Meanwhile, We the People have governing to do

 As callous as it sounds, the street murders of two US citizens exercising their constitutional rights is not the biggest threat facing the country right now. The regime has made a direct assault on free and fair elections by raiding the Fulton County, Georgia, election center and seizing ballots stored under seal from the 2020 election. The contamination of evidence means that any "revelations" by the regime are automatically suspect, but don't expect that to stop them.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has already said that he wished that he had seized ballots and voting machines in 2020 to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Biden was confirmed as the winner of the 2020 presidential election numerous times, as the MAGA regime filed suit after suit, and lost all of them.

While much of the current brouhaha is driven by the thin-skinned and senile dictator's thirst for revenge against imagined wrongs, the forces that have slunk in under cover of his bombast have had their sights on limiting voting rights for decades. Each segment has their favorite targets: the religious right tends to want to keep women from voting. The white supremacists want to keep Black and brown people from voting. The corporatists want to keep the poors from voting.

We on the so-called left would prefer if the supporters of each and all of these enemies of liberty would stop voting that way, but I'd like to think that most of us recognize that blocking anyone's right to vote is a dangerous weapon, lest it be snatched away and used against us.

Unfortunately, we can't try to tell the oppressors that they will be no worse off, and perhaps better, by letting everyone participate. The super rich love being super rich. Falling back to merely filthy rich from obscenely rich would definitely impact their lifestyle. Insecure men who need women to be automatically subservient will have to face more and more women who have no need for them.

Elections aren't going away: authoritarian regimes need them to provide the illusion of legitimacy. Election subversion, on the other hand, is a key element in assuring that the designated winner has a comfortable margin. Deftly done, it can even give the opposition party a shred of hope that some day the system might go their way.

Close electoral margins in actual count give the regime the sense that opinion might really favor them, at least by a slim majority. That's why a big turnout is essential to lay down a number that is harder to deny and falsify. If they have to take away ballots by the truckload, it's harder to conceal than just lugging out a couple of file boxes late at night.

While we can fantasize about firefights at polling places, as MAGA supporters literally battle 2A progressives, such fireworks are highly unlikely. We've seen how voter suppression actually works: polling places scattered over hundreds of square miles; long lines; no food or water; maybe some goons in tactical gear slouching around. And ICE, if still cosplaying in full military kit and snatching people might grab as many brown voters as they can, holding them until election day is over. No need to stick their catch in camps or deport them. Just keep them from voting. Sure, there will be lawsuits, but it will be too late to change the outcome of the election.

White people should be fine as long as they (we) don't smart off or kick any taillights. But that puts a lot of responsibility on us to represent for our less privileged brothers and sisters who might be getting more shit as they try to make their way to the polls.

Maybe we reach a point where the supporters of the regime wear clothing or accessories that mark them clearly. A lot of them already do, but it's not a mandatory uniform item. If they adopt the attitude that "if you're not with us you're against us," and extend that to heavy peer pressure to wear the mark of their beast, anyone planning to vote against them will have to choke down that wardrobe choice to mask our intent.

Violence is always a possibility when dealing with people who glorify their ability to dish it out and take it. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but it's central to their identity. Like any bully, they definitely enjoy beating up on someone they perceive as weaker. So maybe some self-dramatizing popgun patriot starts something somewhere, but it's unlikely. Don't want to risk messing up their costume.

A lot of polling places won't notice anything unusual at all. In my little town, people don't tend to put on their fight face for national elections. We save that for town meeting and school district hearings. Even then, it's been quite a few years since our last fist fight. And we don't have any brown people to exclude, even if someone was so inclined. That's one reason that so many people just chuckle about anyone who shows visible signs of getting upset at the problems we see on the news. It's still mostly theoretical to the people around here, so they treat it like a sport that may or may not interest them. That's a problem, but good luck figuring out how to instill a sense of urgency in a population so isolated for generations.

Oh well. Alex Pretti is burned

 Human sacrifices have to be perfect. Renee Good only served to a point, because she had qualities that repel the right. Alex Pretti was looking good until video surfaced of him being a hothead and stirring shit with the federal forces invading Minneapolis. He's no innocent victim, regardless of how completely wrongfully he was executed.

Stories are always more complicated than the first impression conveys. We have yet to coordinate the new information about Pretti. I will say that going around packing heat indicates a personality prepared for deadly confrontation. There is no other reason to carry a tool only designed to cause injury and death. If you're carrying a gun and you're not willing to use it, you shouldn't carry a gun. If you are willing to use it, you are automatically dangerous to be around. The safety of anyone within range depends entirely on your judgment. And your accuracy, but even if you miss what you intended to hit you could send stray rounds into bystanders. So Pretti's armament is a hint to his self image.

His alleged destruction of property (taillights) is being described on outlets like Fox News and the New York Post as "violent." Property damage is not violence in anything approaching the way that assault is violent, but it does indicate a hotheadedness that could lead the perpetrator to lash out. There are also reports of Pretti spitting at federal agents. From what we've heard, I'm sure a lot of people would like to spit at the federal agents swarming that area right now. However, the resistance is engaged in a delicate public relations exercise. Rising to the bait to engage mano a mano only feeds the regime's story that insurrectionists are siding with the "immigrant invasion" and spoiling for a fight.

Shooting a guy because he spat on you is right up there with shooting your puppy because he was unruly. Cricket's killer has made it clear that she considers Pretti's killing to be within policy.

Over time, a more complete picture of Alex Pretti will emerge, but his value as a martyr is gone. He was built up too high for any tumble to be less than catastrophic. It's all going to devolve into "yes, but." Either side discussing him will take the talking points of the other side and say, "yes, but..."

Alex Pretti did not deserve his fate. Maybe the full story will clarify what was going on in the videos of his alleged provocative and confrontational behavior. Unfortunately, there's no rehabbing a perfect image once the human frailty bursts out in a way that undermines the image of a fun-loving, caring, nurturing person who only wanted to help people. He was probably all of those things. But it appears now that he was also feisty and willing to provoke agents who have already shown their eagerness to secure dominance by killing people in the street.

The nearest Republican to me couldn't wait to tell me about the video, and how those liberals on The View had to walk back their gushing tributes to Pretti. And he's not even a rad MAGA supporter, just well saturated with decades of contempt for liberals and their bullshit. 

Alex gaveth, and Alex done tooketh away.

Sorry, can't help you until just the right person is killed

 The street execution of Alex Pretti has galvanized resistance to the regime's overreach from both the right and the left. This surge has added to the criticism from right and left against the regime from its first swings of the wrecking ball in Jan. 20, 2025, and merged them into calls for actual removal of at least some of the malicious, incompetent toadies placed at the head of every cabinet department.

Is it a general human thing or just an American thing that an untenable situation can persist and grow, causing harm and death until it reaches a tipping point that triggers a wave of repudiation? It takes a certain level of infection to activate a society's immune system. Just the right people have to die.

It's hard to care about people you don't know. It's even hard to care about people you do know, when acknowledging them puts you in danger. How well do you know them?

Human sacrifices pile up, each one perhaps bringing a few more recruits to whatever cause is in play. The crisis we face now is no game. And it clearly goes way beyond brown people. Some of you may recall that some of us were saying that, back while there was still time to vote against the thunderous asshole now devastating the United States from its highest office. Ah well, water under the bridge...with the corpses of the fallen floating on it.

Comfortable people won't surrender comfort. People in precarious circumstances don't want to drop into a worse predicament. People in power do their best to keep the masses divided, distracted, and weak. But eventually, the right person is killed to break the tenuous stability of the oppressor.

In the current crisis, it has taken something like the death of Alex Pretti to alert masses of complacent white men that their oppressor isn't just DEI policies and quota hires, or women with the audacity to want to live as fully free and equal citizens. Sure, from their point of view it is all of those things, but now it's also a government trying to limit the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. Surprise! It wasn't the Democrats after all.

Don't be fooled that the complaints from the right indicate any softening of their traditional prejudices. Much of the objection to the regime from the right focused on how the regime hadn't been as odious as they promised to be. Hard right candidates are being primaried from even farther right. The problem will remain long after the visible pustule in the White House has been lanced and drained. In the meantime, however, the enemy of my enemy is temporarily convenient. A classic case of "right answer for the wrong reason," but the right answer nonetheless. We just have to be mindful that the next candidate the right puts forward will be trying to advance a lot of the same agenda without the conspicuous, proud offensiveness of the current reality TV cast.

Trump and World War III

 Among the unhelpful, panic-mongering posts going around social media about how the regime will cancel the midterm elections, I caught one this morning about how Kristallnacht backfired on the Nazi regime because its public violence caught the citizens off guard. They didn't suddenly grow sympathetic to their Jewish fellow citizens. They just objected to the open brutality and widespread property damage. That is rather reminiscent of the right wing and "moderates" in this country, true. However, the post goes on to say that Hitler forced the "volk" to get back in line to support the regime when he launched World War II. Then it warns us that the current occupant of the Oval Office would not hesitate to start World War III to achieve the same kind of forced unity.

The dictator might fantasize that he could do something that Hitlerish, but several things conspire against him, or anyone similarly motivated.

As bad as the world is right now, it remains inoculated against true world war by the existence of doomsday weapons. It takes more than one country to play World War. In the 1930s, military hardware had advanced beyond what made World War I such a shocking slaughter and generational trauma, but you still had to go out in person to deliver your devastation. You had to drive there, march there, sail there, fly there. Germany eventually did develop early missile technology, but it remained pretty random right through the end of the conflict. At the start of the war, you just rolled out and faced whatever opposing forces rolled from their side to meet you.

The first world war was the result of unfortunate treaties and an outmoded sense of what warfare actually involved. Once it had started, it was hard to stop. Territory and resources were in play that would set the stage for the rest of the century.

The second world war was a result of the bungling of the aftermath of the first. But it might have happened anyway, because macho posturing was in vogue, and evolving weapon technology made global conquest look doable.

If the current dictator wanted to start a world war, it would be a nuclear war. I want to believe that our military would mutiny at that point rather than roll the dice on a limited nuclear exchange. Anyone who agreed to try that would have to be suicidal. It remains a possibility because of the number of miserable bastards who would commit murder-suicide. Look at the number of family annihilations in which a depressed individual, usually a man, takes out his domestic partner and their offspring before ending his own life. On a global political scale, look at the the kind of people who commit suicide attacks. Through history, they're not exclusively brown people from desert countries. All it would take is the perfect concentration of suicidal zealots who are willing to destroy humanity if they can't boss it around on their terms. Gather them, induct them into the military, and promote and assign them to get your cadre of murder-suicide soldiers at the controls of the nuclear arsenal. Fire one missile and see what happens. It makes a good movie plot, but is much harder to put together in the real world.

If you think that an attack by conventional forces, on Greenland, for instance, would do the trick, I call your attention to World War V -- the Vietnam War -- which was so divisive and unpopular that it set the stage for much of the strife that divides the nation today. By the 1990s we were ready to "give war a chance," as the gleeful militarists said at the time, but then the years of inconclusive bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq reminded us of why it wasn't so great after all.

The only people with any enthusiasm for war at this point are the chickenhawks who never put themselves in harm's way. This regime has a pretty high concentration of them, but the people who would have to execute the orders have been trained in more than just TV tough guy bullshit. The TV tough guy currently cosplaying as Secretary of Defense does have military experience, but not a service academy education. His on-again-off-again military career is not the same as the lifelong commitment of a truly senior military officer. He's well marinaded, but not seasoned.

And what if the dictator did start World War III? You and I can't do anything about that. The minority party in Congress can't do anything about that. Any move by military leaders to do anything about it would risk court martial and possibly execution. They might do it, because unswerving obedience isn't a good look when the survival of the human species is on the line. Keep hoping. Getting worried about it, even getting terrified about it, does you absolutely no good. Your "bug-out bag" and escape plans couldn't get you far enough to avoid the fallout -- literally -- of the conflagration. Think of Nevil Shute's On the Beach. So forget about it and focus on the boring, undramatic machinery of a functioning democracy. Continue opposing the regime through the non-routine actions of nonviolent resistance, and through community cohesiveness in the event that the goons come to your town and start throwing their weight around.

"Let's walk down and get 'em all."

 The headline of this entry is the punchline to a joke you may already know. In it, a young bull says to an older bull, "Look at all those cows down there in the pasture! Let's run down and each get us one!" The older bull answers, "Let's walk down and get 'em all."

Ha ha, right? It's about getting laid. It's also not so subtly predatory in its depiction of male-female relations, but that's not today's focus. Today we look at its aspect of low-key patience.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the current regime in the White House needs to, "recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure they get back to get what they wanted to begin with -- and that is to remove people from the country."

It's a chillingly broad statement. Stephen Miller wants to remove more than half -- way more than half -- of the total population to get to the sparsely settled white homeland he has been pushing the regime to build for him. Steve Bannon regularly promotes the "great replacement theory" that views the immigration of non-white people into Europe and North America as a planned long game to outnumber and eventually overcome the white variant of human coloration. Abbott did not specify the number of people to remove. He merely suggested that a more methodical approach without the theatrics of military strikes on apartment buildings and street executions by short-tempered federal employees would yield a better result and not threaten Republican electoral chances as much.

The Republican campaign to purge people of a darker hue began with shock and awe demonstrations like the abduction of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others, to get a lot of immigrants, illegal and otherwise, to pack up and leave on their own, saving the regime money and enhancing their prestige as irresistible power. They have stuck with it, escalated, and poured money into it, long past the time when it was obviously generating resistance more than surrender.

A methodical, quiet campaign might seem to take longer than running in with flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper spray, and the occasional head shot, but it's their only chance. And the goal of sending 100 million people away is just ridiculous. However, they probably hope that a high aspiration will pull their actual results higher than if they truly concentrated on the worst of the worst and sifted only for violent criminals and non-white fraudsters. The shock and awe campaign gave a quick shot of deportations -- many of them completely improper and indefensible -- but it's losing traction now. A quieter approach below the threshold of public notice might have sent fewer people away initially, but could keep on disappearing individuals without arousing the massive public backlash that the atrocities in Minnesota have finally inspired.

There was pushback from the start, but the street executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti pushed it over the top. Particularly the murder of Pretti highlighted that the regime has no use for either of the first two amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. They'd already taken a big steaming dump on the fourth and fifth. They could snarkily claim that a federal agent making a snap decision to shoot someone dead in the street constitutes a very speedy and public trial as promised in the sixth, but a whole lot of other due process elements are missing. When the goons disarmed a legally permitted gun owner and then shot him, they kicked the biggest hornet's nest in American society.

It may be too late to spin this shit tornado down to a mere swirl of dust in a vacant lot. The damage is done. The current regime aspires to absolute tyranny. The stupid Supreme Court and their stupid "unitary executive theory" guaranteed that any president could become a dictator. They knew that the candidate under their banner had said that he wanted to be a dictator. No one should have been surprised when he immediately set out to be one. Forget "day one."

Even as allies of the dictator fall away, take note that they don't fall far. They used the current occupant of the Oval Office to get their brand of authoritarianism into power. They still want to rule rather than represent, because they know better than you do. Freedom does not come from God or any natural order. Freedom comes from them as they see fit to dole it out to you.

Any libertarian or outright anarchist will chime in at this point to say that the same principle applies to any rules or laws from a government with the power to field law enforcement agencies. Don't tell me I can't dump my waste oil right on the ground. The soil is sandy and soaks it right up! No problem! We have to walk a careful balance between letting people make their own decisions on the basis of their intelligence and morals, and limiting the damage caused by the multitude who have neither one. All are equal before the law, but that doesn't mean that the law should be powerless. Violators should be prosecuted.

Our elected legislators make the laws. We have to pay close attention to how those laws are worded and applied. Citizen government makes us all part of it. Big government? I'll say. Even if you demolish the formal structure, we are all governing each other in the aftermath, without a referee. Government is inescapable. Small government is far more dangerous than a full-size, every-adult-included representative democracy.

We'd all love to set it and forget it and devote ourselves to daily gratification of our impulses, but that is -- sadly -- completely impossible. It's like putting your SUV on cruise control and then hopping into the middle row seats to watch a video.

The murder of US citizens

Customs and Border Patrol has murdered a law-abiding American citizen exercising his First and Second Amendment rights. News and video of the cold-blooded street execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, Jan. 24 spread rapidly. The blatant criminality of the federal agents was obvious. The regime is trying very hard to provoke a resister to open fire on a federal agent. Resisters are resisting the temptation to jettison public sympathy by a foolish act of violence.

In a country of 340 million people, odds are it won't happen to you. Right around here, we have no large concentration of targets for ICE and CBP. People with empathy and a broader world view are speaking up and demonstrating, much to the amusement of the more conservative individuals who believe that if it isn't happening right in front of them it's someone else's problem. The Puritan heritage adds, aloud or silently, that those people probably brought it on themselves in some way, too. In any case, no point getting all het up over something that probably will never affect you directly.

Won't it, though?

In our business, we cater to a lot of visitors who come to play around the lake when it's thawed, and on the snow in our legendary winters. We also serve the locals. This winter, the customers we've seen have been very normal. They exhibit a normal level of cheerfulness, engage in only normal amounts of chiseling for discounts, and buy at the price levels we commonly expect. However, we wait hours, or even days, between them. Something is suppressing demand. Beyond our narrow interests, the town itself has seemed unusually quiet.

The business presents a scrupulously apolitical front, although upper management is lifelong Republican. Their more politically connected relatives opposed the current occupant of the Oval Office in his first bid for it in 2016. I don't know if they had rolled over by 2020. One of them told me that they did not vote for the current occupant in his 2024 bid, when the state of New Hampshire as a whole went for Kamala Harris.

Down here in the labor pool, I have opposed the conservatives for decades. I don't know where my only co-worker stands, because I don't want to complicate our working relationship. I don't get the sense that he's a fan of the regime. Even just for practical purposes, the destructive rampage of DOGE and the continued smash and grab that has followed have made life more difficult for everyone, by hobbling useful agencies like the National Weather Service. The people I spend time with the most are not the kind to protest, ever. Bitch and grumble, yes. The founders of the shop used to growl all the time about chiseling rich people, but always voted with the rich people's political candidates. I don't see that changing.

As I travel through the semi-rural, heavily wooded suburbia that this once genuinely rural area has become, I see a few shrines to the authoritarian, racist regime, a smaller number of outright public displays of opposition, and mile after mile of noncommittal anonymity.

It's been mostly lousy weather for winter recreation, as the drought makes even downhill ski areas have to worry about having enough water. I don't know how their attendance numbers have been, but I do know that I have seen very little weekend traffic on Route 16. It was a little heavy southbound on Martin Luther King Day, as whoever had accumulated at the ski areas up north all drained south at more or less the same time. In "normal" years, they would have surged in together in more of a cohesive parade. That did not happen this year.

It's hard to watch the news of what's happening in Minnesota, and what happened in Portland, OR, and Los Angeles over the summer as well as the Blackhawk raid on the apartment building in Chicago. The goons have arrived in Portland, Maine, now, where they are faring no better than they have in any other city they've tried to victimize. They may be doing worse. I read one post from a local describing how the immigrant and minority residents are not clustered into contiguous neighborhoods, forcing the goons "federal agents" to have to hunt around for them individually. And resistance groups had already organized many of the mitigation tactics that evolved in Minneapolis, sheltering and supporting targeted groups from having to travel around on daily errands that would expose them to abduction.

If it isn't happening right around you, it can be very hard to imagine it being real. That's no excuse for letting heroic resisters get gunned down, but the isolation from the hot zones of confrontation also limits what a person can do to help. We can send money, hold vigils, contact our elected officials, write op-ed pieces, join bridge brigades that try to raise awareness of the problem. That creates its own problem, as people unaffected by the brutality grow weary of the constant calls to do something, when "something" remains pretty nebulous. 

What would a general strike look like around here where employment is dispersed over a wide area dotted with genuinely small businesses, mostly oriented in winter toward meeting tangible needs of the locals? Maybe a few people from around the general area believed strongly enough in the cult to go to DC for Jan. 6, 2021, but even if their fervor has reversed, and they have turned against their god-king, the kinds of event opportunities offered to them don't appeal to their "storm the fortress" and "hang Mike Pence" sensibilities.

I don't have the kind of snappy answer that appeals to the general public. I don't even have a succinct, policy-nerd answer. I'm not really that great a policy nerd, being rather like the pitchfork and torch crowd when it comes to direct action. So I hang back and wait for cooler heads to lay out the more effective long-term strategy and tactics.

Guns are like sex

Republicans in New Hampshire have generally been producing the kind of legislation they produce everywhere else, encroaching on women's rights, gutting public education, chatting about returning to segregated schools, playing games with the tax laws to create the illusion that they're lowering property taxes when they're just shifting the burden to a different column in the ledger... the usual crap. However, they have introduced a bill that favors a controversial position of my own: firearms education.

We live in a country where there are already more guns than people. They're here. We have a whole amendment to the Constitution dedicated to preserving the right of ownership for ordinary citizens. It's been stretched way out of shape to help the firearms industry move vast amounts of merchandise, but the principle unfortunately continues to make sense in our primitive species. Any person should have the right to be armed.

Many of us, myself included, have not prioritized personal weaponry. I mean, I have a couple of firearms, and I've gone to the range as few times, but I can think of a lot of reasons not to be armed. Plus it's expensive and time consuming to become competent and remain in practice. You might think it's as simple as pulling the little lever thingy and whatever you're aiming at troubles you no more, but the device itself requires attentive care and maintenance. Your skills require regular range time. Ammunition itself isn't cheap. If you want more advanced tactical skills, that's another whole layer of training. That's also beyond the scope of what the Republicans and I propose is a good idea.

Here's the thing: guns are a part of the fabric of our society. Refusing to teach young people how they work and how to handle them is the same as insisting on abstinence-only sex education. You can be comprehensively educated about sex and decide to abstain. There are a lot of good reasons to abstain. There are also reasons to participate over a wide range of styles. Deciding from a place of ignorance is never a good idea. So is just learning it on the street.

Educating everyone robs the knowledge of its insider power for the people who had already sought it out. Giving everyone a functional base of exposure to the technology and terminology means that arguments against use have more strength. The aficionados can't sneer at your lack of technical vocabulary. Sure, there will always be higher levels of immersion, and changing slang to try to evade the outer circles. But no one will be completely outside the circle.

Obviously, the teachers have to be well screened, but that's true anyway. And the curriculum has to be scrupulously neutral. So the text of the bill may allow for or even nudge toward a pro-gun bias, and that's not good. But the basic idea is sound.

Guns are widely available. They will remain pretty accessible in this country unless there are some drastic -- and probably undesirable -- changes in government. Sure, we need to tighten up access quite a bit, but it's decades too late to make them all go away.

Even now, Second Amendment folks on the "left" are coming out in response to ICE atrocities, to indicate that the stakes for the front line agents might be higher than the happy hooligans anticipated. It's not a great development, but it does demonstrate that the Bill of Rights cuts both ways.

Levels of training on both sides probably span a range from utter noobs to ex-military or law enforcement. If actual fighting broke out, it would be a mess. That's true of fighting in general. The mess gets worse as the use of weapons increases. But one thing that could cut through the gunslinger fantasies would be actual education. It gives everyone a basic informed vocabulary. It sets a baseline standard for what everyone knows about the uses, dangers, rights, and responsibilities inherent in having and using a gun.

Next, institute my plan for driver education that requires anyone getting a license for the first time to have to use a bicycle for transportation for a full year, whether it's 12 continuous months (impractical with our winters) or just a total of 12 months collected over no more than a three-year period.