"You Should Smile More. You're Prettier When You Smile."

     You should walk a mile in my ears.  Men (especially) say things to women that they think of as well-intentioned -- but which communicate something quite different.

     For instance, looking pretty to the men around me is, in fact, not one of my goals.  I hope I'm neat, clean and reasonably well-groomed in the eyes of everyone who sees me, but the choices I make in attire, grooming and even facial expression are for me and nobody else.

     Another aspect of it is the assumption of an avuncular relationship.  Wrong, buddy.  I've been walking around on this planet for a long, long time, and I have outlived all my real uncles, of whom there were many.  At 68, I do not need any new ones.  Friends, acquaintances?  Sure!  That's fine.

     This my blog.  You get whatever I have been thinking of, most often the parts that I believe will be of more general interest, or that I am worrying about, or I'm enthused over.  Including politics.  Don't like it?  Go read something else.  Come back later, if you wish; there will probably be something else at the top of my blog.

     Just understand that I'm not your niece.  I'm a mean old lady, and I have a few things I can do very well indeed, and many more that I can muddle through with.  Sometimes I write about them.

The Case Against Public Execution

     The most recent barbarism from the Trump administration is the planned public execution of the man who committed the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting,* by firing squad.

     While I am opposed to the death penalty on moral, economic and margin-of-error grounds (you can't unkill the person if the verdict was mistaken), there's no question that the man in question committed the crime, nor that it was heinous; his actions were those of a bloody-handed barbarian and had he been stopped by being killed, I wouldn't have shed a tear.  I won't weep for him if he is executed as planned.

     I will weep for us.  Our Federal and state governments execute people rarely, and not in public.  It does not have a deterrent effect, and in his case, it will only make him a martyr for the cause he embraced.  He was paralyzed from the waist down by an injury sustained when people ended his murderous rampage, and while I have no pity for him over it, shooting a man in a wheelchair (or strapped to a support) only makes the spectacle worse.  There's no claiming the moral high ground after such an act.

     And possibly even worse, it's one more trial balloon for authoritarianism: can the government execute a man on live TV without pushback?  Will the sensation-hungry flock to the online video, share screengrabs and clips on social media, cheer on the administration for doing it?  If it flies, they'll do it again, and again, and again.  They've already shown a considerable taste for blood, and executions are much easier to control than street violence and enforcement overreach.

     It's one more spot of mold on the rotten fruit of Trumpism.
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* You do have to specify the date, there having been another one at the base in 2014. 

Political Predictions

      With the mid-term elections about a month away, I'm going to make some guesses:

     One in ten to one in twenty chance of political violence -- roughly on J6 lines but state/local, the probability starting on Election Day and continuing until after the counts are finalized.  It only takes a handful of violent fools to make a mess, and we have no shortage  Those sound like long odds, but with fifty states, I will not be surprised at all by one or two instances.

     75 percent chance of something ugly and stupid happening at a polling place that is significant enough to make national news.  Much more likely to be county-level law enforcement or self-appointed nitwits than any Federal force.  Related, two in three of some kind of brawl among voters (let's all remember that campaign laws mean you cannot wear your political-slogan T-shirt to the polling place.  Smile and talk about the weather, and keep the line moving). 

     50/50 there's an ugly legal fight over a close race for a high office -- U.S. House or Senate, the many elections for Governor.

     85 percent chance of a premature declaration of victory by the President, and that's being optimistic; I think he'll call the outcome a win for his party even if it's a rout.

     Speaking of routs, I don't think we'll see one.  The House will probably get a Democratic majority; anyone confidently predicting which party will take the Senate is whistling in the dark.  But it is unlikely either party will sweep into office with a commanding majority.  Both bodies are closely balanced now and they will almost certainly be closely balanced after the dust settles.

     I think there is a one in four chance of something spinnable happening between now and Election Day.  It may or may not be staged and it's unlikely to originate at the highest levels, but if anything occurs, it will be spun and spun and spun.  I encourage you to ignore it when you vote -- bad stuff can happen at any time, society never runs out of violent idiots, but giving them a "heckler's veto" cannot prevent it or heal whatever harm they do, only make it worse.

     And speaking of harm, I predict Vice-President James David "JD" Vance* will continue to exhibit the charm and charisma of an STI.  Most Veeps are their party's next in line to run for the highest office but he is likely to face a crowded primary field in 2028.  The President's crude schtick† still holds appeal to his base and he knows how to work it; Vice-President Vance remains uncomfortable and awkward around the modern GOP base -- or almost anyone else not well-insulated by wealth and power.

     This election -- and the two years that follow -- is most likely to be a brutal slog.  Norms have been broken and institutions have been demolished with nothing to replace them.  Many will have to be rebuilt from scratch no matter which party is ascendant, but neither party's politicians have shown much appetite or aptitude for the job.

     They'll have to do the work nevertheless -- or find their way through the smoking ruins of Caesarism.
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* Named James Donald Bowman at birth.  Yes, I often point this out.  For a man who sneers at other people who have re-invented themselves, he's certainly done a lot of it -- "hillbilly" to Marine to attorney to venture capitalist, poor student to scholar, lower-class to upper-class, Protestant to atheist to Catholic, child of poverty to rich man.
 
† You can call this "Trump Derangement Syndrome" if you like.  I think it's a rational response to a crude, preening bully who is nowhere near as smart as he believes himself to be, but I'm not the boss of you.

About "A.I." And Data Centers

     You want to know what I think about so-called "Artificial Intelligence?" I think it ought to be banned while there's still less there than meets the eye, while it still hasn't got hands.

     I still think there's a very large element of scam to it, and a lump of self-delusion equally as large.  It's the Internet meme, "If friend-shaped, why not friend?" writ large: "A.I." usually simulates an affirming if not outright obsequious collaborator.  There is still nothing inside the box; it can't feel pain, it has no theory of mind, and there is no actual self-awareness at the center of it.  Say it kills us all, or brings about a golden age: either way, there's no part of it that knows what's going on, or that grasps the difference between Utopia and Ragnarok.

     "A.I." is deadly the way a four-year-old with a handgun is deadly, only more so, because the code has no emotional bonds to Mommy or Daddy and it never will.  When research is done on these simulated-intelligence programs, it should be sandboxed and firewalled as if it was refined plutonium, not offered up for any fool to play with.

     And as for the data centers it (and, apparently, everything else) runs on, they're an enormous vulnerability, and one I thought we'd outgrown.  Go back a step or two in technological development, and they're an approximate analog to telephone switching centers ("telephone exchange"); CLifford Exchange was (and is) near my house, just a few blocks over and north on College Avenue.  Typical of post-WW II exchanges, it was a semi-hardened building: very few windows, stout steel doors, thick brick and concrete walls, backup power.  It wouldn't survive an atom bomb, but it has shrugged off storms, floods, being struck by vehicles, tornadoes and civil unrest without a mark.  The only destruction it has suffered was the loss of the larger of the two buildings that once comprised it: telephone switching equipment is minuscule these days, and the real estate was worth more than the empty building.

     Data centers are built using the same methods and materials as your nearest Target, Meijer or Walmart, just like the ones that have the roof peeled off in summer storms or get looted during riots.  Their best physical security consists of chain-link fences and ordinary locks.  If they're so darned important, how come they're built like big-box stores or modern warehouses?

     At one time, the distributed nature of a pretty clever computer (or three) on everyone's desk and, eventually, in everyone's purse or pocket, all interconnected via the Internet, was seen as a great strength, and the fat nodes on the network were understood as weak points that the system was designed to route around in case of individual failure.  Suddenly it's utterly vital to stick one or two or a dozen around every county seat?

     In Frank Herbert's Dune series,* computers are strictly limited in function and computing power; centuries before the setting of his stories, machine intelligence had reached great heights of power and tyrannical authority over humanity, and was only defeated after a long and bitter struggle.  High drama indeed, later novelized as The Butlerian Jihad, named ostensibly after a key character in the battles, though probably a nod to a 19th-Century utopian novelists's cautions about machine intelligence.  Maybe the time to deal with that sort of thing is before it becomes a problem?

     In February 2024, writing about the possible overturning of Chevron, I included "Artificial Intelligence" on a list of things about which I preferred our generally ineffectual Congress get expert advice, but now I'm wondering if the Feds are listening to the right kinds of experts -- better philosophers than tech moguls, better ethicists than software engineers.

     The price of getting this wrong is exorbitant.  
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* The first book is great; I think it kind of tapers off from there, though not for lack of worldbuilding.

It Wasn't A Dare

     Last night, I pointed to, and mocked, the increasing weirdness of the present administration and their Legislative counterparts (and let us not forget the nutjobs and partisan hacks they've ushered into the Federal Judiciary or who were already in place and happy to step up).

     Truth is, I was thinking it was just about Peak Strange.

     Guess again.

     The huge, ugly triumphal arch Mr. Trump would like to put up along the sightline from the Lincoln Monument to Arlington National Cemetery isn't something I've written about much.  While I think every bit of it demonstrates execrable taste, from the design and decoration to the location to the very idea of it,* it was indeed a matter of taste, and paled next to barring press organizations from attending public events of the Chief Executive of the republic, or the markedly violent immigration enforcement dragnets that have wept up legal residents and naturalized citizens, and which have resulted in the deaths of non-citizens and citizens alike.  The arch seemed like a minor detail, more gold-dripping frippery going up while the price of everything skyrockets.

     Turns out I was wrong.  Here's the President of United States of America, on his social media platform last night:

     "At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, [...] at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. [...]."

     Nothing like it anywhere in the world?  Ain't that the truth -- though I have seen similar setups, usually in church belfries, while watching reruns of Combat!  They were occupied by German Army snipers or sometimes machinegunners.  Lest someone accuse me of hostile editing, you can read the original in its entirety at the source.  You can also read news stories about it, but yes, this is just what it appears to be, a sniper tower just off the Mall.  That'll deter the next poor sod who picks up a loose flap of pool coating!  What it reminds me of are the later scenes in the recent film Civil War, when opposition troops are converging on a fortified White House cowering behind high walls -- well, that and the kind of thing military-obsessed boys liked to draw in middle school during class when they should have been taking notes.

     I'm now unwilling to believe the unprecedented actions and events will stop at the present level.  Buckle up, kids, there's no predicting what's around the next corner.
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* Most Roman triumphal arches, and all of the surviving ones, were built by the Roman Empire, not during the Roman Republic.  And the United States federal government has never built any -- certainly not in the national capitol.  There's a message there, for those willing to heed it.

...And The Waters Receded. Very Slowly.

     The White River peaked through Indianapolis last night, having set new records at several measuring stations -- but never quite overtopped the levees.

     That was scant comfort to the people on the river side.  Oh, they knew the bet, but when it's your home, a once-in-a-century flood still feels unfair.  Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple and few other locations will be a long time drying out and taking stock of what they've lost.

     Successive waves of heavy rain keep sweeping through, keeping the flood higher than predicted.  It's still dropping, just not as fast as we'd all prefer.

     On the personal hobby front, I decided I could string my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna on the other side of the house from where I had planned, away from the neighboring house that got partially crushed.  There's going to be a lot of activity over there by and by, and one end of that antenna would have been barely inside the fence line.  It was a possible complication nobody needs -- especially not me.  I managed to get the antenna in place in the new location, but I haven't run coaxial cable to it yet.  That will take a little planning and a new hole in the wall with a special fitting.

     Tomorrow, I plan to go back to work.  Way back in June when all of this started, I tried twice on successive Mondays to go back, and had to give up before putting in a full day each time: too much pain, too little energy.  I'm doing better now.  Maybe not a hundred percent, but I may not get that again.  85%? 90?  I'll take it.

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.

"We're All Looking For The Person Responsible...."

     Who's most likely to commit politically-motivated violence, the Left or the Right?

     It is unlikely to surprise you that the answer is "people askew from reality," close to a wash between Republican-or-farther-right and Democrat-or-leftier, with "fricking incoherent" in close third place.

     Most people, including the ones with political opinions that many Americans find reprehensible, know you can't assassinate your way to a better world, and a little selective murder produces only more dead people and grieving families.  While major political upheaval often involves killings, it doesn't work the other way (and most Americans are not looking for major upheaval -- again, not even a majority of the ones you disagree with most).

     Don't get sucked into the nitwittery.

Yeah, Nothing Saturday

      I was busy with the fiction critique group -- those folks are good writers and getting steadily better -- and the news has done nothing to disabuse me of the belief that we've gotten ourselves locked into the dumbest timeline.

     This morning (1:30 a.m., really the middle of the night), the Secret Service shot and killed a time traveler nutjob man who'd got inside the security perimeter at Mar-A-Lago carrying a shotgun and a gas can and didn't surrender when confronted.  The President has been rather publicly in Washington, DC this weekend, the club has Head-of-State level physical security layered atop the usual "private resort for the insanely wealthy" stuff and the U. S. Secret Service is known to be very good at what they do, which makes the entire thing fractally dumb.  (Unless, I suppose, he was targeting some other member of the exclusive club, in which case it's just ordinarily stupid, though on a grand scale.  But how likely is that?)

     Moral consistency and my own crazy notions both insist that heads of state (etc.) ought not be assassinated.  Oh, I think a lot of them are crooks, fools or villains; when it comes to U. S. Presidents and members of Congress alone, I've got lists and lists of them who should have been hauled up on various charges, tried and, if convicted, punished as the law requires.  A few of them were even run through parts of the process, though I think not nearly enough.

     Don't tell me those politicians should be above the law or immune from prosecution, "so they'll be free to make hard decisions;" that's let-George-do-it irresponsibility; it's lazy bullshit.  Presidents and Congress can equip young men (and women) with explosives and firearms and send them off in the middle of the night, singly or en masse, to breach defenses and do harm to people and property, and deciding to do so should not be undertaken lightly nor free from consequences.  If it's wrong to undertake such actions against a heavily defended Head of State, it's even more wrong when done to any more vulnerable target.  They ought to think it over and be answerable for it on multiple levels when they do wrong.

     But, hey, dumbest timeline: I don't expect things to get any better or make more sense any time soon.  We're stuck in this chair for the entire duration of the root canal and the only way to get through it is to go through it.  I hope it doesn't hurt too much.

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.

Let's Total It Up

     A failed coup, followed by a return to power a few years later?  Check.

     Make-believe economics?  Check.

     A number of scapegoat minorities singled out, demonized, and the most vulnerable being rounded up by masked, unaccountable Federal police force and imprisoned under substandard conditions before being deported or (rarely) released?  Check.

     Lots of saber-rattling about territorial expansion, accompanied by military action against far weaker forces?  Check.

     Intimidating the Press into compliance?  Check.

     Administration spokesmen push a "might is right" approach to foreign relations?  Check.

     These are not normal times.  This is not normal politics.  Mr. Trump's Republicans are not the party of Lincoln, Reagan -- or even Nixon.

     The Trump administration are bad guys, and they're making over the United States of America in their image.

     You can call 'em any manner of names out of history, and some of the tags are a pretty good fit, but the label doesn't matter.  What matters is their behavior, and they're spinning up genocide at home and military adventurism overseas.

     It may be possible to stop them in the midterm elections.  It may be possible to get the U.S. back on a sane and normal path.

     I sure hope we can -- because we're being led by bloodthirsty fools, and their only other limitation is their staggering incompetence and lack of empathy.  They've got the skills to make a terrible, tragic mess, and no more.

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.

House-To-House Incivility

     I saw the film "Civil War" last night and...wow. Reviewers got it wrong; they focused on the lack of clarity in who's rebelling and over what (we barely know the first and never learn the second*).  Genuine soldiers on both sides come off okay; the danger is always from combatants with no flag.

     On one level, the basic plot is "A Star Is Born" with street combat; on another, the divided future, with real war burning, people far behind the lines ignoring it, power cuts and water shortages nearer the lines, with quiet atrocities and fighters hardened to them feels only too real and only too likely.  This is the future some of our fellow citizens think they want, bloody, divided and lawless, where "what kind of American are you?" is a life or death question and it's fatal to be too foreign in the wrong place at the wrong time.

     Arguably, the ending is a little too easy -- but it's miles and years from the ending of the larger (and, I hope, fictional) story it is told within, a story whose beginnings we never learn but can see all around us, a story written in blood and fire and loss.  This deadly chaos is the enemy, even more than the politicians and fools who long for it.  If it comes, it will leave damage for generations afterward.† I'm no longer sure we will prevent it but we had damned well better try.
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* There are vague hints that suggest water issues in the states mentioned as seceding -- California, Texas and Florida -- and the film shows water shortages in New York city; but water appears plentiful elsewhere and prolific water use sets the tone for a visit to a town largely untouched by war.  While Washington, DC is said to be a place where journalists are shot on sight and the movie's President is apparently a bad guy, we only hear him uttering broad and harmless platitudes in speeches while refusing to hold talks with advancing secessionist forces.  Who started the fighting, over what, and who made it worse rather than negotiating an end is simply beside the point of the story.
 
 † Most American lack recent experience of war, or even recent experience of the scars warfare leaves behind.  Most of the real Civil War's battlegrounds are softly eroded and grown over, a century and a half later.  Look at Ukraine, look at Gaza; look and ask yourself what it's going to take to fix just the physical damage, if and when.

Too Far Out

      As nearly as I can figure, the President of the United States is waging low-grade war on some parts of the United States.

     I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.  I'm pretty sure "Nacht und Nebel" was never U.S. domestic policy.  Or at least it didn't used to be.

     But I'm so old-fashioned and out of touch that I didn't think Presidents could suspend freedom of speech, so what do I know?

     I'm working on a short story.  Fiction.  The fascts, er, facts are too darned hard to look at for very long at a time.

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.

Yes And No

      At a recent press conference in Texas in the aftermath of the shooting of ICE detainees by a criminal (who appears to be a nihilist without partisan ideology -- literally, just there for the violence), U. S. Senator Ted Cruz decried violence and I agree: don't go shooting people, especially not law enforcement.  Not only is it wrong, they've got an effectively unlimited supply reserves; shooting at them is just fancy suicide.  It's not effective opposition.

     But there's some evidence this shooter's political motive, if we can dignify it as that, was simply to make things worse.

     So there's that.  Ted Cruz and I are in agreement: don't go shooting people.  I believe just about everyone agrees.

     The Senator also implied, strongly, that we're obliged to respect law enforcement officers, and there, we part company.  Oh, it's a good idea to treat them with what amounts to respect; no other arm of government can do you more immediate harm.  Further, the majority of LEOs are decent folks, working a very difficult job.  But gangs of masked men, in motley scraps of uniform, badge numbers covered if they're wearing a badge at all, grabbing people off the streets on vague suspicion like the bad guys in a straight-to-video movie or cheap video game?  I'm not obliged to respect that.  It's not respectable behavior.  It's not how any of us were brought up to expect police to act.  I certainly fear it; it looks like a gang kidnapping, and those are things to fear.  The Senator can claim it's okay-fine and any red-blooded American ought to cheer it on, but I don't think it is and I won't cheer for it.  I want 'em to act like proper cops, with proper warrants and a proper respect for their fellow humans.

     I sure don't think anyone ought to be sniping at them.  That's plain wrong.  That's bad-guy behavior.  No, it's worse-guy behavior.  The proper response to a Federal law enforcement agency that's behaving like a gang of masked bandits is to vote in Senators, Representatives, President and Vice President who will make them stop that.  The fix for lawlessness is not more lawlessness, until we end up in a frikkin' Judge Dredd comic book.  The fix is more lawfulness, and that comes from the top down.

     Why, it could start with something as simple as a U. S. Senator with an inside track to his Party's leadership, standing up and telling them, "Enough is enough."

     I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to happen.  And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is demonstrating his party's concern for lawfulness, telling Sean Hannity a few days ago, "Trump 2028.  I hope this never ends."  Yes, he's pressing for a third term, despite that pesky 22nd Amendment limiting Presidents to two at-bats and no more.  Ted, Lindsey?  Respect starts at the top.  Try respecting the U.S. Constitution.

Us, Them And The Excluded Third

     The problem with two-value logic is that it doesn't scale directly.  It's a handy way to build small widgets; relay logic, TTL and CMOS have been a backbone of my work for decades.  It's great basis for computers, but to get anything done, you have to lay in a machine language and start clocking data and instructions through the hardware; to do anything big, you need to stick a more human-parsable language on top, with an operating system to shovel in coal and an assembler to turn your code into ones and zeros.

     Likewise, out in the world of human interaction, if you want to draw one line down the presumable middle and call one side Us and the other side Them, it doesn't scale worth a damn.  Worse yet, it sticks everyone from your cousin who thinks the rate of social change is too high (and what's with all the pronouns?) to militia members bursting from the back of a rental truck to beat up Pride paraders on one side, and your Granny who wants to have Social Security and Medicare expanded (and why are rich people not taxed more?) to a mob of anarchists, Leftists and looters along for the grabbing taking over a town center on the other.  Cousin and Granny aren't into the violence, despite harsh words at the Thanksgiving table, and they don't approve of it, either.

     Even all that and everything in between manages to leave out the real problem, the real enemy of civil discourse: the muddy thinkers who believe they can assassinate their way to a better world.  Go back to the previous paragraph: even the worst of 'em, Left and Right, aren't directly out to kill.  Intimidate, silence, drive out, injure, steal?  They're often okay with that, and it's not good.  Some of 'em would like to trigger widespread conflict.  But it takes a sharply bent mind to murder like lightning from a cloudless sky.

     When a prominent public figure gets shot, or people in a supermarket or school (etc.), we want it to make sense.  We want the shooter to not be someone from "our" side.  (I sure do!)  Quite often, when the malefactor's politics are known, they're garbled, but yeah, they lean one way or the other.  (And it's a mix if you look at 'em all.)  Nevertheless, the essential difference is, that person thought they could improve their world through murder -- and nearly everyone around you, all of your fellow citizens, the religiously devout and the scoffers, the Left and the Right, the politically active and the people who ignore it, do not agree. Even most of the worst of Us -- and Them -- don't agree.

     There are arguments and frantic sweeping-under-rugs about which "side" is the most violent, including a DOJ report that got yanked from their website.  The reality is, most people are not violent; most politically-active people are not violent, and even most of the persons at the far fringes of Right and Left that do endorse violence draw the line short of assassination and mass murder.  Most people with strong feelings would rather yell at one another, vote at one another, wave signs at one another.  Some of them will throw punches and rocks, break windows, start fires.  And yet they still stop short of killing.

     Trying to pin the blame on political opponents, and then painting that entire side as supporters of it, is false logic.  It's not who they are.  It's not even who the worst of them are.  It serves to legitimize increased political violence in return; it makes all of Us -- and Them -- worse.  And the excluded third category, lone wolves divorced from normal logic, normal social strictures, normal morality and ethics, are still around, like sparks from a fire.  We can pour water on the sparks -- or gasoline.

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.

What Day Is It?

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

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

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

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

Cease Fi-- Incoming!

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

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

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

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