The part where three people were shot - two dead - by a teenage boogaloo boy in Kenosha last night is the probably the worst part.

It's funny, as soon as I saw the crowd almost breaking through the fence around the courthouse (or other government building) I thought that someone would be shot, but I was expecting the cops to shoot people. I wasn't smart enough; the obvious cop strategy is to let the far right do the killing.

I wish I were smarter. In retrospect, it's obvious that the first boogaloo murders at a protest were going to be outside a major city - more boogs, less left, less/no armed left, worse-trained police, no history of protest in living memory.

I would like to stress that this is very bad. It's going to give psychic permission to the far right to continue to murder people at protests. Until now, they have largely held back; during the protests here, they shot a lot but obviously to intimidate rather than to kill. It's also bad because it makes explicit to even the dumber cops that the way to handle things is to support the far right at protests (which they all do anyway) and then look the other way (it was obvious in Kenosha who the shooter was, he's identified online and he hasn't been caught yet) to give the shooters as much of a chance to run as possible.

Also it cannot but escalate with the left. There was a point a few years ago where it was possible to argue that the left arming itself was a bad idea since at that point nationwide growth of right-wing paramilitaries was not an actual locked-in future. At this point it's stupid for anyone who has the health and the temperament not to arm themselves, which means there's going to be more leftists with guns and the ones who already have guns will be carrying them and ready to go.

Note that I think this is in fact a reasonable choice with a substantial upside, but I can't say I'm happy about it. The thing is, you're basically betting that an armed left will keep more people safe than an unarmed left because it will discourage both the state and the boogs, and that may be true. It depends on how stretched the state gets - like, they've run out of personnel and equipment at various points out west. But you're also betting that there won't be an all-out effort by the state. I think that's not as dumb a bet as it sounds, because there's a lot of costs in doing urban anti-guerilla stuff - you're in a civilian area that you mostly can't bomb or drop chemical agents on, for instance, and there are issues with credibility so you can't just murder people out of hand. Also, there's the fact that less political civilians won't like being caught in the boog-left crossfire, and no matter how much escalation there is, most people are not going to leap at the chance of joining a paramilitary. At the same time, there's no question but that the state can win if the state throws away all hope of avoiding civilian casualties, etc.

My point being that this is bad, an inflection point for things getting worse, etc. Also it gives Trump quite a lot to make hay with, but I don't really see a way around that other than "if your neighbor gets murdered by police in broad daylight be sure just to file quietly into your homes and put up with it".

It's easy to say that I wish I'd gotten a gun while I had the chance pre-pandemic, but the truth is that I don't. It's hard to envision any but the worst, total collapse situations where I'd be any use if I were armed, and if you have one you have to be ready to use it.

Also - and I admit that I'm pulling this from twitter - think about what a contested election will look like with the boogs and police working together. Protests getting sniped, boogs breaking into state government buildings with the complicity of security.

I really wish someone had some good advice because I feel like we're headed for a totally unpredictable couple of months (and of course, the possible follow-up of a terrible outcome). I feel like I don't know how to operate at all.

I don't know if we're at the inflection point or still have a couple of weeks/months to step back. But otherwise that's what I'm thinking too.

Anyway, if I didn't already have guns, I would have bought them this summer.

I don't find the contrast between 1 and 3 weird at all. It's consistent with a population where one-third to two-fifths of the people are happy with actual fascism.

The prospect that scares me the most is unjustified, non-defensive violence from the 'left' that's either false flag, or even worse from bad violent people who are genuinely more left affiliated than right wing even if they're not really politically leftist or connected to any organized protest group, that then gets seized on by cops and the right to get way, way more violent. They've been trying to do that from the beginning, but left/protest violence has been genuinely pretty minimal -- some property damage here and there, but not a lot of interpersonal violence. But if that gets worse, it'll get bad.

2.1, as well. The prospect of targeted Brooks Brothers riots in multiple states, where right wing violence with law enforcement complicity lets vote counting be controlled and altered by the right, scares the crap out of me.

I don't find the contrast between 1 and 3 weird at all.

I think the eerie part is the emotional commonality, internal to the protesters in both situations: the sense of desperation and feeling compelled to action, the adrenaline of turning anger into action. How emotions can be so uncoupled from the worthiness of a cause, but still feel the same from the interior.

3: I ask this completely sincerely because I try to envision what use I'd get out of a gun: In what situation do you expect to find your guns useful?

For me, I am almost certainly no use as part of an armed contingent at protests and I'm not sure I'd be good enough with a gun to do anything but get shot first and die if someone tried, eg, to take my stuff. And if there were any organized paramilitary or extortionist checkpoint they'd have lots of guns and I'd have one, and it would be no use. Otherwise I have trouble imagining how, given the type of person I am and my physical capabilities, I'd be able to use a gun to protect myself.

I will say that I don't believe 6 is likely, in the more-likely-than-not sense. But it's the kind of thing that I think is a realistic possibility.

Mainly home defense. I'm not a very good shot.

7: A lot of the boogaloos are really young white men who obviously just barely have a sense of object permanence, never mind any ability to plan out any situation that they don't force into video game logic, which is why they have that "got to do something" feeling. They're young for starters, internet-poisoned and not that bright, and unfortunately none of those things is allowed to stand in the way of owning multiple guns in this great nation of ours.

I feel like we're headed for a totally unpredictable couple of months

Yeah, any time I feel optimistic or pessimistic, I just have to admit that I don't really have any idea how things are going to turn out, and that large numbers of possible outcomes are very, very bad. And of course, this kind of unpredictability itself is a bad thing.

I think 11 is absolutely true. Although I don't know how young the Idaho protesters are, on the whole.

Wasn't Bundy there?

5: I think this is less likely than any armed response by the left getting blown up in the media (whereas I've seen relatively little about the Kenosha shootings so far) and used as a pretext. If there were, eg, a shoot-out started by the right.

The thing is, I've been around the type of people who will end up carrying guns at protests. I would bet that while my close friends are feeble specimens like me and are not armed, a lot of my extended anarchist social circle bought guns this summer. I just don't see a lot of reckless shooting being likely. It's not in the culture, it's not in the temperament. As a broad generality antifa/anarchists/popular movement people don't start stuff and don't usually escalate if they can avoid it. When things were lower stakes, I think there were plenty of movement people who found it fun and exciting to fight the cops, but I've always, always seen the cops or the right actually start it. And of course, things are higher stakes now and people aren't fools. I'm honestly amazed at their courage. If it weren't for the pandemic and household health risks, I'd certainly be out at some protests, but I am really amazed at the courage it takes to go out night after night knowing that the cops have blinded and gravely injured people and that there are far right snipers just waiting to shoot.

Part of this has really brought me to terms with my own cowardice. I'm really, really afraid of getting covid. I'd say I'm more afraid of covid than the right, but I'm also afraid of getting shot.

~~
I think the boogs and the Bundy crowd are pretty different - the boogs are younger and dumber and a lot more willing to kill/ready to deal with shooting. The Bundy crowd is relying on state support and numbers and the feeling that no one will shoot back.

I think Idaho is one of the few places where right-wing troublemakers are still dominated by "anti-government would-be cowboys" rather than "ironic internet assholes".

15: I think you're right about the real politicized left -- what I'm afraid of is the general likelihood of violence getting amped up enough that there's violence from people who are just assholes, rather than the politicized left, but assholes who are provably not the politicized right, if you see what I mean. And then massive, disproportionate retaliation from the right on a level worse than what's already happening.

14 I think Bundy supports BLM.

I guess that's an unexpected consistency.

A phrase more often used to describe a failed custard.

I'm reminded again of the classic d-squared post Arseholes considered as a strategic resource

18 He knows that the real enemy is the BLM.

20: Parts of it are excellent!

From 21:

This is my advice to any aspiring dictator; early on in your career, identify and inventory all the self-pitying, bullying shitheads your country has to offer. Anyone with a grievance, a beer belly and enough strength to swing a pickaxe handle will do. You don't need to bother with military training or discipline because they're hopefully never going to be used as a proper military force - just concentrate on nuturing their sense that they, despite appearances, are the backbone of the country, and allowing them to understand that although rules are rules, there are some people who just need a slap. The bigger and burlier the better, but when the time comes they'll be fighting in groups against people weaker than themselves, often under cover of darkness, so numbers are more important than anything else. The extractive industries are indeed often a good source, as are demobbed veterans (Zimbabwe) or the laity of an established religion.

Well, that feels familiar. I'm surprised, knowing his specialties, that he didn't mention fallout from the recession leading to an increasingly large precariat to draw from. And it was probably a bit too early to o

The WaPo just put up an article about the Kenosha shootings; as recently as when this post went up, they were still only reporting on the riots as a response to the original police shooting. So at least they're reporting it, although reading it it seems relatively meek in terms of considering this as reactionary violence.

22: Ha.

D-squared had like 3 or 4 posts that were completely definitive documents that should be in an essay anthology somewhere, and that's one of them.

Err, whoops, bad editing: I might be misjudging timing, but it was probably a bit too early to realize in 2011 that 4chan was going to be one of the prime radicalizing loci.

With the Kenosha shootings: The police let the shooter leave. He was identified by the crowd, carrying a large gun and in fact shot two people who attempted to stop him after he shot the first one. He has been identified online but not arrested. Is he going to be arrested at all?

Further: The police were paling up to the white nationalists, giving them water and reportedly told them that they would drive the protesters in their direction "for you to deal with". One assumes that the cops know some of them socially, too.

27: Unfuckingbelievable.

So given that he drove across a state line, arguably with intent to commit some crime if not necessarily the specific crime he did, does that in any way allow federal jurisdiction?

Here is a thread from It's Going Down (lots of video, be prepared to scroll or deal w/Twitter autoplay):
https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1298564136025153536

This bears out the whole police complicity thing and identifies the shooter.

Worth noting that IGD is one of the orgs banned from Facebook last week.

I've kept up with this stuff by looking at IGD, Rose City Antifa, Left-Coast Right-Watch and related twitter accounts and websites. If they go down, and they could, information will be hard to come by. We're all totally dependent on the internet for organizing, which is a huge weakness.

I mean really, everyone, take care. Whatever that means for you, think about how safe you are where you are, whether you plan to go to a protest if Trump doesn't leave office, what you might need in the house if cities are shut down due to unrest, how you'd get to somewhere else if you had to leave your home.

When the George Floyd protests happened here, my neighborhood was basically shut down for most of a week - not only the curfew, but the buses and mail delivery in our area stopped. Also, the power went out for an extended period because someone did something to a transformer station. I don't like to think what would have happened if there had been more fires than there were.

I actually made us go-bags - now partly unpacked but ready to re-pack. (Can't keep, eg, the meds packed up all the time.)

Mostly this will not happen to you, but really, don't think it can't. I sat up nights watching out the back window to make sure that white supremacists didn't set fires in the alley while my neighbor watched the front, and I saw a convoy of scary cars at 1am, shortly followed by a convoy of national guard. Things happen, don't think they can't.

Kenosha sherriff:
Beth said armed people had been patrolling the city's streets in recent nights but he did not know if the shooter was among them. "They're a militia," the sheriff said. "They're like a vigilante group."

Trib article doesn't read badly. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-kenosha-wisconsin-protesters-shot-jacob-blake-20200826-2whqqtogjrcx5db5zfdkuw374y-story.html

I knew Blake's aunt, we went to HS together.

We need a new TV series to watch so we tried a recommended cop procedural (Bosch) and it's just so out of sync with reality I can't watch it. First of all the guy's name is literally Hieronymus Bosch (goes by Harry) so we're not going for subtlety here. It's got the stereotypical bullshit incorrect courtroom procedure and "Internal affairs is gonna bust your ass" and "you're gonna be sued and lose your badge for killing that minority perp with no witnesses" and just really? Season 1 is only 6 years old but it seems like it's from a different universe.

Hate hate hate that gun purchases are going up. I don't think we'll make much of a dent in police shootings until policemen stop carrying guns. And the biggest hurdle to policemen not carrying guns is that too many randos have guns.

32: I'm watching "Person of Interest", which is definitely not a pro-cop show. There's one good cop, one bad cop who turns good, a few minor other good cops, and a zillion completely evil cops. And yet, it's still sometimes jarring to watch because Internal Affairs is still a meaningful constraint on cop behavior.

A lot of the boogaloos are really young white men who obviously just barely have a sense of object permanence
I don't know how young the Idaho protesters are, on the whole.

The reply is a very good point. Why would we assume that these are necessarily young men, apart from a general middle-aged fear of the young? The current generation of 20somethings are less violent than any previous generation in at least the last eighty years, less criminal, and less likely to hold racist or extremist views. They're also poor and AR-15s aren't cheap.

A look at the news (yes, not a scientific sample but still) shows that the ones marching with torches are sometimes in their 20s (though most are older), but the ones bursting into Idaho legisatures are not. Ammon Bundy is a fat middle aged guy with a grey beard. The others who were arrested are in their late 30s and 40s. These guys are not skinny pale youths who spend too much time online, they are fat guys who spend too much money on Tommy Tactical stuff and won't see 40 again.

We've been watching DCI Banks. That one episode where everyone just goes apeshit because a gun is found in a box on top of the daughter's dresser is jarring, in a nice-ish way. Can't say I'm a fan of the writers' apparent need to have romantic tension between the leads. Or is this something that Brits demand from their procedurals?

Like Morse and Lewis.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter, is 17. The guys who shot up a BLM protest here a couple of years ago were late teens/early twenties. The gamergaters and online white nationalists from the chans are young. Most of the eminences grises in these movements are in their thirties. (And school shooters are by definition young.) Many of them are from rich families, that's where they get the money for guns. Boogs aren't poor, they're not downtrodden, they're rich white young men who like to kill.

The mistake folks are making is lumping, just as usual. The right lumps anarchists with communists and liberals with antifa; we lump boogaloo boys with Bundy with Patriot Front, etc. They're all different and they don't all share tactics or get along.

For instance, there's a difference - not a moral difference, a cultural difference - between white nationalists who are actually rural and white nationalists who come from affluent suburbs. There's a cultural difference between people who are radicalized by personal contact and people who are radicalized on message boards. A difference between people who come into it from a Christian background and people who come into it from reddit.

I add that the fact that the average young person is more left makes a hard core of young rightists more likely, not less, because rightism seems transgressive, unusual, daring and welcoming to anyone with a grudge. When I was coming up, Young Americans for Freedom wasn't cool, you know?

32. Babylon Berlin is kind of a police show if you haven't seen it. Occupied is pretty procedural. Party Down is neither. I really enjoyed the first season of Kidding with Jim Carrey, second season is weaker but still quite good. Fortitude maybe? First few seasons of Shameless?

So we know he's radicalized by the message boards because he's young? Racists raise children in the family tradition.

So s/b do.

32 BB is amazing. And so timely.

42 to 39.

They've changed, but not arrested, him.

40: There's been some excellent work by Left Coast Right Watch and people doing similar stuff tracking the slippage from early-mid 2000s chan culture stuff to white nationalist stuff and I've seen several things about individual people's trajectories. Now, obviously I can't prove that literally every single internet racist came from a white nationalist family and it's all people generating white nationalist content from the deep truth of their white nationalist hearts, but it would be astonishing if somehow there were all this offline radicalization that didn't have any online effect. There was that book Normies or whatever that talks about this - I haven't read it though.

In my own life, I've noticed a change in the kind of young white supremacists I see at protests or encounter in life. Up until I dunno, 2012 or so they were either skinheads who punched people and might have knives or they were no-hopers, weedy little guys who had weird power fantasies about Hitler and who were physical cowards. The standard way of dealing with them was to get groups together and run them off. They didn't have police support and they were obviously working class. (Older biker-types outstate were a different story and much scarier, but also working class.) The new ones are more tech savvy, more media savvy, richer, healthier-looking and they feel confident that the cops are on their side, also more likely to have guns and expensive tactical gear which they have because they're from rich families. Since I have been staying home due to covid, I haven't really seen any up close and personal at the latest protests, but what I'm seeing from, eg, Unicorn Riot suggests the same thing.

On another note - I think I've shared this here before but a friend of mine used to be internet buddies with the guy who started Gamergate and in fact urged him not to publish his horrible little manifesto. Gamergate catalyzed bunch of stuff. You probably wouldn't be catalyzed into violent misogynist white supremacy online if you weren't already in a somewhat dubious headspace, but it was definitely an online phenomenon from which a lot of our current situation flowed.

There's certainly a separate lineage of active white supremacists having white supremacist children, but a lot of what's going on now is young people whose parents were either big zeroes morally and politically or standard vaguely resentful rich whites and who have become radicalized in chatrooms, etc.

I don't know why this seems so unlikely - my politics have changed a lot over the years because of people I know from the internet. I wouldn't be the same person politically if I hadn't been spending a lot of time on anti-racist/social justice blogs and tumblrs from about 2007 onward.

46: Now, obviously I can't prove that literally every single internet racist came from

s/b "didn't come from"

Ugh, 46 to 45 obvi. Now all I need is to accidentally triple post.

I was just thinking that a minor with a gun probably got it at home.

I predict the kid walks on bullshit self-defense claims after the DA drops charges in a few weeks.

He got white-people arrested.

that book Normies or whatever that talks about this

Angela Nagle's book? I got the sense it was one of those books that got marketed as a definitive guide, but was intended more as a somewhat idiosyncratic individual contribution to a larger conversation. Didn't know Zizek blurbed it.

I have aged about 20 years since 2017.

I thought Normies was OK, but it definitely had an under cooked feel to it. My impression is that it was a work in progress that was abruptly rushed into print when Trump unexpectedly won.

My friend who used to know the gamergate guy thought it was interesting but by no means definitive. If the world ever stops being a fucking nightmare I may read it.

~~
I sure hope none of my friends get murdered at protests. Many of us are middle aged now and so less likely to be in the thick of the action - I've been more of a "hang back out of the way of the punching" person since my back started getting bad - but I still know enough younger people who would quite possibly run up on a shooter and get shot like that guy in Kenosha. I feel like this stuff just comes in waves - first I worry about society, then I worry about staying housed and employed, then I worry about what if my friends get killed or jailed or pogromed then I start all over again. I feel so stupidly helpless - our household is high-risk for covid so I don't want to be running around where I could get arrested or encounter violent people but it makes me feel so useless. The more so because I'm really trying to economize and don't have the money to give away that I might at other times.

Does it help thinking that the situation will change a lot after the election? For the worse if Trump wins again, but I do believe that if he doesn't things will calm down a whole lot. Not that everything will be fixed, but that the level of violence will drop. And the election isn't a long time away to wait.

If Biden wins I daresay things will calm down eventually, but I can imagine a few weeks of very serious violence first.

53: I would encourage you to feel less personally responsible for fixing things. Sometimes providing a bit of shelter for yourself and those around you is all that is possible.

I don't have a thought-out reason for not thinking so, but I really don't think so -- it just doesn't feel to me like how people will react.

Between the schools, the hurricanes, the fires, and the deliberate cuts in testing numbers, I think COVID deaths will get worse in the next month.

For instance, there's a difference - not a moral difference, a cultural difference - between white nationalists who are actually rural and white nationalists who come from affluent suburbs.

This is an important point. The actually rural western militia types like Bundy are mostly older and not Very Online, and their ideology is nutty but mostly internally consistent with the main enemy being the government. They're definitely white supremacists but their attitude toward other races is more paternal than eliminationist, so they're open to making common cause with nonwhite groups that they feel are similarly victims of government oppression. Very different from the "fuck yeah race war!" boogaloo types.

There's certainly a separate lineage of active white supremacists having white supremacist children, but a lot of what's going on now is young people whose parents were either big zeroes morally and politically or standard vaguely resentful rich whites and who have become radicalized in chatrooms, etc.

That's been my read of it. I've known a lot of people that if they had been caught at the right time might have gone down that path.

The picture of the murderer here reinforces how much he's in this new lineage. Those shoes.

I freely admit that I just don't understand the boogs at all - I mean, intellectually I get it, but it's like looking at a blank wall. It feels like the only reason they do this is basically because they're bored and empty inside. I don't mean that "normal" white people are so great, but most people, resentful and bigoted as they may be , have something else to do other than actually try to foment race war. It just feels incomprehensible because it feels like it's mostly about the aesthetic.

I don't know, lately I feel like some huge percentage of Americans are...I don't know, fatally stupid or fatally empty, and that this is the inevitable result of post-war processes, even ones that brought some benefit with them. People don't have anything inside themselves that guides them toward making real, caring connections to anything, so they get into all this amped-up videogame-very-online stuff that's like, like being thirsty and drinking six cans of red bull instead of the ice water that is right there. They haven't evolved any individual morality or personal theory of history so they just pick up all this white-future garbage - they can't imagine a future that they personally would desire, so they plug-and-play this incredibly stupid one.

I just feel like they're stupid and it confuses me. You don't need to be an especially good person or an anti-racist person to not be a boog, you just need to, like, prefer music or swimming or books or smoking weed or whatever to race war.

61: I remember reading something, it was around the time that new New Atheist books started being greeted with "Not this again, you've made your point" rather than "A brilliant flambéing of sacred cows", that had the thesis statement "If you don't like the Religious Right, you really won't like the Post-Religious Right. Because there will still be a Right, that's for sure"

60: Note how the story starts "a seventeen year old boy". That's how they'll spin it - going across state lines with a gun is just a boyish error.

Now it so happens that I tend to think that seventeen year olds are basically still kids, or at least kid enough that they shouldn't be held to the same standards as adults even when they do very terrible things. I hate the way that youth is weaponized here - I would like to be able to say that all seventeen year olds who commit crimes should be treated as less responsible than adults, but because I know that any Black or brown kid will be tried as an adult and face a racist jury, I have to beat the drum for trying white kids as adults too. The least terrible option is always "escalate consequences for whites" and never "de-escalate consequences for everyone".

60: Note how the story starts "a seventeen year old boy". That's how they'll spin it - going across state lines with a gun is just a boyish error.

Now it so happens that I tend to think that seventeen year olds are basically still kids, or at least kid enough that they shouldn't be held to the same standards as adults even when they do very terrible things. I hate the way that youth is weaponized here - I would like to be able to say that all seventeen year olds who commit crimes should be treated as less responsible than adults, but because I know that any Black or brown kid will be tried as an adult and face a racist jury, I have to beat the drum for trying white kids as adults too. The least terrible option is always "escalate consequences for whites" and never "de-escalate consequences for everyone".

60: What about the shoes?

65: They're ostentatious in a way that I don't read as working class and serve as further evidence towards what Frowner said. But when I posted that, I thought they were well-maintained fancy sneakers (which have their own weird culture) but I now see they're crocs.

I still wonder if they didn't deliberately send* in a minor to kill someone because there's less prison time usually, even when tried as an adult.

* At least in the sense of giving him specific encouragement.

64: I think it's easy to not obsess about how to try the murderer himself, and focus back on the cops seeing him and saying "Oh good, you're here. High five. We certainly appreciate your contributions, whatever you may have in mind, random guy with an AR-15." leading to this happening what, 2 hours later?

Wow that picture is horrifying. That grinning idiot child with a gun, about to go out and murder people.

I still wonder if they didn't deliberately send* in a minor to kill someone because there's less prison time usually, even when tried as an adult.

Gotta keep 'em separated.

68: So much this. The killer should be prosecuted, but all the cops who were egging on and collaborating with the armed militia should be fired.

Because I live in the Boston area, I initially thought that Abby Johnson you were referring to was the daughter of Ned Johnson, the founder of Fidelity investments.

I'm old enough to remember when printing the flag on shoes was seen as disrespectful.

Ralph Lauren has a lot to answer for.

Cosign 68 and 71. It amazes me that so many cops all across the country are so deeply dedicated to confirming the worst of themselves.

Perhaps the cops wink-and-nudge to an armed 17-year old walking into a disturbance (caused by a police shooting) won't play well in the suburbs.

76: I thought I'd given up completely on my fellow Americans in November of 2004, then again more so in November of 2016, but I guess I still have some hope of that.

The local police chief pretty clearly sympathized with the murderer. Probably both murderers.

You can tell the police sympathize with him because he revived the honorific passive verb treatment usually reserved for so-called police-involved shootings.
"Persons were shot"
"17yo individual from IL was involved in the use of firearms"

Well, the Milwaukee Bucks aren't having it, and I think that's going to prove to be a big-ish deal.

The NBA was the lead indicator (in America, to the public) that the pandemic was gonna be a big deal.

Now if Tom Hanks goes on strike, maybe people will take this seriously.

OT: Lake Charles is in trouble, as is petrochemical infrastructure.

UNSURVIVABLE would be a good title for a movie about 2020, assuming we ever get to a point where there are new movies.

These guys are not skinny pale youths who spend too much time online, they are fat guys who spend too much money on Tommy Tactical stuff and won't see 40 again.

I have *way* scarier far-right armed truck guys to think about; I see really, really, tidy and fit 20somethings on the ferries around Puget Sound, with lots to suggest that they're Navy guys. We have nuke sub bases.

So that's another one for UNSURVIVABLE.

Am currentll reading Larson's Devil in the White City, but recently read his Isaac's Storm about the 1900 Galveston hurricane. The lack of any real warning was the real thing in that case.

The details of exactly where it lands matters a lot in this case. There will be a huge surge and flooding, but there is both a lot of very deserted coast as well as some vulnerable oil refineries and other infrastructure (a bit inland or on bays and estuaries).

87. Thanks for the recommendation; I really loved Devil in the White City, I'll give this one a try.

87.1: The lack of any real warning or cooperation with Cuban meteorologists, right? "The Weather Bureau forecasters had no way of knowing the storm's trajectory, as Weather Bureau director Willis Moore implemented a policy to block telegraph reports from Cuban meteorologists at the Belen Observatory in Havana - considered one of the most advanced meteorological institutions in the world at the time - due to tensions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War."

I'm following the hourly tweets; seems close to Cat 5 right now. Imagining all sorts of outlandishly large people hunkered down watching the RNC in Beaumont, TV at offensive volumes. Port Arthur is worried. Everybody might get lucky, but this year?

89.2: Beaumont is plurality African American, and Clinton lost the county by about 400 votes. It's a poor town that is going to hurt. Details from a smart journalist on post-Harvey recovery:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-03/hurricane-harvey-recovery-aid-shows-racial-disparities

Sorry, I comment so rarely my devices are batting 0.150 on remembering me.

83: Oh man, that's so sad. All I can think of is the beautiful Lucinda Williams song.

MPD is alleging that a suspect in a shooting conveniently shot himself, just as police were closing in on him in downtown Mpls this evening.

Police are firing plastic bullets and gassing everyone with pepper spray apparently.

You know, if Trump wins MN because the local Democrats have so alienated everyone with their vicious response to protests, I'm going to be very upset.

I wish absolutely no harm on Beaumont! Nor on any other place in Texas or Louisiana. (My dad was very Texas-is-asking-for-it when Harvey was making landfall, along the lines of some of Chetan Murthy's comments here... and I get it, but I don't think politics and desert work that way in most of the U.S. Particularly not in the south.) But I bet there's at least one gated community in Beaumont populated by distant blood relatives of mine with office jobs in the petroleum industry, who are watching the RNC. Nah? Maybe not anymore, what do I know.

|| I know that heebie was keeping an eye out for updated Covid understanding. This article concentrates quite a bit on aerosol transmission and corresponding mitigating measures.
https://time.com/5883081/covid-19-transmitted-aerosols/

We should continue doing what has already been recommended: wash hands, keep six feet apart, and so on. But that is not enough. A new, consistent and logical set of recommendations must emerge to reduce aerosol transmission. I propose the following: Avoid Crowding, Indoors, low Ventilation, Close proximity, long Duration, Unmasked, Talking/singing/Yelling ("A CIViC DUTY"). These are the important factors in mathematical models of aerosol transmission, and can also be simply understood as factors that impact how much "smoke" we would inhale.

(The smoke aside is from the visualization technique:

The visual analogy of smoke can help guide our risk assessment and risk reduction strategies. One just has to imagine that others they encounter are all smoking, and the goal is to breathe as little smoke as possible. But COVID-19 is not very contagious under most situations, unlike, for example, measles: the CDC says that 15 minutes of close proximity to a COVID-19 infected person often leads to contagion, which provides an estimate of how much "exhaled smoke" one may need to inhale for infection. Inhaling a little whiff of "smoke" here and there is OK, but a lot of "smoke" for a sustained period of time and without a mask is risky. (To be clear, actual smoke does not increase the probability of infection.)

97: Without the original article showing some of the initial letters being bolded toward the acronym, that selection reads like some very off-kilter comment below a news item.

89: Yes, and with subsequent cover up. Here is my comment last month after I had just finished the book.

I just finished reading a book on the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (~8,000 dead as the entire island was overtopped with storm surge) and was surprised to learn that after the event the director of the US Weather Bureau basically hurricane sharpied the lead up to the hurricane striking land claiming falsely that the Bureau had given warnings that it had not. And the US guys got it wrong in part because in the wake of the Spanish-American war they were in the middle of an effort to discredit Cuban forecasters who they thought were overly alarmist but in this case at least had been much more on the mark.

You know, if Trump wins MN because the local Democrats have so alienated everyone with their vicious response to protests, I'm going to be very upset.

The local police are all Democrats??!!

I got into a spat with a dear friend today, because he insisted that Biden would lose because of the rioting/insurrection in Kenosha and Portland and elsewhere. He was, without thinking about it, blaming people who have had the courage to reclaim the streets and other public spaces, despite the incredible danger, and insist that they're not going to take any more shit. I'm just so fatigued by everything at the moment, but nothing so exhausts me as the people who are doing pre-mortems, all of them rooted in nothing but confirmation bias, on the Biden campaign.

None of this is any kind of a defense of the Biden campaign. But the idea that he's going to lose Minnesota not because Covid-19, right-wing terrorists, or killer cops will keep voters at home, or because there will be other forms of voter suppression or vote rigging, but instead because local officials have been insufficiently attuned to the needs of the anarchist community or whatever, is one of those statements that makes me want to nap until at least February and maybe forever.

100: No, they're all republithugs, of course, but Frey just declared another surprise curfew, and Walz is sending in the state police and National Guard again. This is going to seriously, seriously depress Democratic turnout, both in-person and by mail.

Well, there's no point in staying up and getting all worked up about something which, once again, I am in no position to affect either way. Shit is so fucked.