The Men Who Built The Torment Nexus*

     It's a trope from The Onion and like a lot of satire, it's realer than real.  The essay linked below explains how zillionaire techbros have looted science fiction for settings and widgets while discarding the philosophy and warnings to rot.  Is the future not what you were promised?  Yeah, me, too, and here's one big reason why.
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* Title riffed from Alfred Bester's short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which you should read if you haven't.  It's almost reassuring.  Or is it? 

Reflecting Fool

     While the rule of law (national and international) and long-established government functions come crashing down, I'm hearing a lot of news about the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

     It's a distraction.  Was the repair work graft-laden?  Probably.  Was the previous condition and repair effort over-hyped?  Almost certainly.  But look -- this is a big, shallow hard-surface pool in warm-climate city.  It's filled from the Tidal Pool and/or city water sources,* and in recent decades, every time it gets drained and refilled for whatever reason, it ends up full of green gunk for a while.  You can't have a shallow, slow-moving pool of water in a Washington, DC summer without stuff growing in it, no matter what you have done to the thing.  They'll solve the current mess, including the self-created elements, by and by, and yeah, probably someone's going to line their pockets over it (again!) to the tune of millions or tens of millions.

     But there are people within the Federal government or closely connected to it, ripping off the public coffers or cheating private-spending suckers and rubes of billions of dollars; the destruction of USAID has resulted in deaths on an enormous scale and helped fuel the present ebola outbreak in Africa, which is on the edge of breaking containment.  The only thing that keeps ebola in check is that it kills infected people pretty quickly, and even those who survive it are usually too sick to travel far until they have recovered.  The present version appears to have a slightly longer period of ambulatory-but-infectious, and that's a problem.

     A little bit (or a lot) of green algae in a (usually) pretty part of DC's memorial landscape is insignificant compared to the infectious dead and burial efforts that are barely keeping up.  Millions of dollars are way smaller than billions.  Yes, it's one more embarrassing farce -- but Europe's melting in the summer heat, disease is way up in Africa, and screwworms are infesting American cattle and pets.  We've got more urgent business than pointing at the green water and snickering.
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* Various infographics show a system of nearly Byzantine complexity.  Make what metaphors of it you will. 

Justice?

     This is your regular reminder that nobody "has it coming," unless what's coming is a fair trial and an honest verdict.  Satisfying as tales of vigilante justice or the workings of Fate may be, the real world is rarely that simple.  Sometimes, a bad thing is about to happen and the only way to stop it is immediate, violent action -- but don't mistake that for justice; it's simply a choice aimed at the least-bad solution.

     There are some loathsome people out there, but you can't fix it by becoming loathsome yourself.

I Heard The Bells On Christmas Eve...

     Only they were red and blue lights, instead.

     As mentioned in the previous post, I went into work for a few hours late on Christmas Eve, to deal with the aftermath of an ugly equipment failure.  The initial problem had failed to default over to a backup, and finding someone in the building to look at the failed device, report status and push a button had taken longer than it should have.

     My boss was annoyed -- and even more annoyed that we now had no backup.  I volunteered that I had a replacement for the failed subassembly, bought as a spare the last time the other end of the thing had gone toes-up, and I could go put it in.  At that point, we would at least be no worse off than we had been before the excitement.

     So I did.  It took several hours (the replacement is not exactly a drop-in).  Heading home a half-hour before midnight on Christmas Eve, the streets are not entirely deserted, but you could roller-skate on most of them without too much danger.  A few cars going the other way, a few cars going my directed and, uh-oh, what was that ahead?  Flashing red and blue lights.

     College Avenue south of 38th Street is a interesting stretch, fixed-up and kept-nice old houses up against vacant lots, sagging rentals and old apartment buildings.  There were police lights in front of a four-story wood-siding apartment building, half a block deep and a quarter of a block wide.  As I got closer, the lights resolved into five IMPD cruisers, four with the lights running, all empty.

     No doors open on any of the cars or buildings.  No police officers looking around with flashlights.  No sound.

     Just a reminder that holiday shifts are worse in some jobs than in others.  And in some lives, too. 

Malicious Record-Keeping

      Reading about the history of health risks from asbestos and the things companies did to cover it up, I learned that not all of it was overt.  Sure, people were pressured to sign releases, or sworn to silence as part of settling lawsuits; research was hidden; misinformation was promulgated: all the usual Hollywood-villain stuff really did happen.  But as lawsuits started to pile up, there was another technique: malicious filing practices.  Rather than destroy records, which would have been a red flag, a crime and of itself, some of the bigger offenders began "storing" records by piling them up in random heaps, often in scattered warehouses without climate control.  They could argue it was expensive to keep all those files, and impossible to keep track.

     Of course, they'd let opposing counsel dig through all that -- but don't expect an index.

     I've been thinking about that as the Epstein files have been released, a great big digital heap of stuff, some of it withdrawn for further redaction and then reissued, with no tracking.  Is it all there?  Who can say, but there's certainly a lot of it, and the various journalists and activist organizations are digging through it all, many with their own axes to grind.  It's another six-day wonder for the news cycle, steeped in rumor, adorned with a few facts gleaned catch-as-can.

     More sound and fury, associated with horrendous crimes against vulnerable young women, buried in the noise, much of it self-created.

     Don't think it's not deliberate.

Lessons For The Day

     First lesson, when recovering from a cold, Mandarin oranges are delicious -- and so are imported, dark-chocolate-covered cherries! (One of the first and, by an effort of will, only two of the second.)

     I managed to get to the grocery today, the first time I have left the house since last Saturday.

     Second lesson: Washington rarely gives you what you want.  The Epstein Files were released today -- almost entirely redacted.  Most of the blanked-for-declassification documents nuclear-weapons historian Alex Wellerstein unearths and FOIAs into the light have less blacked out on the page.  Yes, I said it: you can find out more about the once Top Secret U. S. plans to nuke the Moon than about most of the men in nice suits featured in photos in the Epstein Files, their faces entirely elided.

     It's sure nice the Great White Father in DC has managed to clear that up.

Indiana Redistricting

     Indiana's in the middle of a redistricting fight.  The measure passed the House 57-41; not coincidentally, Indiana's Presidential votes typically run near a 60/40 split.*

     The state Senate vote will probably begin in the Elections Committee today and it's looking interesting, with a 3-3-3 split, pro, con and undecided.  If the bill reaches the floor, the GOP needs 26 votes to pass; they hold 40 of the 50 seats -- but 14 Republican Senators say they're against the measure.

     Five Republican Senators aren't saying where they stand.  The bill has a lot of moving parts besides the new map, among them language meant to control how and in what courts suits challenging the legislation may be filed, complexity that gives Senators room to say they're still studying

     Twelve legislators, most of them Republicans, have publicly stated they have had swatting attempts, bomb threats and so on over this bill.  Meanwhile, President Trump has called out nine Indiana state Senators by name, telling supporters, "Let your voice be heard loud and clear."  You can parse that however you like; in context, the statement allows Eddie Haskell levels of ambiguity.

     Local advertising, on TV, and via direct mail, email and text messages, has been intense, mostly warning me about the terrible, terrible things the Democrats are going to do if they retake control of the House in 2026.  The list includes everything from bumper sticker level fantasy about the horrors of wokeness to threatening exactly what I'd like to see: a series of impeachments, convictions and removals from office.  Based on past performance, none of them are things the Dems are really likely to do, and more's the pity.  But it's keeping the lights on at the TV stations and penny-rate electronic and bulk-mail companies, so thanks for that, and for the ongoing, mortifying soap opera that is the collapse of the American system of government.  Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi must be so happy about that last item, and isn't happiness what it's really all about?
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* You'd think, in a polity of sturdy, politically-active Jeffersonian yoemen (and woemen), this would point to a 60/40 split in our U.S. House delegation.  Perish the thought, say redistricting proponents; they're aiming for a nice 60/40 division in each and every district, sending a winner-take-all wall of House Republicans off to Washington DC and the 40% will just have to take their lumps.

Keyboard In The Gutter

     Was it only yesterday that a big tranche -- or perhaps a splatter -- of Jeffrey Epstein's emails were made public?  Politicians are circling the fetid mess; most Republican politicians say the contents contain nothing significant, showing only that President Trump and the late sex offender moved in the same elite circles, while their Democrat counterparts are highlighting passages and conversations that put Mr. Trump in a bad light.

     Absolute smoking-gun evidence or sweeping exoneration has yet to be unearthed and I doubt it will.  The emails do show Epstein and most of his correspondents were shockingly shallow, banal and unconcerned with the fiddling details of spelling, grammar or even coherence, reveling in sleazy innuendo and treating women as property: America's financial and social elite is riddled with mentally-lazy creeps.

     What did the President know and when did he first learn of it?  I have no idea.  I doubt these emails will reveal it.  What they do show is a bunch of emotionally stunted, manipulative men whose lives are lubricated by gobs of money, sliming their way through life along and over the edges of moral behavior with no regard for boundaries, scorning probity as a scam for chumps.

     A few online commenters have cautioned, "What if there are Democrats among Epstein's circle?"  I'm sure there were; I'm sure many of them are still in public life and they deserve to be removed from office just as much as any Republican running with that crowd.  Turf 'em all out.  Primary them.  Get some new crooks in there, people with fewer connections.  They may still be terrible people, but it'll take them awhile to pick up the game, and if we keep voting the old ones out and new ones in, they'll have less time to wallow in the ooze.

     Another question the emails don't answer is how Jeffrey Epstein funded his decadent lifestyle; at times, they imply something on the very edge of blackmail or extortion, but -- yet again -- hard evidence isn't there.  Just a lot of skin-crawling stuff, hints and nudges.  He's clearly trading in influence and access.

     If you're happy making excuses for gazillionaires with stomach-churning private lives, nothing in the emails will change your mind.  If you were looking sidelong at this sort of thing already, here are steaming piles of the same ick.

     This isn't the big chunk of files that Congress may yet release, but those are probably going to be pulled from the same cesspool.

     F. Scott Fitzgerald's, "The very rich are different from you and me," wasn't written in admiration (or even in quite that way) but in disappointment; and Hemingway's rejoinder, "Yes, they have more money," is far too glib.  An excess of money lets people people be even more who they already were.  Freed from the necessity of earning a living by the sweat of their brow, a lot of people turn out to be self-indulgent moral cripples for whom other individuals aren't quite real -- especially those others who work for wages.  We live in a representative democracy; why are we letting these wretches run our government?

Too Far Out

      As nearly as I can figure, the President of the United States is waging low-grade war on some parts of the United States.

     I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.  I'm pretty sure "Nacht und Nebel" was never U.S. domestic policy.  Or at least it didn't used to be.

     But I'm so old-fashioned and out of touch that I didn't think Presidents could suspend freedom of speech, so what do I know?

     I'm working on a short story.  Fiction.  The fascts, er, facts are too darned hard to look at for very long at a time.

Yes And No

      At a recent press conference in Texas in the aftermath of the shooting of ICE detainees by a criminal (who appears to be a nihilist without partisan ideology -- literally, just there for the violence), U. S. Senator Ted Cruz decried violence and I agree: don't go shooting people, especially not law enforcement.  Not only is it wrong, they've got an effectively unlimited supply reserves; shooting at them is just fancy suicide.  It's not effective opposition.

     But there's some evidence this shooter's political motive, if we can dignify it as that, was simply to make things worse.

     So there's that.  Ted Cruz and I are in agreement: don't go shooting people.  I believe just about everyone agrees.

     The Senator also implied, strongly, that we're obliged to respect law enforcement officers, and there, we part company.  Oh, it's a good idea to treat them with what amounts to respect; no other arm of government can do you more immediate harm.  Further, the majority of LEOs are decent folks, working a very difficult job.  But gangs of masked men, in motley scraps of uniform, badge numbers covered if they're wearing a badge at all, grabbing people off the streets on vague suspicion like the bad guys in a straight-to-video movie or cheap video game?  I'm not obliged to respect that.  It's not respectable behavior.  It's not how any of us were brought up to expect police to act.  I certainly fear it; it looks like a gang kidnapping, and those are things to fear.  The Senator can claim it's okay-fine and any red-blooded American ought to cheer it on, but I don't think it is and I won't cheer for it.  I want 'em to act like proper cops, with proper warrants and a proper respect for their fellow humans.

     I sure don't think anyone ought to be sniping at them.  That's plain wrong.  That's bad-guy behavior.  No, it's worse-guy behavior.  The proper response to a Federal law enforcement agency that's behaving like a gang of masked bandits is to vote in Senators, Representatives, President and Vice President who will make them stop that.  The fix for lawlessness is not more lawlessness, until we end up in a frikkin' Judge Dredd comic book.  The fix is more lawfulness, and that comes from the top down.

     Why, it could start with something as simple as a U. S. Senator with an inside track to his Party's leadership, standing up and telling them, "Enough is enough."

     I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to happen.  And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is demonstrating his party's concern for lawfulness, telling Sean Hannity a few days ago, "Trump 2028.  I hope this never ends."  Yes, he's pressing for a third term, despite that pesky 22nd Amendment limiting Presidents to two at-bats and no more.  Ted, Lindsey?  Respect starts at the top.  Try respecting the U.S. Constitution.

Right-On-Right Murder?

     I can't say often enough that I do not condone political violence.  I don't have to like a person or agree with or approve of their opinions to know that they shouldn't be murdered.  And the truth is, I found most of Charlie Kirk's notions loathsome, especially his assertion that womenfolk like me should shut up, stop working for wages (and competing against, oh horrors, men for jobs) and concern ourselves with children, cooking and church.  Nevertheless, nobody should be killed for saying such specious nonsense.

     Republicans, starting with the President, were quick to condemn the political Left for the murder, even before a suspect was in custody.  Some even claimed this kind of violence was especially associated with the Left, conveniently forgetting the previous high-profile assault and murder of Minnesota state legislators -- Democrats -- for which a man long associated with conservative and anti-abortion efforts has been charged.  In reality, it appears the man who has confessed to shooting Charlie Kirk is a very-online gamer associated with the "Groyper" movement and a fan of farther-Right Nick Fuentes* -- and perhaps a bit unmoored, mentally,.  It looks very much like he acted alone, and that's typical of such attacks: not only because a solo operator with murky mental processes is harder to predict, but because conspiracies are unworkable and get stopped early: if there are three or more people involved, the odds are high that at least one of them is an informant.

     Supported in part by the obscure online-ironic nature of the messages on the bullet casings, cryptic to most normies, Republican figures are still blaming the killing on the Left, even on centrist Democrats who said mean things about Kirk (a man who never hesitated to say mean things about people and polices he disapproved of).  While the accused killer is as politically incoherent as most of his murderous ilk, it's clear he leaned far more Right than Left.

     But look here: these killers are outliers.  Most sociopolitical conflict in the U.S. plays out without this level of violence, despite acrimony.  Riots are newsworthy because they are rare.  This kind of targeted violence is even rarer, and most people, most politicians, no matter how foaming-at-the-mouth they might be, neither engage in nor promote physical violence.  (It is slightly newsworthy that South Carolina's Nancy Mace was calling for dire vengeance when early interpretations of the bullet casing scribblings suggested the shooter supported trans issues and abruptly switched to calling for prayers for him when it was revealed he was a cisgender white male.)

     Video games don't make people killers.  They get used as excuses.  Politics, likewise.  The converse is a greater risk.  When politicians and public figures start using these kinds of killings to justify wide-scale repression or worse, look out: throughout history and all around the globe, governments gone wrong are more dangerous to more people than any lone-wolf assassin ever was or could be.

     Update: the alleged killer's politics may be even more incoherent.  Gamer memes are a mirror-maze incomprehensible to outsiders and where they intersect with politics, there's even less clarity.  Various groups use -- and flip or mock -- the symbols of their opponents.  I have added a question mark to the headline, and...time will tell.  Or it won't, and perhaps this will be one more example of an attack rooted in chaotic notions that don't fit neatly into comfortable, familiar categories.
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* Later information does not bear this out.

About Mass Murderers

     Every time it happens, the same general coverage plays out: normal shock and horror at the horrific crime, and once the initial outrage begins to fade, everybody but everybody, from NPR to your uncle who shares loud opinions at every family gathering, from Fox News to gun-control organizations, starts trying to suss out the mind of the killer, often with an eye towards catching the next one before they go off the rails and usually grinding their own axes in the process.

     And they keep on saying the name of the killer, over and over.  Making them famous.

     You want to know the prime motivation of all of these murderers?  They want to be famous.  Many of them treat the stats on similar criminals as some kind of twisted leaderboard.  Sure, the nominally-religious ones say it's for their faith, the racist ones give racist justifications, the political ones claim its for some greater good or to silence their enemies, the seething nutjobs talk about striking back at whatever institution, authority or peer group they think wronged them, yadda-yadda yackety-yak, but it's blather.  They're looking to write their names across history like misbehaving boys peeing their names into fresh snow in their neighbor's front yard.

     Every single person doing a deep dive into the supposed mind of these criminals, "Whatever made Firstname Lastname commit their horrific crime?  We talk to the former yoga instructor of their neighbor across the alley and analyze their MySpace page from twenty years ago," is just feeding the next would-be mass killer: Look how much attention Firstname Lastname got!  Look at how many views their manifesto got!  Look how angry they made people!  They want to be just like Firstname Lastname, only more so -- and they don't mean the killer's religion, politics, or particular flavor of non-murderous nuttiness.  Nope.  It's the killing -- and the fame.  It's the attention.

     We have to stop stoking the flames of criminal celebrity.

     These crimes, striking though they are, are rare.  Over a hundred people die in traffic accidents in the U. S. every day and we scarcely blink.  One person kills two and injures nearly ten times as many, and it makes headlines and gets live special reports.  The overwhelming majority of people in this country didn't kill anyone; Sunday School teachers and the worst racists you can think of, hardcore Antifa people and the nice little old Republican ladies who work as pollwatchers every election didn't kill anyone or even plan to; nearly every Muslim, Evangelical Christian, agnostic and Sikh (etc.), along with just about all Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Whigs (etc.) didn't commit mass murder.  Even most insane people are, in fact, not murderers.  How lovely if we could point at some demographic group and say, "Yes, these people are the ones who commit mass murder," and stop them.  But that's not how it works.

     The most recent mass killer as I write this was apparently a member of a stigmatized group (and also a rabid fan of other mass murderers, from the available evidence).  That is being leveraged in ways that are, in fact, lies; lies that contribute nothing to finding and stopping mass killers and instead deflect attention elsewhere.

     The specific bent that these mass killers share is an intense desire for posthumous fame earned through terrible crimes.  That's as deep as it goes; politically, religiously, socially, they're all over the map, and while most are white males, there have been female, nonbinary and non-white mass shooters -- and all of them wanted to be known for their crimes.

     Deny them that attention.

The Ancient Art Of Bear-Poking

     The thing about pushing limits is that it provokes reactions -- especially if the limit is a historic norm that is poorly-defined in law or courts don't protect: expectations are askew from the legal reality.

     Push too hard, expect people to push back.  I think the Trump administration is hoping for it, hoping sending Federalized National Guard troops into big cities will create an incident leading to riots that will justify even harsher measures.  And yes, big cities are crime-ridden; they always have been -- but the rate has been falling dramatically over the last decade in every one of the cities the President has sent or is talking about sending troops into: a lot of people in close proximity is always going to be a hunting ground for the criminally inclined and as a society, the U.S. has been doing an amazing job of getting it under control, using everything from community policing to outreach programs, mandatory sentencing laws and getting the lead out of gasoline.

     This reality, which you can go look up for yourself, doesn't serve an agenda based on urbaphobia and anecdote; it doesn't serve the desire to test limits -- and cause reaction.  Remember the chaos of the first Trump administration?  He loved it, or at least the opportunities it provided, and he's going to get himself more of it, one way or another.  Count on it.

     Chicago, Illinois seems to be his next target.  That city and state has a pretty good chance of litigating the effort to a standstill, but it won't stop there.

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     Press coverage of the redistricting conflict, with Texas and California at the fore, keeps turning up an interesting tidbit:  Blue states are having a much harder time gerrymandering, because a lot more of them have nonpartisan boards or commissions to draw U.S. House districts, or rules that serve similar ends.  Red states have made no bones about drawing lines to reach partisan goals, even when the result is wildly skewed from voting patterns, pointing out that it's allowed.  This disparity should tell us something, that the Dems are, at least, concerned about the appearance of fairness, while the GOP can't be arsed.  The latter is not a good look; it's not the way our system of government is supposed to work, at least not based on what I was taught about the root causes of the American Revolution.  The English Crown got a reaction there, too.

Exceptionally Self-Deluded

     The United States of America is in the midst of a Viktor Orbán-style takeover of the institutions of our republic -- including many that have long existed outside of the government, either by independent formation (like universities) or via structures intended to distance them from direct government control, like the United States Institute for Peace or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

     In particular, the Executive Branch is arrogating to itself powers that had either not previously been deemed to exist or are Constitutionally granted to the Legislative Branch -- and a supinely complicit Congress along with a compliant Supreme Court are letting it happen, in some cases even empowering it.  It out-Jacksons Andrew Jackson, and puts forward a Wilsonian "Unitary Executive" without the odious Woodrow Wilson's academic rigor and commitment to an international deliberative body.  What it does share with both Presidencies is an overt dedication to furthering so-called "white supremacy," with the added frill of pushing women back to the powerlessness they suffered under Jackson and Wilson.  It's broadly authoritarian; I'm not going to get into any nitwitted discussion of how it couldn't possibly be fascism because they don't have spiffy uniforms or the underlying ideas don't come from the fascistae region of Italy.  The incumbent Administration means to rule, and they are completely comfortable laying a heavy thumb on any measure that will further that end, like partisan mid-decade Congressional redistricting.

     There's still a lot of talk of "overreaction," as though the sweeping changes were inconsequential follies, to be washed away or changed after the next election.  Oh, some of them may be, depending on how that election goes, and barring yet another Trumped-up "emergency" getting in the way of voting.  Others will not; many parts of the Federal edifice, like USAID, have been broken beyond recovery.  There might some day be another "soft power" effort along the same lines, but the institution, with all of its values and specialized knowledge, is gone.  And the accretion of power to the Executive may be as irreversible as the accretion of power to the Imperial throne of Rome.  Maybe not; the men who wrote the Constitution knew Classical history and tried to build a stronger bulwark against despotic power than the Roman Senate proved to be.  But so far, our Congress is failing the same test.

     So don't try to jolly me along, and understand that my rudeness to Trumpist Republicans is deliberate; unlike the conservative Republicans who preceded them, they have nothing of value to contribute to our society or system of government, only destruction and barbarism.  When they speak, hear the shouts of the mob and the howling of wolves in the background.  They seek only power and personal wealth; they smash institutions and sow only ruin.  What comes after them, unless we are very lucky in rolling it back, is darkness.

     American exceptionalism long held that our country was immune from the kinds of chaos that swept through the governments of other nations, leaving death and despotism in its wake.  Turns out that's not the case.

A Waste Of Ink And Electrons

     Over the last two days, news media have made very very sure -- to the point of program interrupting news bulletins for one of 'em -- that I was aware how the criminal trial of Sean "I have an enormous number of nicknames" Combs came out, and that another group of Men With A Theory are launching a brand new search for the remains of Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan and their airplane.

     Precisely why I should be concerned about the unsavory and at least partially criminal sex life of a celebrity -- a thing as statistically predictable as the sun rising in the east for as long as there have been celebrities -- and one more search for a lost aviator (she's dead, guys, and so is he) is a mystery to me.  There's a huge, tragic mess in Gaza, Iran may or may not presently have a viable nuclear weapons program,* U. S. domestic politics are getting crazier, our government is building straight-up concentration camps and treating one of the most outrageous examples as a no-humans-involved occasion for levity and Congress is in the process of pushing through a massively unpopular bill that is certain to have far-reaching effects, but I need to be told about the titillating details of what the rich and famous get up to behind closed doors, and that the sons and grandsons of the same kinds of men who misplaced her are going to go digging for whatever's left of a famous aviator and her slightly less famous crewman?

     No.  I do not.  There's actual serious grownup news to be reported and it would be damned nice if they'd act like it.

     I'm not holding my breath.
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* Fission, fusion, or--  One of the things that frets me is that a desperate and fanatical government with a smashed-up atom-bomb program probably still has loads and loads of nasty stuff with a long half-life, and a dusting of that on enemy territory does both immediate and lasting harm.  Dust and wind being what they are, most nations won't risk the fallout (other than as an add-on oopsie to actual nuclear war, at least).  Iran, however, is not most nations, and they have a history of funding groups even more heedless of consequences.

Poking The Bear

      Sure, you can probably make a case that those hard-working ICE agents are "just following orders" in LA, but even if they're victims of the system (eye roll), the people who gave them their initial orders and who keep sending them back out either know in advance or at least know by now that the protests are reactive; the violence is reactive.

     If the feds were serious about stopping the protests, they'd pull those ICE agents out.  Send them home or, better, to Las Vegas, and wait for the furor to die down.  Come back more stealthily another day.

     Instead, they've got LAPD in there running interference, and the last I heard, National Guard troops were warming up in the bullpen.  I sure hope their officers didn't miss the use-of-force history lesson about Kent State.  You can go on social media right now and find video of protesters tossing tear gas canisters back at the gas-masked police, and if that's just the early innings, it could get way more spicy.

     And it will do so just as long as ICE and police and the National Guard keep getting sent in to poke the bear.  This isn't subatomic rocket-brain physics; we know what started it.  We know what's keeping it going.  And you're either in there cheering on the spectacle or you're asking why the feds are still leaning on the throttle.  What's in it for them?  What's their endgame?

     Better look close.  This isn't war -- it's three-card monte.

America's Favorite Projector Screen

     Was it a Disney invention?  I don't remember.  It's a neat trick: you take a three-dimensional head shape, coat it with reflective motion-picture screen material, set it against an absorptive background and project a carefully sized and cropped movie or video of a person's face on it.  It'll look almost alive, especially if you have good control of the observer's distance and viewing angle.

     The Framers and Founders come in for similar treatment: we tend to project our beliefs and issues on 'em, then take the illusion for reality.  In dealing with men like Jefferson and Washington, you have have to go back to primary evidence: what did they actually leave written down?  When in their life did they write it, and under what circumstances?  Those men were masses of what appear now to be contradictions -- future President John Adams, already involved in the Patriot cause, defended the British soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre of 1770, describing the (at least nominally) Patriot mob that provoked matters in absolutely scurrilous terms.

     Jefferson, who never saw a third rail he didn't almost touch while tapdancing adroitly around it, is frequently misrepresented.  He came in for an especially egregious ride at the hands of the newly-elected Speaker of the House back in January, and while it would be nice to lay all the blame at the feet of Mike Johnson, it turns out he had plenty of help, some of it from unexpected and largely innocent corners.  There's a nice podcast that tells the tale -- and it serves as a reminder to always look things up.  Too many people enjoy repeating plausible tales for the joy of it, and never bother to do any homework.

Don't Know Why I Bother

     There was a point during the pandemic when I stopped doing confrontational debunking.  People had their minds pretty well made up, right or wrong, and they were not going to change -- and some of them were starting get threatening.

     I try to not have strong attachments to anyone or anything (it's that Jr. High flirtation with Buddhism), and to not share too much about the stuff I really love if it's where other people can get at it.  I was always dislikeable: nearsighted, clumsy, stroobly-haired, a tomboy who never knew when to shut up.*  It's never nice to discover someone's poured milk in your school locker, glued your Lord of the Rings paperbacks into a series of solid lumps or keyed your car.  I learned to keep things shut away.  At my present age, I would prefer to retain all the teeth I have left and not suffer any more broken bones -- little things, I suppose, but such comforts.

     Nevertheless--  It irks me when molehills are inflated into mountains.  The Federal Emergency Management has been a prime focus for political extremists from the day it was proposed. If they stock up on house trailers, they're said to be planning concentration camps.  If they ask for bids to supply body bags, they're accused of plotting mass death.  FEMA workers are often greeted with hostility when they show up after calamity has struck, accused of being too slow (States usually have to ask for 'em) or too snoopy (it's a government agency; they have forms that have to be filled out) or of doing things they have never done.  (And I get it, it's nervous-making when The Gummint shows up; my Mom was a township property tax assessor, which occasionally meant having to measure the outside dimensions of somebody's house.  Not everyone was okay with that.)

     So I had a blog comment about how FEMA had left Trump supporters in the lurch, and that comment needs to be addressed.

     In the aftermath of disaster, people are on edge.  Armed with a clipboard and a cellphone or radio, FEMA workers have been known to encounter residents who have rather more armament.  I gather the advice they are given is to avoid confrontation.

     In early October of 2024, Hurricane Milton roared from the Gulf and across Florida, killing at least 35 people and doing over 30 billion dollars in damage.  Afterward (some sources say October 27), a FEMA supervisor of 11 canvassers working in Lake Placid, FL told them not "avoid confrontation" but to skip houses with Trump campaign signs.  She got caught; someone leaked the email and by November, she was fired and FEMA sent a new crew to cover the area.  Short write-up here, news stories here and here.  Any search engine will find more.  FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell was hauled up before the House Oversight committee, where she condemned the supervisor's action.  Jamie Raskin of Maryland called the instruction "a bad mistake, legally and constitutionally, which violated the core mission of FEMA and every federal agency to work on behalf of all Americans. [...] It’s plainly wrong and divisive to use a presidential campaign lawn sign as a proxy for someone’s dangerousness," and that's the ranking Democrat on the committee calling it out.  The Republicans said much the same thing.

     That is the sole documented example I can find of FEMA being partisan.  Some crazy rumors came out of North Carolina after their terrible floods, but it appears to be social-media fantasy.

     Here's what FEMA says: "FEMA provides assistance to survivors regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, English proficiency, political affiliation or economic status." They've got a whole fact sheet you can look over -- and if you've got evidence they're not playing by their own rules, there's a "contact us" link right there at the bottom of the page.  Cc the House Oversight Committee while you're at it, I'm sure they'll be interested.

     Or you can huff the fumes of overheated bullshit, if that's what gets you high, but don't confuse the resulting hallucinations with reality, and don't ask the rest of us to take a whiff.  The stink is unmistakable.
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* One of the first signs of trouble with my ex was when we were building a little platform at my previous home to get the house for the feral cats up out of the mud, and it became obvious he wasn't much good with a handsaw and had trouble sinking a nail straight.  It took me by surprise; I think of those as basic life skills, stuff my big sister, little brother and our parents knew before adulthood.  He was...not real happy that it surprised me.  I'll take half the blame for that, but, um, it was a warning of basic incompatibility we both should have heeded.

Margaret Atwood Says She's Not A Prophet

     Indeed, Ms. Atwood says The Handmaid's Tale drew on historical and (then) contemporary events -- which is one of the reasons she, somewhat sniffily, eschews being lumped in with "Science Fiction."  It's also one of the reasons I, somewhat sniffily, have shelved that book with my other science fiction books: all SF is, in one way or another, linked to current and past events, and to the writer's perception of them.

     You can read The Handmaid's Tale as a warning -- just as you can Le Guin's The Dispossessed; and they both warn about the harm caused by trying to hammer everyone into the same mold and the endless cruelties we inflict on one another when we don't stop to think and to care.

     The lesson is the same: Live however you choose -- but don't force the weird people across the road or the dull people next door to live the way you do.  Treat other people politely; you're not obliged to respect their choices but you don't get to be a jerk about it, nor do they about your choices.

     Otherwise, you're locked into an endless cycle of mutual retribution that will harm innocents every time the wheel turns.  "Oh," you may complain, "But look how it enrages those who disagree with me."  And with that, you have put yourself next to the Carthaginians as Roman historians described them, shoveling babies into the fire to ensure prosperity and victory.

     It's not worth so horrific a price.  It never is.

Footnote

     If you're one of the people chortling how the "lib'ruls" of LA voted wrong and now face fires, two bits of information:

     -Post hoc ergo propter hoc is still a logical fallacy.

     -In the 2024 Presidental election, more people voted for Donald Trump in Los Angeles than voted for him in Arkansas or Oklahoma.  This nonsense about "red America" vs. "blue America" ignores the reality that we all live in purple America, a bit redder in some places and bluer in others, and when bad luck falls on Texas or New York, Oregon or Florida, it falls on millions of people who voted the same way you did and hold similar values, no matter how you voted or what policies you favor.  We're all in the same box. 

     But neither voting patterns, election results or efforts to attracts a more diverse pool of firefighters caused the recent and current fires in and around LA.  They had a fairly wet year or two recently, then things got dry (as is normal in that part of our country) and then--  Then the dice came up snake eyes (or double sixes) for the Santa Ana winds, roaring with an intensity rarely seen.  People being people, anyone with a yard has stuff growing in it, and it was all pretty much tinder.  Add strong winds and all you need is a spark.

     Strong winds kept firefighting aircraft on the ground (and still are, at their worst), leaving the greater Los Angeles area with exactly the same resources as any other big city: a hydrant system and trucks and personnel adequate to battle normal fires, a building or three at a time.

     Information about LAFD funding is muddled; they were in the process of negotiating fire department pay (and apparently other terms) during the overall budget process.  LAFD's portion was left for another bill, later, and their funding went up, not down (as has been claimed elsewhere), but reports on how much and what it was for vary.  All I can tell for sure is that it went up some tens of millions -- not much less than 20, nor more than 50 million over what it had been.  Call it a couple week's income for Elon Musk, or more than you or I would see in ten lifetimes.  They've got the money.  They're not worse off for staff than fire departments generally -- and, faced with a wall of flame pushed by katabatic winds exceeding 60 miles an hour, blowing embers ahead of it into paper-dry shrubs, grass, trees and wooden houses, all they can do is fight for time, no matter who they are.  Against a calamity this enormous, all people are the same size, and it's too damn small.  Additional help is pouring in, from as far away as Canada.

     It's probably ironic that the best tool against this kind of disaster is slow and about as nannying as it gets: building codes and zoning.  Requiring more fire-resistant construction and materials for homes and commercial buildings, mandating largely vegetation-free "clear zones" around them, incorporating firebreaks into neighborhood design -- all of those things would help mitigate the kinds of harm we're seeing happen.  Towns and cities in Southern California have made efforts to create such rules -- and it has been decried as liberal interference in personal freedom to do as people wish on their own property.  Like most things in politics, like most things involved in living with neighbors nearby, it's a matter of compromise and sometimes it works out badly.  It's a part of life -- and only a ghoul revels in the bad outcomes.