Sequester, Sequester--

     I'm just not feeling pestered by this supposedly dire threat, or no more than is usual.  Congress and the Executive are playing Chicken again.  Unable to settle on a budget, the two have nevertheless managed to spend money the Feds don't have at unprecedented rates and will keep on doing so even after (or, I suppose one must say, if) the "deep and painful cuts" in everything from Head Start the Department of Defense the sequester invokes take effect.

     In fact, those cuts will hardly slow it down, since big, popular vote-getting programs will scarcely feel the pinch.  Cut back the military and air traffic control and let TV newsies tell you just how much more dangerouser your world is?  Sure thing!  Cut aid to disadvantaged children, who are then used to tug at your heartstrings?  Absolutely!  Touch Social Security?  Er-- Only to the extent of a small furlough for workers.  Medicare will be facing cuts: all of two percent (This source --PDF warning! -- says they're both exempt.)  See, if it'll get a solid chunk of voters riled up, they ain't a-gonna do it.

     Bread.  Circuses are free but oh, the Empire does hand out bread.  We have built our New Rome and now we're stuck in it.

     And it doesn't appear that dancing with bankruptcy even begins to get their attention on the Capitol hill.

     (Bonus!  "Women, poor hardest hit."  Um, duh.  Trot out the widders an' orphans, Senator, and threaten them some more; and could you please 'splain me how it is moral to use a client class largely of your own creation as a hostage to support your unrestrained spending of the funds with which the electorate has entrusted you and continuing to spend long after those monies are gone?)

     ETA: Y'know, it would be paranoid to suggest that Feinstein, et. al. want you disarmed before the bottom drops out -- which the PDF linked above puts at 2027 - 2028 -- but it sure is interesting how Congress has had all manner of free time to spend plotting and attempting to justify infringing a fundamental, Constitutionally-protected right with the sequester rising up before them like a tidal wave.  Priorities send a message.  What does theirs tell you?

Creator

     Creator?  It's a film, and an underrated one at that; the plot and characters have always reminded me of Theodore Sturgeon's best SF ("Slow Sculpture" and "When You Care, When You Love" spring to mind), though it's actually based on (Hoosier!) Jeremy Leven's first novel.  I watched it tonight -- all the way through in one sitting, for the first time -- and count the time well spent.

     Peter O'Toole stars, as a brilliant physician and biological researcher obsessed with starting a clone of his late wife, gone thirty years, opposite Mariel Hemingway, Vincent Spano and Virginia Madsen and a remarkable supporting cast.  The "science," such as it is, is quite muted (and rather bogus, but definitely there) and the story is something of an emotional roller-coaster.  It was marketed as a romantic comedy, which is quite an undersell; but I suppose it would have been impossible to sell as a nice example of good-hearted literary SF.

    Strong story, a few laughs, Peter OToole (another of the men I can just sit and listen to talk; and boy, can he inhabit a character!).  What's not to like?

     Warning for the action-minded: no gunfights, only a few small explosions.  Rather a lot of "mushy stuff" but it's all in service of the plot.

Indiana To DoD: Please Drone Us

     We need the money, so the state government is pressing to position Indiana as a drone-friendly place, even hiring a Director of Unmanned Systems, an ex-military intel guy who glurges, "We are not...spying on people or anything like that..."  Nope, he wants to "...get into the civilian applications because there's going to be so many of them that we haven't even thought of yet."  Other than spying on people and possibly blowing them up?  Name three.  Name three you can't do better/faster/cheaper from orbit, using what's already up there.

     Hey, somebody's got to murder bystanders by remote control, why not refine the process right here?

     Sometimes living in the future sucks.  One of the darker aspects of the short-lived Fox series Dark Angel (pretty good and gritty post-apocalyptic SF, before it wandered off into silliness in the second season) was the hovering presence of "police drones," small, quiet UAVs that spied on the struggling after-the-Pulse population, a nasty, nagging, over-the-shoulder presence no one could avoid.  Do we really want to live like that?

     On the other hand, Indiana could use the jobs, and is a police drone really any worse than police patrolling in a car?  --In a way, it is; the drone operator, safely back at the control point, can never interact face-to-face; literally alienated, his surveillance choices and (if available) use of force may be drastically different.

     And on the other other hand, military uses of drones will probably remain the most common, especially in the near term.  Parts of Indiana are already routinely bombed  (portions of Camp Atterbury) and/or shot (the former Jefferson Proving Ground, among others).  Getting droned would probably be an improvement.

     "Death by remote control" doesn't sit well with me and hovering robot spies are scarcely more comfortable.  NSA and NRO have been able to read my license plate from orbit since before I even owned anything that had license plate; is a closer view of what's already in plain sight somehow worse?

Wait, What? Workin' On A Starship

     The call was for Big Tom; the starship Lupine was well out of Jump, inbound to Farside City, snug on the unEarthly side of the Moon, and at the start of first shift, the ship had just been caught up to by the first Mad Russian ("Express Delivery Service," a/k/a "BisPosEtKom," or what FedEx would look like if they went faster than light and were run by ex-Soviet Space Force courier and fighter pilots -- no, it's both better and worse than you think).

     "Engineering, Roberta X speaking...."

     "Is Big Tom working today?"

     "Yeah, he's right here" I moved the handset away from my mouth, "Tom, it's for you--"

     The voice in my ear protested, "I don't need to talk to him, just tell him his '42' is at the mailroom."  And he hung up.

     I repeated the message to Tom and asked, "What's a '42'?"

     He grinned.  "It's a secret."

     C. Jay was at the desk next to me, deep in e-mail from some Earthside manufacturer who hadn't bothered to ansible out any service bulletins; he had a lot of catching up to do. "Somebody sent Tom The Answer to Everything."
    
     In the corner at the Calibration bench, old-timer Gale Grinnell had some kind of data transcoder laid out in pieces and was poking through it was a 'scope.  He looked up in annoyance. He served aboard Lupine when she was a warship and and thanks to various time-dilation effects ended up so far out of sync that he has never gone back home (by the calendar, he's well over 70; by his calendar, he's barely past 50) and he figures everyone else in Engineering is in a conspiracy to waste his time.  He gave me a dark look and muttered between clenched teeth, "Probably a damn' stripper.  Foolishness."

     The boys rose to the bait.  C. Jay, "Ooh, a stripper.  '42' could be gooood.  Or it could be bad."

     Big Tom: "Yeah.  It's probably her shoe size!"

     Gale just grunted and went back to his scope-probing, while I endeavored not to blush.

     Undaunted, C. Jay speculated onward, "Shoe size?  42?  Oh, man, a clown stripper!"

     Tom and I both expressed revulsion, but not for long.  From The Chief's tiny office opening off the back of the Engineering Shop there came a determined and somewhat censorious throat-clearing.  "Tom.  That forty-two-inch monitor is for EVA monitor wall in the Environment & Physical Plant console room.  They're in a rush to get it before the outside work really starts."  He'd been moving as he talked and was at the hatch to his office by the last word, fixing all of us with a gimlet eye.  "Seems they got too involved skylarking and one of the techs put an elbow through the old one.  A-hem."

     Tom headed out.  The rest of us got back to work.

*  *  *

     Via the big dishes at Farside City, we're close enough to dear old Earth's original Internet (with seven herbs and spices) that a web search is possible if you don't mind  the answer taking a bit over a day to come in.  "Clown stripper" sounded like a real bad idea, which could only mean one thing: someone was already doing it.  Ew.  Sure enough, there's a video hit: Ew.  (Link is sans nudity but probably NSFW.)

I'm Callin' BS (Incorrectly, As It Turned Out)

     On this photo (in a generally-positive Wired piece on the AR-15 originally linked by Unk).

     Image, supposedly from 1967, shows a soldier in what could be 1960s Army uniform, laying in "jungle" (looks like North American woods to me), holding a rifle described as an AR-15 (!), which has an adjustable stock and a suspiciously ribbed and non-tapered foregrip.  I'm thinkin' Airsoft.  Seriously, you .mil folks and fans, terminology aside, when did the modern adjustable shoulder stock come into use?  

     It's an AP photo, so I'm not quoting it here (they have a little problem understanding "fair use"); that would account for the ignorant caption.  But the photo itself...?  Compare the rifle to others shown on this page of AP pictures of '67 Vietnam troops.

     Hoax or time travel?  Yeah, that's the question.

    ETA: PDB and Frank W. James bring the win in Comments: probably an XM-117E2 or E1, an astonishingly modern-looking full-auto variant. AP's caption description is still wrong, of course.

Poach, Darn You, Poach

...Waiting on The Egg of Eternity this morning.  Maybe I annoyed it by laying a slice of ham on top?  Whatever.

Note From The Ratlab

     You know the classic experiment where scientists inserted a wire that stimulated the pleasure center of the rodent's brains when a button was pushed, then let the rats push the button for themselves whenever they wanted, only to discover that the rats would push it and push it, passing up food and drink (etc.) in favor of pushing the button?

     That's why I can't have Cool Ranch Doritos.

     Sometimes I forget.  Thank heavens the bag eventually runs out.

Ed Rasimus's First Two Books

     When Thunder Rolled and Palace Cobra: I read them over the last week.  They're like stepping into a time machine; while the authorial voice is the guy you knew from his blog -- and should be, he wrote the first one not all that long before starting it -- it's still, somehow, a much younger guy talking, from an earlier time.

     The two books recount his two tours in Southeast Asia (some years apart), flying sorties over North Vietnam; and they're about dealing with fear, dealing with the addictive exhilaration of doing the job, day after day, and making it back.  They are memoirs, not novels; some threads start and are never returned to.  They capture the scene with compelling clarity.

     Fighter pilots are a specialized breed and these two books give you a view of them you'd never get in real life unless you were one.  Highly recommended.  Available as both book-type books and for the Kindle.  Get them via the Amazon link at Tam's.

The Cow goes, "Baaa!" (With Sincere Apologies To Rene Magritte)

     The man was a genius, if you ask me; but sometimes a fool in a hurry stumbles down almost the same path, all unseeing.

     I get e-mail flyers from One Kings Lane, an intere$ting enterprise that specializes in high quality small-lot antique/unique home furnishings and similar items, a business model based on both style and speed.  Occasionaly, this leads to amusing results:

     Nice folk art -- give me a jigsaw, a free afternoon, scrap wood and some milk paint, and I'll make you a half-dozen -- but it is manifestly not a cow.

      Fluffy.  White.  Short-legged. Rudimentary tail.  Pudgy-looking. Poor city kids, never seen gamboling lambs grow up to become stolid, silly sheep.

Pizza Robber Update

     It now appears the 15-year-old attempted robber of a pizza delivery driver was armed...with what reporters are calling "a BB gun."

     Doesn't matter.  Point a gun at someone -- even if it's really a carved bar of soap -- and use it as an inducement when demanding, "Hand over your valuables," and you're committing armed robbery.  Even with a BB gun or an inert replica.  After all, the person you're pointing it at has every reason to believe it's the real deal.


     In comments at the original story, someone who likes steak but would never, ever kill a cow was happy the delivery driver was unhurt but expressed amazement at "...how many people think that the death penalty is proper punishment for armed robbery."*

     Wrong.  Defending yourself is not a matter of "punishment."  You're not out to correct your assailant's behavior, you're wanting to stop it, as quickly and effectively as possible, with the least collateral damage.  Whatever does that is what you should do.

     The delivery driver did the right thing.  Not "to teach these thugs a lesson" (they'll either learn or they won't, and just what lesson they will take is hard to predict; maybe they'll decide it's better to bop their victims over the head and avoid direct confrontation).  Not "to make society safer."  Nope, he acted to defend his own life from a person who was threatening it, period.
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* What's with this notion of the death penalty as "punishment," anyway?  What, so they'll act nicer in the next world? That's not really our department.   If they are killed, they don't learn anything.  Some people are, after a fair trial, determined to be too dangerous to have around.  The State kills them or locks them up forever; I favor the latter, as it is usually cheaper and if it turns out the results at trial were in error, they can be (to some degree) corrected.  But that's unrelated to self-defense and conflating the two conflates rapid reaction to preserve life with the careful deliberations of judge and jury.

Paxton Zumbo Quigley?*

     Aw, darn it.  Early adopter Paxton Quigley -- as in Armed & Female -- had a bad case of the Zumboes talking to pompus twit Piers Morgan.  She was goin' along great guns and then-- and then--  In re Uncle Joe Biden's Home Defense Advice, Paxton said, "...Well, I agree with him that I think an AR-15 is not something that the normal, average citizen should have."

     No, no, no.  Geesh, it's just a rifle.  With a lot of accessories, but it doesn't fire an especially powerful round (in the common .223 chamberings), it doesn't fire them any faster than any other semiautomatic rifle, and it's a normal, average gun; there are more AR-15s at a typical Indy 1500 gun show than any other model of gun -- and that includes the popular and widely-copied lever-action cowboy rifles.  Before the panic creatures like Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein stirred up, it was the cheapest good rifle you could buy and by far the most versatile; they managed to make it even more popular and now they're selling as fast as they can be made, at amazing prices.

     And Paxton Quigley is selling them out.   Selling us out, too, to a pomaded, tea-drinking twit unworthy to wipe up after H. L. Mencken's dog. Please, please, someone take her to the range with an AR-15 and show her what she's talking nonsense about, before she Zumboes herself into irrelevance.  Wake up and smell the fail, lady: if you give them my AR-15 now, they'll be back for the revolver in your purse by and by.  Antis gonna ant; give them a foot -- or a round -- and they'll take a whole magazine.
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* I was thinking about "Quigley down under the bus" for a title, but she's throwing herself there and it seems overly mean to capitalize on it.

Pizza Guy 1, Bad Guys 0

     Don't try to rob pizza delivery drivers in Indianapolis -- they find it objectionable.

     The tl;dr version: two choirboys took it on themselves to relieve a delivery driver of pizza and, presumably, cash.  One of them, a mere 15 years old, made the request at gunpoint.  Pizza delivery guy shot first; his young assailant is in the hospital, en route to jail.

*  *  *

(To a familiar, molluscian, tune:)

"Piiiizzzza time has come
With pepperoni please have some
But please don't steal the pizza
Not the drinks or the car or the tip
(Just don't be like they are)

"Come on baby
(Don't steal the pizza)
Baby, take one slice
(Don't steal the pizza)
No anchovies, don't cry
(Don't steal the pizza)
Baby, it's here in my hand

"La, la la, la la
La, la la, la la

"Pizza pie is almost done
Here, but not quite gone
Pepperoni and mushrooms
Altogether just too yummy
(Pepperoni and mushrooms)

"40,000 pies delivered every day
(Some pepperoni and mushroom)
40,000 pies delivered every day
(They define happiness)
Another 40,000 selling every day
(Please don't steal the pizza)

"Come on baby
(Don't steal the pizza)
Baby, take one slice
(Don't steal the pizza)
No anchovies, don't cry
(Don't steal the pizza)
Baby, it's here in my hand

"La, la la, la la
La, la la, la la"

     (And so on.  I forget where guitar solo goes.)