Always catching up
Hey all, hope you’re well, safe, and have done something with your summer, even if it’s as pure yet time consuming as work around the house (‘work’ to be defined however you wish) or, on your Sunday, reading something for a couple of hours that you don’t have to read. Or hell, doin’ nothin’ might be just as good for you as anything else.
Ended July with a week in Capitola, California, an annual jaunt to hang with friends. I like the town; the photos up there are a view from the beach and one of the town's murals. The town feels as if it likes the thousands of yearly visitors. It’s got the tee shirt shops and other tourist stuff, but it’s small and welcoming, and came back from a helluva destructive winter a couple of years ago.
August had all sorts of fun and 'other.' It included seeing my dad and my sister on their shared birthdays and grabbing a pretty unique photo. How it came to be closes this issue.
Also in August, had a great time, except for the Giant's losing, watching a game from a suite (thanks Steph and Linda). The view was spectacular.
I finished up a very long writing project then drifted for a couple of weeks after, starting and abandoning story ideas that I’d had for awhile, then took a new one and developed it until I liked the feel of it. Now, of course, I’ve got a few different writing projects, a couple for me and one with a collaborator, and some house projects, and…sheesh, it’s not even the rainy season yet.
This week a 14 year-old boy with a gun killed 4 students and wounded 9 more inside his Georgia high school. A kid shot and killed a kid. Kids.
Fourteen years old. That's this young:
You're only just in high school, a freshman or sophomore, you are going through puberty as you also begin to have philosophical, emotional, and developing thoughts about life, trust, and love. But those things also contribute to personality changes, including a feeling of knowing all there is to know and making sure everyone knows that, especially your parents. Bodily, some kids are getting new hair in new places, some don't have it yet, some bodies are changing even as your 14 year-old self becomes more body-self aware. Cliques form. You watch each other, see the change and then become hyper aware of a perceived lack of your own growth, or overgrowth, a still high voice, and...
Something breaks. In all that a 14 year-old is dealing with every moment of existence – note that in the above I didn't even include the stress of schoolwork and the quality of home life – it feels like the possibility of a disconnect or fracture that manifests in taking an exaggerated action is high.
No wonder kids get twisted.
But the act of purposeful murder by a 14 year-old indicates something very, very traumatic has happened to that him. Something seen or heard, or experienced, a witnessed or experienced trauma has twisted this him enough to take someone's life.
Where did that happen? Why? How?
It's bothering me, and it's largely the reason I'm not focusing as much on the use of a gun by a kid too young to buy one. This is only the most recent kid killed or attempted to kill someone incident. Over the last few months, a 14 year-old shot and killed his father; a 17 year-old stabbed and killed his mother, father, and 12 year-old brother; and in San Francisco last week, a rookie NFL player drafted by the 49ers was seriously wounded by a 17 year-old in a robbery attempt in which the 17 year-old was also shot with his own handgun when the player resisted.
Seventeen, close to adult, still oh so god help us young in many ways. Anything else about the teen is speculation, and there's more than enough of that in the media aether as it is, so I'm not going to contribute to it.
I already had a piece on guns and my own involvement in a gun victim story (it's below) ready for this issue, but I feel a responsibility to present some point of view whenever a gun and kid incident happens. I learned many things along the path to completing my gun-related story, and while I don't comment on every gun-related story or every mass shooting (the numbers average out to one mass shooting every day in America) but when it involves a kid, I do.
The earlier reports about the 14 year-old Georgia shooter include that the FBI interviewed him last year because of anonymous tips about a plan to shoot-up a school. That someone dropped a dime on him instead of waiting for a tragedy to occur is an incremental positive step in convincing students to share news that if ignored or whispered might instead end up killing them.
Then, after THE FBI CAME BEY TO ASK IF THE 14 YEAR-OLD WAS THE ONE WHO POSTED ABOUT SHOOTING UP A SCHOOL...HIS DAD BOUGHT HIM AN ASSAULT RIFLE FOR CHRISTMAS.
Several speakers at a Georgia press conference used the word "evil" in connection to the act and the actor. There are people throughout history whose disturbingly harmful acts had a mental of even physiological basis. The recording artist Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father, and later was found to have a brain tumor that altered his sense of reality. Severe mental illness can be an inner culprit, but trauma, physical and sexual abuse, and forced indoctrination on children, cause changes in brain function, which in later years fuel aberrant, violent, or destructive behaviors.
Police confronted the Georgia fourteen year-old and he surrendered, so we may eventually know why, in his mind, he broke. That's the thing to remember about children: they're not done becoming yet.
No kid should be so broken he shoots someone.
No kid should be shot by anyone, let alone another kid.
No kid should be hurt, wounded, maimed, or die because of a gun.
No one should think this country doesn't have a gun problem.
No one should believe that anyone's life should be sacrificed because of a "god given right" to have a gun.
No one of sound mind should think that this country's gun problem can't be solved.
EVERYONE should accept that reducing gun violence will take a multifaceted effort.
EVERYONE needs to know that the gun industry is exempt from federal product safety regulation, and is the least regulated industry in this country.
EVERYONE knows there will be more mass shootings, more thoughts and prayers, more grieving, and nothing of any consequence at the federal level will change.
And America remains in great flux politically
The NY Times has a disturbing piece on the forever chemicals being found in crop fertilizer created from treated sewage that's been used on thousands of acres (might require opening a free account to see this). As if that's not disturbing enough, this story comes just as new books are released on the rise of corporate farms and demise of family farms.
The weather has become a monster that will not cease destroying us anytime soon. BTW, if you’re still a doubter about climate change, I got nothing for you because you already don’t ‘believe’ in the legitimacy of science. Oh, sure, you’ll use your phone or computer (same thing, really) to post a climate-change-is-bullshit paragraph, then get in your car or truck and head off to wherever, and…Well, the point of that mini-diatribe is that without science, which manifests as technology, medicines, etc., the deniers would only have their voices to scream that the science behind climate change research is bogus.
About that orange faced guy running for president
He's never done a damned thing to benefit anyone other than himself, his friends, or anyone he can make money from. The visit to Arlington and the fallout of the disrespectful behavior there, along with comments he’s previously made regarding military service, are much more than troubling, though not as troubling as the support he has from current and active service members. I still don’t understand how that happens, and I often share the following analogy about his supporters who otherwise had once seemed like decent, smart people but now rely on some lame ass thing like, ‘I don’t like the man, but I like his ideas’ and other flatulent attempts to hide their biases: if you someone you know is a klan member, but you only hang out with him when he's not wearing his klan-wear, that doesn't mean you're not hanging out with a klan member.
Got some Open Tabs below, but first, a few slices of existence for you to peruse
Thoughts on an Anniversary
August had an interesting one, from 2011, when a teenager tried to buy a gun company.
On August 12, 2011, an attorney for a paralyzed teenager represented the teen’s nonprofit in a Florida courtroom auction of a bankrupt handgun manufacturer’s assets. A former employee of the gun company was the only other bidder. A unanimous jury in a product liability lawsuit had found that the company designed, manufactured, and distributed a handgun it knew to have a hidden defect, which had contributed to an accidental discharge in which the seven year-old boy was seriously wounded, paralyzing him from the neck down.
The lawsuit, trial, and judgment resulted from a four month trial ten years after the accident and years after a big law firm had taken then dropped the case. The jury had awarded the by-then teenager just under $50,000,000, half of that the responsibility of the gun company and its owner, Bruce Jennings. Immediately after the verdict Jennings declared bankruptcy and, simultaneously, put in motion a plan to clandestinely fund a former employee to eventually bid for the company’s assets at bankruptcy court, then resurrect the company under a new name, with Jennings running the new company behind the scenes.
The teen’s attorney discovered the scheme, helped his client form a nonprofit, then represented it in the bankruptcy auction.
The story had been followed in nine countries.
The auction was one part of what became Move To Fire, my 2015 book, but before the book was published I had written and posted an essay on Scribd about how I came to be waiting for the press and media pool to show up in the attorney's Northern California office after the auction closed. The essay hit more than 20,000 reads after a post about it on one of author Cory Doctorow’s websites. If you’d like to read it you can click here and download a PDF.
Your big screen TV is ratting you out
With all the understanding I have about how we as consumers are constantly tracked during our jaunts around the digital universe, I was really surprised by the information in this Ars Technica piece on how much and to what extent our lifestyles and consumer interests are sucked up by OUR BIG SCREEN TELEVISIONS! I don’t often use the ‘ya really have to read this,’ but ya should. Be aware, be very aware… but also note that if you want a big screen, you got to agree to a lot of stuff.
Not That. This! — no more phish for you (if you own your domain)
Consider what follows as a public service announcement thingy.
It’s no revelation that everyone you know (with very tiny exceptions) has an email address. We all ‘have email,’ as the phrase goes. There are people who do not, but I don’t know any of them even though I know they’re out there. I also know people who are very infrequent or casual users.
It varies to degrees, but I receive about one hundred emails a day. I’ve never put a spreadsheet together, but it feels like a quarter to a third are newsletters or things sent about news (real news and the latest not-so-real-news schemes), science, industries, medicine, the economy, politics, and other specific subjects. The remaining are general notifications, or from retailers and friends.
What remains is junk and spam. I get some impressive phish spam, emails that accurately replicate everything from my domain registrar, to my credit card companies, to my bank institutions. Things like bullshit “thanks for ordering 1,000 tallywhackers, we’ve charged your card for $17,936 bucks, so click here to chat if you have any questions,” to “Hello Customer, we recent see bad activity on yur account…” and on and on.
Each time I receive one, I know it’s phish instantly, and I feel for the millions of recipients who can’t detect the fake from the real and occasionally suffer the consequences after clicking through.
What keeps me, more than many, somewhat safe is something I did over 26 years ago, and I did it without a thought about phish scams because they largely didn’t exist yet.
I own my domains. That’s plural because I have multiple domains, but I have a couple I use regularly. Each domain I acquired came with an email.
Here’s the This! of Not that. This!: The main email for each of my domains is a catch-all.
The main email might be abc@defg.com, but if it’s a catch-all, I will receive anything sent to the domain no matter the recipient, and that means I can assign an email address to any entity from which I receive email communications. So when I receive an email from something I subscribe to or do business with, like say, Royal Cayman Bank for Thieves (man, there probably is something with that name), I know it’s most likely from them because when I signed up I provided the entity with a specific email address for me, i.e., royalcayman@defg.com.
If I receive a message from Royal Cayman about my account being overdrawn or I owe them money, but the sender’s address isn’t the one I assigned them, I know it’s BS.
For example, if I acquire the domain pleasestoptalking.com and setup the email account as fred@pleasestoptalking.com, I can also designate that email address as a catch-all, and then give my bank an email address that’s specifically for my bank: mybank@pleasestoptalking.com
And that means when I get an email from my bank that says, gosh there’s a problem so give us your Social Security number right away, I know it’s phish because the email it was sent to is something I gave to another entity that’s apparently been hacked, like, basketballsforyou@pleasestoptalking.com
Is it foolproof? Not in this day and age, but it’s really effective and helpful.
Now, it does get me a range of facial expressions from people, like if I’m surrendering to the cashier’s upsell of “Sign up for our rewards club now and you’ll get twenty percent off this purchase,” and I say okay and when they ask for an email, I give them costco@pleasestoptalking.com. I then have to explain that I own the domain so I assign different email addresses to different stores.
Another option is to acquire a domain with an email you’ll only use for certain accounts and associated info.
Many of you might not have the number of phish attempts that I experience simply because you don’t receive the volume of email that I do. But, if you’re looking for a relatively simple tool to enhance your online security…
Not one single email address. Instead, This! — one email address that’s a catch-all
Open Tabs
Turns out there are indeed comatose patients who aren't quite comatose. Wow.
Ben Bradlee – Even giants fade A reminder of what the right person, say, Ben Bradlee, in the right place, and with integrity, can do for history. I love the quote, because I live by this: “The job is to find out what is the truth. What is the truth. What happened. What really happened.”
This from the Department of Unsettling Thoughts: Octopus farms? Geezus, let's 'think' this through...because the octopus might be thinking about things too.
We lost a great. Bob Newhart is known to multiple generations of movie and television watchers. Unique, smart, hilarious, and sooooo understated. Obits and remembrances abound, but this clip from The Bob Newhart show is a personal fave. He played psychologist Dr. Robert Hartley, his patients' neuroses funny to us but never presented in a disrespectful manner, with Dr. Hartley's life anchored by his adored wife Emily.
We come into this clip as one of his patients has joined Bob's friends in his apartment to watch a Thanksgiving football game. They've decided to play their own game as they watch, to wit, every time the 'other' team scores they all have to have a drink of wine. Turns out their team has a rough game, and someone has the wine-fueled idea to order Chinese food. I think this may be the only more than a bit tipsy role Newhart ever did. We'll miss ya' Bob.
Feel like Chinese?
The Close – Two berets
I posted on Instagram about this, so apologies if a few of y'all have seen it already.
My dad and my sister share the same birthday. I travelled to spend it with both of them and extended family. It was his 97th. A couple of weeks before, he had an idea...
He sent a photo earlier this year from a wedding he had attended wearing his full bagpiper regalia, including a great looking green beret. I asked him where he got it, because my own maroon beret from my time in the 82nd Airborne had vaporized, along with everything else including our house, in a 2017 widlfire, and his beret looked great. I told him I'd like to get one from wherever he'd gotten his.
He said it was the one he had from his time as a British Royal Marine Commando...over 70 years ago. He also still had his black beret from the same unit. He subsequently sent me the green one. It looks like he just bought it. He had an idea for a birthday photo op, asked me to bring the green one with me. I'd wear his green beret and he'd wear the black one, but he asked me to put my unit's flash on mine. I hustled up and found a decent replacement for the flash and a maroon beret, and brought them with me.
The results: father and son, commando and paratrooper, 97 and 70.
I'm blessed.
Thanks for your time. Longtime members know that while I attempt to put out monthly issues, sometimes it's month-and-a-half-ish, sometimes every two months. My hope is that the sometimes extra time I take putting content together is worth the wiggly schedule. There are the occasional two issues in one month that happen, and I endeavor to do more of those. Should you ever feel disrespected or disappointed in any way re your membership, or the content links aren't working, let me know – my email is on the Contact page. I say it as often as I can: I appreciate and respect your support.
Stay well, stay sane, and like the little guy in the fried earth below, stay hopeful and resilient.
And go have a glass of nature.
MWH
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