Guns, cars, armories, solutions

I like guns. I’m attracted to all things mechanical. I like helicopters, tractors, Roombas, catapults, pianos, and, most of all – the automobile. The coolest and fastest of which I am not allowed to drive. I do not have a racing license and these cars are not street legal. They are not meant for the roads we all share. They are wondrously powerful and therefore reserved for the trained and for competition. Like most car enthusiasts I put up with this. I understand that cool as it would be to drive a single-seat, opened wheeled racecar up and down Elmwood on a Friday night, it’s not exactly safe for anyone, me included. Headlights (at least 22 inches off the ground), some distance between my car and the pavement, an exhaust system that doesn’t blowout windows as I drive by, bumpers, flaps and fenders, etc. I can buy one. I’m allowed to own a racecar; I’m just not allowed to use it unless I go to a closed course.

That was the way with guns.

Whenever I hear people talk about not needing an assault rifle to hunt deer, I shake my head a little bit. No one knows this fact better than your average gun enthusiast. There are varmint guns, hunting guns, home protection weapons . . . and then there’s the assault rifle. It is designed, and people own them to, combat a serious aggressor. Like the government.

This was always this way with guns.

Which is why the Second Amendment of the US Constitution says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Founders had just formed a shaky state, by cutting themselves off from a tyrant. The militia is an important – and now often overlooked – part of that sentence. The early United States militias were like volunteer fire companies. They gathered regularly. Trained and drank beer. They built and maintained community arsenals to store their powder and lead and firearms. Maybe even canon. Which weren’t, you know, street legal. Some things are not supposed to be just out there for anyone, no matter how cool.

During the Civil War, America’s relationship with militias and their munitions magazines changed. The militias became more formal, morphing into National Guard. The arsenals became armories, and for the most part, the doors closed to the club.

We should reopen those doors. If we are going to stick with the current Second Amendment, we should go all in. Local, and I mean local, brigades, with local arsenals. Free and open to anyone who wants to train. Just like volunteer fire companies. We can maintain a defense against any aggressor, foreign or domestic, while also keeping continuous checks on the members.

Sure you can own an assault rifle, but you’ll need to keep it at the armory. Where you can train with it, learn how best to use it, and prepare for whatever kind of threat you fear. But leave it there. Like a closed course and car that isn’t street legal.

It’s a not a loss of liberty, it’s a way to help ensure liberty for everyone.

Billsism’s Cathedral

Consternation over a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills is understandable. In fact, it’s almost mandatory, because most people do not fully understand that the Bills are neither a sports team nor a business. The Bills are a religion.

I’m kind of not joking. Religion is a slippery concept. It does not require a deity. There are a number of nontheistic religions, include Buddhism, which is practiced by about seven percent of the world’s population, making it the fourth most practiced religion in the world. It is not an outlier.

At its most basic, the term religion can be any system of beliefs and practices. Devotion to the Buffalo Bills gets past those markers. Though most people would agree that a religion should reach for the large, the spiritual. Billsism does that too.

Billieve is plastered on billboards and bumper-stickers all over the region (if not all over the world.) We are encouraged to support the team’s actions and goals pretty much on faith. That faith has been tested in saint-like trails over the years. They went 1 and 13 in 1971. They went to four super bowls in a row, 1990-1993, losing all four. Snowstorms, below zero temperatures, traffic, flaming folding tables – through it all, fans are asked to endure, focus and Billieve. And so we watch every game, shaping our lives around game times. We read newspapers. We listen to AM radio. Am, people. We participate in endless discussions of possibilities, hopes and torments. There are Bills-specific phrases, like wide-right. While general football fans understand the denotation, Bills followers have a much more moribund connation: We have lost at the moment of triumph. It ties into one of the many Bills parables and acolytes. Where would you rather be than right here, right now?

The most critical aspect of a religion has, with regard to the stadium conversation, become the most impactful. Like most religions, Billsism defies common logic. People outside the faith cannot be expected to fully comprehend the need for a place of worship. Mesoamerican pyramids ate up unimaginable resources for those civilizations. What kind of people started Notre Dame de Paris in 1163, with no cranes or bulldozers or nail guns? Or nails that weren’t hammered out individually, by hand? Those people were Bills fans . . . the equivalent there of.

Understanding that fact can help us understand why there will never be a consensus on how best to build a new stadium. The Buffalo Bills is a private company, making substantial profits. There is no reason to support that endeavor with public funds. Yep. They should build exactly what they need to better their business goals and keep the government out of it.

Or the Buffalo Bills are an ever-changing pantheon of near deific heroes worthy of a Parthenon. Also yep. Let’s create an architectural miracle that exemplifies our love and devotion, as well as the profound abilities and stature of our community.

Compromising those positions gets you a large bowl surrounded by acers of nothing eighteen miles from the center of this civilization. No retractable roof, with very little utility beyond a dozen or so games a year - three percent of the year - placed conveniently next to the previous, now empty and crumbling billion-dollar bowl. Future archeologists will look back on us and write papers trying to discern why.

The Oppenheimer Alternative

Robert J. Sawyer's book is not what you think and I think more books should be that way. At first it feels like historical fiction - exceptionally thorough and well-researched. Then it bends a bit, giving us the alternative hinted at the title. By the end, though, the book is something else all together. I will give nothing away, other than my admiration. This novel is like a painting that you first encounter three inches from your nose. You can't fully appreciate it until you've backed up. Or, in this case, read through to the end. Loved it.

I read the electronic version, not that the method matters much, other than the ability to search things, which came in handy.

The Oppenheimer Alternative, by Robert J. Sawyer.

Tom Mullen Talks Freedom

Like a straight guy going to a gay bar, but a safe one. Maybe you're a marathon runner who wants to try a cigar - take a puff of this. I have a new podcast on rotation. Tom is a capital-friendly libertarian, but rational and reasonable. So I get to listen to someone outside of my echo chamber without a blood pressure cuff  and a tin of pills. His topics include democracy as a value, the American empire, and a recent spat of Ukraine-related topics that might help round out your world view. If you're a Volvo-driving, Picpoul-drinking, NPR listener who thinks AOC should be POTUS, this is your chance to hear how others think. 
Tom Mullen Talks Freedom

Kingo is real

Eternals, Chloé Zhao’s entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was not the best reviewed movie of the 27-feature film set. It is not the worst. And ranking them at all is pointless. Movies are not horses in a race. I can love or hate many films simultaneously. Or, as in the case of Eternals, land somewhere in the middle, and curious as to why.

I love all Marvel movies without shame or irony. Zhao’s take on the superhero world is lovable and laudable, though it didn’t fill me with glee as did almost every other movie and TV show set in this world. It gave me a fair amount of glee - perhaps 80% the norm – but it didn’t top me off. I just watched it again to figure out why. And one of the reasons is Kingo.

If you have not seen this movie, you should stop here and go read other things I’ve written. Most are better than this post anyway.

As you may or may not remember, Kingo is part of a band of superbeings sent to protect humanity from Deviants. Sort of like angels sent by God to keep demons at bay. Kingo can shoot blasts of energy from his hands. He is played by Kumail Nanjiani, who is absolutely not my problem with the character. Nope. Nanjiani’s performance is delightful – funny, touching, heroic from a place of reluctance (which is hard to pull off in a movie dealing eleven other major characters) and most of all, real.

That last adjective is the problem. In the lead up the climax, Zhao has Kingo exit. He leaves before the big fight. I fully expected him to return at a critical moment. Yes, a plot device we’ve seen done to death, but hey, it’s common because it generally works. Zhao never takes that tool out of the drawer and it’s brave, artistic, original and so un-superhero like that it bothered me.

At the end of the second act, Kingo is given a choice: He can side with the Eternals that want the Earth to crack like a big egg releasing a being that will help save the universe, or he can side the Eternals that want to stave off the cracking and save humanity. Tough choice, really. The people you see versus the multitude you do not. The tangible versus the hypothetical. Now v. future.

Kingo doesn’t choose. He picks door number three. He walks away, leaving this philosophical mess to the others. It’s a crazy choice for a Marvel superhero. It’s also crazy realistic. Most of us don’t know what to do in an emergency. We like to think we do but faced with completely new and unpredicted situations most of us – most, I stress – hesitate and contemplate. It’s why first-responders train. It’s why pilots, Navy SEALS and surgeons train. Practice mitigates chaos. We find people who can handle chaos heroic because they react like we all want to react.

Regardless of his training – or programming or whatever Eternals go through – Kingo acts like a common human. It’s a bold move in a world of Captain Americas, Iron people and Asgardians. I respect about as much as it disturbed me. I read comic books and watch superhero movies to break these human boundaries. Sure, there’s plenty of other characters in this movie who serve as heroic ideals. One dissenter should not have marred the effect. And yet it did.

The movie is about order’s never-ending fight with chaos. The Eternals exist to dispel the Deviants because they deviated from their orders. The Eternals were created by Celestials, who’s purpose in the universe is to reduce entropy. They will destroy Earth and all of us who live here to hold off disorder. Kingo found this fight unwinnable and unnecessary and went home to chillax and accept the inevitable. Even though some of his family brought forth a stay of execution for humanity, they did not change the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy always increases with time.

Kingo will be right, eventually. A real hero.

In the dark

So I’m walking around in the dark, flailing my arms like a chicken. I’m at the gym on a Saturday night. It’s only 5:30, but this time of year that means dead of night and there are no lights. I got in with one those fobs, no problem. Now I’m trying not to stumble over kettle balls and dumb bells and negate my modest attempt to stay healthy. I figured the lights would go on with a motion sensor. Makes sense, right?

Wrong. I’m just getting some weak, blue ambience down from distant street lights and through the tinted windows. After a few minutes of this, I decide to workout anyway. I’m here, this is the time, and light shouldn’t matter much to the bone density I want to protect. I change into my shorts. I use the light on my iPhone to find the settings on the machine and put my ear buds in.

Here’s the weird part. I have to take the ear buds out. I can’t sit in the dark AND tune out the world. I can’t listen to a pod cast about grammar. I can’t listen to music. I have to keep the ear buds out because I’m so freaked out working out in the dark. I think now losing one sense does not make the others stronger – it makes you cherish them more. It makes you want to wring more out of them. As we should with just about everything. I listen to my huffing and puffing. It's not pleasant, nor informative.

I did not injure myself attempting to stay healthy. Yeah me.

Dumpster Diving

So I stop at the Dollar Store because I want a new luffa. Being the Dollar Store I buy all kinds of other crap - candy bars, tissues, Band-Aids – you know how it goes. I bring my own nylon bag, but in my checkout haze the cashier puts everything in an unmarked, brown paper bag. This unsettles me, but fine. It’s not worth dumping stuff from container one to another, even though this is not my system. I’m trying to be more flexible in my life and not make a huge deal out of such things. It is in trying to be better that I am wrong. I drop the bag somewhere in the house, I don’t care where, and go about doing things. 

The next day is Sunday, I decide to take all my paper recycling up to the church. As a family, we put out a lot of paper. Junk mail, schoolwork, old manuscripts, new manuscripts – I put them in brown paper bags and when there seems like too many, I load up the trucklet and head for St. Stephen’s. I think they make like twenty bucks a month from everyone tossing their paper in the shed-sized bin. Part of me wants to believe it also makes me a better citizen. It is in this belief that I am also wrong.

Later that day I remember my bag from the Dollar Store. I can’t find it. I in the familyroom, kitchen, bathroom . . . the bag has vanished. It’s not small. We’re not hoarders. We should be able to find a brown paper bag . . .

No, I tell myself. I am not that out-of-it. There’s no way I chucked a bag of candy and bathroom supplies thinking it was scrap paper. No way. I’m not that daffy. And I would’ve had to be that daffy twice. Once to load the SUV, then again to snatch it up and hurl it into the bin. No. I’m not that . . . touched. After another search, I decided there’s no other course of action. I announce that I’m returning to St. Stephen’s to see if my Dollar Store bag is in the dumpster. Max, for reasons that escape me, says he’s in. We drive up to the church and look inside. Someone else has been there and deposited several hundred pounds of shredded documents. Light, wormy snow. Oodles of it. There’s a light rain, and the temperature has dropped, and Max climbs in anyway. We dig around finding a couple of the bags I chucked. They are easy to spot. Most of the stuff says “Martineck” in the upper right corners.

We do not find the bag of Band-Aids, tissues, luffas and candy.

I return home not know if I’m going crazy, already crazy or if rolling around in wet shreddings proves I am simply nuts, no other modifier necessary. It is a depressing internal conversation. Do the mad know they’re mad? Is there a moment, like this one, that tips you from kooky to insane?

Two days go by and I go down to the basement to get the Firestick off the old TV. Between the old TV and the couch facing it sits a brown paper bag. Inside are Band-Aids, a box of tissues, two luffas and a mess of candy wrappers. There are more of those on the couch. My first thought is mice. But they don’t unwrap. And they don’t lug bags down a flight of stairs so they can relax. Mice never relax. I realize I’m wrong one more time . . . in my choice of mammal of interest.

I take the bag up to Max and show him. Max – after watching me search the house, drive up to the church, and rummage through a soggy dumpster for thirty minutes says, “Oh that bag?”