Month: September 2019

I’ve touched on this a couple of days ago, but I thought this deserved its own posting.

Over on the Book of Faces someone said that one of my posts made some good points but “too bad the people who need to hear it won’t.” He then went on to point out that the people on the “other side”, and particularly politicians, are simply not interested in the facts of the argument.

This is true.  True Believers aren’t going to be swayed by any argument I can make here (or elsewhere).  They’ll reject anything I say out of hand.  Even, if as has happened more than once, they accept an argument that I present they’ll be back the next day (if indeed they wait that long) stating the same positions that they had just acknowledged that I had refuted.  It’s all in one ear and out the other to use the old metaphor.

So, I was asked, “why bother?  Those who need to understand this won’t listen.”

Here’s why I bother.

Since at least 1990, on the order of four million babies have been born in the US every year.  Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but in that ballpark.  that’s four million brand new people that haven’t “picked a side” yet.  And since it will be some years before any of those “new people” settle into unpersuadable “true believer” status, that means there’s a large pool of millions, tens of millions, of people who might be reachable by arguments such as those I make.  That’s more than enough to sway future elections if we liberty-minded people can reach them.

For a long time the Left has had control of the media.  Oh, back in the day they played pretend that they were “objective” but they could only get away with that because there was no one else to refute them.  Time and again I sat and watched Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” lie about Southeast Asia.  I have no reason to believe he was any more truthful about anything else simply because I wasn’t familiar with the material he was covering.  They’ve had control of Education, of Entertainment, and much of both major parties. (People forget that “Neocon” came to describe more hawkish leftists disenchanted with more pacifistic leftists who switched parties, bringing their other leftist views with them.  When people started using “Neocon” as meaning some “arch” or “uber” conservative, well, that just showed how far “left” even the “right” had gone.)

While that was the case it was easy for folk like me, folk who believed in ideals of Liberty, to think they were alone or in a tiny minority.  But as the stranglehold on the media got broken, that became less the case.

So, there are three reasons why I “do it.”

• To attempt to reach some of those tens of millions (at least) of people who haven’t become “true believers” in the other side, the ones who are amenable to persuasion.
• To provide others on “my side” (at least partly–“I’m not altogether on anyone’s side because no one is altogether on my side.”) with facts and arguments they can use to persuade others.
• To show those on “my side” that they are not alone.  They’re not the tiny minority of “extremists” that the media portrays.

So that’s why I do it.

Last month I got an email ad about a special being run at the Brazilian steakhouse Fogo de Chao.  Normally, I ignore such things but I had long been curious about the place and the deal seemed like a good chance to try it out.

I made reservations (do, if you plan to go there) and went there with my daughter.

Even with the reservations we had to wait.  Which is not unexpected.  After all, they don’t have control over when people who are already seated leave so they can seat the ones who’ve just arrived.  Ended up being about a fifteen minute wait.

Drinks.  They have an extensive wine list.  I can’t drink wine.  It spikes my blood sugar.  I didn’t look to see if they carried distilled spirits.  What they do not have is fountain drinks and certainly no free refills.  They did, however, have Diet Coke in bottles.  The bottle was a little teeny thing.  Eight ounces maybe?  I didn’t find a size written on it, so that’s a guess.

My daughter had some canned soft drink.  I don’t know what it was.  Some imported thing.

While talking about drinks, when you sit down, there are these little red disks at the place settings.  They are not coasters.  I’ll get to them in a moment.  Just remember, they are not coasters.  You have a knife, fork, and tongs.  I’ll get to the tongs in a moment as well.

You can order a meal off the menu but that’s not the way to do Fogo de Chao.  Instead, what you want is the service that regular price is just over $50 per person.  The special that brought my daughter and me here was less than that ($39), and did not include some of the higher-priced meat cuts, nevertheless that’s what we ordered.  The person who explained the setup and took our drink orders explained the difference but didn’t press when we demurred on the higher cost item.

You start with the “Market Table”, basically a very upscale salad bar.  You get a plate.  The Market Table has vegetables, a number of cuts of cured meats–I think I saw Salami there along with others and the cured leg of some animal, don’t know what–cheeses, fruits, and so forth.  I got a few vegetables and a bit of tomato mozarella salad.

Once you bring your plate (whether you get anything at the market table or not) the fun begins.  Those little disks I mentioned?  They start red side up.  You turn them green side up once you’re ready to have some meat.  What they have are people circulating with skewers of different cuts of meat–or plates in the case of the pork ribs.  When they see green side up they come to your table and offer you some of the item they’re carrying.  If you don’t care for that one, they move on.  If you do want some of that one they’ll start to carve a piece off, then you’ll grab the meat in the tongs so they can finish the cut, and you transfer it to your plate.

You continue in this way until you’ve decided you’ve had enough.  We had several cuts of beef, chicken, and pork.  All were delicious.  The marinated chicken drumsticks were particularly interesting.  They weren’t the full drumstick, just the “head” portion which they said were marinated overnight.  I’ll admit, my daughter didn’t care for hers but I thought they were quite good–although, given a choice I’ll generally go with beef over chicken pretty much any day.

When you’re done, or if you need a break to finish what you already have on your plate simply flip the card over to the red side and they’ll know not to bother you.

It’s expensive, yes, but the food is excellent and there’s plenty of it.  So, I consider this a “special occasions place”.  And I can highly recommend it on that basis.

One thing.  If you’re on any kind of diet, just assume that any day you go to Fogo de Chao will be a “cheat day.”  Food that good should be savored without having to worry about whether you’ll eat too much or what the effect will be on your waistline.

This is a very frustrating question to receive when discussing RKBA, not because it’s difficult to answer but because of a single, overwhelming fact:

The people asking the question never really want to know the answer.  They have already assumed that there is no justification for the desire (said justification qualifying as “need”).

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“If you need 30 rounds to hunt, you suck at hunting,” they’ll say.  They don’t care that it’s not about hunting.  Or even if it is, some forms of hunting aren’t sport, or even for meat for the table.  They’re pest control.  There are cases out there where the best means to selectively control the population of certain pest species is through hunting.  Traps and poisons can harm species other than the target, species you don’t want to.   So sometimes, the most effective method with the least harm to the ecosystem is to have someone out there with a rifle and lots of ammunition, to cull as many of the pest species as possible as quickly as possible.  Yes, it’s possible to have that job handled by “professionals”, but someone on his own land who can do it himself isn’t going to want to pay professionals to do it for him.  And, for public lands or other such, why burden the taxpayers with the task when there are folk who not only will do it for free but often will pay for the privilege! (See most African big game hunts as examples–they are not someone going out and killing whatever strikes their fancy, but organized as a part of responsible wildlife management and getting people to pay large sums of money to do what you otherwise would have to pay someone else to do.)

But the “why do you need” people don’t care about any of that.  They’re not interested in explanations of wildlife management, pest control, and the realities of dealing with fecund species that not only interfere with human activities (like, for instance, crop damage, or predation on livestock) but can harm other wildlife species and habitats as well.  You can explain all of that until you’re blue in the face and it won’t matter one bit to the people asking why you need a firearm with particular characteristics.

The “Why do you need” people just do not care.

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“Just get a shotgun” is a popular one on the subject of home defense.  Part of the problem with that one is that it’s a defensible argument in many cases but not all.  The problem is that the people making the argument have developed a mythology around them that reality does not bear out.  Yes, you still need to aim a shotgun.  At interior distances the spread of shot is only a few inches.  That means the center of your line of aim has to be within that few inches for some of your shot to hit.  (Conversely, if you’re within that few inches of the edge of the target on the inside, that means some of your shot will miss.) Yes, shot of sufficient penetration to reliably stop an intruder will also go through residential walls and present a possible risk to others.  No, “racking” the slide of a pump action shotgun does not automatically make any threats run away.  No, firing both barrels of your double barrel shotgun into the air from your porch is not guaranteed to scare would-be intruders away (and is very likely illegal depending on where you are). Yes, shooting through the door of your residence (see “will penetrate residential walls) is not a good way to deal with a would-be intruder and is extremely likely to get you up on felony charged.

Do you have children or other people in your residence  who might be taken hostage by an intruder?  Remember that the odds of recovering a hostage alive go way down of the hostage is taken from the scene.  Then remember the spread of that shot from the gun.  Can you hit the target but miss the hostage?  Or just let them go with the hostage and hope you beat those odds?

And sometimes “illegal entry of residence with resident’s present” (i.e. “home invasion) often involves multiple invaders.  And often, even with “big” guns with lots of “stopping power” it takes more than one shot to reliably stop a threat.  Oh, he may be dead on his feet but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped.  He can do a lot of damage to you and yours between the time he receives the mortal wound and the time he finally goes down.  You may need additional shots to actually stop him.

I’ve dealt with this before.  The features that the “why do you need…” people criticize are exactly what resolves those kinds of issues.  If one wants to be armed against the possibility of home invasion (of which over one million happened average per year between 1994 and 2010) then a very strong argument can be made that a so-called “assault weapon” is the best choice for dealing with the widest range of possible situations.

But the “why do you need…” people don’t want to hear that.  They don’t care.  They’ve made up their mind and to blazes with your facts.

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“But the government has tanks and planes and nukes…” This one comes up in “answer” to the primary purpose of the Second Amendment:  as a protection against a government gone rogue and turned to tyranny.  “Being necessary to the security of a free state” (emphasis added).  And, once again, it’s another one I’ve dealt with before.  Yes, the government has tanks and bombers and fighters and nukes of every size from small, tactical warheads to big city-busters.  And most of it is of limited if any use against an insurgency, particularly when the insurgents are thoroughly mixed with the people you are supposedly “defending.”  Yes, you might nuke Des Moines to get some insurgents, but how many loyalists would you kill with them?  What are you going to do with those tanks that doesn’t make you the kind of tyrant that justifies the insurgency in the first place?

But again, the “why do you need…” people don’t want to hear that.  They don’t care.  The narrative they’ve created in their own mind is impervious to any arguments, any facts that don’t fit, anything but the sole answer they’re looking for, admission that “we don’t.”

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And then there’s the attempt to point out to them that rights are not contingent on “need.” We don’t have to justify the “need” for something to have the right to it.  Rosa Parks didn’t “need” to keep her seat at the front of the bus.  The back of the bus went to all the same stops, after all.  No, she just demanded her right to remain where she was.

But, again, none of this matters to the “why do you need…” crowd.  If you don’t have a “need” that they accept (and they will accept none), then clearly that’s a green light to ban away.

Your “rights” are just what they want you to have.  No more.

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So, given all the uselessness of trying to convince the “why do you need…” people that there are legitimate needs, and that even without that, the absence of those needs would still not justify banning, why do I keep making the arguments?

Well, there were 3.86 million people born in the US in 2017.  Similar numbers in previous years. (Actually, 2017 was the lowest since 1990 per the linked source.)  That’s 3.86 million new people who are neither in the “pro RKBA” camp nor in the “why do you need…” camp.  That’s 3.86 million new people who, at some time in the future (two year olds are probably a little early to try persuading) might be convinced to one side or the other.  Going beyond that one sample year, there are clearly millions of people out there who are still amenable to persuasion one way or the other.

So my purpose here is threefold:

• I am trying to reach as many of that large body of persuadable people as I can.  Obviously that’s not very many considering the readership of this blog (and the various other venues where I also make these arguments).
• I am providing data and arguments for others to use in their effort to reach those that they can.
• Since the media is so thoroughly in the “why do you need” camp, I am vocal so that those who are in my own camp can see that they are not alone.  The unanimity the media likes to pretend exists is just that, pretense.

And that’s why I need to keep making these arguments.  And so do you.

So…go, and do thou likewise.

I figure I’ll do these “memoirs” bits in stages as I go along.  Many of my reminisces will be kind of jumbled since I can remember that certain things happened, but am less clear on when they happened.

So here’s the first.

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I was born early in the year 1961 in the small town of Kennewick, Washington.  My mother claimed that I was a month late–she knew exactly when I was conceived because there was only one time when my father was home. (He was in the Navy at the time, so she said.) To be honest, I’m not sure how much of that I believe.  I have since come to learn that my mother was not terribly reliable in reporting events from her first marriage (or afterward for that matter).  As a result, I have my doubts about the details.  But for much of my life, I grew up believing this to be the case and who knows?  Perhaps it is.

My sister was born in Portland, Oregon two and a half years later…to the day.

I had reasons to consider my birth date unfortunately timed.  It was close enough to Christmas that over the years that “this present is for both Christmas and your birthday” was a refrain that I would come to hate.  With my sister born in mid-summer, I quickly realized that she would get two presents during the year where I would often get only one.  To a child, of course, this was completely unfair.

I have few memories of those very early days.  I remember a car seat we had.  The seat would have given modern certifying board the vapors as there was nothing safe about it.  It served mainly to keep me out of the way of the drivers in the car and to keep me mildly entertained.  The seat had a steering wheel with a button in the center that “beeped” every time I hit it.  Great fun to a two year old, let me tell you.

I remember a folding crib we had for my sister.  Something not unlike this:

There are several events I remember from those days.  One of them, is that I was staying with some people–relatives I think, while my mother and father were out.  It was a house in the country.  They didn’t have a garage, but they had a “cinder block” driveway and car park with an awning to provide modest protection to the cars from the elements.  I was out playing in the field when I learned that my mother had returned.  I raced toward the house.  As I neared it I tripped and fell, catching my right eyebrow on the edge of the cinder block driveway, laying it open.  Blood everywhere.

They ended up taking me to the hospital where I got three stitches.  While it’s mostly faded now, I carried the scar through much of my childhood, with a matching one on the other side that we’ll get to later.

I think it was from this same household, although not the same visit, when my father took me on a ride on a motorcycle.  Little attention back then was paid to protective gear.  He sat me, no helmet or other protective wear, in front of him wedged in between his lap and the fuel tank, and we went riding out on old country dirt roads.  I can still see the image in my mind and remembering thinking that it felt like flying.  I think I’ve been enamored of the idea of flying ever since.  Many years later I had a motorcycle of my own and, yep, that old feeling came right back.  Unfortunately, I ended up losing that motorcycle and haven’t really been in a position to get a new one since.  Sigh.  Some day, I’m sure.

I remember a toy fire truck I had, with a little rotating water cannon on the top–purely decorative of course in that it didn’t actually squirt water.  But I loved it dearly.

Not all my memories from that period are pleasant ones.  I have a vague memory of being in the hospital.  Later my mother told me that I had had severe bronchitis when I was young that had me hospitalized twice (and have always been susceptible to upper respiratory infections ever since).  Perhaps one of those incidents is what I am remembering here.  A distinct memory I have of being in the hospital is my mother telling me that the IV was how they were “feeding me”. I suggested that the bottle contained mashed potatoes and gravy in liquid form.

Another incident involved the baby aspirin that was available back then (long before the association of Reye Syndrome and aspirin were well known).  Unlike regular “adult” aspirin, this was flavored and not bad tasting.  I got my hands on a bottle and ate the entire thing–telling my mother when they found out that “I just had a little headache.” This prompted another trip to the emergency room but by that time there was nothing they could do except hope that I hadn’t overdosed to the extent of poisoning myself.

I’m here, so it looks like I survived.

I remember a fight between my mother and father.  Perhaps it was one of many, but one in particular that I remember.  My sister was in her crib on one side of the room.  My father was in the doorway to the kitchen, next to the refrigerator.  We had several cans of orange juice concentrate in the freezer. (The stuff you mix with water to make a yellow drink almost, but not quite, exactly unlike orange juice.) In the course of the argument he took one of these cans, made some comment about the logo on the can (a little cartoon figure with an orange as a head) and threw the can across the room.

I think this may have been not long before my parents split up.  I do have a memory, probably not long after that fight (although I can’t be sure) of waking up in a strange place.  I opened the door and went outside to a parking lot that I did not recognize.  In retrospect, it was clearly a motel and motel parking lot.

In any case, my parents did separate.  I have spotty memories of taking a bus across the country.  My mother bought me a toy bus at one of the gift shops along the way.  And in this way, we made it back to her hometown of Portsmouth Virginia.

And that’s where I’ll end this part.  More to come at a future date.

 

When people talk about someone successful in various fields, they talk about how “talented” the person is, how “lucky” they are to have such “talent” for their particular field.  And in some cases there is some truth to that, but only some.

Reality is a lot more complicated.

The thing is, there is no  “drawing” gene, or “gymnastics floor exercise” gene, or “basketball gene” or what have you. What there are, what “talent” consists of, is a lot of little things: fine motor control, eye-hand coordination, how fast nerve impulses are able to propagate, ratio of fast twitch to slow twitch muscle fibers, body size and proportions, etc. Or going from the physical to the mental and perceptual, it’s ease of memorization, ability to visualize (I can’t), a knack for spotting patterns, a good sense of shape and proportion, and so on and so on.

None of those directly translate to any particular skill but they can, however, affect to what levels one is able–with practice–to hone any particular skill and how quickly one can progress in those skills.

Since everybody not suffering from severe handicaps has some of all of these, anybody (same caveat) can, with training and practice, achieve some level of mastery in just about any human endeavor. And a person who puts in the time and effort can do a lot better than a “talented” person who doesn’t.  Because practice matters, a lot.

The people at the very top will tend to be the ones with the combination of those various little things that between them make up “talent” for that particular field and who put in the time and effort.

Fortunately, most of us don’t need to be at the very top to be successful in whatever field we are pursuing. And there’s lots of room for successful individuals who are less ideally “talented” but who are willing to put in the work to succeed anyway.  Now, that varies from field to field.  Unless you have the reflexes, calmness under stress, sensitivity to “feel” what a car is doing under you, and so forth of a top level race car driver, you will never win a Formula One Grand Prix.  You’ll probably never be invited to drive one.  On the other hand, there are club races and other events all over the place you can be very successful at if you’re willing to put in the effort to hone your skills using the talents you do have.

Similarly, I’ll never be a Larry Correia–lots of work honing his craft and incredible talent as a story teller (which is quite different from an “author of lit’ra’cha”).  However, I don’t have to be.  There’s lots of room for us lesser lights to tell stories that people can read with pleasure.

So, if you feel so inclined, grab one of my books, kick back, and have some fun.  Such talent as I have is aimed at letting you do just that.

I was mowing the yard recently (between weather and schedules it had gone much too long since last time). I got the back yard done and was starting on the front when I was mowing next to an old woodpile and wasps started coming out of the pile. I got away from there but managed to get stung twice.

I thought I had some wasp spray around here but couldn’t find it. What I did find was a guy up the street mowing a neighbor’s yard.

“Are you equipped to deal with wasps?”

“Yes.”

How much to take care of a wasp nest on my yard?”

Skip to the end and for $40 he’ll finish the mowing, including trimming, and deal with the wasp nest.

Sold!

Normally I’d just finish the job myself. But this time, the wasps just added that little bit of extra that said, “let somebody else deal with it.”

As it happened “deal with the wasp nest” meant mowing and trimming the area with the nest, not spraying it down to kill them.  So, next day I head out to the store and get a double can of wasp spray.

The wasps are dead now.  And at least my yard looks nice.

 

Frederic Bastiat wrote about “The Seen and the Unseen”, essentially describing what economists now call “opportunity cost”.  What this means is that while you can see the effect of money being spent–as in the case of money spent to fix a broken window (the classic example) puts money in the glazier’s pocket which he can then go and do other things with, what you don’t see is what else the person might have done with that money if he hadn’t had to fix that broken window.  Once you start looking deeper at those things, a different picture emerges.  The person, instead of fixing the window (since it’s not broken) buys a new suit of clothes, and the clothier then goes and does other things and…the upshot is the economy is ahead by one suit of clothes over the broken window case.  This is called “The Broken Window Fallacy” like so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3AKoL0vEs&t=7s

The same principle applies in fields other than economics.  Take, for instance, what happens any time a high-profile crime (especially when the crime involves guns, but it doesn’t have to be) and people call for more “gun control” and the argument is “don’t you care about (the victims of that crime).”

Yes, I do care about the victims of those crimes.  But that is the “seen”.  I also care about the “unseen.” I care about the little girl whose father was accosted on the way home but whose attackers fled on seeing that the father was armed.  I care that she wasn’t rendered fatherless, or at the very least her father’s ability to provide for her reduced.  I care about the woman who was not raped because she was able to pull a gun on her putative rapist.  I care about not just the patrons and employees of a store not robbed because an employee or customer was armed; not just them but all the future patrons and employees of other stores that will not be robbed because that robber was stopped.  I care about the neighborhoods that riots diverted around, and the people living in them, because people living in them, armed people, presented a clear message of “this line you do not cross.”

I care about the hundreds to thousands of times (minimum) every day that crimes do not happen because people are armed for their own protection.

But these are the “unseen.” News doesn’t report “crimes that never happen.” People who aren’t robbed or raped or victims of battery often do not report the crime that didn’t happen to the police.  People alive, healthy, unmolested because they’re armed.  A “silent population” that doesn’t make headlines.

That these things are often not reported present a difficulty to attempts to study the phenomenon.  At the very low end, a survey of crime victims, we get numbers like 70,000 per year.  The problem with that one is that, again, it’s only the “seen”:  crime victims.  People who were not victims, who never reported the incident, usually where simply presenting the gun causes the criminals to flee, are excluded by its very nature.  So it’s going to be low.  But even there that’s twice as many people defending themselves with guns as being killed by people using guns.  And if we exclude suicides (the presence of a gun may affect choice of method; it does not render a non-suicidal person suddenly suicidal) it’s 4-5 times as many as are murdered with guns.

Most studies, which attempt to quantify the number of gun uses including those not reported to the police produce estimates ranging from 500,000 to a high of 3 million every year.  Even at the low end that’s better than half again as many as the total number of guns being used to commit crimes (300,000 for the year in 2008–and, incidentally violent crime in general and crime committed using firearms is down from 2008’s levels.  See the chart I generated here.)

This is the great unseen, not just because it’s not obvious without careful thought and study, but because the people who are publicly wringing their hands over the latest atrocity and using it to stampede you into agreeing with their political demands don’t want you to see it.  They’re purposely silent on this other side and, indeed, belittling those supporting it, playing the “don’t you care…” game.

So when people put up pictures of the latest atrocity up on your screens and asking “don’t you care” remember the others, the people you don’t see, the people who are able to go about their lives safe and unmolested that those putting the pictures up would have you forget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMzT4KNweTo

So Ms. Milano tweeted this:

Heart-wrenching, to be sure.  However, once again we have a “seen and unseen” situation.

The post where I saw this over on the Book of Faces snarked about her two abortions as the “two children she killed” and suggested she should “let that sink in.”

Well, my views on abortion are complicated and I don’t generally discuss them in public–and I’m not inviting discussion on that topic here by others.  Too much heat, too little light for any such to serve any purpose.

So, leaving that aside, let me offer the following:

Hey, Alyssa, between 900 and 9,000 people defended themselves against criminals today–with guns (presuming an “average” day). Let that sink in. Their being armed meant that they weren’t victims.

So, yes, my heart goes out to the family of that baby. What happened to it was tragic. However, my heart also goes out to those who weren’t victimized thanks to their being armed to defend themselves. And it goes out to those who were victimized because people like you stripped them of the ability to effectively defend themselves.

We live in a horribly imperfect world. Terrible things happen in it on a daily basis. But mindless, simplistic “answers” like “ban guns”, and “leave people disarmed” do not help. The “solutions” often make the problem worse. They would do so here–as shown by the simple fact that, by the best available studies on the subject, more people use guns to defend themselves against crime than use guns to commit crimes.

Remove the guns and. you. have. more. victims.

Since those in the political class have access to all the information necessary for them to know this, they either have other reasons for wanting to restrict RKBA or they’re being willfully blind and proceeding “in reckless disregard of the truth.”  There is no third option although I will allow the possibility that they combine the two.

Now, Ms. Milano, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.  After all, you made your fame playing pretend, mouthing words that other people wrote for you.  Nothing in that “talent” requires any great level of brightness, nor any grasp of risk assessment, criminology, probability and statistics, or really anything that makes you any more qualified than a dancing monkey to spout on topics you do not understand.  You’re good at hand-wringing on cue.  That’s about the extent of it.  So, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are simply ignorant and too stubborn to look beyond your blinders and not actually malicious.

The politicians and pundits from whom you get your marching orders, however?  They still fall into one of those two categories (or, as conceded above, possibly both).

Make your bets on which way for any given politician or pundit.

Long ago, in the dim recesses of prehistory, there were some of TV shows that I’d seen then that largely vanished but somehow remained stuck in my consciousness.

First, we have The Avengers.  No, not the superheroes but, well, if coolness is a super power…

In the initial episodes, mostly lost, Patrick McNee in the role of John Steed was the assistant to Dr. David Keel played by Ian Hendry but as the series progressed the roll of John Steed took increasing importance.  A strike cut short this first series and when they resumed John Steed took center stage, he was assisted by Dr. Martin King (Jan Rollason) and Nightclub singer Venus Smith (Julie Stevens), but what really changed the dynamic of the show was Dr. Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman).  Gale soon became Steeds regular partner.

Steed himself saw a transformation during this time, changing from a more typical tough guy to a suave, charming British Gentleman, full of sang froid.

In 1965, the show was sold to ABC which provided the budget to start shooting on film rather than tape.  This era also saw the introduction of Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel.

This is when I started seeing them.  It was only years later that I even knew that there were earlier partners for John Steed.  The “Emma Peel years” pretty much sum up my memories of the series.  As the series progressed episodes featured science fictional themes with villains who were mad scientists and their plots being the problem they had to solve.

Eventually, Rigg left the series to pursue other interests.  I know that’s often a euphemism for “fired”, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

The show was a lot of fun.  And, to my great delight I found that the Emma Peel episodes are collected and available from Amazon:

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Another show from my childhood, one of a slightly later vintage, was UFO.  In the first episode Colonel Ed Straker, of the US Air Force is the only survivor of a UFO attack.  We jump forward ten years and he’s the commander of SHADO–the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization.

I took this show a lot more seriously as a youth than I can today.  The creators had some strange ideas of how the future would go, from the mesh uniforms worn by their submarine crew (Skydiver) to the tight jumpsuits worn by female personnel in both the Earth headquarters (secretly located under a film studio) and the moonbase. to the purple wigs that were part of female uniforms on that moonbase.  The vehicles show the influence of the producers previous “supermariotmation” programs such as Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds.  Kind of depressing that they thought we would actually have the capability for routine flights to the moon (in at least one episode in addition to SHADO’s moonbase, there was a commercial facility) by 1980.

Still, I very much enjoyed the series, enough that I remembered it years later despite rarely if ever seeing it in syndication.  And on rediscovering it recently, I found that it is still eminently watchable, episodes often having a delightful darkness without going into the outright depressing.  This is a war with casualties, where one is often having to scrape together the best out of a bad situation.

And the series is available on YouTube:

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The third I’m going to discuss today is The Champions.

Three agents for an international espionage organization named “Nemesis” crash in the Himalayas.  There, they are rescued in secret by a hidden civilization that heals them and also, unbeknownst to them at first, bestows on them the epitome of human capability, strength, speed, and even limited psychic powers.

The series revolves around them using their abilities to complete their missions for Nemesis while keeping their abilities secret both from the people they oppose and their own bosses.

Look, I grew up on superhero comics so this was more of the same to me.  Why they’re keeping their abilities secret may not make a lot of sense.  Those people in the Himalayas may not want their existence revealed but wouldn’t these people’s first loyalty be to the people they work for?  Still, roll with it.

On discovering the series later, I don’t find it as good as I remember.  It hadn’t aged as well as the others.  Not something I’d “binge watch” these days but I can still spend a pleasant fifty minutes or so on an episode.  And it, too, is available on YouTube:

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There you have it, three TV shows from my youth and childhood that stuck through me through the years well enough so that in the modern age of Internet Video I was able to track them down.  The Avengers has aged very well indeed, in my opinion.  UFO, not quite as well.  The Champions, the least of the three but at least retains enough nostalgia value that I still find it watchable.