Tab Clearing...

• "These aren't my pants."


• Looking at your old photos.


• The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood

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Time marches on...

At the camera store yesterday I asked if they had any 16GB SD cards.

The counter guy looked at me with pity.

I literally said to the sales clerk "What year is it?" and he replied "2024" and I realized he probably wasn't even born when Jumanji was in theaters.

Pardon me while I walk into the ocean. I might be some time.

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Generation Gap

Sitting next to me at the bar yesterday was a dude out with his parents celebrating his 21st birthday.

Guy was a student at IU in Bloomington... twenty-one years old would be, what? Junior year of undergrad? ...and was mentioning to his parents how he'd recently found not having a driver's license to be inconvenient a few times.

My mind was blown.

I knew the trend of getting driver's licenses later had started with the younger end of the Millennial Generation, but Zoomers are taking it to extremes that seem unimaginable to this GenX'er. My social life was positively stunted by my folks holding off on letting me get my driver's license until early in my senior year of high school, bare months shy of me turning 18 and presenting them with a fait accompli by getting it on my own stick. By the time I was twenty-one I'd owned probably five cars...and two motorcycles.

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Something's Amiss Among the Wing-Wipers

Ah, the USAF Air National Guard, America's thirty-seventh line of defense... 

I kid, I kid. Thanks to post-Vietnam reorganization, the U.S. military actually depends pretty heavily on National Guard components for its combat power. The Hoosier Air National Guard, for instance, includes the 122nd Fighter Wing out of Fort Wayne, currently in the process of transitioning back to F-16's from A-10's.

But I gotta say that some of the Air National Guard's junior enlisted didn't exactly cover themselves in glory in the media in the Year of Our Lord 2023.

There was, of course, the high-profile incident of A1C Jack Teixeira back in April, who got busted for trying to impress his fellow dorks in a video game chatroom with the classified documents he copied from his day job as a Guard bum at a Massachusetts ANG intel wing.

What flew beneath my radar was that the same month saw A1C Josiah Garcia of the Tennessee ANG decide he wanted to be a hitman, using his 1337 TNANG combat skills (he claimed his nickname in the unit was "Reaper".)

So he went to a parody rent-a-hitman site on the internet and... get this ...he sent them a resume.

The parody site helpfully hooked A1C Garcia up with a not-at-all-a-parody FBI agent who offered him real money to ice an imaginary person. Garcia accepted the bogus assignment and the real bucks and is now looking at time in the graybar motel.

Folks, all that hire-a-hitman stuff doesn't work in real life the way it does in the movies. 

When I'm shopping for a store-brand John Wick, I look for a dude with his finger on the trigger of a derp tier AR that looks like a Cheaper Than Dirt catalog threw up on it.

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At this point, sure, why not?

In my email in-box:

Probably because what good is living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia without people looking like they're living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia, I guess?

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But why, though?

Civilization has fallen so far that there are instructional videos on YouTube for doing burnouts in a 5.0L five-speed SN95 Mustang.

Bro, I don’t know how you stretch “Drop the hammer and then sidestep the clutch” into an eight minute vid for your fans, but it dismays me.

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Private Dancer

You want Duran Duran to sing at your birthday party or Flo Rida to perform for your kid's bar mitzvah? All it takes is dough, according to this fascinating article at The New Yorker:

The willingness extends to icons who might seem beyond mortal reach, including three Englishmen honored by Her Late Majesty: Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and Sir Rod Stewart. “We just did Rod Stewart for $1.25 million here in Las Vegas,” Glenn Richardson, an event producer, told me. It was a corporate gig for Kia, the car company. “He’ll do those now, because Rod’s not doing as many things as in his heyday,” Richardson added. A random selection of other acts who do privates (Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mayer, Diana Ross, Maroon 5, Black Eyed Peas, OneRepublic, Katy Perry, Eric Clapton) far exceeds the list of those who are known for saying no (Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, and, for reasons that nobody can quite clarify, AC/DC).

Pop culture in the New Gilded Age, after the death of record sales, has gotten really weird.

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Top. Men.

So, imagine you got a job as an IT dude at WidgetCo, Inc.

Obviously, in order to keep WidgetCo's networks up and running, you have to be given administrator access to the network, right?

But what you're expected to be doing is keeping the network running, not farting around and sifting through sales records and the manager's emails and all the files in the HR department. If you were doing that, you could get in trouble.

On that note, hey, let's see what's shakin' in the Massachusetts Air National Guard!

The filing also shows that Teixeira was written up by colleagues for apparently not following rules for the use of classified systems. A Sept. 15 Air Force memorandum included in the newly released court materials notes that Teixeira “had been observed taking notes on classified intelligence information” inside a room specifically designed to handle sensitive classified material.

Teixeira, the Air Force memo says, was instructed “to no longer take notes in any form on classified intelligence information.” About a month later, a memo noted that Teixeira “was potentially ignoring the cease-and-desist order” given to him in September. He was instructed to stop “any deep dives into classified intelligence information and focus on his job,” that memo said.

So, basically this kid was caught multiple times and repeatedly told "Mr. Bunny Rabbit, those carrots aren't for you! Or the kids in your War Thunder Discord channel!"

"I pinkie-swear I won't write things down in the SCIF again!"

I swear to Vishnu, this is the by-gawd dumbest Clancy novel I've ever been stuck in.

If every man-jack in this dude's chain of command isn't finishing out what's left of their wrecked careers conducting polar bear censuses at Pituffik Space Base, heads need to roll.

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Some of us never left.

Apparently some Zoomers and younger Millennials who've grown disenchanted with the fractious state of normie social media, the frenetic pace of short-form video at TikTok and Instagram, and the ponderous seriousness of newsletter sites like Substack or Medium are discovering a new way to write content on the internet.

It's called "blogging".

I predict it'll never catch on.

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Called Shot

Man, Mike Black got nothin' but net with this prediction:

E'rrbody running around like "OH NOES! HOW DID THIS JUNIOR ENLISTED HAVE SUCH CLEARANCE??"

Well, when you're the digital plumber in charge of keeping the Sooper Seekrit series of network tubes unclogged and running and you have superuser access, they gotta give you clearance. Sure, they make you pinkie swear that you won't look at stuff you're not supposed to look at, but sometimes that just doesn't work out so hot.

As they say in the sewers of the internet: “wew, lads”.

Dude has thoroughly wrecked his life and damaged national security and also possibly the global order, all for the sake of some clout-chasing with a couple dozen incel gamers in a Discord server. It's not even like he got seduced by a hawt Russian agent or was promised a jillion bucks; he just wanted to flex for his Minecraft pals.

The future is so dumb.

EDITED TO ADD: Worth a read.

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Revenge of the Nerds.

Some dork stealing classified documents to impress his friends by posting them on a gamer Discord channel is just absolutely the most Current Year thing I've seen in a while.

"OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watched movies together, joked around and prayed. But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them."

I wonder what this gomer's screen name is on Arfcom? Because you frickin' know he has one.

I'll tell you what his screen name should be: TomNicholsWasRight.

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Helpin' a Brother Out...

Hey, do you have kids or grandkids (or know someone with kids or grandkids) who could use a book about firearms safety?

Yehuda Remer is a nice dude and he's got a little children's book called Safety On: An Introduction to the World of Firearms for Children which is all about how a kid learns about safe gun handling, storage, and ownership from his dad. It's charmingly illustrated and an easy read for a young elementary schooler.

Check it out!

Dank

While recreational weed has been legalized in two adjoining states (Illinois and Michigan) and a third, Ohio, has medical marijuana and decriminalized possession, Indiana is still not down with the jazz cabbage.

While I've had very little in the way of buyer's remorse with our current term-limited governor, he has been foursquare against the legalization of wacky tobaccy, and it's unlike our state legislature would send him a bill anyway.

Nevertheless, just walking through the parking lot of the local big-box store has had me wondering if I'd be able to pass a whiz quiz by the time I get to the front door. I'm told this ain't the Oaxacan ditch weed of my youth. When the stuff is so dank you can smell it from multiple car lengths back at interstate speeds, this is a whole different strain of the chronic.

Alas, 5th Circuit decision or no, my line of work keeps me from finding out until we legalize the stuff federally.

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The real dangers of Halloween...

Can we not talk about the real danger of Halloween, which is not fentanyl-laced Good ‘N’ Plenties and razor blades in kumquats, but the fact that the streets will be crawling with zombies, pirates, and ninjas?

Lock your doors and turn off all outside lights to ward them off!

Seriously, though, the last few years we've just been turning the lights out. Most of the little kids in the immediate neighborhood had grown into their teens or their families had moved, and the number of tricker treaters had dwindled and was skewing heavily toward kids who should have been too old to be out scamming free candy with a half-assed costume.

Over the past year, though, at least two families with small children have moved into the 'hood. There are enough houses that put on pretty elaborate productions that they should be able to get their sugar fix without Roseholme Cottage's participation. Possibly next year.

Audience Capture

Influencer culture weirds me out...

"When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

The caricature quickly becomes the influencer's distinct brand, and all subsequent attempts by the influencer to remain on-brand and fulfill audience expectations require them to act like the caricature. As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer."

Fair Queen

Friday morning, during the 10AM historical agricultural display in Pioneer Village, Miss Indiana State Fair 2022 showed up to put in a turn at the thresher.

It wasn't just a ceremonial forkful, either. 

Ms. McKillip stayed up there, tiara and all, slingin' wheat for the whole demonstration. Peak Hoosier.

Photos shot with the Fujifilm X-T2 & 16-80mm f/4 OIS WR.

Good Sports

Here's the scene...

Outstanding young men. https://t.co/284Cz83e1Y

— Chris Cypert (@MrChrisCypert) August 10, 2022

Chris Cypert, who is as close to a walking, talking Captain America as you're likely to encounter, is qualified to judge outstandingness of character in young men.

This moment caught our collective attention for just that reason, outstandingness of character on display. It's a much more scarce commodity than we'd prefer, these days.

I'll let Matt Labash explain:

News anchor after news anchor closed their shows with it. The very people who seem to spend 95 percent of their lives amping us up with fear and paranoia, distrust and anger, took a moment to bask in the glorious humanity of this little episode.

I know the feeling. I did too. I wasn’t just moved by Jarvis’s act of generosity, but by Shelton’s breaking down over the damage his errant pitch could’ve caused. As a manly man, I generally discourage public displays of tears. I tend to limit mine to funerals and Celine Dion concerts. And yet, watching someone feel genuinely remorseful for what they did, even if it was only a mistake, was strangely refreshing.

We are unaccustomed to that – we have become unaccustomed to all of this – because public life is no longer populated by people committing quiet acts of heroism and gallantry and graciousness. We have instead become acclimated to boorish jackasses stoking grievance, claiming victimhood, and pinning the blame on others when they should be assuming blame themselves. No names - it would take too much space to list them.

That is why, I think, what would’ve been a throwaway feel-good little league story a few decades ago, feels like a major morality play now.

Can I get an amen?

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The Next Generation

Some peak State Fair right here, I tell you what...

This lad was making tractor noises and generally having the time of his life.

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Fallacy of the Excluded Middle

There's a piece over at GAT Daily that discusses how "knife" in the gun world has come to be synonymous with "tactical folder", which is to say aggro-looking things with textured scales in Tactical Dirt Colored G10 and meat-eating 3"+ blades.

I certainly have several knives that fit this description, but I don't generally carry them anymore. The closest thing is probably the rather understated-looking Bestech Kendo I'll bring to SHOT, because I like the way it looks and if it disappears over the week's travels I won't be crushed by its absence.

It may be slim and understated looking, but a 3.75" blade makes for a noticeable pocket anchor.

For day-to-day use, I've even retreated from the waved Spyderco Endura I used to carry to the smaller waved Delica.

Even these middlin'-sized Spydercos can be a little startling to people uncomfortable around anything weaponlike, what with the way they deploy instantly with an audible *snap* on being yanked from a pocket.

This socially-acceptable angle is what caused the author of the GAT piece to wax eloquent about grandpa's slip joint pocket knife.

I’m talking about the gentleman’s pocket knife. If your dad didn’t carry one of these, your granddad almost certainly did. These are the smaller, slimmer 2-3 in bladed knives from Buck, Case, and Great Eastern Cutlery.

Most of the folks from Gen-Z forward will likely be most familiar with this knife format once I say “Swiss Army Knife”

These are far from tactical. You need both hands to open the knife, there’s no pocket clip, the blades are relatively thin, and the knife doesn’t lock open. But they carry a lot of advantages as well.

Firstly, one of the biggest benefits is the fact that they’re not tactical. Pulling out one of these in mixed company is more likely to spark a conversation than it is to make someone uncomfortable.

I get that in certain quarters of the Manliness Movement, it's fashionable to cosplay an imaginary version of the Fifties, and that Old Spice has staged a comeback alongside the fedora, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with LARPing as grandpa, but it is possible to have a small, elegant gent's folder that looks like it was designed in this millennium. You don't have to go retro for a nice looking bit of pocket jewelry.

Benchmade has been making attractive small gent's folders for decades, but you don't have to spend a bunch on a pre-prodution McHenry & Williams Benchmite or 1st Production Terzuola Park Avenue to get a sleek little pocket knife. The current CRKT catalog, for instance, has the slick-looking but inexpensive Dually, with a sub-2" blade (legal in even Chicago and Boston). It even has a built-in bottle opener, in case you aren't far enough into the grandpa-LARP for twist-off tops.

Just because you need a small, classy knife, it doesn't mean you have to start wearing white socks and sandals and pulling your trousers up to your armpits.

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Pop Will Eat Itself

A couple years of doing business via Slack chats and Zoom meetings has apparently accelerated an already-existing culture of purity spiraling and infighting at progressive lobbying orgs. 

This article at The Intercept is a worthwhile...and slightly schadenfreudelicious...read.

Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, as entry-level staffers for Sanders repeatedly agitated over internal dynamics, despite having already formed a staff union, the senator issued a directive to his campaign leadership: “Stop hiring activists.” Instead, Sanders implored, according to multiple campaign sources, the campaign should focus on bringing on people interested first and foremost in doing the job they’re hired to do.

There are obvious difficulties for the leadership of progressive organizations when it comes to pushing back against staff insurrections. The insurrections are done in the name of justice, and there are very real injustices at these organizations that need to be grappled with. Failing to give voice to that reality can leave the impression that group leaders are only interested in papering over internal problems and trying to hide their own failings behind the mission of the organization. And in an atmosphere of distrust, the worst intentions are assumed. Critics of this article will claim that its intention is to tell workers to sit down and shut up and suck up whatever indignities are doled out in the name of progress.

The reckoning has coincided with an awakened and belated appreciation for diversity in the upper ranks of progressive organizations. The mid-2010s saw an influx of women into top roles for the first time, many of them white, followed more recently by a slew of Black and brown leaders at most major organizations. One compared the collision of the belated respect for Black leaders and the upswell of turmoil inside institutions with the “hollow prize” thesis. The most common example of the hollow prize is the victory in the 1970s and ’80s of Black mayors across the country, just as cities were being hollowed out and disempowered. Or, for instance, salaries in the medical field collapsed just as women began graduating into the field.

“I just got the keys and y’all are gonna come after me on this shit?” one executive director who said he felt like a version of those ’70s-era mayors told The Intercept. “‘It’s white supremacy culture! It’s urgent!’ No motherfucker, it’s Election Day. We can’t move that day. Just do your job or go somewhere else.”