Author: lefttiger

A tangent or parallel of Bacigalupi’s SF Classic “The Water Knife”, which was a look into one possibility of how the society of a few decades from now around the US Midwest may experience life.

“The story of this diner, and this strip mall?”

One guy down the counter laughed out loud, nearly a spit take into his coffee. He wiped his lips with a napkin and then spoke.

“Well, this is the whole original place, and here we are, and we’re in the same spot on the map as we always were.”

He gestured out the front windows, which were of an old style, with glass doors and metal handbars to open and close them. To either side were large windows spreading the length of the diner from chest height up to the lowish ceiling, which was much wider than it was long.

The three particular large catamarans directly across from the wide promenade and boardwalk leading to the docks rose up on legs high enough that their streamlined prows bobbed up and down lightly in and out of sight at the top of the windows.

From this point, the story could be true two ways.

I guess I’ll tell the less exciting one first, but it has just as much water in it. You may be too young to remember when “too much salt water” was a complaint of the World.

Now that we have balance, it’s easier to talk about all these things. Though, they were exciting times, and I worry that perhaps we risk much forgetting what being so immediately alive felt like, physically, I mean. Sure, we all are fit and well and we work hard and bruise our shins and compare scars, but being able to cast our sight out farther, of being focused on helping the Galaxy and hence the fleet of other Galaxies out there, sometimes that may make us forget that our contribution comes from our struggle.

Sorry, I ramble sometimes. I’m younged again lately for a time out, so of course I want to explain things you probably already know.

Oh, here’s the part where the first way starts:

“Oh, how was the weather when you came in? I have to leave in a few minutes and I won’t look until I get to my Ship.”

This said by a young woman at one of the booths.

The young woman in foreign clothes looked at her, the one who had asked about the incongruity of the diner and strip mall with the more modern town. She blinked once, perhaps to hide her admiration as she looked at the woman in the booth with the catamaran crew clothing. No way to tell if it was a uniform, with only the one of her to look at.

“There is a reasonably predictable storm whose edge will give us some heavy squalls, but sees won’t raise the boardwalk today for twenty miles out in a South by Southeast track. Should be settling by tomorrow sunrise, for a calm but overcast today?”

The woman nodded.

“Thanks. I think you mean seas, though.”

“Thank you. Seas, then.”

The man who decided to explain it was behind the counter, in front of another man who could be seen working to prepare food. Mostly everyone was listening, but only just. You couldn’t see the food, as the wall was high enough for him to be able to comfortably put the plates on the steel shelf, underneath infrared lamps, but the smell was for everyone in the restaurant delicious but only unfamiliar to the traveler.

Just wondering. Thanks.

Yes, I know this isn’t the support channel. That was a joke.

and show the ways that those two amazing sets of performers both reached out to so many, and gave them character.

I cannot caution you strongly enough that while there is certainly no foul language used, this talk by former President Jimmy Carter may discuss very troubling things going on, in I think a very objective and bipartisan manner.

This is very difficult material to hear even for someone who was aware of some of it via “reading the news from lots of places and listening to a lot of people a lot”. I agree with him in that I do see a way forward that does not have to involve conflict between groups. In fact, I think this may be the one thing that a majority of US peoples and some other Nations’ peoples can agree to discuss above many other beliefs.

There is no link. You should be able to find it easily if you are in the US or many other places, but it would be better if you chose to do so via earnest decision.

This page will grow as I bring in more research I’ve done over the years.

tl;dr

“Save all the information available on endangered species, the DNA, any pattern-of-life data, video and other media, and then allow new instances of them to live in a simulated world with no humans.”

We’ve seen the Asiatic Cheetah, the Sumatran Tiger, and the American Caribou* go extinct recently. This is not to say there are none still alive, simply that they will no longer survive as natural species. Efforts are being made to freeze viable genetic material of these animals. Equally important is saving their appearance, behavior, movement, chemistry, environment, and anything else we can find via enduring data stores of raw numbers, images, sounds, and our impressions of these magnificent creatures humanity’s children will only see when they or someone else can provide a safe world for them to live in.

A few years ago people were surprised when certain domain names turned out to be worth millions, now perhaps some of the shortest or most i18n are worth factors of ten times that amount. Now some are surprised that all of the effort that went into making something like Bitcoin or its descendants and siblings.

Yes. That’s the short answer. The slightly longer answer is that Linux Mint is perhaps the best OS (Operating System) to try if you are thinking about moving away from Windows.

If you play any but the most resource-friendly games (browser-based games like the farming one), then you may wish to go for SteamOS, but you probably already knew that, and are only reading this in a search-snippet.

The reason I recommend Linux Mint aside from the obvious ‘installing it is pretty much like Windows with a lot “oh, it’s not asking me for a DNA sample and the spare key to that safety deposit box I forgot about that it somehow knew about before I connected it to the Internet”.1

Windows is so ubiquitous that we forget that $100 is a great barrier to entry to so many. Now, we hear the inevitable probably-likely-true rumours that Windows 7 will be deprecated in 2020. Well, now that we al think about it Microsoft not securing Windows 7 could lead to an even worse repeat of the greater-than-zero chance that there was widespread election fraud

1. There is, of course, a way to install even Windows 10 without all of the onerous things like the to-be-honest-maybe-smart-for-most Microsoft account. Think about how many people MS has in their database, and how much money it must make for them. BoA money, must be. I won’t list all of that here, but it helps to have install media. You can actually download perhaps every version from Microsoft’s download center, to burn .iso’s regardless of license or account. They planned for that a while back when they piggy-backed off of the spectre microcode fixes to brick a few million devices so we’d have to buy more, etc etc. That’s what the rumors say, but of course they would when the whole thing was just probably not the best that could have been done but ‘what was done’ and each step was correct in the context of the moment. Why were we picking on MS again? Oh, because AMD and Intel told them to slow down etc. but MS saw people falling into the abyss of complete world-wide identity systems failure. Thankfully (?) only a few hospital systems were cryptolockered, and presumably (tbc)
   

The car alarm chirped twice as she locked the car. They turned and walked through the parking garage. She started to make a mental note of the huge number five against a red background indicating which floor they were on, but then realized it was the one straight across from the mall’s movie theaters and so easy to remember.

It was Sunday morning, and they had both had coffee and she felt too much energy to be just going to the mall. She thought about breaking into a run, past the elvators and stairwell and across the concrete pedestrian bridge. She started a step and grinned over at him, and then took off with him a step behind, trying to run with one hand holding his opened watch band, the case smacking against the underside of his wrist. They thundered past a young family who was safely off to the side, waiting for the elevator. He turned his head slightly to nod in apology at the commotion but she smiled and hardly glanced back. He tried to catch up with her as they thundered across the bridge.

They slowed to a walk as the neared the doors.

“I didn’t mean that in a bad way, I really don’t. I have ninety-nine examples I can think of times I personally, or someone in my field, has criticized a user unjustly. Oddly, even though I have heard gripes about users that I’ve had to offer counterpoint to, I’ve never heard even those most bitter information-technology-wars veteran encapsulate the issues we are all facing quite that succinctly.”, he said.

She sighed. They took turns ‘getting things hooked into their lip’ which was a harsh metaphor that they said aloud as a last resort. Today, there had been something with him that morning. He had been happy enough at the launch party on Friday night, though it had been an awkward semi-mandatory when-is-it-polite-to-leave affairs. Yesterday, he had revealed the truth of the sting of suceeding, a software launch of a program that was now buried in features. Everyone who wasn’t qualified to understand the basic realities of computing were adding features like they were packing a suitcase for the airport. As if they could just keep going, adding whatever they thought of, until they hit some illusory and arbitrary weight limit that was news to the coders coding the thing.

“Bad way? When you said that the majority of people, ninety-nine and five nines, I think you said, just suck at computers?”

“Yeah.”

“You keep liking that number, ninety-nine. Are you going to start trying to become the next Kanwheat again?”

“Hah. No. Hey, why do I have to emulate him of all people?”

“Sensitive. You’re a mutt anyhow. I think your family likes fucking more than they let on. I think your grandmothers on both sides kept a few secrets, maybe took a c-note into the delivery room so they’d fudge the blood test.”

“Nice try, spouse.”

She smiled, a little satisfied she had accomplished a little bit of ‘huss’ training of her husband. A friend of hers would always ask ‘is he huss-buh-roken yet?’ and laugh at her own semi-annual joke.

“So you were saying that everyone should have to get computer ‘driver’s licenses, even for smart phones?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Think you’d pass the test?”

“Well, not for my phone, but for operating systems that move around less moment-to-moment, sure.”

“Any chance you could stop going on about this for the weekend? I’ll take you to that wind tunnel place later.”

“Hmmm. Hanging face first in a hundred and twenty miles at two dollars a minute. let me think. OK, deal. Well, I can try.”

“You say that a lot. “

“Sometimes I mean it.”

He held the big quiet glass door open for her and to let a different family pass on their way back across the flying walkway back to the parking lot. Rather than remind them both about their meaning to park on the bottom floor this time, so they could run up all five flights of the parking lot’s mostly empty stairs (everyone used the elevators nowadays), he closed his mouth and just made a mental note to do that next time.

It was getting near the holidays, and people still got excited for that even if everyone seemed to have faced the truth that there really wasn’t as much money in the World as everyone thought there was. The weather had delivered a snowy backdrop criss-crossed with the oily dark lines of the highways and six-lane routes through the built-up complex of office high-rises, condo high-rises, and of course, the bastion-like indoor mall which used to be one of the original focuses of the area.

As the tags and banners called from every corner of the huge fifth-floor of the five story department store about savings to be had on gifts for everyone (especially oneself, lately) they both smiled tightly at each other, as if to challenge each other to make it all the way through the store, and to the main concourse to head to the movie theaters. She always noticed the smiling children and young people, but the incongrous way the parents eyes were sad, maybe a little, even as they smiled. The one great thing about the gifiting holidays was that there was usually no need to say ‘no’ right then, for those children young enough that they would not have expected the purchase ot be made right then, or even necessarily by their parents as opposed to the wondrous angles who may or not be bringing those presents every year.

Thirty was actually a good age, she thought. She had been really surprised by that, after twenty-nine years or so of jokes about women ‘stopping the clock’ and having a twenty-ninth, twenty-ninth, twenty-ninth, and then suddenly the unexpected thirty-ninth birthday, with the cycle repeating. She felt his hand on his arm, not the usual guidance he would offer on her arm if she was on the phone and about to head towards a stairwell, or a wall. He did it to, but wouldn’t admit it. Perhaps he was a little better at it, but then again he never really gave the people on the other end of the phone the proper attention, so perhaps a balance.

That was the thought she was able to complete as she looked at him and noticed he was looking at her and down at one of the cross-over areas of the concourse that hugged the sides of the huge open area which all of the stores faced in towards. Normally, there would be a gaming system set-up for kids to play dance games or whatever least-offensive but most-popular game was being launched that season. It would always draw a crowd, and people laughed and really seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Beyond that, though, was something new. She thought it had been one of those phone repair or perhaps jewlery kiosks that dotted the center areas on every floor, with more of course on the bottom that you could look down to from up here.

“What is that?”, he asked, stopping off to the side of the railing where it widened. Fellow shoppers moved past, none showing any special notice of what his eyes could not reconcile.

“Well it’s just…”, she stopped, but then finished what she was saying, “…a new display for the holidays, or something?”

She hadn’t meant to finish it as a question, but the question would not stay out of her voice. She hadn’t ever seen him like this, and then she blushed and had a strange deja vu at the suddenly realization. She hadn’t ever seen him like this, not scared, but suddenly very aware of everything around them. It was contagious, and she consicously began to echo with her eyes the way he was looking not only at the new sales display taking up a piece of prime holday-season mall real estate, but the people around it. They walked past and glanced over and smiled, obvisouly puzzled at what they were seeing, yet so used to seeing amazing things revealed with every passing shopping year, that they just looked vaguely troubled, but still they would quickly smile again and shake their heads a little to each other, and then move on.

She looked at him, at the way his eyes almost seemed to vibrate as he looked at the display, which was nothing more than a small conference table with a business-attired man and woman standing, while three other people sat at the table, two talking to each other with the third paying her attention to the two standing. The woman standing was gesturing to a small polished-metal rectangle the size of a credit card with a softly-glowing green circle that seemed a button, probably, but the fascinating thing was that by some trick of display magic the rectangle that the woman’s fingers were pointing at seemed to just be hanging there in the air, with no visible means of support.

“Yeah.”, she said, “That’s a little odd. How?”, she trailed off.

Now she had her head cocked a little to one side, and so the two of there stood looking across the empty five story distance to the landing, to the kids and parents facing them and focused on the game, which seemed to have evolved since last year and now involved a skateboard deck with no turcks or wheels, but lumps of plastic in their place to allow the player to tilt and change the angle of the board. They couldn’t see the game itself, only the back of the large display screen that everyone looking their way was watching. No one seemed to notice them looking past them.

He rubbed his face for a few seconds, and then opened that hand away from his face in gesture to the engimatic whatever-it-was-advertising. As he spoke he was shaking his head as if he didn’t really believe his own words.

“It’s a hologram?”, he tried.

She rolled her eyes, knowing that he knew what she’d say. While her husband was fascinated by such things, she was the one who had to take physics and engineering classes, and kept up with the state of things. She was already shaking her head but let him finish, and then said what both of them were thinking.

“It’s too real. All of it, the people there, the way it’s hanging. It’s just mannequins, and some clever expensive magic trick. They just want it to look…”

That wasn’t right either. However they had done it, the seven in the scene … hadn’t there been six a minute ago? wearing the immaculate business attire if anything, looked even more real than the people walking past them, as if the lines separating the edges of their clothes, of the strands and tops of their hair, the outstretched hand gesturing toward the control, all seemed somehow much sharper than the fuzzy edges their eyes usually saw.
They kept staring at the scene, but the people sitting at the table didn’t move. The man standing next to the gesturing woman kept a half-spoken, smiling observation frozen in time with his silent, open mouth and his perpetual smile. The woman’s hand, the fingertips pointing at the suspended button, had the presence of a cast-bronze statue, as if it there were no moving it for all time. She shook her head, puzzled at the stong reaction to nothing more than some clever new trick of lighting or material she just hand’t read up on yet.

“Let’s go see”, she said.

She didn’t wait, but fell into the crowd circulating in that direction. Her left hand trailed behind her expectantly, waiting for him to start after her and take it in his right. He winced and thought for a moment, and then caught up with her to cover the three storefront-lengths between them and the strange display.

“It’s too bright in here for it to be a hologram, isn’t it?”, he asked.

“Right. Last I checked the only way they could do something like this is with some kind of silk or background, or at least something like a projector we would see? I could be wrong… they do amazing things so quickly.”

“Eh, it’s just not right, somehow.”

“There’s no way we won’t be able to figure out something out when we get closer.”

He didn’t say anything, but inhaled deeply in what was almost a yawn. She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head at him.

“Don’t get excited or anything”, she said and let the last ‘or anything’ trail off into a muttering grumble that sounded like a complaining puppy. He laughed.

“Sure.”

As they came around the crowd he was surprised to see an actual green velvet rope surrounding the diorama of ‘people in a meeting’. It was suspended between heavy-footed bronze posts that were waist-high and set perhaps two meters apart, giving the effect of an exhibit in a museum. The green was almost like a light-stick, the kind you bend until a capsule of glass breaks and you shake it, and the obvious quality reflected in the way the light glittered off of the crushed-velvet surface. As they approached, a couple, married he guessed from the way he carried more bags than her and how she led the way, speaking back over her shoulder to him. He heard them speaking Mandarin in what sounded like a Singapore accent, and so he started to greet them but then they were past him. He was at the rope, putting his hand on it and staring at it closely. It should be a red velvet rope, he thought. He couldn’t remember ever seeing one in green, but then thought that maybe old black and white movies and photos were where he had seen them, so perhaps there were some green ones after all.

She was standing with her hands behind her back, turned ninety degrees to the ‘exhibit’ or whatever it was. Both eyebrows were raised at him now. She kept her face blank except for the obvious query her eyebrows conveyed. he thought he knew her well enough that the expression must be saying ‘Well, here we are. You first.’ He always ended up playing the tank in the types of online games they played, the player in a team that would put on all the armor and pick up the big shield and try to have the ‘bad guys’ (always kind of relative in those situations) beat on him, rather than his teammates.

He realized he was having the same feeling as when the two of them had gone to Chicago, and gone up in the Willis Tower which used to be the Sears Tower, he has read. It had seemed odd that Sears was ever big enough to have the tallest skyscraper in the world, as it had been for so many decades. They had dared each other to, and did, go out on the glass floor that extended from one of the top floors. Others had walked out with their own phones in full arm-upraised selfie-mode, their eyes wide and not looking down.

Instead, they had started walking out hand-in-hand but then she had stopped at the last step before the glass, and laughingly snapped her hand out of his so that he had to step down firmly on the glass of the observation platform to keep from tripping. He stood out there, forcing himself to look not only all around, out at the whole city, but then down, straight down 1,353 feet all the way down to the street as seen through the glass underneath his feet. She had come out a second later and they had stood, holding hands, looking at the city together, but she hadn’t let go of his hand. He hadn’t wanted her too, but after a few minutes it was much more amazing than scary. he wasn’t there yet on this one.

Lifting his head, he looked directly at the man in the diorama who was standing as if he might be jokingly arguing with the woman pointing at the button. He had the perfect salt-and-pepper gray hair of a man who spent a lot on his appearance. Looking closer, the man, who he thought of as ‘the smiling man’, wasn’t really that happy. Although his whole face was done up in a clothing model’s practiced joy, his eyes looked angry, perhaps. The edges of his nostrils were incongruous with the smile and the tilt of his head, flared slightly. His right arm, the farthest away, had its elbow tucked tight against his side with his forearm extended and palm upraised in gentle complaint. The other, closer arm, though, gripped the edge of the desk tightly it looked like. The man’s hand was too tan to see ‘white knuckles’, but he was obvisouly gripping it tightly for no good reason, except perhaps to control himself.

Still, the ‘smiling man’ didn’t move but was so much more real and alive than any manequin could be. Was it a trick of the light, that he seemed brighter and more defined somehow than the shoppers who walked on past behind him?

He dragged his eyes away from the man, to look at the button in the brushed steel credit-card sized rectangle. It was just to the left of smiling man. Now he could see why they had chosen that bright green for the rope, as it was a close match to the ‘button’. Now that he was closer, just the small conference table away, he could see it could have as easily been a decoration, a shallowly rounded cabochan in green such as a piece of jade, but more transparent and with subtle flares of light rolling across it like an opal’s flashes of color all in shades of green. And it just hung there in mid-air at eye-level, suspended by nothing he could see.

“Blue.”, she said suddenly. “I’ve never seen a shade of blue like that.”

The following sentence is Choice 1 for the first sentence in Chapter 2.

“<his name>”, she said.

The following sentence is Choice 2 for the first sentence in Chapter 2.

Thanks for joining me.  I was apart.

Perhaps the first thing any even half-aware computer programmer, especially those who work with both web programming and whatever ‘data science’ is (no one knows… shhhh) should address on any new site is to mention the incredible increase in ‘siloing’ of people aka ‘Users’ (w/ a capital ‘U’).

As more and more of us choose to remove ourselves from one-to-one in-person communication except with those we choose to, the domain lexicons of everyone are diverging at an incredible rate.  Everything you say, either in person or online, will almost certainly be ‘heard’ a different way by someone.  At the least, another’s understanding of what you ‘meant’ will be parallel or tangent to what you ‘thought you meant’.

At worst, and much more likely, is that you do in fact mean something else, at least subconsciously.  This actually is a phenomenon that is being urgently described (∴ formulae exist, which can be applied) by Sociologists (who turn out to be pretty good at math) and can be found on the National Institute’s of Health ‘pubmed’ system at NCBI, and search the Sociology papers for ‘bullshit’. It’s called ‘Believing Your Own Bullshit’.

You may ask ‘where’s the link to that’?  The answer is, if you were interested enough in what I had written, it would be better if you actually went and looked it up.  The vast majority of human beings who even read this are either not that interested, or just clicking on anything that looks like a distraction.

Now, this isn’t to say that I am a pessimist. Far from it, in fact.  I know, in my heart of heart that things will be OK even if they really go to complete shit.  That’s just one of those things about persepctive. Even if the world keeps on dragging you down, as the old song says, that’s no reason not laugh and smile. When you do that, at some point you realize you aren’t so much falling as flying, and maybe you’ll find someone down low who needs a lift up the stairs.

So what? What’s the point?  As I am the sort of ‘bouncy’ (kind words) person who has to just run everywhere and see everything, what I am seeing is really, really scary and people need to know that ‘we all see it happening’.  It seems as if everyone is diving into silos of inclusion-exclusion such as social media apps and online-games in a way I’ve never seen before.  It really wasn’t making sense when i was seeing it as simply isolated cases of very-addictive user experience. Something seems to be really putting people on edge in virtually every domain.  Look at any issue of a Psychology, Sociology, Human Resource Management, virtually any Governement agency charged with the good of everyone, and everyone is seeing the same thing happening.

People are walking around scared in a way that is far beyond what might be expected.  We, especially those of us who live in the most diverse and cosmopolitan areas, have known people all of our lives who have been through war, famine, the worst you could imagine, yet they never seemed to act as people do now.  Certainly, the lack of confidence in our Governemntal systems isn’t helping.  Is that it?  Terrorism isn’t entirely fictional, although it is certainly not something it would even make sense to worry about, unless someone is paying you to. People have tried to blame games, movies, and other media as long as anyone can remember, and perhaps there is merit in that, but I would tend to think they are more of a system than any cause.  Kids go and play FortNite not to practice for doing harm to others, but to learn how to live in a world where ‘that could suddenly happen’.  Of course, learning tactics and even strategy will only go so far n the real world, but who knows?  Maybe Discord will keep working no matter what, somehow, and the twenty-somethings will make great and necessary communicators.  Perhaps they will be the ones who teach the older generation how to talk to each other.

My best guess as to ‘what has changed’ is simply that we have been allowing our managers and leaders, and even our parents and older wise folk, to bullshit us for too long.  I mean ‘bullshit’ in the formal sense, in the Sociological sense.  ‘Formal bullshit’.  It’s a thing, you can look it up on NCBI and search for the ‘bullshit’ papers.

The one paragraph summary of ‘formal bullshit’ is pretty simple.  People in positions of authority are given unrealistic demands for work to be done, at ridiculously low cost, with workers the company doesn’t care about, who are all probably spending a good chunk of their time trying to find a ‘loyal’ employer.  No, that wasn’t backwards.  Companies just have removed ‘loyalty’ as anything except a platitude to explain ‘why we’re fucking you over’, and people stopped believing things anyone above them said a long time ago.  Those who do believe things people who are supposed to be in charge tell them, such as young people or military veterans, or those who have had their emotional maturity forced out of synch with their chronological maturity suffer the most, as they are the most trusting. So, managers and leaders tell ‘half-truths’ or ‘euphemisms’ that, even if people understand them, people increasingly simply will not tolerate it anymore.

Given the state of the world today, it’s hard to really listen to anything that comes out of the mouths from the same people who got us into this mess. So, people are casting about for truths.  There was an old television show that captured the world’s attention with the engimatic ‘the turth is out there’. That was at a time before there was ‘too much truth out there’, perhaps. I think that there are increasingly situations where ‘bullshit’ and ‘no bullshit’ simply cannot co-exist, and we see a lot fo social issues because of it.

It is said often now ‘No Justice, No Truth’, ‘Know Justice, Know Truth’ and many are disturbed by what they think is an ominous tone when they ‘hear’ the first version said.  Which version would you hear, had you heard it said aloud before reading it?  I think that so many very intelligent people are saying this is pretty simple.  It’s a formula that is probably the only way forward.  We cannot proceed in any meaningful fashion without a levelling of the playing field.  It makes no sense, as everyone seems to be saying, that innocent people are imprisoned while the most corrupt receive the most rewards.

So, what’s going on?  Why do you think people getting so squirrely lately? It seems like everyone is picking sides for some kind of end-game that no one even wants.  Why?  We can’t blame everything on one guy, can we? Would anyone give anyone, especially that ‘any one’ that much credit to have this much power over all of us, regardless of job title?

The weird thing in all this is that somehow, by being the worst possible person for the job, we’ve all suddenly awoke to the possibility of changing things like our current leadership by poular demand.  Under any previous administration, even Nixon, there was a ‘let’s let the system work’ feeling overall. Certainly, marginalized groups have never stopped pointing out that they are being marginilized.  Yet now, everyone feels a little of what so many have felt not only their own lives but a casting out that has lasted generations.

With this empowerment, though, come those who didn’t get the memo that tryign to force the situation with lone-wolf behavior is alwyas going to have the opposite effect.  The object of hatred becomes a victim, and whatever horrible things they may or may not have done will never be known.  The outliers who are stirred to action don’t see this. Worse, they are gullible enough to believe the broadcast promises of inclusion, only to realize that they don’t fit in the promised new home as they did anywhere else.  Perhaps that’s all it is, the thing that’s causing small numbers of misguided but motivated people to do horrible things.  They believed the bullshit, and simply could not reconcile things when it melted before their eyes.

“Do you know who the President is?”

(mumbling from the tranqs):

“Some asshole.”

– David S. Goyer, “Blade: Trinity” (2004)

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