Hacking Congress

     Political commentators and professional viewers-with-alarm have been having a field day with President-elect (and convicted felon) Donald Trump's* nominees for key jobs in his Administration, especially Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense; former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence; and Representative Matt  Gaetz, Attorney General.

     All three have been subject to somewhat sniffy observations that they've got to get through Senate vetting and confirmation before assuming their posts, and the GOP has an extremely slim majority in a body that is traditionally quite protective of their power.  The Senate, we're told, will dig in their heels.  The GOP hasn't a single vote to give up in that body, and so these three have barely a chance of getting through the process.

     Not so fast.  The nominees appear to be quite confident.  Matt Gaetz even went so far as to resign from the U. S. House of Representatives.†  Mr. Trump has already posted on social media, calling for a workaround: "Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments [...]."  Charlie Sykes thinks the incoming President Pro Tem might do just that, tradition and Separation of Powers be damned.  --But you see, he doesn't have to.

     Here's how it works, with everyone ducking blame: Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution give the President the power to make appointments when Congress is in recess, appointments which stand until the end of the next session.  And Article I, Section 5, Clause 4 requires the House and Senate to mutually consent if they adjourn for more than three days.  If they cannot agree, if one body wants to cut school for a week and the other vows stubbornly to remain on the job?  Why, under Article II, Section 3, it falls to the President: "...in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper...."  This power has never been exercised, but all it takes is the House proposing an adjournment the Senate finds unacceptable and hey, presto: Mr. Trump's got the magic wand.  The Speaker can profess innocence -- his House members just wanted to go fishing, or hear from constituents; the President Pro Tem of the Senate can thunder and fume -- how dare the House treat this weighty matter so lightly!  The House and Senate fail to agree and Mr. Trump pulls the plug, after which they can all knock off work and repair to the bar, or perhaps somebody's yacht, free and clear.  Whatever happens after that is on Mr. Trump, not them.

     That's how it can work.  Or perhaps the threat alone will be enough.  Or maybe we've all been played, and these three particularly egregious choices are no more than distractions, slipped into the deal to be discarded while other, slightly less objectionable picks sail through.

     Our Constitution is hackable.  It was written by men who thought the people applying it wouldn't be trying to pull a fast one.  They did their best to not leave any openings, but nobody -- and no document -- is perfect.
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* After some thought, I have decided to give convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter Donald Trump a recognition I have accorded to only one or two other Presidents: I'm going to mention his worst behavior at least once whenever his name comes up.  Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson were virulent racists; in particular, Wilson resegregated the Federal civil service, which had become a colorblind meritocracy.  In so doing, he helped set the stage for the racial unrest that followed, over a generation later.  Mr. Trump is a scofflaw -- and we're about to see just how far he will follow that particular star.
 
† Credit where credit is due!  I'd like to thank Mr. Trump for doing what the courts and his House peers were unable to do: get Matt Gaetz out of Congress.  It's something.

And Another Thing

     You may believe American are insufficiently Godly.  Or you may believe they are sufficiently Godly, or that they are far too much so.  It's a range of opinions that may be held by any resident of this country -- and not just held, but expressed.

     You might even be of the opinion that our governments -- Federal, state, local, whatever -- ought to be involved in that.  You can think it, you can say it, you can write to the newspaper about it.  It happens to be wrong; we've got a First Amendment that covers the precise issue and a pack of clamoring, competing religions, secular organizations, sects and denominations who want to make sure Uncle Sam doesn't back the other guy's horse.  Nevertheless, you can have your own opinion.

     If you happen to be a U. S. Supreme Court Justice, you get to have your own opinions, too -- but you're expected to be mindful that your every word potentially carries the weight and might of the Federal government behind it; you're expected to be circumspect; you're expected to have thought the whole thing through.

     So when I hear of a Justice being a-okay with the idea that "We've got to return the nation to a place of Godliness," I'm gobsmacked.  Our government is a secular affair, and they're not supposed to be putting a thumb on those scales.

     It's ugly when the Justices are found hobnobbing with wealthy pals who have axes to grind and. occasionally, cases that come before the Court; they can be dazzled.  The black-robed Nine are making about $300,000.00 a year,* which would delight me, but is modest by Washington-attorney standards or compared to a gazillionaire oligarch's lifestyle.  It's worse when they appear to be committed to ideologies they hold higher than the Constitution of the United States of America.

     I used to have faith that even when I disagreed with the ruling, the Justices would have carefully considered their positions, and would support them with honest reasoning based on foundational documents and sound jurisprudence.  I'm not so confident now.
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* A little more for the Chief Justice and a little less for the others, and it looks like they even have buy their own lunch at the cafeteria in the Court building if they didn't bring a sandwich from home.  If we could better secure the independence of their thought by paying them far more, it would be cheap at the price; but it's extremely unlikely to help.

Just Asking Questions

     Y'know, if I told you one of my cousins was facing 88 felony charges across four different jurisdictions, and had recently lost some big civil cases as well, would you be inclined to loan him your car?  Or would you be thinking up polite excuses while trying to remember if you'd left the keys in plain sight?

     It's worth pondering.

"Getting Hit On The Head Lessons"

     I replaced the Amazon Fire Stick streaming device on my bedroom TV last month.  The old one was struggling to keep up.  The slightly different menu structure of the new one led me to discover Prime Video offered Mannix in their free programs.

     The series takes heat for the number of times the lead character gets hit over the head.  I didn't remember much about it, but I thought it might be instructive to watch, since I'm writing a little PI fiction these days.

     It's instructive, all right.  While Mike Conners as "Joe Mannix" does get hit on the head enough in the first few episodes to lead to a lifetime of career-ending traumatic brain injury trouble (and takes bad beatings all over, too), that's not the only lesson to learn.  The first season writing is remarkably lazy.  It's not incompetent; story continuity's good, the characters aren't especially thin for 1960s - 70s TV.  And the actors are okay; Conners can carry off the role well even in hokey scenes, sets that wouldn't have been out of place in the campy TV Batman and contrived fight sequences (why do groups of bad guys always attack one at a time?).  But major plot points turn on coincidence and blind luck; normal police procedure is waved off when the hero and his associates even bother to wait around for law enforcement after leaving dead bodies on the scene; somehow, Mannix knows every mid-level mobster and small-time crook in LA, in depth and detail.  There's a little support for the last item, given that the first season has him working for "Intertect," a highly-computerized PI firm...in a time long before centralized, interconnected databases and high-tech piracy made the kind of snooping and probing the company apparently does even possible.  Later seasons have him striking out on his own, which is likely given the amount of grief he causes his tolerant boss at Intertect and the way his methods clash with theirs.

     The series is pulpy stuff, even by the standards of the time, and Season 1 was shot on a budget that leads to repeated use of the same interior sets, redressed (all LA apartments appear to have the same layout), but the plot holes big enough to back his various custom cars through are the real problem.  Action  and acting skills can only go so far in covering for them, and it's a real lesson in how not to keep the audience engaged when you tell a story.  Serendipity happens -- but nobody can make a living relying on it and any detective worthy of the title views it with extreme skepticism.  Just ask Philip Marlow or Sam Spade, who were working that coast long before Joe Mannix first got bopped behind the ear with a length of pipe.  Or Harry "Get off your ass and go knock on doors" Bosch, who is a lot more careful about who he lets sneak up behind him.

     Still, the jazzy theme music and fast-moving plots do have their appeal; but it's junk food, filling but not nourishing.

Um, No

     I could swear the local news told me this morning that Republican Representative Patrick McHenry, announcing he will not run for re-election, said he would "serve out the remainder of his four-year term."  I'm really hoping I misheard.  That's not how House terms work.  Congressperson McHenry knows that, and if I heard it correctly, there's a news producer out there who does not.

     Meanwhile, the Texas GOP has shied away from banning their party members from associating with N-zis, neo-N-zis and antisemites -- that would be people like, say, Nick Fuentes, who's apparently been doing the Texas Two-Step with a big right-wing political consulting firm in the Lone Star State.  Look, if your party can't even slam the door on Holocaust deniers, it's not much of a party.  Tensions are running pretty high down there, especially in the wake of the attempted impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and it's anyone's guess how that's going to work out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, No

      Just try to be nicer to one another.

9/11; COVID-19

      The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is all over the news and the Web this morning.  As ever in recent years, I'm of two minds about this.  It is a date of somber significance, and we did go after the men responsible (and got most of 'em, too).  But the reaction expanded the scope and power of the federal government in dangerous and alarming ways; it fueled prejudice at home, jingoism and nation-building outside our borders, and mired America in our longest, fourth-longest and sixth-longest wars.

      And what did we do on 7 December 1961 or 15 February 1918,* anyway?  24 August 1834 seems to have passed without notice, yet it was the twentieth anniversary of a truly terrible event of profound national significance.  Nevertheless, 9/11 remains a solemn marker, the day many of us first realized how thin the walls were; rank it with the attack on Pearl Harbor, 22 November 1963 or the last two weeks of October, 1929 as a devastating jolt.

      After each of 'em, most Americans pulled together to deal with events.  People speak warmly of those times, almost longingly despite the awful circumstances--

      --And yet here we are, a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic, more divided than ever.  President Biden spoke yesterday, outlining a series of steps to fight COVID-19, most of them well within the power of the President (expect the courts to get rung in on the ability of OSHA to require employee vaccination and testing at any business employing a hundred or more people, and won't that be fun?).  Pushback has already begun along partisan political lines, some of it hyperbolically overwrought.

      We have a common enemy.  It's a blind biological robot, not some old guy in a suit with a fancy office and a 24/7 job.  It's not your neighbor, masked or maskless, vaccinated or not.  It's not your mayor or Governor.  It's a damned virus, and the sooner we can get it under control, the sooner we can get back to having political arguments over things that matter instead of embracing crazy nonsense.

      I'm not holding my breath.
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* Admittedly, we had other worries then, up to our necks in a World War and, all unbeknownst, on the very threshold of the devastating influenza pandemic that would be officially marked as beginning early the next month.  Stars and Stripes for that date features an interesting headline: "AMERICA DROPS POLITICAL GAME TO WIN THE WAR."  Make a note that; the notion will resurface later.

Expert Syndrome

      There's a problem that afflicts skilled tradespeople, engineers and those working in the professions (science, medicine, law): Expert Syndrome.

      We know one subject.  We know it well -- really well.  We have spent years learning it and years successfully applying our knowledge and skills.

      And all too often, we assume that transfers to other areas.  After all, we have mastered A Difficult Thing.  Picking up others should be a snap, right?

      Nope.  We have forgotten how to be ignorant, what it's like to have to learn new vocabulary and concepts.  We don't see the limits of our knowledge.  Outside our specialization, we are often worse off than the novice who comes to it understanding they know nothing.

      In dealing with the pandemic and what measures I choose to take (or even urge others to take) in response to it, I have tried not to rely on my skilled-trade* background and instead look to a couple of other areas of experience:  my very limited and hasty training to do hazmat work in a basic "moonsuit" and  full-face filter mask, and -- of all things! -- arguing about gun control.

      Gun control?  Yep.  The data is generally lousy.  The correlation between changes in laws and in behaviors is low to non-existent.  The temptation to cherry-pick stats and substitute anecdote for statistics is enormous.  The noise level from all sides is outrageous.  To make any real headway at all, you have to step way back and even then, one's conclusions are unsatisfyingly general.

      It's a lot like public health, though public health measure are often a bit easier to quantify and some changes do result in positive, traceable outcomes.  But neither subject lends itself to traditional research design; the "research subjects" are real people living real lives and you don't get to set up "control groups" or isolate one experimental group from another.  Conclusions are general, even hazy.  There are things we know that work on a macro scale and yet tragedies continue: there are no perfect answers or methods, nor would compliance with them be perfect even if they were.

      And for me, these are things I'm not an expert in: I know that I don't know much, that I need to look things up, that there are people who know more than I do, including the ones I think are wrong.
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* People who do what I do in my business are generally called "engineers."  Most of us are not Certified Professional Engineers and very few have even a B.A. in Engineering.  We're technicians.  It's a skilled trade.

Still Socially Distant

      Yeah, I did it.  I've gone back to wearing a mask at the store.  I'll be wearing a mask to interact with co-workers.  I'm limiting my shopping trips again.

      But why?  After all, I'm vaccinated.  The odds are incredibly good that if the SARS-CoV-2 virus hits me, it will amount to no more than sniffles.  Or I might get it and never notice.  I'm as protected as anyone could be.

      Thing is, a good many other people aren't.  I could infect them without even knowing I was sick.  And while I have no problem with other people deciding to roll those dice, I don't care to roll the dice for them.  If someone wants to skip the vaccine for whatever reason, it's not my job to argue them out of it.  I'm not the boss of them.  Nevertheless, I don't care to be their disease vector -- and that is under my control.  Nope, it's not noble or selfless and I'm not smugly congratulating myself over it: I don't want the guilt.  It's like not sweeping someone with the muzzle of a firearm, even one I just checked and found to be unloaded: why risk it?

      It's a small thing, and yet -- I don't want to kill someone because I was lazy.  I don't want someone to fall ill because I didn't care to breathe through a filter for half an hour.  (I have worked weeks of eight-hour days in a full-face APR -- that's a gas mask, close as it matters -- and a taped-up hazmat "moonsuit" with hood, gloves and overboots.  A dopey little paper/cloth mask is nothing.)

      YMMV.  Make your own choices.  I'm not the boss of you, either.  I am the boss of me, and this is what I have decided to do until we get this damn bug under better control.  We can still stomp it flatter than smallpox, but the clock is ticking.

Sturgeon's Law And The Recommendation Engine

      A modern truism holds the "The Internet drives us apart" or "Social medial encourages extremism."  I think it's at least partially true -- but why does this happen, and how?

      It may be the intersection of two things: recommendation engines and Sturgeon's Law.

      Recommendation engines?  The do great things when you're looking for a film or TV show to stream -- Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or whoever has been keeping track of what you've been watching, and provides a whole category of "things you might like."  The more you watch, the better those suggestions match your tastes. 

      Hooray, right?

      Well--  Musical acts (for instance) get sorted pretty severely.  To get onto the machine's to-be-recommended to people who like X, Y and/or Z list, they've got to be objectively good.  Untalented acts never break that threshold.  Unskilled musicians never break the threshold.

      That "threshold" is where Sturgeon's Law comes in.  The law itself cautions that "90% of everything is crap."  One of the origin tales has Theodore Sturgeon on a panel of judges reading short stories submitted for publication at a science fiction convention; the slush piles are high and the material is, well, not so great.  One of the judges sets down an especially bad example and says, "Most of these stories are crap!"

     Sturgeon agrees, "Sure.  But ninety percent of everything is crap."

      That's one version.  James Gunn remembers something both kinder and more pointed.

      Music is pretty well sorted for quality.  Films and movies, for me it's close but not great; there's a lot of chaff to sift through.  Book recommendations from the smart software are even more hit-or-miss.

      But head off in a less mass-audience direction and things get strange fast -- and that's a problem.  My Hidden Frontier stories rely on playing fast and loose with history; the FTL drive is independently discovered at least three times and stolen twice, and some of that happens during WW II and just after.  It only takes one video or web page about "WW II flying saucers" or the post-war Byrd Antarctic Expedition to end up with some very strange stuff coming up next, entirely ahistorical and often pushing offensive political ideas or worse.  And letting those play just points you at even weirder and crazier stuff. When people say, "It must be true!  I researched it on the Internet," that's the kind of "research" you can end up with: 90% of those recommendations point to utter crap.

      The software can only work with what's there.  Flood the topic with crazy, conspiracy-theory stuff and made-up revisionist history, and where do the recommendation engines aim you?  Yep -- right at it. Get two layers in and you're in Crazytown.

      Be mindful of it. It's a bad neighborhood.
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* As an experiment, I started with "Six Underground," got Zero7 after that, then a Chet Faker video I'd never heard but enjoyed (not what it first appears -- there's narrative depth there, also considerable degree-of-difficulty points), followed by Talking Heads "Psycho Killer" and White Stripes "Seven Nation Army."  The Rolling Stones are up next.  It's pretty good guessing.

Not Today

      Please talk quietly among yourselves.

Good Sense About Coronaviruus

     Plain talking and clear thinking from a reporter at ProPublica.  Zero handwaving, zero fearmongering.

Some Basic Truth

     The Oatmeal, on how our minds work and why some things are a lot easier to take than others. 

     It's well worth reading.

It's Not License To Be A Jerk

     I'm sick and tired of people behaving like arseholes and when they are called on it, shrugging it off by claiming to be "on the spectrum."

     That's not how it works.  If you're on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, you're not any different than anyone else with a disability who is able to function in the wider world: sure, decent people treat you fairly, and decent -- or at least ADA-compliant -- workplaces and businesses have removed physical barriers, but if you're on wheels or sticks, if you can't hear or have lost a limb (and so on), you've still got to work harder than the person who isn't challenged.  I watched a blind man cross a street the other day; he read the signals fine by ear and with his cane leading the way, crossed briskly, found the curb, stepped up (the cut is offset and he'd missed it), crossed a patch of grass to the sidewalk and worked his way over to the traffic-light pole to press the button so he could cross the intersecting street: it was more work for him than you or I encounter accomplishing the same task. 

     And if you're not so good at social interaction, that's not a license to be obnoxious.  It means you're going to have to work harder at saying "please" and "thank you."  If you're not so good at reading nuance, you're going to have to ask people for clarification. And you're probably going to have to figure out how to phrase it in advance.  It's not a badge of specialness or a get-out-of-awkwardness-free card, it's a problem, and one that you must deal with.  Deal with it.  Work at not being a jerk.

This Is Heinlein Territory

     The created -- well, chopped and channeled from English, more like -- language "E-Prime," which builds on the interesting notions of of Alfred Korzybski, dodges faulty or misleading usage of the various forms of "to be"/"is."

     Korzybski would be the fellow who explained to Heinlein that "the map is not the territory" and that humans are, perhaps uniquely, time-binding animals.  Startin' to sound familiar?  Thought so!  

     One does have to wonder if the Wikipedia entry has been looked over lately by any General Semantics types; the sentence, "This* was developed into the language "E-Prime" by D. David Bourland, Jr. 15 years after his death," has me suspecting otherwise.  Either that or he's a zombie.
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* "This" being the notion that one ought to be aware of and avoid sloppy or misleading usage of "is."

Idiots, Idiots, Idiots

     The Usual Voices on both sides are predicting -- and/or calling for -- some kind of "race war" over the Zimmerman verdict.

     I'm not seein' it.  There have been a few riots in  few cities, in which the primary harm has been done by persons with something on their minds other than the perceived injustice of the criminal justice system.

     But any time the TV cameras talk to real (non-celebrity) people who are not in the process of looting and/or burning, even people who deeply, sincerely loathe the verdict in the Zimmerman trial, you hear something else: they talk about non-violence; they urge people to call or write politicians, to picket, to urge action that, while I might not like it -- for instance, pressing DOJ to go after George Zimmerman over a supposed civil rights violation -- consists of working the system, not tearing things up.  If you don't believe me, go watch the interview the Trayvon Martin's parents; I disagree with their read of the trial and verdict in every respect but they're specifically urging non-violent action.

     Nobody in their right mind, nobody not criminally-inclined and/or glory-seeking (Rev. Sharpton, I'm looking at you, along with a handful of conservative and progressive bloggers) thinks that violence will improve matters -- no matter what they think of as an "improvement."

     That's a notion people may be able to come together over.  The criminal trial is over.  Hate the result or be relieved at it, we now have a chance to do what didn't happen in the precipitating incident: let's all talk.  That's got to be an improvement over repeating the tragedy of errors that led to the trial in the first place, no matter who you think made the first mistake.

     From where I stand, it looks like a whole lot of people of a whole lot of hues and political inclinations feel the same way.  A majority of people.

     'Cos the only thing any "race war" creates is losers.  Haven't we got enough of them already?  Isn't it better to argue than to burn?

Blood Libel

     It is surprising to me -- perhaps it should not be -- that this vicious myth survives; as recently as 2005, some 20 members of the Russian Duma presented it as fact.

     Interestingly, similar sweeping libels are still applied against other minorities and are still promoted as absolute truth by people who one would expect to know better.

     There's a very simple yardstick for determining the truth of such talk: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."  Not to mention an extraordinary degree of skepticism in evaluating.  Remember, the simplest (and most directly personally beneficial) motive is usually the actual motive for people's actions, and vast conspiracies are only the stuff of spy novels.  (Sorry, Mrs. Clinton!)

     Is the NRA fomenting insurrection?  Are homosexuals out to destroy your marriage?  Is every swarthy cabdriver a mad bomber and lying to you as a matter of religion? Does Rush Limbaugh run the Republican Party? Probably not.  On the other hand, George Soros and the Koch Brothers are indisputably political activists with their own agendas and if money talks, they're plenty loud.  See how this works?

     (Edited: I had typed "poof" instead of "proof," with the expectable result in Comments.  Extraordinary, indeed!)

MAYDAY: Federal Reserve

     "Mayday, mayday, mayday.  This is your money, calling mayday.  Location uncertain.  Losing value fast.  Gasbag reinflation attempts have only made situation worse.  Mayday, mayday, mayday. I suspect Navagator Bernanke may have succumbed to hypoxia.  Mayday, mayday, mayday...."

     It is, you know.  May Day, that is.

"Democracy Lost" Or, Editors Slept Through Civics Class

     Bemoaning the "undemocratic" results* of the latest push for gun control has become a common refrain on the Left.  Even granting their phoney-baloney poll results ("90% in favor of background checks"  -- extrapolated from a small sample via leading questions), it's a meaningless question.  Or worse; because if "Democracy wins," Constitutional government loses.

     "The right to keep and bear arms" like "religion," "the press," "peaceable assembly" and "petitioning the Government for the redress of grievances" is, by express Amendment, not up for a vote.  And yet it was, and the United States Senate was only saved from screwing up the Federal government even worse than it already is by the requirement for a (mild) supermajority.  --Sure, the party with a slim majority condemns this provision but they never forget that some day they, too, may want that power.

     Personally, I don't think it goes far enough.  If 60% is good, why not 75%?  If a measure is so bad that a quarter of Senators vote against it, it's probably pretty bad.

     And on the subject of bad ideas--  The Senate, or a good majority of them, are quite comfy with the notion that nothing is outside their legislative purview.  "There ought to be a law!" is their rallying-cry, not "Are we permitted to make a law about this?"  It doesn't bode well; in the long run, it means we will all lose -- everyone except those with the price of a Senator, anyway.  We can fight to slow the trend, as was so successfully done with the badly-drafted "Universal Background Checks" bill, but we're winning battles in a war we are all losing.

     Keep up the good fight but remember it's a long, long way from won and just as long as Congress believes there's nothing they can't lay holt of, it's not over.  They've been chip, chipping away at the 4th and 5th Amendments for a good long time now, to make you "safe."  Funny, I feel even less safe....
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* Link goes to the Concord (NH) Monitor.  With all due respect to the Free State Project and the freely-armed granola-eaters of Vermont, I consider the Northeast a lost cause from Maine to Delaware.  They've largely destroyed or scorned their gun culture. It would take a generation or more to recover, if ever -- and that's not the direction things appear to be trending.