The Avalanche of Current Events!

Cloward-Piven never thought of this!

Want to see minutes, hours, days of productive time zoom past? Check out X anytime. Since Twitter stopped twitting, hard-core news events are in a downpour; comments come on like a wagonload of wet goats! Even the most seriously addicted hounds for information are barely keeping up. Time for serious consideration and contemplation is hard to come by.

What’s It All About, Alfie?

Our old fiends [sic], Cloward and Piven must be multi-orgasammus by now! Even with the New Boss and experienced assistants this time, effectively juggling all these hand grenades while expecting a happy ending will be a challenge.

Here are a few compelling observations from friends and Substack colleagues. I share their thoughts and conclusions, but they type faster than I so why risk such insights to limited exposure?

The LA Fires:

“The [NY] Times played it safe, front-loading its article with quotes from city and fire officials, who primly insisted that the reservoirs were full, but they just ran out quickly under unprecedented demand. Also, high winds shut down aerial firefighting. And, the department’s tools and strategies were never designed for wide-scale urban firefighting in the first place.

Almost reflexively, to a woman the LA officials all blamed climate change, which is a very useful scapegoat that cannot be fined, jailed, sued, or fired. “Climate change” is a deep reservoir for unwanted blame. You just have to get your blame balloon to the brink and push it in before it bursts.

The alert and pronoun-perfect leading ladies of LA all protested that manmade climate change —punishment for our sins against mother earth— has produced a great fire for which there was no possible way to officially prepare or Mayorially imagine.” …

Social media’s grasping for explanations that fit the partially known and war-fogged facts is our collective way of informally applying the res ipsa loquitur without even knowing the dialect. At this point, people are picking out unburned, blue-colored objects in photos and speculating about DEWs like in Hawaii. Other alert citizens are uploading videos allegedly showing arsonists at work:

Who knows?

Coffee and Covid

Q, but no A

how did we lose critical thinking and critical assessment?

how did we trade quiet competence for cartoon-grade clownworld and place into positions of power plentitudes of post-peter principle poltroons?

and how, after having done so, did we watch everything wobble, fail, fall over, and ultimately catch fire and not lift a finger to stop it?

the signs were all there. it was obvious to anyone who was looking that danger was mounting in any one of a hundred spheres. the storm into which we are sailing (a storm of our own making no less) has been becoming clearly and obliviously darker and more dangerous. how on earth did the modal modern american response become “so fire anyone who knows how to drive a boat and replace them with someone who not only lacks such skill but who thinks that the most important aspect of seamanship is mermaid cosplay”?

how did we get this oblivious, this credulous, this insanely situationally unaware of the dangers from elevating actual anti-merit?

this seems like an important question and a question we should be asking because “get there” we have and the levels of interlocking and all encompassing incompetence around us are starting to build into failure cascades unlike anything the modern west has seen.

there are no systems to fall back on.

it’s all rot, rust, and ridiculousness.

and we need to get on top of this before it gets any worse.

“a crisis of confidence” - El Gato Malo

And…

What happened to all those Jersey UFOs?

Lawfare continues: Trump’s a “convicted felon”; D’s apoplectic, SCOTUS refusals, Jack Smith’s “report”, the Fanni Willis Soap Opera, Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal, “Gulf of America”, permanent Daylight Savings Time, David Muir’s clothespins and fashion fetish – the list goes on ad infinitum. And too many stories that just fade to black: hurricane victims still living in tents in WNC complete with FEMA politically demented meddling instead of humane support.

Meanwhile, outgoing hubris champion and sorta-President Joe “Pantload” Biden hands another $500M to Ukraine and a 6-month blank check to California (State clean-up vs. citizens’ losses). And just where are those 350,000 missing children? What about that list of politicians who had the costs of their various sexual peccadillos covered by taxpayers (and are still “serving” in Congress)? The P. Diddy’s “list” - anyone?

And here’s the latest from the Party of Tolerance Protecting Democracy!

But - there’s is one bit of GOOD news: Rand Paul is now the Homeland Security Senate Chairman – and that’s a Very. Big. Deal.

Heading down the home stretch, many – including me – are still anticipating Something Big and Bad in the next 10 days. What? Dunno. But speculation runs rampant. Personally, I’ve begun a 10-step Program to give up Speculation in ’25. Ten days in and no medals. But the year is young!

BW

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Finally…this is hard work! So…