I feel like Libertarians have been keeping a low profile for the last few years, after learning that airing their ridiculous views gets them almost as much ridicule as “sovereign citizen” declarations (I think there is a lot of overlap between the two groups, though.) The existence of laws and regulations is a slap in their faces, and they believe that if only they could get rid of those meddling, interfering restrictions they could live in an Edenic paradise. So a group of independent thinkers decided to build a suburb in Arizona while ignoring the need to provide water. Water? It falls out of the sky and flows on the ground, we don’t need no stinkin’ pipelines. In the desert.

Arizona law requires homebuilders in active management areas to secure a reliable source of water expected to last at least a hundred years. However, there’s a loophole: the law only applies to subdivisions of six homes or more. You can guess what some clever developers do: they simply build lots of “subdivisions” each consisting of only five homes.

These so-called “wildcat” communities are all over the state. They’re miniature havens of freedom, perfect for stubbornly independent libertarians who want to get out from under the thumb of government bureaucrats telling them where they can and can’t live. Rio Verde Foothills is one such.

But then they made an awful discovery. It turns out, even when you find a way to skirt regulations about water… humans still need water.

Curse you, physical laws of the universe! How dare you disrupt my fantasies with harsh realities?

Suddenly, these people faced what every Libertarian dreads most: consequences.

…because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, many others rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.

In my limited experience with life in the dry Eastern Washington state, residents have to pay attention to things like aquifers and reservoirs and irrigation, especially if you’re in a resource-intensive occupation like farming, and those are communal resources with strict rules about how they may be shared. Everyone has to work together to get access to the water they need. These developers decided to just ignore those rules for their own selfish gain.

But let’s not just blame Libertarians and developers. Everyone in the desert Southwest has to recognize that their environment imposes limitations on their growth.

A Jewish history teacher in Israel, Meir Baruchin, dared to criticize Israeli action in Gaza on Facebook.

“Horrific images are pouring in from Gaza. Entire families were wiped out. I don’t usually upload pictures like this, but look what we do in revenge,” said a message on 8 October, below a picture of the family of Abu Daqqa, killed in one of the first airstrikes on Gaza. “Anyone who thinks this is justified because of what happened yesterday, should unfriend themselves. I ask everyone else to do everything possible to stop this madness. Stop it now. Not later, Now!!!”

It was the day after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel, when the country was reeling from the slaughter of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of more than 240.

He’s made many posts in a similar vein, but that’s all he has done, to rightly criticize the excesses of the Israeli government and their genocidal actions. That’s all. He has written comments in a public forum decrying bad, counterproductive policies and demanding an end to the violence.

You can imagine how that turned out in a fascist state.

An unlikely charge of intent to commit treason landed Meir Baruchin, a grey-haired, softly spoken history and civics teacher, in the solitary confinement wing of Jerusalem’s notorious “Russian Compound” prison in early November.

The evidence compiled by police who handcuffed him, then drove to his apartment and ransacked it as he watched, was a series of Facebook posts he’d made, mourning the civilians killed in Gaza, criticising the Israeli military, and warning against wars of revenge.

I bet you didn’t know that “STOP KILLING PEOPLE” was such a dangerous and seditious thing to say.

Ten days after that Facebook message, he was fired from his teaching job in Petach Tikvah municipality. Less than a month later he was in a high-security jail, detained to give police more time to investigate critical views he had never tried to hide.

Inside Israel, veteran journalists, intellectuals and rights activists say, there is little public space for dissent about the war in Gaza, even three months into an offensive that has killed 23,000 Palestinians and has no end in sight. “Make no mistake: Baruchin was used as a political tool to send a political message. The motive for his arrest was deterrence – silencing any criticism or any hint of protest against Israeli policy,” the long-established Haaretz newspaper said in an editorial.

Yeah, I don’t think an “investigation” was necessary. He was jailed for openly saying things, not for sneaking around with treacherous view he wasn’t airing.

Finally, this might be one of the rare times when using the phrase “witch hunt” is appropriate.

“This story is much bigger than my personal story, or Yael’s personal story. It is a time of witch hunts in Israel, of political persecution,” he said. “I became a ‘Hamas supporter’, because I expressed my opposition to targeting innocent civilians.”

He said he’d received hundreds of private messages of support from fellow teachers and students who were too frightened to go public, and showed several to the Observer.

“The message is crystal clear: keep silent, watch out,” he says, adding that they strengthened his own conviction about speaking out. “I thought to myself, when I retire, I might conclude this is the most significant lesson I ever gave in civics.”

As usual, as always, one must rush to clearly state that one does not support Hamas. We can deplore the violence and genocidal intent of the terrorists and simultaneously deplore the brutal state-sponsored violence and ongoing genocidal frenzy of the retaliation. Most of us learned in kindergarten that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Because he’s a Republican.

Republicans are religious zealots who want to expand the power of government to control your personal private life…and create a white nationalist fascist state. Greg Abbot, the Texas governor, dreams of killing people of the wrong color and wrong ideology.

Appearing on The Dana Show last week, Abbott declared: “We are using every tool that can be used from building a border wall to building these border barriers, to passing this law that I signed that led to another lawsuit by the Biden administration where I signed a law making it illegal for somebody to enter Texas from another country…. The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

Oh, dear. He spoke the quiet part out loud.

I grew up sucking at the teat of the Boeing company — like most people living in the Seattle area. So I pay attention when Boeing makes the news in a bad and terrible way, since there was a time when that would have been catastrophic for my family, would probably mean we’d have to move to a smaller, more run-down house, and I wouldn’t be getting any dentistry done for a while. That was the reality of living in a company town. It’s weird to think we’d be happy when Boeing sold a couple of more planes, which would be front page news in the paper.

I felt a faint frisson when I heard about the door panel blowing out on a 737 in flight, and it was peculiar because my first thought wasn’t about the terrified passengers, which would have been more appropriate, but…uh-oh, is my family back in Seattle going to feel the consequences? Boeing has made a lot of bad decisions in the decades since I moved away, and the worst has been the shift from putting the engineers first and at the top of the decision tree and instead promoting all the suits, the MBAs who don’t give a fuck about these machines except as a way to squeeze more money out of the customers. It’s profit uber alles.

A faulty course change pretty well describes Boeing, which went through a restructuring during the 1990s from an “association of engineers” to a firm run by Wall Street shareholders. This catastrophic path has led to another systemic crisis for one of the world’s two major commercial aviation companies, underscoring the deterioration of Boeing’s product quality by financialization, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.

Yep, that’s about it. I’ve known a few engineers in my time, and they’re a bunch of persnickety, demanding people who would have cut a suit dead if they dared to suggest cutting corners on a basic safety issue to save a few bucks. They can be pretty obnoxious that way, daring to rebut such plans with math and analyses and outrage at the temerity of some damn business guy daring to tell them how to make a hunk of metal fly better.

Let’s also blame the airlines. They’re not about safety or even reliable transportation — I’ve had so many bad experiences with airlines that I’m not going to fly unless the situation is pretty dire. Last summer I had scheduled a flight to a science conference, and instead of getting to Syracuse, I spent two days sitting in an airport until they finally just canceled the whole trip beneath me…and offered me a $300 travel voucher to repeat the same bad experience with the same goddamn airline.

After subjecting their passengers to a horrific terror-ride on their improperly maintained airplane, Alaska Airlines offer their traumatized customers a refund and $1500. $1500! Would you take a $1500 offer to fly on a plane that was going to blow out midflight?

I guess in the future I’ll (1) simply not fly anywhere, or (2) if I’m faced with essential travel, book on Airbus, or (3) take a train, if possible, which it often isn’t in America. I’m suddenly sympathizing with Richard Lewinton, who was infamous for refusing to fly. I think it wasn’t because he was a scaredy-cat, but because the state of air travel in this country is deplorable.

I’m blaming capitalism.

You can always trust the Republican candidate to be wrong on all matters of science. Now Trump is opining on magnets. It’s all part of his long history of complaining about magnetic elevators and electronic catapults on aircraft carriers, and it’s just plain stupid.

This guy is the leading Republican candidate. He’s an idiot.

Join me in getting a glimpse of the demented, broken minds of the people who idolize right-wing autocrats.

Here’s Neil Strauss, formerly best known for writing about pick-up artists, and then landed a job writing cover stories for Rolling Stone. I don’t know why. He wrote the November 2017 cover story on Elon Musk, the Architect of Tomorrow.

If we don’t send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dream’s inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

And then the article just goes on and on in this vein. I couldn’t get far before cramping up with all the cringing.

Matt Binder tells us about Kevin Sorbo’s January 6th Twitter epistles. It’s a classic, here they are in chronological order:

Beautiful descent. I remember watching Hercules with the kids years and years ago…if I knew then what we know now…

It’s January 6th! Not normally a date to party down, but if I were to celebrate it, this is a good way to do so: arrest more insurrectionists. Three more traitors got picked up from their hideout in Florida today. Three years after the fact…the wheels do grind exceedingly slow, but it means we’ll be getting these events for a while to come.

Stupid dupes. I feel no sympathy for these people who challenged the law in order to support a colossal fool and fraud like Trump.

The Washington Post featured this messy caricature of the 147 Republicans who opposed the election of Joe Biden, and are now trying to get re-elected, in spite of their opposition to democracy. I don’t care for it.

The problem is that it exaggerates the surly, nasty, hateful expressions of each individual to the point that they are unrecognizable. I stared at this image for a long time trying to figure out who was who, and just couldn’t do it. At least the article provides a labeled key, which in this case is absolutely essential.

For instance, here’s my state representative, Michelle Fischbach.

If all you knew was the caricature, would you recognize her walking down the street? I don’t think so. Even familiar, easily cartoonish people like Cruz and Green are harder to identify than they should be.

Sure, it accurately captures the spirit of the person — Fischbach is a nasty regressive Catholic culture warrior — but a caricature should at least give us a hint of the physicality of the figure being mocked, or it’s going to miss every time.

Nikki Haley got asked a straightforward question: “What was the cause of the United States’ Civil War?” She staggers back, stalls for time, and finally coughs up, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. She just couldn’t spit up a statement about how slaves were denied those freedoms, and instead tried to turn it into some variation of a state’s right excuse.

The questioner was inaudible, but said something about slavery. Haley says What do you want me to say about slavery? and then fails to say anything…Next question.

It’s a perfect example of why the Civil War isn’t over yet, and how the Republican party has inherited the mantle of the Confederacy.

---

Oh, good. Someone transcribed the whole exchange, including the inaudible bits I couldn’t make out.

“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.'” That about sums it up.

Last week at this time, I was back in the suburbs of Seattle, in the towns where I grew up. My sister lives in Kent, in the familiar neighborhood where my grandparents lived, where the church I attended was located, and also, where my wife-to-be grew up. My sister can’t drive anymore, so she let me use her car that week, and I drove out to Kent multiple times to pick her up and bring her to my mother’s place, and I’d drive through old familiar places and reminisce a bit.

Except…they all felt terribly cramped.

It wasn’t just that these were places I frolicked in when I was a small child, and now I’m all growed up, but because everything was walled off with barricades and police tape. In particular, the entire strip along the railroad tracks was cordoned off. This was one of my favorite places to play, because it was full of garter snakes and grasshoppers, and when I was very young, we’d walk along the tracks picking up coal that had fallen off the coal cars to bring to my grandmother, who’d burn them in a pot-bellied stove to keep her house warm. It never appealed as a place to camp, though, since all through the day and night the freight trains would roar through there, and the crossing would flash red lights and ding-ding-ding. You’d have to be truly desperate to want to sleep there.

Well, now no kid is going to want to play there because it’s taped off and there never were any toilets there, so I guess people would just go in the bushes, and they were strewn with garbage. It’s all very unsightly. Here’s a convenient map of homeless hot spots in Kent, and it’s disturbing because I knew the area well. #18 is right next to my grandmother’s house, and #33 is the Green River Road where I’d often go biking and swimming in the river and fishing.

So far it seems like the solution is to send the cops in to chase everyone away, and to ask local religious charities to help out. Remember, this is in the kingdom of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, where incredible wealth thrives, but at the same time many people are assembling cardboard lean-tos in rocky fields next to the railroad tracks. It’s a bit chilly out there, and it rains almost all the time. Too bad they can’t all build a mansion with a gorgeous view of Lake Washington or something.

Another solution: the NY Times ran a story about people in Oregon who were so distressed by all the homeless people that they fled to red Missouri, where apparently they do a more thorough job of rousting the layabouts and keeping them away from good Republican citizens. AR Moxon summarized the story, which is good for me, because I do not read the NY Times anymore and forevermore. The whole article is worth reading, but this is the hard nasty core of it all.

Anyway, everywhere around this country, cities whose governments (not always Republican government, I notice) have agreed to accept the underlying supremacist premises (even if they oppose various supremacist tactics), and have engaged in a policy of elimination of unhoused people, all in the name of safety, even while state governments pursue policies that ensure that more and more people will fall into poverty and lose their access to housing.

It seems to me that better, but more expensive, strategies than walling off portions of the town with police tape would be things like Universal Basic Income, and cracking down on predatory landlords, and capping and enforcing limits on rent, and taxing the hell out of McMansions and especially real mansions, and changing zoning laws to encourage the construction of low income housing. I imagine the people running those towns would panic over the hit to their tax base, but you’d think they’d realize that having refugee camps scattered all over town wasn’t particularly attractive, either.

There is more to that NY Times story, though, because it sure as heck isn’t about deploring policies that create a tide of homelessness. No, it’s about how the Huckins family of Portland was so disturbed by liberal Oregon policies, in exactly the same way that the Nobles family of Iowa was forced to flee to Minnesota because of red state policies. They’re exactly the same! Both sides are indistinguishable.

The Nobles moved because one of their children is trans, and the government of their home state of Iowa has decided that it would be better if trans people didn’t exist quite so much in Iowa, and have passed a law to make that happen. Iowa isn’t particularly special here. Pretty much every state controlled by Republicans has decided much the same thing, and has either passed a similar law or is planning to. There are a lot of intentions stated behind this: the desire for fairness in girls’ sports is one, for example—which is interesting, since Republicans have never been particularly interested in funding girls’ sports, and the actual impact of trans kids on high school sports in Iowa is best described as “undetectable.” The desire to keep girls safe in school bathrooms is another, which is sort of rich coming from the same people who refuse to make schools safe from gun massacres, and who insist on forced birth legislation that is making maternal mortality rates spike, and who pass laws that require genital inspection. The desire to make students comfortable is cited, which is interesting, since it gives away the clear belief that trans kids, who are being othered and excluded in the name of this comfort, are not considered students, or at least that their comfort is considered utterly immaterial, that their existence as students is something divorced from the general responsibility to create a safe comfortable environment for students—that their existence as students represents only discomfort and danger for others.

The NY Times pretended that these two families were exactly the same. They ignored the fact that what drove the Huckinses away were wasteful, destructive Republican policies that amplified the rich-poor divide and that have dismantled the social safety net, while what drove the Nobles away were hateful Republican policies that directly threatened their family. There’s a reason I don’t read that rag that props up the status quo.

The Nobles needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government. The Nobles were, and are, in serious danger.

The Huckinses wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time, specifically for people like the Huckinses, who enable the danger that others are in, and still do.

I guess I can be thankful this Christmas that we don’t have a visible homelessness problem here in rural Minnesota — you can’t survive a Minnesota winter with a makeshift camp, it takes a serious investment in survival to build the kind of shelter you need here.

Although that makes me wonder — we still have a serious problem with poverty here, there are homeless people around, we just don’t see them. Where do they go? Missouri?