Above right is the Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson. He has been in the news about his opposition to an acoustic sensing system known as “ShotSpotter” currently deployed in the Windy City, He recently dismissed the system as “nothing more than walkie-talkies on a stick.” That is a bit simplistic, since the system was designed to recognize the sound of gunfire and triangulate it on GPS to enable effective urban fighting. It was military tech that migrated to law enforcement and is now a political issue.

So, that is over there in Illinois. Here, it’s Sept. 20, and the HFS-tival returns to town tomorrow. If you weren’t around here in the ‘90s and early 2000s you may not recall how to pronounce it. The Post helped this morning in that curious take-off on The Five, the sarcastic Fox closer of the day. They call theirs The Seven, and they helpfully reminded us of local alt-rock radio station WHFS 99.1 FM. They held an annual concert series using the call sign, shorn of the “W” and pronounced as: “H-F-S-tival.”

Tomorrow’s edition is at National’s Park downtown and it could be fun. Today, we were told we could cover some of the tumult in the election and the swirl of overseas stuff if we didn’t seem too alarmed about it, and have decided to comply. We arrived here in The Swamp in 1986 after a remarkable decade outside the Continental United States towing two small and rambunctious young boys and with grins on all our faces.

Not so much these days. We are not frowning, not exactly. Just a little agog in amazement. We had the lawfare folder lit up with the two stories we were specifically told were blips yesterday that reported the 47thDistrict Judge was shot in his chambers. We alerted on it because it could have been part of something else, but this morning it got both more and less strange.

Apparently the Hatcher County Sheriff, an elected official, wanted a word with the Judge, Then, in chambers, he drew his service revolver and shot him multiple times before emerging to surrender with his hands up.

So, that story went from one with possible connections to the election to one about local emotions in the swirl of social acting out. The other one involves the Lt. Governor of North Carolina who has been a candidate for the Governor’s seat, or was until yesterday’s bold investigative story by former media leader CNN, which claims to have linked the candidate to some unfortunate and somewhat visceral postings on an adult website a few years before he got into the political scrum.

There wasn’t anything related to “tech” in the Judge’s shooting but there was with this one. A search of the internet protocol address used to describe his appreciation for trans-gender beauty was correlated to another he used for more mundane communications.

There is some intersectional aspects of this one- a man of color with professed conservative views- that make it an appealing story from a partisan aspect. The Other Stuff? The bizarre story of the latest assassination attempt is now part of an ongoing multi-faceted story of violence. The Iranians appear to have an interest in our election. They are focused on acquiring tactical and operational intelligence to facilitate direct action against targets on behalf of Tehran. Their job is not to influence an election but rather to alter it by killing people. Previous reporting surfaced after the Butler shooting and new reports after this latest one at Mar a Lago suggests multiple hit teams are in the country right now.

That strikes us as an “act of war” or one of those old time phrases used before our phones started exploding, and we have examined some of those portents this week. The bloom appears to be off the Harris rose, and her inability to speak extemporaneously may be the cause. The Trump campaign is simply running clips from her previous campaign ads to demonstrate she has a poised ability to recite the most remarkable policy goals which she assures us in her advertising she has completely abandoned.

And the Israelis are completing the elimination of the Hezbollah C3 network in Lebanon using war-reserve strike modes against pagers and walky talkies and the other electronic devise carried in pockets around the Mid East.

So, given the choice, we are going to do the HFS thing. We can vote in that one just by singing along and waving our hands in a forthright manner, disavowing any previous gestures.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com