little news item has caught my eye.  It's a disturbing one.  I'm a big fan of the decorous conduct of legislative proceedings: the people we elect to fool around with our laws ought to be able to wield words against one another like swordsmen -- without ever actually using blades.  And I am no fan of gun control laws, largely because most of them are poorly thought out, based on inaccurate understanding of firearms and/or contrary to the Second Amendment or corresponding State constitutional protections (where they exist).  So when three Tennessee Democrat lawmakers staged an ill-advised stunt in support of gun control, haranguing their peers through a bullhorn in that state's House chamber and leading the gallery crowd in chants, you might expect me to be all in favor of a vote of censure by their Republican-majority peers and a stern talking-to from the podium.

      You're right.  I would be.  But that's not what the Tennessee House is doing.  They're voting to expel the three Representatives.  Toss 'em out.  And I cannot countenance that.

      A majority of the people of their districts who cared enough to vote had voted 'em in.  Presumably they knew what they were getting, and they deserve to keep getting it.  Raucous behavior deserves censure, not removal from office.  The people they're representing can replace them if they see fit, come the next election.  Vigorous debate is a fundamental pillar of this country's system of government and it has been known to get out of hand -- and to get reined in, however venomously.  Bouncing the Representatives stymies any cooling-off or debate -- and the state will probably have to run special elections to replace them.‡  In the meantime, Tennessee's House GOP supermajority looks even more like a rubber stamp and less like a representative, deliberative body.  Debate is better than shouting through a portable PA system, but removal of dissenting voices is much worse.  It's like cutting off a person's head to cure a toothache: while they're not feeling any pain after the procedure, the wider effect is obviously undesirable.
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* The successor to the old Daily Worker, apparently now not even a weekly.  My goodness, you don't think the USSR had been propping them up, do you?
 
† You're not supposed to feed them bread.  It's not good for them, and can leave them stuffed full of food that isn't very nourishing.  Any similarity between this and the previous footnote, well....
 
‡ Nope.  Not how that works in Tennessee.  County or city-level officials appoint replacements, who will serve until the next regular general election.  There's nothing to prevent the an ousted Representative from being appointed to or running foe election to the job again, either.

History Hits The Chorus Again

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

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

What He Said

      Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark, on what he wants from politicians, starting with an example recorded as the U. S. Capitol was under siege:

      "We have an Evangelical Republican from Indiana, who is the sitting vice president, working directly with the liberal Democrat from San Francisco in order to save the ship of state and get the job done.

     "That’s what I want out of American politics. I want a baseline level of professional cooperation from elected leaders that approximates Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi on the afternoon of January 6."

     It's worth reading, and worth following the links.  Grifters and liars don't deserve your support, no matter which of your pet causes they promise to impose.  You can only get them from those folks with a heaping helping of lies and nascent authoritarianism on the side, and it's far too high a price to pay.  Especially when we have a system built to keep you (and me, and those freaks and weirdos down the block) as free as possible and seek reasonable compromise where necessary.  Stop being chivvied by cynical pols invoking stupid boogeymen.  Communist drag queens of color twerking as they play antique flutes are not a real problem.

Wading The Rubicon: Yesterday's Hearing

      The Rubicon wasn't much of a river in Roman times and none of the modern candidates -- the river renamed "Rubicon" in 1933 is still the most likely -- are any more imposing.  Along a lot of its length, you can wade across.

      However puny, it was the border between the provinces and the territory of Rome.  It was a line no army raised by a provincial governor could lawfully cross.  To do so was a direct threat to the Republic's government.

      The Trump Administration's defense against claims of attempted coup have generally been along the line of "What river?  There was no Rubicon, and if there was, it was just a little ditch and besides, the other side was engaged in skullduggery!"

      Said "skullduggery" was non-existent; then-President Trump's own Justice Department said so.  In the wake of yesterday's 1/6 Committee hearing, it appears Mr. Trump's Rubicon was real, he waded it knowingly, and he's had river mud on his shoes and water-soaked pant-legs even as he has maintained his innocence.

      He is no innocent.  His culpability was direct.  His intentions were to create even greater unrest than he managed and he was only barely restrained by some members of his staff.  I had taken him to be little more a petulant man-child magnified by fame and money, enraged by defeat, grasping futilely at straws; the enormity* of his ambition and the coordination of his efforts to illegally retain power is now becoming clear.

     Mr. Trump wanted to be Caesar.
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* e·nor·mi·ty  /iˈnôrmədē/
noun: enormity; plural noun: enormities
1.the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong.
   "a thorough search disclosed the full enormity of the crime"
2. a grave crime or sin.
    "the enormities of the regime"

And Now We Don't Know

      The mysterious crash appears to have been from the living room, where we finally discovered a small box had fallen on a folded camera tripod.  There may be an animal in the basement.  There may not.  Time will tell.

And Yet The Glittering Lie Appeals More Than Dull, Gray Truth

      Yesterday's post drew comments.  Partisan comments, for all that I stuck to general principles.  I was going to just let them sit in the queue, but they rile me and I was never one to shy away from yelling at clouds.  Or what the heck, losing friends; popularity has never meant anything at all to me.

     So here goes, both barrels, no filter:

Yesterday, from "Carteach:"
     "What happens when the elected officeholders manage to rig the system to the point they no longer need worry about keeping their jobs no matter what they do to the citizens?"

     Okay, hell, let's run with that hypothesis: let us posit the system has done been rigged.  Even in states where the election apparatus is wholly under the control of elected and appointed Republicans, the Democrats have secretly seized the reins of power and can dial up the results they want as easily as one, two three....  Now tell me what kind of insane supervillains get themselves in a position to control elections -- and fail to give themselves commanding control of the legislature?   There were more than enough seats up for grabs in the Senate to get a two-thirds majority, and yet instead that body sits at 50/50, balanced on a knife-edge of a single defection from the party line (or, for the Dems, a tie).

     Nope, sorry.  Didn't wash when the Republican government of Georgia ran and checked their own elections and the incumbent Republican President lost.  It didn't wash when the Trump administration's own appointees in a position to know reported there was no manipulation or fraud in the 2020 elections.  Former President Donald John Trump and his campaign helpers spent months before the election sowing doubt about the honesty and fairness of it, then spent months after the election reaping that same doubt -- and it is fiction through and through.  Oh, it's fiction they are doing a very good job of selling, especially if you have no faith in our system of government, but it's simply a lie.  The professionals in his own Administration said as much, and were dinged for it.  The utterly pragmatic Senator Mitch McConnell said as much and got himself unfriended by the then-President. 

     I spent a lot of time looking into this calumny and every single claim that had any foundation at all in reality turned out to be a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation, or a misstatement that was later refuted by provable, solid facts.  Elections in the the United States of America are decentralized, run in large part by amateur, part-time labor and underpaid, honest civil servants who are barely able to keep up with the demands of the job, let alone run some kind of large-scale scam.  Mr. Trump is pleased to undermine public faith in the veracity of our elections to soothe his own ego.  He's 74; he has considerable resources.  He won't have to live with the consequences.  You and I will.  Our families will.  Are you willing to throw them into the fire to please a man with a well-established history of counterfactual running off at the mouth to suit his own ends?


12 hours ago, from "B"
     "You are correct. But we no longer have elections we can count on. SO that part id s off the table. THe rest of your statement above stands on it's own merits, however."

     We can indeed count on our elections, as I have shown above.  Again, what kind of inept baddies get control of election results and fail to give themselves a commanding majority in the legislature?  If their goal was "get Trump" and smash him flat, they fell far short of it.  Are you truly going to claim these master manipulators, with tentacles deep into the election machinery in a sufficient number of states -- even Republican-dominated states -- to control the outcome just forgot to hand themselves a Senate supermajority?   It's just about certain Mr. Trump's going to waltz away from the current Senate trial untouched -- to the great disappointment of most Congressional Democrats.  If they're so all-fired powerful, how come they can't manage to fully master the Senate?

      Downticket Republicans did very well in the 2020 elections.  If the elections were some kind of covert Democrat coup, it was bungled, and badly. 

      The simpler hypothesis is that Mr. Trump lost in 2020 for the same reason Ms. Clinton lost in 2016:  state-by-state, a majority of Americans didn't want them to be President.  Possibly a slim majority, but that's how it works.

      You play along with Mr. Trump's baseless undermining of credence in our elections at considerable peril to yourself, your fellow citizens and to their posterity.  If you were really concerned about our elections, you'd volunteer to be a pollworker.  Most cities and states are chronically short-handed -- if you think the system's rotten, go have a look for yourself.  I can tell you right now, the system's Peter-principled.  There are barely enough sufficiently competent people to get the work done, let alone try to cook the books.


4 hours ago, "Mark Matis" wrote:
     "They have already destroyed the soap box. They have now destroyed the ballot box with the massive fraud. So what does THAT leave??? Ask Ashlii Babbit if she thinks THEY will refuse to use the cartridge box..."

     Let me take that point by point:

     "...[D]estroyed the soap box?"  Really?  What a private business does along those lines is up to the private business; last time I looked,  you could still preach on the streetcorners, Gab was still running, the NRA's magazines as well as National Review and The Nation were still around and had a web presence.  Having freedom of speech does not oblige anyone to provide you with a hall to speak in; you'll have to go about that the same way Aimee Semple McPherson, Robert Green Ingersoll and Ayn Rand did.  Mr. Trump got himself kicked off Twitter and Facebook for rabble-rousing, pure and simple.  Let me suggest that's something we all should refrain from using someone else's megaphone to do.

   "They have now destroyed the ballot box with the massive fraud."  Asked and answered.  To date, no one has provided even one shred of proof that such a thing happened and there are multiple reasons to doubt that it did, starting with Mr. Trump losing in states where the GOP is in majority in the state government, as well as the wins of downticket Republican candidates.  Elections in the United States are honestly and fairly run -- and you can volunteer and find that out for yourself.  I'm told the Election Day refreshments are free, or they were before the coronavirus pandemic screwed things up and they will be again.

     "Ask Ashlii Babbit if she thinks THEY will refuse to use the cartridge box..."  Oh, I have been just waiting for this to come up.  Here, let me set the scene: a mob has burst in.  They are trying to break into legislative chambers.  Policemen/armsmen are on the other side, guns drawn and aimed, their posture clearly indicating readiness to shoot.  The mob smashed a window -- and the first person to try climbing through is shot dead.

     You bring a violent mob to my house -- or have one show up at yours -- and the first one of them to attempt hauling themselves through a broken window will most assuredly get shot, and the act will be deemed justified when it comes before the courts. 

     Ms. Babbit chose her death.  She died a criminal.  What, you believe the people charged with the physical security of our Capitol building are obliged to knuckle under to a mob?  That a military veteran shoving through a window in a locked door leading to the House chambers at the head of a mob does not constitute a credible threat to the Congresspeople and others sheltering in that room?

     Might does not make right.  A mob does not outweigh a duly elected assembly of Senators and Representatives, and a good many Americans have died to ensure that principle.


     I'm an anarchist.  I understand that governments are not inevitable, that they are merely arbitrary structures that most of us play along with* and quite flimsy.  I also understand that a majority of the people around me rely on that flimsy structure.  I must not break it without an overwhelming -- and overwhelmingly obvious -- reason, and neither should you.  Mr. Trump's pique at losing an election falls far short of that standard, and playing along with his self-serving falsehoods does enormous harm to our culture and our country.  The people who have done so should hang their heads in shame.
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* That's that nifty concept, "government with the consent of the governed."  You may have heard of it before.

Felony Stupid, At Best

     At worst, another loser hoping to get famous.  It's been all over the news -- a young man showed up at a Springfield, Missouri Walmart, videoing himself, carrying an AR-15 and wearing some kind of vest or plate carrier, hung with pouches.  He is reported to have been carrying "a hundred rounds of ammunition" (probably meaning three full 30-round magazines) and a handgun.

     Unsurprisingly, people in the store reacted with fear; even without the recent horrific attacks, the man was wearing what amounts to the "uniform" of mass killers as described in news reports.

     He does not appear to have made any kind of aggressive move with either gun and eventually another person, described as an "off-duty firefighter" (in other words, an ordinary citizen) drew his own concealed handgun and held the young fool until police arrived.

     Was he planning something terrible?  Was he just a nitwit with a grudge over Walmart's 21-and older limit on ammunition sales?  We don't know.  If he gets a good lawyer, we may never know for sure. 

     At the very least, his behavior was "felony stupid."  In most states, it's legal to open-carry a long gun; some states may require a permit and a few prohibit it.  It is, however, rarely a wise choice unless you're hunting, target shooting, or the like.  --Yes, in Miss Bobbi's Libertopia Wonderland, no one would bat an eye, but that's not where we live.  "Don't scare the average citizen" is a good approach to life; it was even before "Get Clean For Gene," but that's probably the best example.

     In 1968, both the incumbent mainstream Democrats and challenging Republicans were in favor of the War in Vietnam.  Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy got into the race as an anti-war candidate, and all the hippies (well, most of them) were for him.  It was a candidate's dream, a ready-made pool of enthusiastic door-knockers and envelope-stuffers.  There was just one problem: Mr. and (especially) Mrs. Average American were not about the open their door to a dirty, long-haired hippie, even if they were registered voters of the proper party to support the Senator's primary bid, even if they had doubts about the war: hippies scared them up close and personal, while Washington D.C. and Vietnam were far away.

     The answer, of course, was a shave, a haircut and a clean white shirt.  Even a bath, if necessary.  "Get Clean For Gene" was a success.  The McCarthy campaign ultimately failed, impaled on the candidate's gaffes and loss of momentum when Robert Kennedy entered the race -- but not because his campaign workers "scared the normal people."

     It's a good guideline.  Push boundaries a little at a time, if you want to see something different in the world.  Don't commit "felony stupid."

     (P. S., the U.S. eventually left Vietnam.  Did those scrubbed-up hippies help "move the Overton window" on debate about that war?  Probably.)

"3.6 Roentgen...."

     The weather was dreadful today, "killer hot" and no hype about it.  So I stayed in and binge-watched HBO's Chernobyl.

     It's well-told and gives a much better look into the terrifying near-miss; the outcome could have been so much worse.  And it's a story of the dangers of politically-driven engineering, a story of overconfidence and of what happens when you forget that failure is an option and Murphy never sleeps.  --Especially not when hazards are not communicated.

     This is the story of many engineering disasters: when engineering bumps up against politics, politics often triumphs; the dam must hold, the lower temperature limit for Shuttle launches is just a guideline, the power grid is sufficiently robust....  Political numbers are often nudged, adjusted, massaged; what's a few billion dollars or rubles here or there?  Engineering numbers don't work that way; even the "wiggle room" is part of the calculation.

     ...You can't fudge it; you can't cajole it.  If you built mistakes into the technology, hiding them doesn't make them go away.

     Chernobyl is an engrossing docudrama.  At the very end, there's a short segment explaining the simplifications used to tell the story, the large science staff distilled to just two people, one real, one composite.  There's no similar segment directly calling out the dangers of misinformation, of concealing information from the people in a position to understand and apply it.

     All around you, every day, there are plenty of potential small-scale engineering disasters.  And plenty of politicians who don't know how that stuff works are making decisions about it.  Below them, plenty of non-technical managers who can't tell genuine reasons for concern from under- or over-reaction.  And an Internet full of bad information.

     None of us can know everything.  Each of us knows a few things -- some of which is true.  Be certain of what you know; be wary of both complacency and panic.

Oh, NRA Board...

     So, the NRA Board elected a new President.  You might expect they would choose a real Boy or Girl Scout type, squeaky clean and inoffensive; after all, the group's many opponents would start digging just as soon as the name came out. 

     At that level, the likely candidates are going to be civically and politically active; that's normal.  NRA's Board runs to conservative people, and that's normal, too.  We just had Oliver North as President and....  His was not an untarnished reputation.

     With the ongoing issues with Ackerman McQueen and the investigation launched by the hostile New York Attorney General Letitia James, you'd expect the Board to proceed with caution.  Indeed, new NRA President Carolyn Meadows is active in her state's Republican Party and on the board of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC.  Unfortunately, as Media Matters gleefully points out, she's also the chairperson of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association -- yes, the great, big nationally-divisive carving of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis on the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia.

     I am not interested in refighting the Late Civil Unpleasantness Between The States on my blog.  It ended a long time ago and as a nation, we have been coping with the aftermath ever since.  Part of that aftermath is that people have heated, divergent -- and often unrealistic -- opinions about it.  Northerner, Southerner, conservative, liberal, no matter where you are on those lines (and many others), there are plenty of people who disagree with your fool notions and will yell at you about it all day long.  It's a third rail and the NRA Board has apparently decided to bite down on it.

     Oh, it may not matter; they could have elected a saintly aesthete with no political ties and an entirely bland personal history, and Mother Jones and The Trace would still run multi-part articles about that person kicking dogs, jaywalking and buying caviar from a babushka with a suspicious accent.  Still, is this they best they could come up with?

     Man, they'd better get shut of Ack-Mac and set their finances in order in a genuine New York minute, and perhaps President Meadows, retired from a fiscally-responsible position with the Lockheed-Martin employee store, is just the woman for the job.  I sure hope so.

Where's The James Bond Theme Music?

     There's supposed to be James Bond theme music and a splashy gun-barrel photomontage when a shaven-headed billionaire with his own space program tangles with a shady tabloid publisher who has possible ties to bloody petrodollar moguls, dammit.  And where's Bond?  I've been watching those movies for years now and even this early in the film, he's supposed to be right in the thick of the action.

     --Of course, one side was supposed to be quite visibly Simon-pure and true (not to mention hidebound), and as for the phrase, "below-the-waist-selfie," one can hardly imagine something more at odds with the straightforward bedroom athletics of 007.  It's starting to sound more like Harry Palmer than Ian Fleming's man of action and intrigue, only with less panache.

     There's probably not even going to be a secret base or inexplicably explosive computers, either.