Hasta La Gadget!

Sometimes you pick up a book you know nothing about, read a few sentences and are immediately hooked. Such is the case of The Never Open Desert Diner by James Anderson. This is Anderson’s first novel and it is a great one. This “new” author has created a distinctive world populated with absorbing characters. It is a place you will greatly enjoy visiting and will hope for many further travels there.

The hero of the story is Ben Jones, an independent truck driver along Highway 117. It is a fairly desolate route but Ben knows every mile by heart. He likes his job and he likes his customers. Sadly he is not generating enough money to pay the bills and the loss of his truck looms ahead of him.

One of the people Ben knows along his route is Walt Butterfield, the owner operator of what the locals now call “The Never Open Desert Diner”. The place is kept prepared for business but Walt rarely hangs out the “Open” sign. There is a tragic story behind this but few know as much as Ben does.

On one of his runs Ben encounters a mysterious woman named Claire. She is hiding from something or someone, and her only companion is a cello. Ben is fascinated by her and his feelings draw him into a dangerous situation. Claire means him no harm but just knowing her places him in jeopardy.

Anderson’s writes with a style that is totally refreshing. It is not because of grandiose words or phrases but rather because of its simple directness. He is also very talented at describing places and situations, while making the Utah landscape come to life. His words are so rich you can see it, feel it, even smell it. When the book has ended the reader has a sense he has traveled to this part of the country and stayed awhile.

There is also genius in Anderson’s ability to create characters who stay with you. They creep into your brain and settle in for a lengthy visit. Jones becomes someone you know, like and want to be around. He is not heroic in the general sense but he is a hero. He is flawed but consistent; a realist with heavy doses of idealism mixed into his psyche.

The romance between Ben and Claire goes from gentle friendship to passionate romance at just the right tempo. If it were rushed it would have been fake; if it had been too slow it would have been disappointing. Believe me it is just right.

You have not read a book like The Never Open Desert Diner in a long time, if ever. Once you open its pages you will know you are in for something surprisingly enjoyable. James Anderson and his premiere novel are a serendipity that will make a mark on your brain in the most positive way.

The Never Open Desert Diner is published by Caravel Books. It contains 288 pages and sells for $25.00.

— Jackie K. Cooper 

The battle between Congress and the District of Columbia over its new voter approved marijuana legalization initiative may seem esoteric at first blush. That is because the current debate centers on when the District law was deemed enacted in order to determine whether it has violated a Congressional restriction on use of funds to “enact any law, rule, or regulation to legalize or otherwise reduce penalties associated with” controlled substances.

Should the debate move beyond semantics, this confrontation could result in a very significant, consequential and long overdue debate both about marijuana policy in the United States and about Washington’s continued status as the nation’s last colony.

The Battle of Dates

To understand this debate you have appreciate the importance of a few key dates. The first is November 4, 2014 when seventy percent (70%) of District of Columbia voters approved Initiative 71 legalizing possession of up to two ounces of marijuana (and this results was duly certified on December 3, 2014).

The second date is December 9, 2014 which is when President Obama signed an appropriation bill containing a provision from Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) prohibiting the use of federal or local funds to “enact any law . . . reducing penalties associated with” any controlled substances.

Now comes the third date – February 28, 1801. That is the date that President John Adams signed the Organic Act placing the District of Columbia under the exclusive control of Congress. In 1973, Congress passed the Home Rule Act allowing the District the ability to elect a Mayor and City Council but providing that all laws enacted were subject to review and rejection by Congress during a review period of thirty (30) legislative days.

The final date is February 26, 2015. That was the last day of the review period and hence the law’s effective date since Congress took no action to override it.

The District contends it did not violate the Harris amendment since the law was already enacted when the President signed it into law. The House Committee on Government Oversight contends a District law is enacted only once the review period has ended and therefore even the transmittal of the law to Congress was unlawful. They have even suggested that the Mayor could be arrested for violating the Deficiency Act.

The Real Debate Part 1

While Congress and Washington Mayor Bowser debate the intricacies of when a District law is “enacted”, the prospect of legalized marijuana in the nation’s capitol should spur great interest and hopefully debate.

The debate over what our policy on marijuana should be is long overdue. Marijuana was criminalized and made a controlled substance in 1937. President Nixon’s National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse recommended the decriminalizing of private possession of marijuana in 1972, but both Nixon and Congress rejected their recommendations.

Jump forward forty plus years and marijuana prosecutions now clog our courts and fill our prisons with estimates that the U.S. would save nearly $8 billion per year in costs by legalizing marijuana combined with revenue projections for the taxation of marijuana ranging from $6 to $100 billion per year.

The War of Drugs, like any other war, has created real societal costs that should be evaluated. This is especially true in Washington that has one of the highest marijuana arrest rates in the nation.

The Real Debate Part 2

Frequently in such a debate, there is the notion that the states are laboratories of democracy that should be able to experiment or test what solutions work best for their communities. Not so in the colonial city of Washington where Congress has over the years intervened to prevent the District from, among other things, extending health benefits to registered domestic partners, funding abortions, establishing medical marijuana dispensaries, experimenting with needle exchanges or lobbying for representation in Congress.

All this from a body in which it has no voting representation. Unlike Puerto Rico and other territories who also have no voting representation but whose residents pay no federal income tax, the District pays more in federal taxes than 19 states and the most of any state on a per capita basis.

The U.N. Human Rights Commission and the Organization of American States’ Commission on Human Rights each have found that the denial of voting rights to Washingtonians is a violation of the United States’ human rights obligations under international law. Nonetheless, recent efforts to grant the District voting representation in Congress or even budgetary autonomy as to non-federal funds have gone nowhere.

So today Washingtonians play the familiar role of the pawn, this time in the resistance to updating our marijuana laws. Hopefully activists who engage to protect Washingtonian’s right of self determination will see the bigger picture and recognize that it is not just our marijuana laws that are seriously antiquated.

While the Boston Tea Party was a spark that ended taxation without representation for most Americans, maybe it will be a different leaf that finally brings it to an end in Washington.

Bennet Kelley is a former Washington resident who has studied and written extensively on the history of Washington, D.C. home rule.

The idea of transplanting a person’s head onto another person’s body is nothing new, and for those with catastrophically damaged bodies, the prospect is likely an exciting one (and, you know, it’s creepy, too). Such ideas have been, more or less, left to the realm of fiction writing, but one scientist is hoping to change that in the next couple … Continue reading

The world should put together all their brain power and weapons experts and artillery and dumpling ammo so that we can make this dumpling gun machine happen. Imagine a world where at a push of a button we can shoot out the perfect amount of meat, spice it, wrap it and cook it in less than 2 seconds.

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The proposed BATFE action will have little technical impact on the practical protection for police officers and mostly threatens to strengthen the hand of the gun lobby in the upcoming election cycle.

As the 2016 election cycle begins, one hopes that issues such as the nation’s continued struggle towards economic recovery and our foreign policy strategy to deal with a world we seem less and less able to positively influence should dominate our selection of the next president. Into this tenuous hope for a more cogent debate, the BATFE has introduced a proposed executive branch rule regarding ammunition that will likely pivot the election cycle back towards the same driving forces that caused so many blue states to turn red in the November 2014 midterm.

Fueled by a seeming need to create a “we’re doing something,” optical illusion, the executive branch threatens to raise the hunger of the gun lobby to fight even harder for its political values in the critical opening phases of the primaries by infuriating gun owners. In the past few years, you’d have to be living under a rock to not have realized that there’s been an explosion in the market for the AR-15 rifle. Derived as a sporting version bearing the same name assigned by its inventor Eugene Stoner, the AR-15 is a semi-automatic civilian version of the military M-16 series weapons system. It has proven to be so well designed and adaptable to sporting purposes that it now rivals the prior turn of century’s wonder gun, the Mauser bolt action, as the basis for evolving hunting and competition applications in the shooting sports.

To use guns in a sporting manner you need ammunition. In the American marketplace, that means lots of ammunition. It’s used to plink. It’s used to practice. It’s used to compete. It’s used to hunt. For the AR-15, ammunition comes in three principal forms. Lightweight bullet ammunition used primarily by small game hunters such as those who hunt varmints for sport to generate the carrion meat used to feed animals like the California condor so they are fed before they fly too far from their range into the selenium and pesticide farms that would poison them far faster than lead bullets. Medium weight, general purpose ammunition used by plinkers and short-range competitions shooters such as those participating in a variety of action games. And heavy bullet ammunition used by traditional target shooters as well as large varmint and medium game hunters.

The BATFE has proposed regulations to ban a type of ammunition called M855 or SS109 ammunition that has bullets that weight 62 grains falling into the medium weight projectile range in 5.56x45mm or .223 ammunition used for general purpose plinking and competition. It happens to be, as one would expect, the sporting use segment that consumes the largest quantities of AR-15 ammunition that is highly supported by a manufacturing industry supplying this demand. An interruption in the supply of this “popular” use category of ammunition will set off an availability crisis that will linger and surely affect the entire 2016 presidential election. Changing factories and supply chains takes time. Manufacturers will not be able to adapt their factories to switch to other forms of ammunition at the same price points to satisfy market demand fast enough. The fact is that shortages of this type affecting America’s gun owners begets a powerful political unhappiness that no opposing lobbying or spinning can quell is a well-known phenomenon that every candidate must include in their electability calculus.

It deserves repeating. Banning this type of ammunition, the BATFE will affect the sporting use ecosystem of the AR-15 rifle and its owners who vote for at least two to three years. The true policy question should be, is such an inconvenience or encumbrance as I’m sure it will be called as it is politicized worthwhile?

To me, it does not seem to have a meritorious technical argument. The BATFE notice of proposed rulemaking is not convincing that M855/SS109 ammunition differs in performance from other 5.56mm ammunition that will remain available to the public other than a long and arduous lawyerly treatise that it seems to fit the description of the letter of the law. There is no evidence or analysis shown in the BATFE’s proposal that indicates that its considerable technical division did one iota of analysis to determine whether this ammunition poses a unique and extraordinary threat to the soft armor of law enforcement officers any different from other AR-15 ammunition that will continue to be available.

The answer is that it does not. Whether you examine 5.56/.223 ammunition from a muzzle energy or penetration energy concentration perspective, at urban law enforcement engagement ranges, all of it does the same thing. It all hits with around three times the energy of a .357 magnum with about four times the soft armor defeat potential or “burn through efficiency” of true pistol ammunition. It doesn’t matter if it’s Vietnam era M193 55 grain ammunition, M-16A2 era M855/SS109 62 grain ammunition, or borrowed from the competition world Mk262 Mod 0/1 77 grain ammunition. In a gunfight with an opponent one and one half car lengths from you, it all performs about the same.

This causes me to conclude that BATFE is stretching the rubber band of interpreting the law to create bureaucratic rules a bit too much in this instance. When that happens, my smell detector goes off and I start to ask whether the rule is truly public safety motivated.

One then returns to the dramatic effect it will have on the supply-demand equation for ammunition availability for a popular rifle’s owners – both left and right – impacting its most common sporting use … and then ponder the political consequences of it. The bottom line is that what the BATFE proposes will create a physical shortage of ammunition that will in turn create a stockpile of political ammunition. I’m not really sure the country needs that right now.