We had three nice tales lined up for this weekend morning, jockeying for position. One was “green,” being the usual weekly Weather Report with the assortment of unlikely stuff swirling in our world. Ready to go. Another was a biographic adventure of two individuals in our town wrapped up in the swirl we know, a cautionary sort of amber tale about modern life. The third was a crimson-tinged interesting cycline of cyber-tech, privacy and politics.

The first Chock Full O’ Nuts and Marlboro was going to wrap them up into a single uniform hued package of lucid and ironic observations to help focus the day.

Temperatures for the first smoke on the Patio were cool but tolerable, skies clear now that the waxing gibbous harvest moon had retired for its night in our day. Which is how we got disoriented.

Here was the disorientation that upended the plan. Splash held his Kindle tablet up with a bright amber headline: “Britain and the United States are on the verge of allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles against targets in Russia after accusing President Putin of “escalating” the conflict by accepting ballistic missiles from Iran.” He put it down with a scowl.

“Apparently, Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Anthony Blinken, US SECSTATE are returning to London and DC to inform our collective leadership on the “operational details” surrounding Ukraine’s use of the 30-yer old Storm Shadow missiles we gave them. Low observable, long range air-launched things to put on the F-16 jets we are also forking over.”

Vic was not amused. “You know the ground war is at an ugly stalemate that Russia is continuing to grind out. Ukraine needs some options and using the rockets to hit targets deeper into Russia is one of the only options they think they have.”

We have a little real sympathy for Tony Blinken, since he was recently in our position as an observor when he was a passive participant in the shooting incident over at the Pentagon City Mall we told you about. So, we know that he has at least a hint of the way the rest of us feel about hearing of events in his day job.

Legal has told us not to get alarmed or join the chorus of chaos being used to achieve things other than order and public safety. We has been told to keep the alert level at a place that makes general sense. That seems to be some sort of edgy “Yellow,” as a cautionary signal to just stay alert and pay attention to what is going on.

The close-off last night was sobering, or the direct opposite of what we normally attempt. That was the word that the two largest holders of nuclear weapons are discussing the consequences of someone else using some of the weapons provided by one of the non-belligerents in a conflict started by the other one could actually signify a direct offensive act. Which would naturally provoke a direct response.

The tag line to the story was that it was tenser than the Cuban Crisis about rockets in an October with weather sort of like this in 1962.

So, “Yellow” on the little stop light on the weekly Weather Report seems a little weak, considering the news, but we don’t want to get anyone alarmed. We assume it will all work out, or maybe it won’t. We are not going to turn the signal to “crimson,” since we don’t want to be alarmist and we already visited the smoke shop and the Class Six Store to stock up, just in case.

We asked Management if there was another approach. We were told to recommend being a little more alert and pay attention to developments without getting over-agitated. There was some minor confusion about that, so we went back to the tech story we were trying to understand.

You would enjoy that one. Apparently, some of the old battlefield technology we were familiar with in the Iraq fighting had other applications. The one we knew took audio sensors to triangulate the geo-positions of gunshots. Useful in streetfighting, and some of the applications were apparently just used in the Gaza fighting. The tech was adapted for use in urban environments in stress, like Chicago. We could shred the statistics for you, but in cartoon terms, what the system provided the police was the time and location of what might have been “shots fired.”

It eliminates the need for someone to call into a 911 number and report the event, which eliminates the need to sort it and assign someone to investigate a sound that already happened. There are all sorts of claims about quick response and violence prevented, which could be part of the marketing aspect of the story, but also could be quite true.

Quicker police response times could also be fed into the messaging about whether quicker response times are actually not a good thing, but rather represents imposition of oppression by a systemic biased system.

You know, the usual sort of gyration we saw when the cities went to heck in the 1970s and tough love needed to be applied in the three-strikes sort of legal reforms, which was effective enough to result in the current movement to defund the police.

None of which makes a great deal of sense, since it is a natural process of excess in an attempt to find social equilibrium. This one, of course, is resulting in a political issue wrapped up in acoustic sensing. The issue in this one is about ceasing to fund the acoustic sensors to ensure there is fairness in the resulting silence.

Or, of course, not silence. It is just not hearing the noise, you know?

Be safe!

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra