A fellow local blogger has written a fine piece, Dating the Good Witch.
I'm not entirely sure I understand the piece, other than one of the familiar elements of the Weirdness that is Washington DC. And that is Someone Special Who Seems to Know All About You.
Sometimes we who live in this area somehow manage to forget that we live in the suburbs of the Nation's Capital. Some of us remember that we could at any moment stumble into The Weirdness, but most of us prefer to not much think about it, especially not out here in the 'burbs. We like to think that we'd have to be silly enough to get onto the train or hop in the car and head on downtown. People seem to like to think that the things that are weird are all downtown, maybe on Capitol Hill or in the White House, or maybe someplace farther away, such as perhaps, you know, McLean. And it is definitely a bit spooky out that way, sometimes more than surrealistically so. By now, we're all used to seeing cameras everywhere, from our webcams on top of our monitor to the unblinking glass eyes staring back at us from the ATM every time we pull some cash out of the bank.
But these are only the eyes that we see watching us, as it were. Welcome to Washington!
A few years ago, I decided that despite the fact that I'm one of the expert writers in the genre, I would write my very last vampire story, and close it out in a way that ought to make it the last one that it's possible for anyone to write, at least within that particular sub-genre of the genre. It's somehow just not the same, that subject, when they're all a bit overfed, postmodern, and boring, reduced to sitting around watching CNBC and in between trips to the refrigerator for another wee drinkie of the stuff that comes in bottles.
I figured that a little bit of science casts a bit of light on a subject fraught with mystery, and that once the shadows were banished, so would be any fears of the dark. Yet the thing is, it's very possible to write raw pornography that is all fine technical detail and is loveless for all of that, and you can write a love story the will live for generations, without including the least mention of sex other than maybe some kissing and a nice "and they lived happily ever after".
It's sort of why people wear clothes, it's not just to keep warm; sometimes a little mystery makes things a lot more attractive.
There's magic, and then there's magic and then there is... magic. Plus, there's magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, the famous scientist and science-fiction writer, who gave us all sorts of things ranging from the geosynchronous communications satellite concept to a ream of stories including 2001: a Space Odyssey, once remarked "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
He's right, of course, and technology can cover a lot of territories, from electronics to operational methodologies.
I was sitting on a porch downtown, not far from Dupont Circle, where I was living as a sort of kept boy of my girlfriend, when up walked probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She was blond, had sparkling green eyes, and she was tall with curves that just wouldn't quit, all nicely arranged on the sort of body that you get from years and years of spending hours and hours in the gym, and even then only if you've got the raw genetics on which to build.
She flashed me a grin full of the pearliest whites you could imagine, hunkered down on the sidewalk in front of me, and then also flashed me a badge. It figures. Welcome to Washington.
I looked at her ID and looked at her and the pictures matched and I said, "you know, I have no way to verify this". She grinned even bigger, if you can imagine that.
"So," she said, "I am curious about..." and then she mentioned a name. I had never heard it before. I told her so.
She said that they had solid information that this person, with a very deeply African name, lived at the address on whose porch I was sitting. I asked her if they were looking in the right quadrant, this being NorthWest Washington, and there being probably three other instances in town of the same address, in NorthEast, SouthWest, and maybe even SouthEast.
She just grinned at me even more, with the sort of smile and focus that is distinguished from someone about to bite you mostly by the appearance of little crinkles around the corners of the eyes. "We checked there. Those seemed to be the obvious places, this was the last one we looked at."
My coffee was just kicking in, and I remembered something one of the housemates had said the night before.
"Uh, ma'am, one of my housemates tells me that there were some African guys here yesterday, looking for someone, and my housemate evidently had about the same discussion with them. You know, about maybe they were looking for the right address, wrong quadrant."
"Remember anything else?" The grin wouldn't go away, and in fact I was getting almost dizzy under the similarities between that grin and the grin on the Cheshire Cat.
"Ah, he said something like don't all crowd up to the windows, but those guys are all hanging out double-parked in limousines, been there all night".
"I don't see any limousines," she said, and I remarked that they must have got tired of waiting for someone who had sent them on a wild goose chase, and must have left overnight.
"Right," she said, and then got up and said, "if we need any more information from you, we know where to find you", and then, still grinning, sauntered off. If she was wearing a pistol I have no idea where she might have been hiding it; she'd been wearing a fairly nice if generic blouse, sensible shoes, and old faded jeans that fit like a second skin. I stared for a second and then realized that I was seriously checking out a big time cop of the sort that you never want to even hear about, much less meet, and besides, my GF was inside hollering for me. I blinked and looked again, and she was gone.
Everyone who has to deal with the Official Weirdness of Official Washington mostly comes away with afterimages, recollections of slightly-portly men in their late 30s or early 40s, or maybe 60-ish women with terrifying librarian specs overtop of which they peer at you as if they're not sure whether you qualify as animal, vegetable or mineral. Occasionally one navigates the halls of this or that agency to find one's self confronted with some very studly fellow in a great suit or a fetching vision of beauty and fashion, only to discover that they're paralegals.
Then there are the people that actually fit the stereotype of "faceless bureaucrat" and there are a lot of them. And then there are the people that you don't see, most of them with unheard-of careers doing things that are just too mysterious and weird to discuss. Like, you know, secret agents and stuff.
Lots of folks think that secret agents are all dashing athletic men and fine-figured femmes-fatales who stay in shape rappelling down skyscrapers and parachuting from perfectly good airplanes in between assignments saving the world from Doctor Evil. Then they start thinking about it, and they start realizing that of course you can't have secret agents that are going to attract attention, much less ones that break the hearts of all who behold them. And that's probably true, but just because someone's just too insanely good looking to be a secret agent doesn't mean they can't be some other kind of Fed.
Strangely enough, throughout history, people who are smart and strong have often risen to the top of their respective heaps, and quite frequently they marry very attractive people. This is, over the course of time, led to lots of kids who are strong, smart, and attractive. There's this commonplace misperception that people who are in great shape and who are fine looking are invariably dumb as a box of rocks. There are cases where this is true. And there are cases where this is definitely not the case.
Feds need love just like anyone else does, but the facts of life are a little different for Feds.
Now, I am one of those guys who is a total sucker for a pretty face. I know this about myself. This is why I stay home and watch bad television a lot, on the reasonable presumption that if I start drooling, the TV isn't going to call me an idiot and slap me. And it was generally fortunate for me that when I had a government job, I worked on the floor where one was least likely to be working with svelte fashion plates, in the department least likely to interface with the public. Of course, this also meant that I worked in the department most likely to have interagency visitors, and to have interagency visitors from agencies that generally don't like to have a lot of discussion about them.
And so, of course, me not wanting to have to deal with these sorts of people any more than I want to have to be slapped out of a drooling episode, that's exactly what I get. Not merely a week or two of high-level discussions from representatives of every agency that doesn't want people to know they exist, it all has to happen right across the hall from my office, and of course every last one of these agencies puts their best face forward in terms of the representatives.
The office across the hall from me is, more or less, a churning mass of highly-trained and extremely athletic women maybe a few days over 27, most with advanced degrees from the best private universities as well as significant coursework from agency academies, all of them dressed to impress for success. I think I will take an extended and early lunch, starting right now. And as I walk out the door, they're all... grinning at me.
Some of these women are so lovely that the intensity of their high-voltage grins is probably blistering my skin. I sneak out, and three martinis later, I try to sneak back in, and if anything, their grins are even bigger and seem only to grow as I quietly shut the door to the office.
Over the next few months life got a little stranger than usual but I did what one does to stay even slightly sane in the Weirdness that is Washington. I tried to ignore it.
But how do you ignore a 200-proof hottie when she pops up in line behind you at the 17th Street Safeway and starts speaking to you in German? Well, I don't speak German, so it was fairly easy.
How do you ignore a ravishing beauty dressed up like a homeless gal when she's slumming down at your favorite hangouts? Well, it's easy if you try to talk to her and she just ... grins. Won't say a word. Just grins.
How do you ignore what appears to be a pack of insanely buff gals who pop in out of nowhere, it seems, who are just "playing through" in what looks to be a running game of Ultimate Frisbee carried on in rush-hour traffic? Wearing, of course, the obligatory designer dresses and their Metro sneakers, as they dash past you while you're stuck at a light.
Feds as a rule are what they appear to be: well-educated, well-trained, and well-maintained. They also are something that is not evident from appearances, but what should be evident to anyone who thinks about it much: they're part of a team. They're part of a culture and part of a subculture and it's only the rarest of the rare who have the level of training and the personal qualities that let them "go it alone", and these would be the folks who operate "uncontrolled" if operating domestically; operating abroad they are labeled "no official cover". Good luck ever meeting one of those and ever having a clue as to who they are and what they do. That nice chatty housewife you know is probably really just a nice chatty housewife, but she could quite possibly be a nice chatty housewife who can topple governments, and has.
Government-toppling housewives are fortunately fairly rare and they prefer to hide out in the suburbs rather than downtown, so you're probably more likely to run into them down at the mall, rather than down on The Mall. Feds, however, are all over the Federal City and beyond. Unlike the government-toppling housewives, they travel in packs. Sometimes the packs are visible, as they were when I used to see Aldrich Ames wandering through the park at Dupont Circle in the interval between when he got "outed" and when they actually took him into custody. Sometimes, the packs aren't visible. When the lady agent was asking me questions on my porch, I could see the lady agent, not to mention every last tooth and fabulous curve. I could not see her associates, of whom there were probably several. I didn't even try to look for them; they're very good at hiding in plain sight and you don't have to see them to simply know that they're there.
"If we need anything else," the lady agent had said, "we know where to find you". And they do.
Feds have different things to gossip about than most people do. Aside from talking shop about things going on in the career and at work, they can talk about each other, but sooner or later they figure out that while they might be having a good old time being an agent, they are no longer much interested in dating agents, or Feds, or Washington establishment types.
As a rule, these are not exactly plain-vanilla people even though many of them have jobs mostly making sure that nobody else ever gets anything other than plain-vanilla. Most people can't handle anything that's not plain-vanilla, that's why there are laws against it and more or less the Feds are enforcing the laws.
Sometimes they have to be pretty, well, sneaky. You know, tracking and confronting criminal masterminds, playing the endless Game against their counterparts, some of whom are known, and the majority of whom are unknown.
The world of the agents is a strange and mysterious place, even to the agents. That's why they're always investigating everything, and everyone.
To me, sitting on a porch, watching an agent fade back into the Weirdness that is Washington, I'm looking at the world with a summary of "oh, okay, some weirdness is afoot, and the weirdness just landed an agent at my doorstep".
To the agent, aside from whatever mission she was on, I represent something else: either a dossier she hasn't seen, or a dossier which she must create, or a dossier to which she must add, whether its one she will or won't ever see again or has seen it before. And if it's not she who is making or keeping the records, it's probably one of her friends or associates. And if that dossier doesn't show a history of something that agents find worrisome, it goes back into the pile marked "safe enough, more or less". Hopefully it won't get tossed into the pile marked "circulate widely for amusement value", or you could have people grinning at you. Lots of them, both grins, and people.
Agents are generally pretty cautious. They have to be, they're certainly trained for it, and incredibly bad things can happen if they aren't pretty cautious, and not just to them or their colleagues. It's one thing if you're a police officer and you don't cover your ass and a bank robber makes your wife a widow. It's another thing entirely if you don't cover your ass, and blow an investigation into counter-counterintelligence operations where the fates of nations hangs in the balance.
So, as cautious persons, who work as teams, whose special needs very frequently include having nobody (who doesn't need to know) know exactly who they are or what they do, who, outside of their own profession, can agents and Feds date?
I've had to work on the environs, more or less, of the intelligence community -- which is where all of the heavy Feds live, so to speak -- and this is where the Weirdness that is Washington makes itself felt. No, I do not know where all the bodies are buried, and I didn't bury any of them and I don't know which bodies nor who buried them, nor for a fact if they were buried or are just rumored to be buried. I am just a boring office clerk with computer skills. I also have no criminal record and neither do my relatives, I don't owe money and thus I pass credit and background checks and there just aren't all that many people who can say that and also have my boring clerical and computer skills. All of this, unfortunately, makes me just about exactly what agents or Feds can safely date. However, I have made it a point to be so utterly boring that none of them could reasonably want to. And somewhere out there are people, however, who lie between the bounds of safety and boredom.
If you're one of those people who lie between the bounds of safety and boredom, and you live anywhere near the Weirdness that is Washington, and you're also not outside the bounds of what anyone could consider eligible, you might also be the sensitive type who is attuned to fluctuations in the level of weirdness. And you might find yourself meeting new friends, and their friends, and if you're lucky you might never suspect that you are being "cruised" (to use a word from counterculture) by lovelorn spies or deep secret services types. You might never have to say to yourself, "yes, honey, those folks were from the government, I'm just not sure if they were from ours".
Washington is a place where the weather changes all of the time. Yet sometimes you might be sitting around some morning and have your housemate come inside from outdoors and you could ask them "what's it like out there" and all they'll say is "weird". This could result from all sorts of thing ranging from the parking lot being full of HAZMAT trucks to having unutterably cute special agents bumping into you at the newspaper vending machine at every last Metro station you frequent. You could be walking to work and be confronted with the appalling spectacle of people herding cats, and not even notice. But you could blog about it and have it get noticed, even though you didn't quite see it for what it was.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Councilman Praisner Dies
We offer our condolences to the family and staff, in the matter of the Passing of Councilman Donald Praisner.
Welcome Wagon Walking Tour of Weirdos and Wackos in Aspen Hill?
How odd.
I often post here -- and elsewhere, of course -- and it seems that just about as soon as I go out of the house, whatever content I generated appears on people's cellphones as Twitter or something. Or maybe some AM-radio "shock jock" recirculates my online ruminations into Christian EvangeRadio News or whatever. At any rate, I go through my daily routine and on some days nobody much seems to notice me, and on other days, this or that crew is out on the warpath having conniptions and shit-fits. The only difference, as I might hypothesize, is the content I posted.
But how to test such an hypothesis?
I got a lot of reaction from when I posted about the apparently self-appointed "welcome wagon" walking tour of weirdos and wackos in Aspen Hill, where newcomers to the neighborhood are evidently sought out by people -- nobody seems to know quite who they are -- who pop in out of nowhere, tell them where to shop, and then walk them around a few blocks, pointing out group homes for people with psychiatric disabilities, people who they think act funny, to whom they are politically or morally opposed, perhaps. Newcomers being newcomers, they evidently think that this is actually Official and don't check credentials, and either the local government is unaware of this, or tacitly approves as it may (perhaps inadvertently) further activities of goals of this-or-that element of County government.
Well, the reaction that I got from posting the "weirdos and wackos walking tour" doesn't begin to compare to the reaction where I mentioned that comparable (maybe part of the same crew?) people are pointing out to newcomers where Lesbian Policewomen live. I mentioned that yesterday afternoon and instead of the usual handful of low-rent "spanish" idiots in old crappy nissans throwing crap out of their windows at me, about every other female county-worker type that passed me as they headed into the neighborhoods of Aspen Hill gave the rather heinous looks of moderately raw venom.
Have I accidentally and with all innocence opened up a huge can of the worms that dare not speak the name of their love, to mangle a metaphor or two? Or is it simply a case that some Lesbian Policewomen in the neighborhood decided that it's just fine with them if people are driving newcomers around pointing out helpless mentally-disabled people's group homes so they can be targeted for harassment, but it's somehow just wrong that there are driving around pointing out the houses that are home to certified-competent and well-trained armed women?
Well, that ought to test the hypothesis...
I often post here -- and elsewhere, of course -- and it seems that just about as soon as I go out of the house, whatever content I generated appears on people's cellphones as Twitter or something. Or maybe some AM-radio "shock jock" recirculates my online ruminations into Christian EvangeRadio News or whatever. At any rate, I go through my daily routine and on some days nobody much seems to notice me, and on other days, this or that crew is out on the warpath having conniptions and shit-fits. The only difference, as I might hypothesize, is the content I posted.
But how to test such an hypothesis?
I got a lot of reaction from when I posted about the apparently self-appointed "welcome wagon" walking tour of weirdos and wackos in Aspen Hill, where newcomers to the neighborhood are evidently sought out by people -- nobody seems to know quite who they are -- who pop in out of nowhere, tell them where to shop, and then walk them around a few blocks, pointing out group homes for people with psychiatric disabilities, people who they think act funny, to whom they are politically or morally opposed, perhaps. Newcomers being newcomers, they evidently think that this is actually Official and don't check credentials, and either the local government is unaware of this, or tacitly approves as it may (perhaps inadvertently) further activities of goals of this-or-that element of County government.
Well, the reaction that I got from posting the "weirdos and wackos walking tour" doesn't begin to compare to the reaction where I mentioned that comparable (maybe part of the same crew?) people are pointing out to newcomers where Lesbian Policewomen live. I mentioned that yesterday afternoon and instead of the usual handful of low-rent "spanish" idiots in old crappy nissans throwing crap out of their windows at me, about every other female county-worker type that passed me as they headed into the neighborhoods of Aspen Hill gave the rather heinous looks of moderately raw venom.
Have I accidentally and with all innocence opened up a huge can of the worms that dare not speak the name of their love, to mangle a metaphor or two? Or is it simply a case that some Lesbian Policewomen in the neighborhood decided that it's just fine with them if people are driving newcomers around pointing out helpless mentally-disabled people's group homes so they can be targeted for harassment, but it's somehow just wrong that there are driving around pointing out the houses that are home to certified-competent and well-trained armed women?
Well, that ought to test the hypothesis...
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Malevolent H-1B Visa Employee (India) Sabotages Mortgage Database at FANNIE-MAE
In a story that should be in "first men on moon" typeface above the fold at the Washington Post, instead we find a story at the DC Examiner as well as all over the rest of the WWW: Ex-Fannie Mae worker charged with planting computer virus.
Rajendrasinh Makwana, an Indian citizen and Gaithersburg resident, is out on $100,000 bail. Makwana was fired from Fannie Mae on October 24, 2008 for unauthorized changes to system settings without permission from his supervisor.
It would seem that in the course of checking over his recent scripting, engineers discovered a "trojan horse" script that would have activated in January 31, 2009, and would have locked legitimate users out of the system of over 4000 servers to which Makwana had superuser access. After the lockout, all of the data in the servers' databases would have been overwritten with zeros. These databases, of course, are primarily mortgage data.
"Had this malicious script executed, engineers expect it would have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not shutdown operations at Fannie Mae for at least one week,” said FBI agent Jessica Nye in a sworn statement. “The total damage would include cleaning out and restoring all 4,000 servers, restoring and securing the automation of mortgages, and restoring all data that was erased.”
As if the economy wasn't already in bad enough shape, the damage this could have done is incalculable. Literally, incalculable. We already don't have enough information on the ownership of the "tranches" of the mortgage-backed securities, and the so-called "Toxic Assets" problem is one of not knowing who all exactly owns any given mortgage, especially if it's a so-called "Option ARM" (adjustable rate mortgate). This would have only thrown more ink into the muddle, as it were.
This sort of information-based attack is the equivalent of the September Eleventh tragedies. It's low-likelihood, but very high risk.
It's time to massively reduce the number of persons admitted on the H-1B Visa program. As more and more American and Canadian companies are shrinking their workforces, there is a profound surplus of competent American and Canadian software engineers. We have no need to hire from abroad, especially not from countries that see us as their primary rivals and competitors, and which have anger and revenge as acceptable within their traditions.
Rajendrasinh Makwana, an Indian citizen and Gaithersburg resident, is out on $100,000 bail. Makwana was fired from Fannie Mae on October 24, 2008 for unauthorized changes to system settings without permission from his supervisor.
It would seem that in the course of checking over his recent scripting, engineers discovered a "trojan horse" script that would have activated in January 31, 2009, and would have locked legitimate users out of the system of over 4000 servers to which Makwana had superuser access. After the lockout, all of the data in the servers' databases would have been overwritten with zeros. These databases, of course, are primarily mortgage data.
"Had this malicious script executed, engineers expect it would have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not shutdown operations at Fannie Mae for at least one week,” said FBI agent Jessica Nye in a sworn statement. “The total damage would include cleaning out and restoring all 4,000 servers, restoring and securing the automation of mortgages, and restoring all data that was erased.”
As if the economy wasn't already in bad enough shape, the damage this could have done is incalculable. Literally, incalculable. We already don't have enough information on the ownership of the "tranches" of the mortgage-backed securities, and the so-called "Toxic Assets" problem is one of not knowing who all exactly owns any given mortgage, especially if it's a so-called "Option ARM" (adjustable rate mortgate). This would have only thrown more ink into the muddle, as it were.
This sort of information-based attack is the equivalent of the September Eleventh tragedies. It's low-likelihood, but very high risk.
It's time to massively reduce the number of persons admitted on the H-1B Visa program. As more and more American and Canadian companies are shrinking their workforces, there is a profound surplus of competent American and Canadian software engineers. We have no need to hire from abroad, especially not from countries that see us as their primary rivals and competitors, and which have anger and revenge as acceptable within their traditions.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Supreme Court Harassment Investigation Case
In an interesting ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States ("SCOTUS") has made a determination on legal issues surrounding employer retaliation in an internal corporate harassment investigation.
Employees who do not initiate or instigate a harassment complaint, but who merely answer questions asked in the course of an investigation, are as protected against retaliatory actions by the employers, as are those who personally initiate or instigate proceedings.
Previous rulings from the lower 6th Circuit Court and Court of Appeals were flawed when they ruled that federal anti-retaliation law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, did not protect the plaintiff because she had not "instigated or initiated" the complaint, and instead had merely answered questions in a case already underway.
Justice David H. Souter wrote, in part: "Nothing in the statute requires a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question".
The ruling was 9 to 0, with no dissenting opinion.
Prior to this Supreme Court ruling, it would appear that if a Regional Manager from a corporation were to investigate complaints about discrimination in their subsidiary offices or storefronts, they might meet a unified wall of denial in a situation where a manager was organizing (or gave tacit approval to) discrimination. The manager might have made it clear that if any local employee answered any questions in the investigation in a way which supported discrimination claims, they'd be terminated, and have no legal recourse.
Today's ruling makes it clear that there is a legal recourse. The employees can answer truthfully without fear of getting fired, or if they get fired for informing an investigation, they have grounds to successfully sue.
Employees who do not initiate or instigate a harassment complaint, but who merely answer questions asked in the course of an investigation, are as protected against retaliatory actions by the employers, as are those who personally initiate or instigate proceedings.
Previous rulings from the lower 6th Circuit Court and Court of Appeals were flawed when they ruled that federal anti-retaliation law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, did not protect the plaintiff because she had not "instigated or initiated" the complaint, and instead had merely answered questions in a case already underway.
Justice David H. Souter wrote, in part: "Nothing in the statute requires a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question".
The ruling was 9 to 0, with no dissenting opinion.
Prior to this Supreme Court ruling, it would appear that if a Regional Manager from a corporation were to investigate complaints about discrimination in their subsidiary offices or storefronts, they might meet a unified wall of denial in a situation where a manager was organizing (or gave tacit approval to) discrimination. The manager might have made it clear that if any local employee answered any questions in the investigation in a way which supported discrimination claims, they'd be terminated, and have no legal recourse.
Today's ruling makes it clear that there is a legal recourse. The employees can answer truthfully without fear of getting fired, or if they get fired for informing an investigation, they have grounds to successfully sue.
Monday, January 26, 2009
(Part III) Roust the Bums in Aspen Hill: People Are Not Statistics
Previously, we covered abusiveness of myself, and of autistic charges of a publicly-funded day-supervision outfit.
I must stand corrected on this; the organization with whose staff I found fault -- Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children ("CSAAC") -- is in fact a private non-profit agency, though they almost certainly access taxpayer-funded grants and programs.
Next, we covered a bit of contrast and compare of cultural attitudes to working with the Disabled.
Today, well, we're "winging it".
Watching today's news about major job losses at major employers all across the nation, I was struck in a non-positive way by phrasing which seemed to me to reduce human individuals to mere statistics.
I can't give you an exact quote, but more or less it was to the effect of "48,000 jobs translates to mortgages, bank accounts, credit card payments, auto purchases, college loans..." etc.
Well, that's all true, and if all you are discussing is the economy -- itself pretty much all numbers and statistics -- you might be tempted to simply dissociate the horror of ruined lives and turn them into nothing but a set of numbers factored into a larger, more complex, equation.
Yet the fact remains. These aren't lost jobs. These aren't vanished payment plans on which bankers can no longer count. This isn't a wooden shoe tossed into the machinery, to conjure an image from the Dutch Resistance. These aren't vehicles piling up in the output parking lots of Detroit auto-makers.
These aren't statistics. These are people.
It's tempting to reduce people to statistics, especially if on the one hand you are a business manager and you need to pay close attention to the accountants, and if on the other hand, you have a college degree which required you to learn to see people not as people, but as segments, aggregates, sectors, and regions. As a college student, that's easy enough to do; you probably went to a school where you had a circle of fairly close friends, but the vast majority of the people you saw were easily relegated to a conceptual world where they weren't exactly persons, but rather individual members of a class. You could say of someone, probably on the basis of appearance, "oh, that's a nerd", or "oh, that's a jock", or "oh, that's a media student". And you could probably -- based on stereotypes based on statistics, more or less -- reasonably predict what interested them, where they shopped, what current movies they had seen or intended to see. And much of your education in college would be about teaching you to refine those statistics.
Abstractions into statistics are indeed exceptionally powerful when you are looking at masses of people, rather than at individuals. And it may be due to the successes that follow from the power that one is tempted to see people as statistics, as members of a class, as abstractions away from human-ness, and not as individuals who have many attributes which in fact do not fall within your statistical model, though within those individuals you might find many traits that are shared with your model.
But when you forget that individuals are individuals, and start treating individuals as nothing more than statistical abstracts, you've entered a realm that amounts to delusion. You're ignoring the fact that they are individuals. They are not statistics. They are people.
Everyone has a stereotype about Bums.
Part of the stereotype includes low-cost clothing, which might be true enough, but it's not just bums that like to buy what costs the least. Some people are just frugal. It's also quite possible for people to be poor and not be bums, but if your stereotype, your statistical model, equates cheap clothing with bums, you're not going to see people in cheap clothing as anything but bums.
I know a gentleman, if you can call him that, who has been seated on a certain wall on a busy city street in Washington, DC. He's there all day every day, and has been there for at least twenty years. He always asks, "sir, some change?" and holds out his hand. I've stood there and watched and seen him take in probably a hundred dollars in five minutes. He is in fact bumming, but I've seen him in a bank in a very different part of town depositing literal bags of money. If you judge people on the basis of how much money they have in the bank -- assuming that you can possibly know that -- then this man is not a bum. I'm pretty sure that by now he is a millionaire, several times over.
But how much money would he have in the bank if he wasn't out there bumming all day, every day, and kept it up for at least 20 years?
Like I said, literal bags of money. Yet he buys his clothes at the Salvation Army Thrift Store.
So do I, now and then.
In the lovely and friendly city of Austin, County of Travis, in the great state of Texas, there is the O. Henry Museum. In case anyone has reverted to utter cultural illiteracy -- or never possessed American cultural literacy -- O. Henry was the pen-name of one William Sidney Porter, an acknowledged grand master of the English-language short-story.
Mr Porter was known at one time for his affection for homeless drifters, and in Texas at the time of his residence there, there were many such men. Mr Porter used to let them camp in his back yard, which earned him some approbation. Why ever would such a nice man, a banker and former pharmacist and clearly of an educated and artistic bent, allow drifters to use his back yard as a campground? Mr Porter allegedly responded to such inquiries by saying that if he was having trouble coming up with a story idea, he could just dress like the drifters, walk out back by a roundabout way so that they didn't see him as the man of the house, get drunk with the boys, and hear a couple dozen stories far more imaginative and odd than any he himself could ever originate. And there he'd have his idea. He claimed that as he generally brought the bottle, he figured he'd paid for the idea.
Sometimes I like to go listen to people as we all drink and talk, and I like to go a roundabout way so that they don't recognize me as the man from the house. I've never heard of a story that Mr Porter got whipped through the streets of Austin as occasionally were the men from whom he sometimes got his story ideas and exactly like to whom he dressed, but honestly, it would not surprise me if I did hear that.
People, you see, sometimes have their stereotypes, and a lot of those sort of people like to trot out statistics as their excuse. Yet if someone ever did whip Mr Porter -- "O. Henry" -- through the streets of Austin, I expect that Mr Porter wrote it up in one of his enduring short stories in a way that would have people scoffing at the sort of asshole that like to whip drifters, scoffing for so long as assholes, and O. Henry's famous stories, endure.
My point here, of course, is that as much as people might like to judge people on the basis of their clothing, in some cases they might be right, and in some cases they might be dead wrong.
At Austin's O. Henry Museum, there is an old and battered book sitting on a shelf. It's old, and it is battered, and it's full of wonderful stories which are reprinted to this very day and taught to schoolchildren across the English-speaking world, and generations of Americans have read those stories and remember them with great fondness. It warms their hearts to read those stories again, years later, in any of the millions of reprintings that are floating around. But to look at that book in the museum, some people might just sniff and say "that don't impress me". But even with that old tattered cover and dog-eared pages, that is a first edition, and it is about priceless.
You cannot judge a book by its cover.
People are not stereotypes.
People are not statistics.
Statistics are certainly useful in some cases.
Outside of a few specific disorders -- notably certain extreme cases of paranoid schizophrenia, and personality disorders such as the non-disabling but criminal Antisocial personality disorder -- the mentally ill and the autistic and "intellectually disabled" are no more criminal than people who are of normal intelligence and emotional state and pure shining sanity. That's a statistic to remember. There is no statistic supporting any notion that the "differently abled" are a menace to society or to your business.
Absent any statistical basis to try to run the "afflicted" out of your store, off of your property, or out of your facility, or even off of the streets of their neighborhoods or out of their homes, any and all harassment is simply baseless violation of Federal law, violation for no reason of the Americans With Disability Act.
Don't do it. There is no argument to support such activity other than an exceptionally honest admission of "I am a fucking asshole who discriminates against people because I think I can get away with it". There isn't even any statistical basis for such arguments, and discriminating against the disabled, or people one might think dress like poor folks, or drifters, that's going to end.
Don't be expecting to get away with it much longer. There's a centrist Democrat in the White House right now, and while I remember that I can't get served in a restaurant today, the President of the USA stated in his Inauguration Address that things have changed a lot, changed from the days when his father probably could not have gotten served in a restaurant, and here he is starting his new job today.
The George W. Bush Republicans aren't in power anymore, and they're no longer denying funding to the agencies that prosecute people who discriminate against the disabled. Those agencies will be getting their funding and they will once again be out in force, with orders from the top down to defend the law and defend the helpless, all at the same time.
I intend to point them at as many offenders as I can.
And so will any other decent human being.
TO BE CONTINUED AS WARRANTED
I must stand corrected on this; the organization with whose staff I found fault -- Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children ("CSAAC") -- is in fact a private non-profit agency, though they almost certainly access taxpayer-funded grants and programs.
Next, we covered a bit of contrast and compare of cultural attitudes to working with the Disabled.
Today, well, we're "winging it".
Watching today's news about major job losses at major employers all across the nation, I was struck in a non-positive way by phrasing which seemed to me to reduce human individuals to mere statistics.
I can't give you an exact quote, but more or less it was to the effect of "48,000 jobs translates to mortgages, bank accounts, credit card payments, auto purchases, college loans..." etc.
Well, that's all true, and if all you are discussing is the economy -- itself pretty much all numbers and statistics -- you might be tempted to simply dissociate the horror of ruined lives and turn them into nothing but a set of numbers factored into a larger, more complex, equation.
Yet the fact remains. These aren't lost jobs. These aren't vanished payment plans on which bankers can no longer count. This isn't a wooden shoe tossed into the machinery, to conjure an image from the Dutch Resistance. These aren't vehicles piling up in the output parking lots of Detroit auto-makers.
These aren't statistics. These are people.
It's tempting to reduce people to statistics, especially if on the one hand you are a business manager and you need to pay close attention to the accountants, and if on the other hand, you have a college degree which required you to learn to see people not as people, but as segments, aggregates, sectors, and regions. As a college student, that's easy enough to do; you probably went to a school where you had a circle of fairly close friends, but the vast majority of the people you saw were easily relegated to a conceptual world where they weren't exactly persons, but rather individual members of a class. You could say of someone, probably on the basis of appearance, "oh, that's a nerd", or "oh, that's a jock", or "oh, that's a media student". And you could probably -- based on stereotypes based on statistics, more or less -- reasonably predict what interested them, where they shopped, what current movies they had seen or intended to see. And much of your education in college would be about teaching you to refine those statistics.
Abstractions into statistics are indeed exceptionally powerful when you are looking at masses of people, rather than at individuals. And it may be due to the successes that follow from the power that one is tempted to see people as statistics, as members of a class, as abstractions away from human-ness, and not as individuals who have many attributes which in fact do not fall within your statistical model, though within those individuals you might find many traits that are shared with your model.
But when you forget that individuals are individuals, and start treating individuals as nothing more than statistical abstracts, you've entered a realm that amounts to delusion. You're ignoring the fact that they are individuals. They are not statistics. They are people.
Everyone has a stereotype about Bums.
Part of the stereotype includes low-cost clothing, which might be true enough, but it's not just bums that like to buy what costs the least. Some people are just frugal. It's also quite possible for people to be poor and not be bums, but if your stereotype, your statistical model, equates cheap clothing with bums, you're not going to see people in cheap clothing as anything but bums.
I know a gentleman, if you can call him that, who has been seated on a certain wall on a busy city street in Washington, DC. He's there all day every day, and has been there for at least twenty years. He always asks, "sir, some change?" and holds out his hand. I've stood there and watched and seen him take in probably a hundred dollars in five minutes. He is in fact bumming, but I've seen him in a bank in a very different part of town depositing literal bags of money. If you judge people on the basis of how much money they have in the bank -- assuming that you can possibly know that -- then this man is not a bum. I'm pretty sure that by now he is a millionaire, several times over.
But how much money would he have in the bank if he wasn't out there bumming all day, every day, and kept it up for at least 20 years?
Like I said, literal bags of money. Yet he buys his clothes at the Salvation Army Thrift Store.
So do I, now and then.
In the lovely and friendly city of Austin, County of Travis, in the great state of Texas, there is the O. Henry Museum. In case anyone has reverted to utter cultural illiteracy -- or never possessed American cultural literacy -- O. Henry was the pen-name of one William Sidney Porter, an acknowledged grand master of the English-language short-story.
Mr Porter was known at one time for his affection for homeless drifters, and in Texas at the time of his residence there, there were many such men. Mr Porter used to let them camp in his back yard, which earned him some approbation. Why ever would such a nice man, a banker and former pharmacist and clearly of an educated and artistic bent, allow drifters to use his back yard as a campground? Mr Porter allegedly responded to such inquiries by saying that if he was having trouble coming up with a story idea, he could just dress like the drifters, walk out back by a roundabout way so that they didn't see him as the man of the house, get drunk with the boys, and hear a couple dozen stories far more imaginative and odd than any he himself could ever originate. And there he'd have his idea. He claimed that as he generally brought the bottle, he figured he'd paid for the idea.
Sometimes I like to go listen to people as we all drink and talk, and I like to go a roundabout way so that they don't recognize me as the man from the house. I've never heard of a story that Mr Porter got whipped through the streets of Austin as occasionally were the men from whom he sometimes got his story ideas and exactly like to whom he dressed, but honestly, it would not surprise me if I did hear that.
People, you see, sometimes have their stereotypes, and a lot of those sort of people like to trot out statistics as their excuse. Yet if someone ever did whip Mr Porter -- "O. Henry" -- through the streets of Austin, I expect that Mr Porter wrote it up in one of his enduring short stories in a way that would have people scoffing at the sort of asshole that like to whip drifters, scoffing for so long as assholes, and O. Henry's famous stories, endure.
My point here, of course, is that as much as people might like to judge people on the basis of their clothing, in some cases they might be right, and in some cases they might be dead wrong.
At Austin's O. Henry Museum, there is an old and battered book sitting on a shelf. It's old, and it is battered, and it's full of wonderful stories which are reprinted to this very day and taught to schoolchildren across the English-speaking world, and generations of Americans have read those stories and remember them with great fondness. It warms their hearts to read those stories again, years later, in any of the millions of reprintings that are floating around. But to look at that book in the museum, some people might just sniff and say "that don't impress me". But even with that old tattered cover and dog-eared pages, that is a first edition, and it is about priceless.
You cannot judge a book by its cover.
People are not stereotypes.
People are not statistics.
Statistics are certainly useful in some cases.
Outside of a few specific disorders -- notably certain extreme cases of paranoid schizophrenia, and personality disorders such as the non-disabling but criminal Antisocial personality disorder -- the mentally ill and the autistic and "intellectually disabled" are no more criminal than people who are of normal intelligence and emotional state and pure shining sanity. That's a statistic to remember. There is no statistic supporting any notion that the "differently abled" are a menace to society or to your business.
Absent any statistical basis to try to run the "afflicted" out of your store, off of your property, or out of your facility, or even off of the streets of their neighborhoods or out of their homes, any and all harassment is simply baseless violation of Federal law, violation for no reason of the Americans With Disability Act.
Don't do it. There is no argument to support such activity other than an exceptionally honest admission of "I am a fucking asshole who discriminates against people because I think I can get away with it". There isn't even any statistical basis for such arguments, and discriminating against the disabled, or people one might think dress like poor folks, or drifters, that's going to end.
Don't be expecting to get away with it much longer. There's a centrist Democrat in the White House right now, and while I remember that I can't get served in a restaurant today, the President of the USA stated in his Inauguration Address that things have changed a lot, changed from the days when his father probably could not have gotten served in a restaurant, and here he is starting his new job today.
The George W. Bush Republicans aren't in power anymore, and they're no longer denying funding to the agencies that prosecute people who discriminate against the disabled. Those agencies will be getting their funding and they will once again be out in force, with orders from the top down to defend the law and defend the helpless, all at the same time.
I intend to point them at as many offenders as I can.
And so will any other decent human being.
TO BE CONTINUED AS WARRANTED
Interlude, Brief
Um, yo, White House guys, gimme a call and I'll come on down and fix yer busted e-mail, okay?
Here is my resume.
Oh, and here's my related Patent. Sorry, Linux/UNIX only.
Here is my resume.
Oh, and here's my related Patent. Sorry, Linux/UNIX only.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
(Part II) Roust the Bums in Aspen Hill: Blame the Victims
Previously, abusiveness of myself, and of autistic charges of a publicly-funded day-supervision outfit. Somehow I think it's related.
People are strange. They always seem to be looking for the outsiders, someone to oppress or to fight or vanquish, and they always seem to be willing to organize to do it.
In 1994, Rwandan Genocide stunned the world with the vicious murder -- generally hand-to-hand at close quarters -- of hundreds of thousands over about 100 days. Despite the fact that ethnically and culturally the Hutu and Tutsi tribes were almost indistinguishable one from the other -- and were largely the creation of classism imposed by the Belgian colonial government -- the bloodshed was astonishing. And all that was necessary to set it off, it seems, was a lot of propaganda on the radio and the use of the word "cockroaches".
Africa, of course, is globally infamous for the unremitting tribal warfare, and in recent decades, the very name of that continent has become as synonymous with genocide and famine as it was in earlier times synonymous with slavery and the exportation of entire nations as slaves.
Africa is the mother of all of mankind, and some suggest that the farther you go from Africa, the closer you are to civilization. How strange it is to say that; the earliest civilizations were in Africa, from Great Zimbabwe to Egypt. Yet is Egypt in the modern day believed to be the center of mankind's rise above the bestial? Is Zimbabwe now famous in the modern day for its construction of grand palaces, or for cholera? And throughout the history of Africa, civilizations arose because they welcomes the trade of strangers, but defended their own places from enemies. In the modern day, the worst parts of Africa are in such terrible shape because the enemies they attack are their own countrymen, as in Zimbabwe where the ruling tribe and political party have reduced a fertile nation to a failed state, as in Sudan where one ethnic group is driving another into destruction in the desert.
Many who can have fled Africa. Many have sought refuge here in the US, but recent State Department and Immigration estimates place at above 80 percent the number of African applications for immigration or refuge, which are fraudulent on the face of the application. Many do come here from Africa, however, and it is very important to make the distinction between honorable persons of good family who emigrated from their homelands as the elite of their society. The African immigrant population here in Montgomery has one of the highest per-capita rates of college education. This reflects very positively. Yet many who have come here from Africa came here by means of fraud perpetrated on an immigration agency so broken that it granted to the 9/11 hijackers their student visas -- to come to America to learn how to fly -- six months after their fiery murder/suicide that was the most devastating attack ever made on American soil.
I rather enjoy conversations with foreigners, though most such conversations I have had took place in Washington DC, and sometimes in Northern Virginia. I'm less interested in speaking with professional visitors and more interested in speaking with "ordinary people". I like to understand from such people how it was that they lived in their homelands, and I often hear from them about how beautiful was Nature, and how ugly was the corruption and warfare. Many such persons with whom I have so conversed were the cream of their nation's youth, and many of them left their fine academic careers a year before graduation, mostly due to political upheavals or due to running afoul of this-or-that corrupt official or their entourage. Or so they say. But I won't deny that these were literate and well-educated people, and most of them had a great concern for the welfare of their friends and families back in their homeland, and for their culture and for their nation.
Here in Montgomery, my contacts have been less, but nonetheless where it is possible to be a friendly person and to listen to and remember the histories of others, that is proper and fitting. Here, as elsewhere, one meets a lot of people whose fine academic careers was cut short by this-or-that war, uprising, change of political power, or running afoul of corrupt officials or their entourages. Yet to my alarm, in many cases it has turned out that the political associations were not with the more moral (to my thinking) side of the conflicts. Some of the people rightly fled corruption in places such as Zaire (Congo) and some of them escaped because their families sent them abroad to escape being victims of reprisals for their family's looting of the public treasuries. Some did not rightly flee corruption either because they opposed it, or because they were a part of it; some fled because they were officers in the militaries of revolutions or insurgencies, whether Soviet-backed or otherwise.
Research into the conflicts in Africa show patterns of genocide and atrocity. The so-called "diamond conflicts" and the resource-control wars such as the "coltan war" are characterized by machete amputations of the limbs and extensive use of child soldiers, not to mention rape as a weapon of war.
But the common thread in all of this is seeing people not of one's own tribe (or religion, or nation, or political party) as nothing more than enemy, or a resource. In the "coltan wars", in particular, captured parties become slaves in the diggings, if male, and the females suffer far worse fates.
Seeing "others" as nothing but a resource or opportunity for income is nothing new. Slavery and subjugation are hardly limited to Africa or to Africans. Greece and Rome were both built on slavery as an institution and with slaves as a majority of the workforce. Comparably, the early days of the United States were, in some regions, highly populated with slaves and permeated by the institution of chattel slavery, the ownership of human beings. Indeed, in the modern day, slavery is almost widespread once again. Of course it isn't legal, and recent legislative action by the Montgomery County Council has required all persons hiring domestic workers to record a contract specifying duties and pay. This is in part due to a recent spate of domestic-worker slavery prosecutions in Montgomery County. Evidently an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America wasn't enough; now the much higher authority of the MoCo County Council has to step in.
At the Aspen Hill Local Park I have seen two totally different groups of autists.
One group comes down the hill from the Frost Center.
One group used to be brought over by van from the Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children ("CSAAC"), as best I could figure and as I was told when I asked.
The group that comes down to the park from the Frost Center comes down to play baseball. These guys are not going to be winning the World Series, but they seem to be having fun and they're playing baseball. The staff is interacting with them in a totally human-to-human if slightly custodial way.
The group that came down to the park in the van from CSAAC either sat in the van for hours, or were herded around the parking lot of the park. It looked almost like someone was filming background footage for a zombie movie. The staff weren't exactly prodding them along with sticks, most of the time. But the overwhelming impression was of human being herding cattle.
The Frost Center people seemed to have an individual sense of each of the personalities and persons with whom they interacted, and one got the sense that their clients were perhaps not the same as the average "normal" person, but they had personalities, hopes, fears, and perhaps talents and aspirations. Perhaps, like most autists, they didn't seem to be all that concerned with what anyone else might be thinking, yet they seemed to be human people and a part of their culture. The Frost Center staffers were all, to judge by the accents, born here in the USA.
The group of autists that came in the van from "over on Twinbrook Parkway" milled about like cattle: lost cattle, at that. I've spent a summer with relatives that ran sheep, and I have been around cattle farms as well. You get to know the names and the personalities of some of the most outstanding livestocks. But mostly what they are is something stubborn that wants to go its own way, and as stubborn as they are, you'd like to let them go their own way... except that would be a monetary loss. So you don't do anything to them that would decrease their value at market; but also if they get out of line, you yell at them, throw things at them, and if necessary you manhandle them.
The difference here is one of whether the caretakers of disabled persons treat them as human beings with the intrinsic worth of humanity. Alternatively, the caretakers of disabled persons treat them as cattle, kine for the market, with no value other than the income they can bring.
The Americans were therapists.
The Africans were herdsmen.
Or so it seemed to me.
Once I had some very strange interactions with some of the Africans.
Once some of them seemed to be quite ready to deal with me as if I were one of their herd, one of the clients whose therapy consisted of being herded around a public park's parking lot like so many cattle. I had seen some of these Africans get fairly violent on some of their charges. I didn't much care to be the victim of such dehumanizing treatment at the hands of a man I already knew to be a veteran of the revolutionary-insurgent side of the exceptionally bloody and atrocity-riddled Angolan Civil War. I left in a bit of a hurry.
In retrospect I am not quite sure what to make of it, other than that these guys want to have a larger herd, because it increases their income.
Or perhaps it was because all but one of the autists they herded like livestock were white, and about my age, and insofar as anyone could tell, I was just as unemployed and unemployable as were their charges.
Perhaps the African staffers (and sometimes customers of comparable origins) at the Northgate Rite-Aid who abuse me as if I were a recalcitrant sheep are abusing me because I'm not earning a paycheck for some African who should be following me around to keep the autist in line. Maybe they just think that autists are there for them to abuse.
Or perhaps they're just American-hating foreign racists.
Or maybe someone thinks that if they can convince the staffers to help run me out of the neighborhood, they'll be able to close down my group-house and turn it into a flophouse for illegal alien workforce. That's not going to happen; I live in the family home and it has been paid-for and mortgage free for over 30 years now.
Or maybe they just hate bloggers.
It doesn't matter to me; all that matters is that the abuse is studied and of clear long practice. It evidences, to me, clear organization and a furtive pursuit of criminal violence.
Another thing that matters to me is that if they are doing this to me, to whom else are they doing this? The difference here is that I'm not a voiceless autist who can only suffer and can complain only to their abusers. I'm here to stand up for those voiceless autists, though. And perhaps there will be others who will speak up for them. Perhaps the people at the Frost Center and other comparable institutions will start asking around, because if a clear pattern of systematic discrimination against persons covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act is ongoing at local stores, Montgomery is a county full of lawyers who love nothing more than crushing litigation.
TO BE CONTINUED
People are strange. They always seem to be looking for the outsiders, someone to oppress or to fight or vanquish, and they always seem to be willing to organize to do it.
In 1994, Rwandan Genocide stunned the world with the vicious murder -- generally hand-to-hand at close quarters -- of hundreds of thousands over about 100 days. Despite the fact that ethnically and culturally the Hutu and Tutsi tribes were almost indistinguishable one from the other -- and were largely the creation of classism imposed by the Belgian colonial government -- the bloodshed was astonishing. And all that was necessary to set it off, it seems, was a lot of propaganda on the radio and the use of the word "cockroaches".
Africa, of course, is globally infamous for the unremitting tribal warfare, and in recent decades, the very name of that continent has become as synonymous with genocide and famine as it was in earlier times synonymous with slavery and the exportation of entire nations as slaves.
Africa is the mother of all of mankind, and some suggest that the farther you go from Africa, the closer you are to civilization. How strange it is to say that; the earliest civilizations were in Africa, from Great Zimbabwe to Egypt. Yet is Egypt in the modern day believed to be the center of mankind's rise above the bestial? Is Zimbabwe now famous in the modern day for its construction of grand palaces, or for cholera? And throughout the history of Africa, civilizations arose because they welcomes the trade of strangers, but defended their own places from enemies. In the modern day, the worst parts of Africa are in such terrible shape because the enemies they attack are their own countrymen, as in Zimbabwe where the ruling tribe and political party have reduced a fertile nation to a failed state, as in Sudan where one ethnic group is driving another into destruction in the desert.
Many who can have fled Africa. Many have sought refuge here in the US, but recent State Department and Immigration estimates place at above 80 percent the number of African applications for immigration or refuge, which are fraudulent on the face of the application. Many do come here from Africa, however, and it is very important to make the distinction between honorable persons of good family who emigrated from their homelands as the elite of their society. The African immigrant population here in Montgomery has one of the highest per-capita rates of college education. This reflects very positively. Yet many who have come here from Africa came here by means of fraud perpetrated on an immigration agency so broken that it granted to the 9/11 hijackers their student visas -- to come to America to learn how to fly -- six months after their fiery murder/suicide that was the most devastating attack ever made on American soil.
I rather enjoy conversations with foreigners, though most such conversations I have had took place in Washington DC, and sometimes in Northern Virginia. I'm less interested in speaking with professional visitors and more interested in speaking with "ordinary people". I like to understand from such people how it was that they lived in their homelands, and I often hear from them about how beautiful was Nature, and how ugly was the corruption and warfare. Many such persons with whom I have so conversed were the cream of their nation's youth, and many of them left their fine academic careers a year before graduation, mostly due to political upheavals or due to running afoul of this-or-that corrupt official or their entourage. Or so they say. But I won't deny that these were literate and well-educated people, and most of them had a great concern for the welfare of their friends and families back in their homeland, and for their culture and for their nation.
Here in Montgomery, my contacts have been less, but nonetheless where it is possible to be a friendly person and to listen to and remember the histories of others, that is proper and fitting. Here, as elsewhere, one meets a lot of people whose fine academic careers was cut short by this-or-that war, uprising, change of political power, or running afoul of corrupt officials or their entourages. Yet to my alarm, in many cases it has turned out that the political associations were not with the more moral (to my thinking) side of the conflicts. Some of the people rightly fled corruption in places such as Zaire (Congo) and some of them escaped because their families sent them abroad to escape being victims of reprisals for their family's looting of the public treasuries. Some did not rightly flee corruption either because they opposed it, or because they were a part of it; some fled because they were officers in the militaries of revolutions or insurgencies, whether Soviet-backed or otherwise.
Research into the conflicts in Africa show patterns of genocide and atrocity. The so-called "diamond conflicts" and the resource-control wars such as the "coltan war" are characterized by machete amputations of the limbs and extensive use of child soldiers, not to mention rape as a weapon of war.
But the common thread in all of this is seeing people not of one's own tribe (or religion, or nation, or political party) as nothing more than enemy, or a resource. In the "coltan wars", in particular, captured parties become slaves in the diggings, if male, and the females suffer far worse fates.
Seeing "others" as nothing but a resource or opportunity for income is nothing new. Slavery and subjugation are hardly limited to Africa or to Africans. Greece and Rome were both built on slavery as an institution and with slaves as a majority of the workforce. Comparably, the early days of the United States were, in some regions, highly populated with slaves and permeated by the institution of chattel slavery, the ownership of human beings. Indeed, in the modern day, slavery is almost widespread once again. Of course it isn't legal, and recent legislative action by the Montgomery County Council has required all persons hiring domestic workers to record a contract specifying duties and pay. This is in part due to a recent spate of domestic-worker slavery prosecutions in Montgomery County. Evidently an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America wasn't enough; now the much higher authority of the MoCo County Council has to step in.
At the Aspen Hill Local Park I have seen two totally different groups of autists.
One group comes down the hill from the Frost Center.
One group used to be brought over by van from the Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children ("CSAAC"), as best I could figure and as I was told when I asked.
The group that comes down to the park from the Frost Center comes down to play baseball. These guys are not going to be winning the World Series, but they seem to be having fun and they're playing baseball. The staff is interacting with them in a totally human-to-human if slightly custodial way.
The group that came down to the park in the van from CSAAC either sat in the van for hours, or were herded around the parking lot of the park. It looked almost like someone was filming background footage for a zombie movie. The staff weren't exactly prodding them along with sticks, most of the time. But the overwhelming impression was of human being herding cattle.
The Frost Center people seemed to have an individual sense of each of the personalities and persons with whom they interacted, and one got the sense that their clients were perhaps not the same as the average "normal" person, but they had personalities, hopes, fears, and perhaps talents and aspirations. Perhaps, like most autists, they didn't seem to be all that concerned with what anyone else might be thinking, yet they seemed to be human people and a part of their culture. The Frost Center staffers were all, to judge by the accents, born here in the USA.
The group of autists that came in the van from "over on Twinbrook Parkway" milled about like cattle: lost cattle, at that. I've spent a summer with relatives that ran sheep, and I have been around cattle farms as well. You get to know the names and the personalities of some of the most outstanding livestocks. But mostly what they are is something stubborn that wants to go its own way, and as stubborn as they are, you'd like to let them go their own way... except that would be a monetary loss. So you don't do anything to them that would decrease their value at market; but also if they get out of line, you yell at them, throw things at them, and if necessary you manhandle them.
The difference here is one of whether the caretakers of disabled persons treat them as human beings with the intrinsic worth of humanity. Alternatively, the caretakers of disabled persons treat them as cattle, kine for the market, with no value other than the income they can bring.
The Americans were therapists.
The Africans were herdsmen.
Or so it seemed to me.
Once I had some very strange interactions with some of the Africans.
Once some of them seemed to be quite ready to deal with me as if I were one of their herd, one of the clients whose therapy consisted of being herded around a public park's parking lot like so many cattle. I had seen some of these Africans get fairly violent on some of their charges. I didn't much care to be the victim of such dehumanizing treatment at the hands of a man I already knew to be a veteran of the revolutionary-insurgent side of the exceptionally bloody and atrocity-riddled Angolan Civil War. I left in a bit of a hurry.
In retrospect I am not quite sure what to make of it, other than that these guys want to have a larger herd, because it increases their income.
Or perhaps it was because all but one of the autists they herded like livestock were white, and about my age, and insofar as anyone could tell, I was just as unemployed and unemployable as were their charges.
Perhaps the African staffers (and sometimes customers of comparable origins) at the Northgate Rite-Aid who abuse me as if I were a recalcitrant sheep are abusing me because I'm not earning a paycheck for some African who should be following me around to keep the autist in line. Maybe they just think that autists are there for them to abuse.
Or perhaps they're just American-hating foreign racists.
Or maybe someone thinks that if they can convince the staffers to help run me out of the neighborhood, they'll be able to close down my group-house and turn it into a flophouse for illegal alien workforce. That's not going to happen; I live in the family home and it has been paid-for and mortgage free for over 30 years now.
Or maybe they just hate bloggers.
It doesn't matter to me; all that matters is that the abuse is studied and of clear long practice. It evidences, to me, clear organization and a furtive pursuit of criminal violence.
Another thing that matters to me is that if they are doing this to me, to whom else are they doing this? The difference here is that I'm not a voiceless autist who can only suffer and can complain only to their abusers. I'm here to stand up for those voiceless autists, though. And perhaps there will be others who will speak up for them. Perhaps the people at the Frost Center and other comparable institutions will start asking around, because if a clear pattern of systematic discrimination against persons covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act is ongoing at local stores, Montgomery is a county full of lawyers who love nothing more than crushing litigation.
TO BE CONTINUED
(Part I) Roust the Bums in Aspen Hill: Merchants Crossing the Line
My recent mammoth epistle got me to thinking, even if it didn't do the same for more than one other person, to judge by the lack of comments to the article. Yet after all, I am not writing just for Aspen Hill, nor just for the County. Judging by the rate at which revenue from the google-ads is starting to pile up -- and it piles up whether you're reading this direct from the site, or from a crawler cache -- readership is expanding. Thus, I am taking it upon myself to develop an underserved constituency. I rise to speak for those who cannot easily articulate. I rise to speak on behalf of the mentally ill, intellectually disabled, and emotionally "different". Asperger Syndrome folks, I'm standing up for you too, okay?
As the Astute Reader is aware, Aspen Hill, Maryland is not highly regarded elsewhere in the County.
Even in the less-than-shiny Rockville neighborhood of Twinbrook, they seem to think that we're our own little brand of "special", not entirely surprisingly, although we think they're kind of "special" too. We like to think that they have more "specialness" than we do, mostly thanks to the presence of the "Mental Health Association of Montgomery County" ("MHAMC") and a lot of other "outreach" facilities right down the street from the MHAMC at 751 Twinbrook Parkway. That includes the "Interfaith Clothing Center" and the "Core Services Agency" of the County's Department of Health and Human Services.
Aspen Hill has, at the other end of the spectrum along the line of publicly-funded to privately-endowed, the Frost Center, which doubtless gets some sort of Federal and possibly State and County grants funding to help the struggling parents of autistic children and young adults, though evidently the facility is part of the private not-for-profit Sheppard-Pratt Health System. Frost Center mostly deals with Autism Spectrum disorders. There's a County contractor serving roughly the same community back at 751 Twinbrook, "CSAAC", or "Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children". Although there is significant funding available for the education of minor children with Autism Spectrum disorders, generally speaking when the person turns 18, the majority of funding dries up and adults with autism-spectrum disorders are effectively left to their own devices, outside of support from groups such as CSAAC.
Closer to the heart of Aspen Hill, we have Saint Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church, which though housed in a fairly modern building, is one of the oldest congregations in Montgomery County. Their old building burned down in the late 1970s, sadly; they used to run one of the earliest youth outreach centers, known as "Maggie's Place". They still have a thrift store in the back of the lot.
There are various other churches in Aspen Hill, many of which have varying levels of outreach to the poor.
As for me, I'm pretty poor, or so you might think to look at me. But if you take a look at my resume, you might notice a pattern of working for a fairly short period of time, now and then, in an industry notable for paying quite well. This resume, I might add, only covers one of my several career tracks, and quite frankly you see it -- or any of my career history -- because I want you to see it. This only lists the things that you can check out, and that I would want you to check out. More importantly, it only lists my references who would want to have people checking me out with them. This does not show my Federal employment history, for example; nor does it give anyone any clue as to how many friends and associates I may have acquired over about 25 years of being out, and about, in our Nation's Capital.
Honestly, I'm just some middle-aged guy that you've never seen in a suit, and unless I get elected or have to attend a wedding or a funeral, you probably never will see me in a suit. I have bad hair, smoker's teeth, and I'm a bit cavalier about how I dress. My idea of fashion is the standard uniform of a working man who's not at work at the moment: blue jeans and a shirt appropriate to the weather. Lately I've been affecting cheap import polo shirts as a concession to the fact that I'm no spring chicken.
If you see me driving down the street in my rather old and sketchy looking pickup truck, you would easily and instantly arrive at the conclusion that I am a no-account loser with some sort of crap job an illegal alien would be embarassed to do, and in fact, I will do all of the jobs most Americans won't do. I'll haul trash, do landscaping, code in PHP and build internet servers from parts I picked out and had bought by small corporations specializing in aspects of internet that are a bit too cutting edge to discuss here. If you've seen nice graphics on the local news that look at lot like photorealistic buildings in three-dimensional perspective laid on top of a Google Earth view, you're looking at a finished project built on my first stab at it.
Now where would a shabby poor man like me get his hands on the data, and how would someone who cuts lawns build the software from source code, and certainly it's not imaginable that he'd integrate wildly disparate packages from a potpourri of online Federal research labs to create a system that can convert flat ARCData from one source and elevation data from another source and spit out image after image of downtown Washington as it was in 2002.
Yet if you saw me pulling up in the parking lot of the Northgate Plaza Shopping Center, you certainly would not take one look at me and think "there's that Mister Hardman that writes that awesomely erudite if overly wordy blog I like to read!". No, you would most likely think, as evidently does the staff of the Rite Aid Pharmacy, "there's that goddamn bum again".
Rite Aid's staff do not like me, and neither do their customers. However, it is the drug-store located closest to me, and it will be where I will be shopping.
Rite Aid, and most of the other storefronts in all of the Shopping Centers in Aspen Hill and environs, is a bit overrun. You see, while Aspen Hill was never exactly the shining jewel of Montgomery County, is has become one of the most "affordable" places to live. That means that probably most of the shoppers at these stores are people who live here because they are poor. For merchants, poor people mean crime problems, mostly shoplifting. However, there is a problem particular to this area, which is so well-served by the charitable outreach of churches, and on so many bus-lines that also serve the destitute, and the homeless, and the mentally ill.
I suppose I could dress better when I go into Rite Aid -- or any of these stores here -- and perhaps they would be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, and not go far out of their way to roust me as a bum. However, I am aware of no Maryland law which admits an affirmative defense -- to criminal charges for assault -- of "I didn't like how he was dressed".
I suppose I could try to make a clear distinction in the minds of the staffers between me and the people who dress quite similarly to myself, and tend to be either begging shamelessly at the intersections and some of the storefronts, or seeking day-labor gigs hanging out at the nearby Home Depot or 7-11 Store #11713. Yet I do not accept the legitimacy of any argument to the effect of "if only you dressed better they wouldn't think they have the right to beat you like a dog".
I suppose that I could simply ask them what the hell is wrong with them when one of them takes my money for a purchase, and another walks up behind me an pokes me in the neck with something small, sharp, and painful. Yet I think they're working a strategy that works for them no matter how it goes. If I confront them, they can claim to have legitimate reason ("he just started up and went off for no reason") to bar me from the store. If I do not confront them, eventually they will drive me mad and into confrontation (see above), or they will drive me into such docility that no matter what they inflict, I'll sit still for it, and they could hurt me very badly -- as minor injuries pile atop one another over time -- if I do that. Since they've got my money in their hands already when these pinprick attacks occur, if I want my change back as well as a receipt which would be required to prove I was there, I pretty much have to sit still for it. To me, it feels very much like being beaten and robbed for having walked into their store. The ultimate goal, of course, is to get me to shop elsewhere.
I suppose I could try calling the police, but we've been all through that over the last decade or so. The police generally aren't interested in dealing with this, since they know that they will go to the store and discuss it with staff and staff will make the excuse "well, we thought he was one of those autistics" or "we thought he was a bum".
I suppose I could just run screaming from the store, leaving behind my product, my change, and my receipt, and dial 911 and charge them with robbery, too.
I suppose I could shop elsewhere, and I have tried that. The first time or two I changed shopping destinations, I was a welcome customer, someone who paid cash. Then after a few visits, attitudes changed drastically.
It was almost as if someone were following me around, to make sure that I wasn't welcome no matter where I tried to shop.
Astute Readers will remember that I pointed out how Anti-Group-Home sentiment led to organized vilification of persons thought to be resident at such group homes. The same Astute Readers will remember that there is a clear and evident profit motive; clear out the psychiatric-disability people and those nice clean and licensed group homes can be turned into unlicensed flophouses for the illegal-alien workforce. Everyone from the illegal aliens themselves, through greedy speculators and house-flippers, through people seeking to rise in politics by supporting the cause of "hardworking undocumented migrants" sees nothing but opportunities for personal gain in the eviction of the residents of the scattered-site residential care facilities.
Yet there's another group that can only see gain in the discomfiture and eviction of the psychiatrically disabled. And that is a group comprising, among other, those who get paid to deliver care to the psychiatrically or developmentally disabled.
I often spend a part of my day at the Aspen Hill Local Park.
It's a nice park, a fairly large one, and it's right nest to Rock Creek and the Rock Creek Trail. Some years ago, before the product was discontinued because of side effects, I got immunized against Lyme Disease. Unlike most people, I have no fear of deer ticks, and thus I feel free to enjoy the woodlands environment which is very similar to the homelands of my German (and proably English) ancestors.
This park used to be the athletic field of Robert E Peary High School, and I first started visiting this park in 1973 as a student at that school. Now, it is mostly a soccer field next to woods; joggers and cyclists pass through it fairly frequently, getting their miles in.
As a frequent visitor I got to know, or at least to recognize, most of the other frequent visitors. On a daily basis, for some years, there would be a van arriving a bit before noon and leaving at about 2:30. This van generally had some African staffers, and a lot of autistic people.
It turned out that these people were from CSAAC, and driving the autists to the park parking lot off of Baltic Avenue, and walking them around it for a few hours, was their idea of "therapy".
I beg to differ.
At the park, over a period of some years, I watched the Africans mostly herding the autists by voice, though on a few occasions I saw more than a bit of prodding and poking and in some cases I saw actual beat downs. I saw one autist -- who in general descriptive terms as one might see in an "all points bulletin" was a dead ringer for myself -- beat down and pinned, with his captor kneeling on his testicles.
I saw your tax dollar providing a steady wage -- probably not a particularly low one -- to people whose idea of therapy for the adult children of taxpayers was to herd them around a parking lot, day after day, for years.
Those autists can't tell people what was done to them.
I can tell. I'm telling now.
TO BE CONTINUED
As the Astute Reader is aware, Aspen Hill, Maryland is not highly regarded elsewhere in the County.
Even in the less-than-shiny Rockville neighborhood of Twinbrook, they seem to think that we're our own little brand of "special", not entirely surprisingly, although we think they're kind of "special" too. We like to think that they have more "specialness" than we do, mostly thanks to the presence of the "Mental Health Association of Montgomery County" ("MHAMC") and a lot of other "outreach" facilities right down the street from the MHAMC at 751 Twinbrook Parkway. That includes the "Interfaith Clothing Center" and the "Core Services Agency" of the County's Department of Health and Human Services.
Aspen Hill has, at the other end of the spectrum along the line of publicly-funded to privately-endowed, the Frost Center, which doubtless gets some sort of Federal and possibly State and County grants funding to help the struggling parents of autistic children and young adults, though evidently the facility is part of the private not-for-profit Sheppard-Pratt Health System. Frost Center mostly deals with Autism Spectrum disorders. There's a County contractor serving roughly the same community back at 751 Twinbrook, "CSAAC", or "Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children". Although there is significant funding available for the education of minor children with Autism Spectrum disorders, generally speaking when the person turns 18, the majority of funding dries up and adults with autism-spectrum disorders are effectively left to their own devices, outside of support from groups such as CSAAC.
Closer to the heart of Aspen Hill, we have Saint Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church, which though housed in a fairly modern building, is one of the oldest congregations in Montgomery County. Their old building burned down in the late 1970s, sadly; they used to run one of the earliest youth outreach centers, known as "Maggie's Place". They still have a thrift store in the back of the lot.
There are various other churches in Aspen Hill, many of which have varying levels of outreach to the poor.
As for me, I'm pretty poor, or so you might think to look at me. But if you take a look at my resume, you might notice a pattern of working for a fairly short period of time, now and then, in an industry notable for paying quite well. This resume, I might add, only covers one of my several career tracks, and quite frankly you see it -- or any of my career history -- because I want you to see it. This only lists the things that you can check out, and that I would want you to check out. More importantly, it only lists my references who would want to have people checking me out with them. This does not show my Federal employment history, for example; nor does it give anyone any clue as to how many friends and associates I may have acquired over about 25 years of being out, and about, in our Nation's Capital.
Honestly, I'm just some middle-aged guy that you've never seen in a suit, and unless I get elected or have to attend a wedding or a funeral, you probably never will see me in a suit. I have bad hair, smoker's teeth, and I'm a bit cavalier about how I dress. My idea of fashion is the standard uniform of a working man who's not at work at the moment: blue jeans and a shirt appropriate to the weather. Lately I've been affecting cheap import polo shirts as a concession to the fact that I'm no spring chicken.
If you see me driving down the street in my rather old and sketchy looking pickup truck, you would easily and instantly arrive at the conclusion that I am a no-account loser with some sort of crap job an illegal alien would be embarassed to do, and in fact, I will do all of the jobs most Americans won't do. I'll haul trash, do landscaping, code in PHP and build internet servers from parts I picked out and had bought by small corporations specializing in aspects of internet that are a bit too cutting edge to discuss here. If you've seen nice graphics on the local news that look at lot like photorealistic buildings in three-dimensional perspective laid on top of a Google Earth view, you're looking at a finished project built on my first stab at it.
Now where would a shabby poor man like me get his hands on the data, and how would someone who cuts lawns build the software from source code, and certainly it's not imaginable that he'd integrate wildly disparate packages from a potpourri of online Federal research labs to create a system that can convert flat ARCData from one source and elevation data from another source and spit out image after image of downtown Washington as it was in 2002.
Yet if you saw me pulling up in the parking lot of the Northgate Plaza Shopping Center, you certainly would not take one look at me and think "there's that Mister Hardman that writes that awesomely erudite if overly wordy blog I like to read!". No, you would most likely think, as evidently does the staff of the Rite Aid Pharmacy, "there's that goddamn bum again".
Rite Aid's staff do not like me, and neither do their customers. However, it is the drug-store located closest to me, and it will be where I will be shopping.
Rite Aid, and most of the other storefronts in all of the Shopping Centers in Aspen Hill and environs, is a bit overrun. You see, while Aspen Hill was never exactly the shining jewel of Montgomery County, is has become one of the most "affordable" places to live. That means that probably most of the shoppers at these stores are people who live here because they are poor. For merchants, poor people mean crime problems, mostly shoplifting. However, there is a problem particular to this area, which is so well-served by the charitable outreach of churches, and on so many bus-lines that also serve the destitute, and the homeless, and the mentally ill.
I suppose I could dress better when I go into Rite Aid -- or any of these stores here -- and perhaps they would be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, and not go far out of their way to roust me as a bum. However, I am aware of no Maryland law which admits an affirmative defense -- to criminal charges for assault -- of "I didn't like how he was dressed".
I suppose I could try to make a clear distinction in the minds of the staffers between me and the people who dress quite similarly to myself, and tend to be either begging shamelessly at the intersections and some of the storefronts, or seeking day-labor gigs hanging out at the nearby Home Depot or 7-11 Store #11713. Yet I do not accept the legitimacy of any argument to the effect of "if only you dressed better they wouldn't think they have the right to beat you like a dog".
I suppose that I could simply ask them what the hell is wrong with them when one of them takes my money for a purchase, and another walks up behind me an pokes me in the neck with something small, sharp, and painful. Yet I think they're working a strategy that works for them no matter how it goes. If I confront them, they can claim to have legitimate reason ("he just started up and went off for no reason") to bar me from the store. If I do not confront them, eventually they will drive me mad and into confrontation (see above), or they will drive me into such docility that no matter what they inflict, I'll sit still for it, and they could hurt me very badly -- as minor injuries pile atop one another over time -- if I do that. Since they've got my money in their hands already when these pinprick attacks occur, if I want my change back as well as a receipt which would be required to prove I was there, I pretty much have to sit still for it. To me, it feels very much like being beaten and robbed for having walked into their store. The ultimate goal, of course, is to get me to shop elsewhere.
I suppose I could try calling the police, but we've been all through that over the last decade or so. The police generally aren't interested in dealing with this, since they know that they will go to the store and discuss it with staff and staff will make the excuse "well, we thought he was one of those autistics" or "we thought he was a bum".
I suppose I could just run screaming from the store, leaving behind my product, my change, and my receipt, and dial 911 and charge them with robbery, too.
I suppose I could shop elsewhere, and I have tried that. The first time or two I changed shopping destinations, I was a welcome customer, someone who paid cash. Then after a few visits, attitudes changed drastically.
It was almost as if someone were following me around, to make sure that I wasn't welcome no matter where I tried to shop.
Astute Readers will remember that I pointed out how Anti-Group-Home sentiment led to organized vilification of persons thought to be resident at such group homes. The same Astute Readers will remember that there is a clear and evident profit motive; clear out the psychiatric-disability people and those nice clean and licensed group homes can be turned into unlicensed flophouses for the illegal-alien workforce. Everyone from the illegal aliens themselves, through greedy speculators and house-flippers, through people seeking to rise in politics by supporting the cause of "hardworking undocumented migrants" sees nothing but opportunities for personal gain in the eviction of the residents of the scattered-site residential care facilities.
Yet there's another group that can only see gain in the discomfiture and eviction of the psychiatrically disabled. And that is a group comprising, among other, those who get paid to deliver care to the psychiatrically or developmentally disabled.
I often spend a part of my day at the Aspen Hill Local Park.
It's a nice park, a fairly large one, and it's right nest to Rock Creek and the Rock Creek Trail. Some years ago, before the product was discontinued because of side effects, I got immunized against Lyme Disease. Unlike most people, I have no fear of deer ticks, and thus I feel free to enjoy the woodlands environment which is very similar to the homelands of my German (and proably English) ancestors.
This park used to be the athletic field of Robert E Peary High School, and I first started visiting this park in 1973 as a student at that school. Now, it is mostly a soccer field next to woods; joggers and cyclists pass through it fairly frequently, getting their miles in.
As a frequent visitor I got to know, or at least to recognize, most of the other frequent visitors. On a daily basis, for some years, there would be a van arriving a bit before noon and leaving at about 2:30. This van generally had some African staffers, and a lot of autistic people.
It turned out that these people were from CSAAC, and driving the autists to the park parking lot off of Baltic Avenue, and walking them around it for a few hours, was their idea of "therapy".
I beg to differ.
At the park, over a period of some years, I watched the Africans mostly herding the autists by voice, though on a few occasions I saw more than a bit of prodding and poking and in some cases I saw actual beat downs. I saw one autist -- who in general descriptive terms as one might see in an "all points bulletin" was a dead ringer for myself -- beat down and pinned, with his captor kneeling on his testicles.
I saw your tax dollar providing a steady wage -- probably not a particularly low one -- to people whose idea of therapy for the adult children of taxpayers was to herd them around a parking lot, day after day, for years.
Those autists can't tell people what was done to them.
I can tell. I'm telling now.
TO BE CONTINUED
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Into Aftermath: Anti-Group-Home Opposition Rises Again in Aspen Hill? (Part IX)
Earlier we covered opposition, in-general, to group homes in Aspen Hill, Maryland; later, we opposition to "scattered site housing" for persons with psychiatric disabilities.
We covered, minimally, an abortive effort to close down one such group home. We covered some background on psychiatric disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill. We cover PROFIT as a motive for clandestinely organizing neighbors to the cause of evicting these group homes and their residents.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions, and we covered the strategic and tactical niceties of destroying these group homes and their residents so as to acquire the properties on the cheap to turn them into worker-barracks and flophouses for illegal alien workers, and explored the causes and effects of the housing bubble and consequent crash of the economy.
We laid out a start-to-finish trajectory that starts with a search for higher property values, and then goes outside the bounds of decency -- not to mention outside of a huge variety of law -- sparing no amount of wicked cleverness and despicable sneaking-about in the pursuit of raw greed. The story ends in a place we all know: Aspen Hill, Maryland, with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the State of Maryland.
We had to digress into blatant -- yet extremely plausible, given the location under discussion -- fiction to carry off our dissertation while providing some much-needed lighthearted entertainment.
What could be more plausibly comical, one might ask, than the thought that someone (or lots of someones) made huge amounts of money -- for a while -- by sneaking around like a character out of Desperate Housewives, with a little comic relief in the form of scary sociopathic bums waging a propaganda war on hapless brain-trauma victims and actually winning? It doesn't get more ridiculous than this, folks, and ridiculous is what makes for a good laugh.
Yet, even in a comedy -- perhaps especially in a comedy -- however successful the villain, eventually they must get their comeuppance. This tradition goes all of the way back to the Greeks. There are some things you just don't do unless you want to offend the gods. One of those things is abusing the mentally ill. They are near and dear to many of the classic deities of many cultures. As classical studies tell us, it is not necessary in most cases for any human actor or actors to rise in defense of the offended gods, though the myths and legends of the Greco-Roman world are rife with such heroes. Rather, the gods reward unsupportable greed in its own special way.
In the classic myths and legends of our founding cultures, the pagan deities rewarded drunkenness with drowning and greed with perverse surplus; King Midas who loved gold was gifted with a magic touch which turned everything to gold... including his children, and his food. He starved amid the greatest wealth in the world amid cold golden statues of his dead family. Comparable cautionary tales abound in other cultures.
In casting out those already afflicted, to increase their suffering and to replace them with an illegally resident population, and in doing it for the money, might be seen by the Greeks as hubris though it might even be an act, as it were, of Atë. Whatever Nemesis may be approaching, perhaps it will come through one of Eris's domains.
Perhaps their first Nemesis has already come and gone.
Nobody was more likely to fall into foreclosure than the slumlords who bought on speculation and then overcrowded their properties with illegal rentals at occupancy levels far outside of housing code, fire code, health code, and any code of decency.
When you hear a cry for massive taxpayer funded bailouts of those poor poor homeowners, nobody is crying more loudly than the slumlords who lost their asses, as well they should, unless perhaps a louder cry is now coming from those who lived in the properties of the slumlords. They, at least, may hope for a visit from a lesser figure out of legend: Justice. They at least, unlike the people they displaced, are physically fit and not incapacitated by psychiatric disability.
We don't want to see this story played out again, as fiction or reality.
Thus, we totally support the idea of County ownership of foreclosed properties in Aspen Hill, so long as a very high percentage of those housed in these properties will be persons suffering from incapacitating psychiatric disabilities. We believe that in this new Federal Administration, which is beginning even as I type, will return significant funding and aggressive prosecution of the Americans with Disabilities Act. We believe that pressures from the top down as well as from the bottom up will change the current Montgomery County attitude of favoritism for illegal aliens into a more humane and caring attitude favoring the destitute and helpless, as is and has been required by law.
Otherwise, "All Hail Eris".
Would you rather not forego Greed, and rather pursue Charity?
.
We covered, minimally, an abortive effort to close down one such group home. We covered some background on psychiatric disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill. We cover PROFIT as a motive for clandestinely organizing neighbors to the cause of evicting these group homes and their residents.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions, and we covered the strategic and tactical niceties of destroying these group homes and their residents so as to acquire the properties on the cheap to turn them into worker-barracks and flophouses for illegal alien workers, and explored the causes and effects of the housing bubble and consequent crash of the economy.
We laid out a start-to-finish trajectory that starts with a search for higher property values, and then goes outside the bounds of decency -- not to mention outside of a huge variety of law -- sparing no amount of wicked cleverness and despicable sneaking-about in the pursuit of raw greed. The story ends in a place we all know: Aspen Hill, Maryland, with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the State of Maryland.
We had to digress into blatant -- yet extremely plausible, given the location under discussion -- fiction to carry off our dissertation while providing some much-needed lighthearted entertainment.
What could be more plausibly comical, one might ask, than the thought that someone (or lots of someones) made huge amounts of money -- for a while -- by sneaking around like a character out of Desperate Housewives, with a little comic relief in the form of scary sociopathic bums waging a propaganda war on hapless brain-trauma victims and actually winning? It doesn't get more ridiculous than this, folks, and ridiculous is what makes for a good laugh.
Yet, even in a comedy -- perhaps especially in a comedy -- however successful the villain, eventually they must get their comeuppance. This tradition goes all of the way back to the Greeks. There are some things you just don't do unless you want to offend the gods. One of those things is abusing the mentally ill. They are near and dear to many of the classic deities of many cultures. As classical studies tell us, it is not necessary in most cases for any human actor or actors to rise in defense of the offended gods, though the myths and legends of the Greco-Roman world are rife with such heroes. Rather, the gods reward unsupportable greed in its own special way.
In the classic myths and legends of our founding cultures, the pagan deities rewarded drunkenness with drowning and greed with perverse surplus; King Midas who loved gold was gifted with a magic touch which turned everything to gold... including his children, and his food. He starved amid the greatest wealth in the world amid cold golden statues of his dead family. Comparable cautionary tales abound in other cultures.
In casting out those already afflicted, to increase their suffering and to replace them with an illegally resident population, and in doing it for the money, might be seen by the Greeks as hubris though it might even be an act, as it were, of Atë. Whatever Nemesis may be approaching, perhaps it will come through one of Eris's domains.
Perhaps their first Nemesis has already come and gone.
Nobody was more likely to fall into foreclosure than the slumlords who bought on speculation and then overcrowded their properties with illegal rentals at occupancy levels far outside of housing code, fire code, health code, and any code of decency.
When you hear a cry for massive taxpayer funded bailouts of those poor poor homeowners, nobody is crying more loudly than the slumlords who lost their asses, as well they should, unless perhaps a louder cry is now coming from those who lived in the properties of the slumlords. They, at least, may hope for a visit from a lesser figure out of legend: Justice. They at least, unlike the people they displaced, are physically fit and not incapacitated by psychiatric disability.
We don't want to see this story played out again, as fiction or reality.
Thus, we totally support the idea of County ownership of foreclosed properties in Aspen Hill, so long as a very high percentage of those housed in these properties will be persons suffering from incapacitating psychiatric disabilities. We believe that in this new Federal Administration, which is beginning even as I type, will return significant funding and aggressive prosecution of the Americans with Disabilities Act. We believe that pressures from the top down as well as from the bottom up will change the current Montgomery County attitude of favoritism for illegal aliens into a more humane and caring attitude favoring the destitute and helpless, as is and has been required by law.
Otherwise, "All Hail Eris".
Would you rather not forego Greed, and rather pursue Charity?
.
Destroying Disabled: Anti-Group-Home Opposition Rises Again in Aspen Hill? (Part VIII)
Earlier we covered opposition to group homes in general, and then opposition to subsidized housing of psychiatrically-disabled people in group homes in Aspen Hill. We covered a tentative move by the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., to close down a group home housing elderly severely disabled people, and we note again in passing that they just couldn't bring themselves to follow through.
We provided some background and links to various types of mental illness, contrasting and comparing people who were incapacitated by mental illness and those who octuply outnumber them, the competent but horrid personality disorders such as Borderline, Histrionic, and Antisocial.
We covered the mysterious "welcome-wagon walking-tours of wackos and weirdos" given by people who seem to have no actual association with any legitimate agency or organization, and contrasted and compared these odd instigators with the legitimate agency of the County government, the "Assertive Community Treatment ("ACT") team", which actually has a mission roughly opposite to the mission evidenced by the "walking tour" posse.
We detailed how it sure would make sense, in terms of profit motive, for speculators in real-estate -- house-flippers and illegal boarding-house slumlords -- to try to shut down subsidized housing sites in order to "free up" the property so that they could acquire it "on the cheap".
We then descended into Pure Fiction -- although we made it as plausible and locally-realistic as possible -- to give fictional details of how a person could recruit henchmen and minions and send them on a diabolical mission of Pure Evil meant to throw harmless incompetents into the harsh streets to flounder and perish in uncomprehended misery as their former safe and healthy assisted-living managed-care group residence was converted into an out-of-code flophouse for an illegal-alien workforce.
We covered the very plausible elements of a good old-fashioned "hatchet job": Identity, Vilify, Nullify... and today we will cover DESTROY.
This is, of course, FICTION. Don't try to make it real, because a freshly warmed Hell awaits you. And though this is fiction, in the same way that you can read a story and believe it when the author tells you "it was a sunny day" because both you and the author have seen it, you can read and believe this fiction when the author tells you that there is genuine nastiness afoot in the very real world. The author may never have seen the ocean, and perhaps the reader also is a stranger to the sea. Yet the author can write of, and the reader can believe in, pirates. Because, after all, everyone knows that they are out there.
Ahrr, matey.
Welcome back to the mind of a Dastardly Doer of Despicable Deed, and Mastermind of Many Minions.
You've picked your targets, and you have your reasons. You want a bunch of "mental folks" out on the street, you don't care where they end up as long as you get your hands on the house where they live. Remember, this isn't costing you much except the time to go cast a spell of delusion on a bunch of sketchy day-laborer types with their own mental problems, maybe a hundred dollars worth of beer and burrito money, and the time to hatch this nefarious plot and watch it unfold. If it succeeds, you could maybe make fifty or a hundred thousand dollars by flipping the property, or maybe have a long-lasting income stream of maybe ten thousand dollars a month by turning the place into a flophouse housing maybe 20 people in the basement and half as many as that upstairs. Compared to any legitimate work you could do, this is such big money -- and there is so very little personal risk to you -- that you simply can't pass it up.
You've sent your henchmen and minions to scour the land and they've made darn sure that the whole neighborhood -- especially the more borderline and histrionic residents -- are all up in arms about "those crazy people living in luxury on the taxpayer's dime". You've convinced everyone that the owner/operator of the place is a skimming and skimping and fostering an environment from which will doubtless emerge a new plague, or at least sad and sordid tales of woe and giant rats eating the toes of drugged-out mental patients. Or maybe you've convinced the neighborhood that they're all secret cannibals opening a gateway to the underworld and inviting in demonic forces. Maybe you've convinced half of the neighbors of one thing and the other half of the other, the impressionable ones, anyway. In either or any case, the approbation and ostracism is so relentless that the caretakers can't take care, and in the absence of any hopes of ever getting any work from anyone who has ever heard the stories you have sown far and wide (and deep, too), the clients of the caretaker are very slowly starving or failing to pay for their medication. One or two days work per month would make all of the difference to them, but you've got the neighborhood locking them down so tightly that they're withering on the vine, so to speak.
And that means that everything is going according to your plan. Eventually, you succeed.
Successful destruction of a legitimate, inspected, legally licensed, health-and-housing code compliant, actually-therapeutic managed-care group home has left three professionals unemployed, and has put five completely helpless mental patients on the streets where they go to the middle of the ten-year waiting list for another managed-care facility that isn't an overcrowded and underfunded state mental hospital. The best thing that could happen to most of these people is that they get arrested and get housed and treated in jail, and placed by the release management team into another managed-care facility.
In place of the one-caretaker-per-shift and five residents with very rare visitors, you now have four families of five illegal aliens and their US-born kids living in the basement, and each of these 20 people earns you $300 a month. That's $6,000.00 per month just for renting out the basement. You should have no problem paying the first year of "low low teaser rates" on the "option ARM" mortgage that you got with a "liar loan" that your sociopath friends helped you get.
When the mortgage "adjusts" you can just flip the house, either refinancing it or selling it out from under the four or five families to whom you illegally rent this out-of-code flophouse and worker barracks. In the meantime, your repetitive refinancing has grossly inflated the value of the home, and it drags up the values of everyone around you, and they start using their own refinancings to turn their homes into ATMs, extracting equity which is in fact mostly fictional.
Eventually, there's a downturn in the housing market and the 20 illegal aliens in the basement lose their construction jobs and can't pay you, you can't refinance, neither can your neighbors, neither can anyone else because all of that equity is indeed fictional, and as the accountants start to figure that out, the global economy goes into free fall.
Congratulations, Evil Mastermind!
You set out to scam some mental cases out of their managed care so you could become a slumlord, and you've succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.
You've just launched the second Great Depression.
I think this pretty much covers DESTROY.
Next: Into the Aftermath...
TO BE CONTINUED
We provided some background and links to various types of mental illness, contrasting and comparing people who were incapacitated by mental illness and those who octuply outnumber them, the competent but horrid personality disorders such as Borderline, Histrionic, and Antisocial.
We covered the mysterious "welcome-wagon walking-tours of wackos and weirdos" given by people who seem to have no actual association with any legitimate agency or organization, and contrasted and compared these odd instigators with the legitimate agency of the County government, the "Assertive Community Treatment ("ACT") team", which actually has a mission roughly opposite to the mission evidenced by the "walking tour" posse.
We detailed how it sure would make sense, in terms of profit motive, for speculators in real-estate -- house-flippers and illegal boarding-house slumlords -- to try to shut down subsidized housing sites in order to "free up" the property so that they could acquire it "on the cheap".
We then descended into Pure Fiction -- although we made it as plausible and locally-realistic as possible -- to give fictional details of how a person could recruit henchmen and minions and send them on a diabolical mission of Pure Evil meant to throw harmless incompetents into the harsh streets to flounder and perish in uncomprehended misery as their former safe and healthy assisted-living managed-care group residence was converted into an out-of-code flophouse for an illegal-alien workforce.
We covered the very plausible elements of a good old-fashioned "hatchet job": Identity, Vilify, Nullify... and today we will cover DESTROY.
This is, of course, FICTION. Don't try to make it real, because a freshly warmed Hell awaits you. And though this is fiction, in the same way that you can read a story and believe it when the author tells you "it was a sunny day" because both you and the author have seen it, you can read and believe this fiction when the author tells you that there is genuine nastiness afoot in the very real world. The author may never have seen the ocean, and perhaps the reader also is a stranger to the sea. Yet the author can write of, and the reader can believe in, pirates. Because, after all, everyone knows that they are out there.
Ahrr, matey.
Welcome back to the mind of a Dastardly Doer of Despicable Deed, and Mastermind of Many Minions.
You've picked your targets, and you have your reasons. You want a bunch of "mental folks" out on the street, you don't care where they end up as long as you get your hands on the house where they live. Remember, this isn't costing you much except the time to go cast a spell of delusion on a bunch of sketchy day-laborer types with their own mental problems, maybe a hundred dollars worth of beer and burrito money, and the time to hatch this nefarious plot and watch it unfold. If it succeeds, you could maybe make fifty or a hundred thousand dollars by flipping the property, or maybe have a long-lasting income stream of maybe ten thousand dollars a month by turning the place into a flophouse housing maybe 20 people in the basement and half as many as that upstairs. Compared to any legitimate work you could do, this is such big money -- and there is so very little personal risk to you -- that you simply can't pass it up.
You've sent your henchmen and minions to scour the land and they've made darn sure that the whole neighborhood -- especially the more borderline and histrionic residents -- are all up in arms about "those crazy people living in luxury on the taxpayer's dime". You've convinced everyone that the owner/operator of the place is a skimming and skimping and fostering an environment from which will doubtless emerge a new plague, or at least sad and sordid tales of woe and giant rats eating the toes of drugged-out mental patients. Or maybe you've convinced the neighborhood that they're all secret cannibals opening a gateway to the underworld and inviting in demonic forces. Maybe you've convinced half of the neighbors of one thing and the other half of the other, the impressionable ones, anyway. In either or any case, the approbation and ostracism is so relentless that the caretakers can't take care, and in the absence of any hopes of ever getting any work from anyone who has ever heard the stories you have sown far and wide (and deep, too), the clients of the caretaker are very slowly starving or failing to pay for their medication. One or two days work per month would make all of the difference to them, but you've got the neighborhood locking them down so tightly that they're withering on the vine, so to speak.
And that means that everything is going according to your plan. Eventually, you succeed.
Successful destruction of a legitimate, inspected, legally licensed, health-and-housing code compliant, actually-therapeutic managed-care group home has left three professionals unemployed, and has put five completely helpless mental patients on the streets where they go to the middle of the ten-year waiting list for another managed-care facility that isn't an overcrowded and underfunded state mental hospital. The best thing that could happen to most of these people is that they get arrested and get housed and treated in jail, and placed by the release management team into another managed-care facility.
In place of the one-caretaker-per-shift and five residents with very rare visitors, you now have four families of five illegal aliens and their US-born kids living in the basement, and each of these 20 people earns you $300 a month. That's $6,000.00 per month just for renting out the basement. You should have no problem paying the first year of "low low teaser rates" on the "option ARM" mortgage that you got with a "liar loan" that your sociopath friends helped you get.
When the mortgage "adjusts" you can just flip the house, either refinancing it or selling it out from under the four or five families to whom you illegally rent this out-of-code flophouse and worker barracks. In the meantime, your repetitive refinancing has grossly inflated the value of the home, and it drags up the values of everyone around you, and they start using their own refinancings to turn their homes into ATMs, extracting equity which is in fact mostly fictional.
Eventually, there's a downturn in the housing market and the 20 illegal aliens in the basement lose their construction jobs and can't pay you, you can't refinance, neither can your neighbors, neither can anyone else because all of that equity is indeed fictional, and as the accountants start to figure that out, the global economy goes into free fall.
Congratulations, Evil Mastermind!
You set out to scam some mental cases out of their managed care so you could become a slumlord, and you've succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.
You've just launched the second Great Depression.
I think this pretty much covers DESTROY.
Next: Into the Aftermath...
TO BE CONTINUED
Monday, January 19, 2009
Evicting the Idiots: Anti-Group-Home Opposition Rises Again in Aspen Hill? (Part VII)
Earlier we covered the general movement in opposition to any increase in the number of rental properties in Aspen Hill, and then we covered the opposition to "scattered site housing" -- on the taxpayer's tab -- in Aspen Hill for disabled persons. We covered, minimally, an abortive effort by some members of the local civic association to close down one of those group houses. We covered some background on mental disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill. We covered the motive of PROFIT as a reason that
people would go out of their way to turn new neighbors into the snitching watchers, and would-be evictors, of publicly-assisted mentally-disabled residents of scattered-site housing in Aspen Hill.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions to further the evil scheme of pitching idiots, incompetents, and airheads into the street so you can buy and flip those properties or rent them out to illegal aliens as flophouses..
Note from the blogger: Many things are described, below, which nobody should do. These are horrible terrible things and many of them are illegal, in some cases very illegal and in some cases barely so. However, if you do any of these things, even if you don't go to Jail, you will in fact go to Hell, and everyone will be happy when you do.
This is FICTION. Don't try to convince yourself that it's not.
Okay! Now you've rounded up some likely prospects to become your henchmen and maybe even some minions -- hey, you're a sinister and wicked shadowy figure bent on destroying the lives of helpless victims for fun and profit, aren't you? of course you want minions -- how should you use your cats-paws as demented and deluded wind-up toys run amok on a secret mission to make you rich?
As every Evil Mastermind of Dastardly Deeds knows, there are a couple of simple rules:
Identify your goals. Identify your victims. Identify your assets. Identify your operational terrains, be they cultural, geographic, institutional, or psychological. Most importantly, identify where you or anyone else could possibly slip up and expose your operation. The last thing you ever want to hear is someone saying -- as did Angela Lansbury's character did towards the end of Gaslight -- "yes. Actually I do know how it is".
The goal is to, by whatever means are necessary and won't get you exposed, get those darned mental cases out of those taxpayer-subsidized rental properties. Then you can buy and flip the property -- or get a Realtor commission from those who do -- or you can illegally convert the property to an out-of-code flophouse and rent it to a couple of families of illegal aliens. Remember, the whole point of this is to convert someone else's property that generates a small cash stream to the owner and takes crazy people off of the streets, and make it your property that generates a large non-taxed cash stream and houses your illegal workforce. (At least local history shows that this has almost invariably been the result.)
The victims are already identified, as are many of the assets, at least in terms of the down-and-out sad bastards you recruited -- from the outskirts of the addiction-outreach center in Rockville -- and deluded into the faith that whoever they got ousted they themselves would replace.
Assets outside of henchmen and victims include, not surprisingly, elements of the cultural and institutional terrain. These would include any systems you can game, such as false-reporting to parole and probation officers and psychiatric case-workers.
These would also include, oddly enough, local churchgoers and church-leaders, in some extreme cases. For instance, if you need someone to spy on some assisted-living home for the mentally-ill, convince someone who is deeply religious and a bit "gone around the bend" that you've heard that "those mental folks" are holding satanic ritual abuse of kidnapped illegal alien babies in the basement and that explains the weird chanting (which is actually some Autistic person making Tourette utterances while jamming to their iPod(tm)). You could maybe go scatter in the target's yard some printouts of alleged satanic crap you found on the InterNet. Your contact will be dropping the dime to your voice-mail every time those "mental folks" flush the toilet or step outside to smoke a cigarette.
The most important asset -- outside of law-enforcement -- is the psychological terrain. This is very tricky terrain and this is why you need henchmen and minions. Remember, your primary goal is to have all of this running at a distance. So, convince your henchmen that they're doing a public service. Since you selected them carefully for being both gullible and sneaky, it should be easy to convince them that they're saving money for the taxpayers by making disabled people homeless. Hey, they're not going to turn to a life of crime, they're disabled ya know, worst thing that's gonna happen is someone finds them frozen to the sidewalk some morning, end of story. You chose your henchmen, after all, because they're the sort of people who accept this sort of reasoning, and because they are so morally incapacitated that this sort of outcome can't bother them at all.
The other psychological terrain to be navigated, of course, is that of the victims. They're crazy, right, which is why the collect a disability, right? But in what way are they crazy? You're going to find or make a way to bring their own madness to start them marching on the path you have chosen for them. You may now take a break to laugh quietly to yourself as you imagine the unfolding of your sinister plot.
Depending on how skilled you are, and how inexperienced the officer or well-equipped the force, you may wish to take the risk of getting your henchmen or minions to try to game the police. Depending on the histories and records of your henchmen and minions, and of the victims, and also depending on the information systems of the local authorities, this may be easier done than said. Enough of the right sort of complaints, coming from a wide-enough variety of sources, can overwhelm the probabilistic and statistical underpinnings of the information system, turning the police force's best asset into your best asset. The goal, of course, is to get a statistical association of name or address with complaints. Even if the complaints all turn out to be baseless, the computers will still red-flag the name or address in the calls-for-service statistics. It should go without saying that if the police discover that you are doing this, they will not be pleased with you, which is why you have henchmen and minions.
Now that you have covered all of the aspects of "identify", let's move on to "vilify".
In an example, above, we pointed out that it's pretty easy to turn some folks into informational assets. Let's say you turn a person hovering on the edge of hysteric religious delusion into your personal spy on "those mental folks". You could go two ways with that. You could tell them to just call your voicemail (associated with a stolen cellphone with a pay-as-you-go plan, a.k.a a "burn phone") and otherwise be sure to keep it a secret, can't let the word get back to them or the investigation will be spoiled, etc etc. Or you could tell them that they should spread the word far and wide, but to do it quietly. That way "those baby raping satanists" never hear the accusation, and can't ever have a chance to deny it... or start tracing your evil scheme back to you, the Dastardly Mastermind of Wily Wickedness.
This last approach will in fact vilify, and it will vilify far and wide. However, anyone hearing this from your asset is also likely to hear from your asset that the Tribulations are at hand, let us pray for salvation, brother, kneel kneel kneel, and other such things that would detract from the credibility of the rumor you are trying to spread. Thus, to create more credibility for the incredible among the only-moderately-credulous (remember, you've already gotten to most of the truly credulous and gullible, and they are your henchmen and minions by now) it is necessary that all mentions whatsoever of your victims are accompanied by the same story, and that the same story come from a wide variety of sources. Most reasonable people may be incredulous of wild slander coming from one or from a few people, yet the same wild slander coming from a wide variety of people, day after day, becomes credible even to the most skeptical. There's no vilification like pack vilification.
Now we move on to "nullify". Up to now, we as Sinister Overlords of Icky Badness (along with our minions etc.) have been ruining the reputations of people who are disabled by psychiatric conditions. Their reputation was already bad enough before you started in on a ridiculous case of overkill.
Is this all just a waste of time? After all, "those mental folks" just live in the house you covet. Isn't your real target the owner/operator of the scattered-site subsidized house?
Well, of course he is. However, keep in mind that you have to understand the cultural and psychological terrain in which you operate. The cultural terrain may fear madness, but it supports the disabled. You can't just vilify the individual disabled or the terrain will expel the individual. It's necessary to vilify all of the disabled, or at least all of them in that particular house. And the way to do that is to nullify the owner.
Go after his permits. Go after occupancy restrictions. Question credentials. Call every possible agency you can and pester them endlessly, or actually, have your henchmen and minions do it, and have them do it in the most roundabout way possible. They shouldn't call it in themselves, nor should they complain to (for example) the community association. Rather, they should identify members of the community association and get those fine upstanding civic-minded people to agitate for the community association to agitate at the government.
Why all of the (extra) sneaking around? Well, it's one thing to harass people who are incapacitated and disabled by profound mental illness. It's quite another thing to harass someone who is sane, has credentials and a widespread positive reputation, and who is used to the antics and mechanations of the insane, up to and including those of malicious paranoid sociopaths such as yourself.
Still, if you want that property to fall into your greedy little clutches, he's the one you have to take down. So how to accomplish this?
Let's go back to take a closer look at your henchmen. For top quality work, you really need a minion, someone who is less of a dupe, and more of a player, one who is playing along with you because he likes to see how the Real Talents work because he might learn something. Having learned something, as you move on to bigger and better things, he might just take over doing what you're doing, which would be something he would like.
The ideal minion for this sort of thing is someone who is at least semi-well-known in a lot of places. He's definitely going to be a shady character -- hell, he talks to you even though he knows what you are and what you're doing and why -- and he's probably fairly smart even though he's probably also a devious asshole that a lot of people barely tolerate.
Probably he's well known in a lot of places because he's what people would call "a working bum", a hometown character who won't hold a steady job and probably drifts in and out of homelessness largely for that reason. He probably subsists on the edge of the "legitimate day labor" pool of workers, meaning he can't get hired at the centers because he was kicked out for not following the few rules that even illegal alien yard workers are expected to follow. He probably does minimal maintenance and cleanup for very small businesses. For example, he might do very light landscaping at local gas stations, or junk removal at rental properties, or squeegee work at places that don't want to hire on Union window-washers. Now, there are a lot of people who have done this sort of work, and indeed, this is the sort of work that a lot of mental-healthcare outreach and assisted-living places encourage their clients to do. A lot of these clients do try to do it, but there's a problem with that. There are only so many opportunities, and so many more clients trying to do it. That leads to bum-fights. And this, your best Minion, has won a lot of these bum-fights, not so much from being a fighter, but from being a master of slander and backstabbing. Every place that could possibly offer occasional temporary unskilled work that would supplement the disability income of "those mental folks" is visited on a regular basis by this person, and whether or not he gets a job, he hangs around spreading juicy gossip about how crazy those folks living in this-and-that group home are known to be.
As a rumormonger, he has got to the point where people don't just tolerate his gossip, they ask him if he knows anything about so-and-so. He might be telling Gimbels what they're doing over at Macy's to use an old New York City phrase. He's turned himself into an intelligent asset and a bona-fide player, as long as he can mostly stick to the truth. And having come to be understood as someone nobody's caught in a lie, he can lie like a dog and have it stick, so long as he's consistent, and only does it rarely.
This is why he's your best Minion. He's playing the game the same way you are, he just has less "lofty" goals. He's just trying to make sure he's got enough odd jobs a week to eat and drink and party. You're trying to evict harmless disabled people so you can become a slumlord.
He does know a lot of people, and he doesn't mind making sure that they all know all that you want them to know about the subsidized-housing owner/operator, and all about the clients living there. And this minion doesn't mind making sure that everyone knows that it's all bad, bad, bad, and only getting worse. Why, this very morning I heard... etc. you get the picture.
Enough of this sort of talk, and the disabled clients can't walk the streets without getting abused and they definitely will find no work from people who've heard that they're all (at the very least, to hear all of the rumors) baby-raping satanists following unspeakable rituals with unimaginable practices, and not even the house owner/operator can shop for his clients' groceries without ostracism and demands that he shut down the operation and sell the property, after a nice exorcism, of course.
Next we move on, having covered Identify, Vilify, and Nullify, to...
DESTROY.
TO BE CONTINUED... and remember, at this point, it's all fiction, except for the true parts, which are the very best form of a lie.
people would go out of their way to turn new neighbors into the snitching watchers, and would-be evictors, of publicly-assisted mentally-disabled residents of scattered-site housing in Aspen Hill.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions to further the evil scheme of pitching idiots, incompetents, and airheads into the street so you can buy and flip those properties or rent them out to illegal aliens as flophouses..
Note from the blogger: Many things are described, below, which nobody should do. These are horrible terrible things and many of them are illegal, in some cases very illegal and in some cases barely so. However, if you do any of these things, even if you don't go to Jail, you will in fact go to Hell, and everyone will be happy when you do.
This is FICTION. Don't try to convince yourself that it's not.
Okay! Now you've rounded up some likely prospects to become your henchmen and maybe even some minions -- hey, you're a sinister and wicked shadowy figure bent on destroying the lives of helpless victims for fun and profit, aren't you? of course you want minions -- how should you use your cats-paws as demented and deluded wind-up toys run amok on a secret mission to make you rich?
As every Evil Mastermind of Dastardly Deeds knows, there are a couple of simple rules:
Identify, Vilify, Nullify, Destroy
Identify your goals. Identify your victims. Identify your assets. Identify your operational terrains, be they cultural, geographic, institutional, or psychological. Most importantly, identify where you or anyone else could possibly slip up and expose your operation. The last thing you ever want to hear is someone saying -- as did Angela Lansbury's character did towards the end of Gaslight -- "yes. Actually I do know how it is".
The goal is to, by whatever means are necessary and won't get you exposed, get those darned mental cases out of those taxpayer-subsidized rental properties. Then you can buy and flip the property -- or get a Realtor commission from those who do -- or you can illegally convert the property to an out-of-code flophouse and rent it to a couple of families of illegal aliens. Remember, the whole point of this is to convert someone else's property that generates a small cash stream to the owner and takes crazy people off of the streets, and make it your property that generates a large non-taxed cash stream and houses your illegal workforce. (At least local history shows that this has almost invariably been the result.)
The victims are already identified, as are many of the assets, at least in terms of the down-and-out sad bastards you recruited -- from the outskirts of the addiction-outreach center in Rockville -- and deluded into the faith that whoever they got ousted they themselves would replace.
Assets outside of henchmen and victims include, not surprisingly, elements of the cultural and institutional terrain. These would include any systems you can game, such as false-reporting to parole and probation officers and psychiatric case-workers.
These would also include, oddly enough, local churchgoers and church-leaders, in some extreme cases. For instance, if you need someone to spy on some assisted-living home for the mentally-ill, convince someone who is deeply religious and a bit "gone around the bend" that you've heard that "those mental folks" are holding satanic ritual abuse of kidnapped illegal alien babies in the basement and that explains the weird chanting (which is actually some Autistic person making Tourette utterances while jamming to their iPod(tm)). You could maybe go scatter in the target's yard some printouts of alleged satanic crap you found on the InterNet. Your contact will be dropping the dime to your voice-mail every time those "mental folks" flush the toilet or step outside to smoke a cigarette.
The most important asset -- outside of law-enforcement -- is the psychological terrain. This is very tricky terrain and this is why you need henchmen and minions. Remember, your primary goal is to have all of this running at a distance. So, convince your henchmen that they're doing a public service. Since you selected them carefully for being both gullible and sneaky, it should be easy to convince them that they're saving money for the taxpayers by making disabled people homeless. Hey, they're not going to turn to a life of crime, they're disabled ya know, worst thing that's gonna happen is someone finds them frozen to the sidewalk some morning, end of story. You chose your henchmen, after all, because they're the sort of people who accept this sort of reasoning, and because they are so morally incapacitated that this sort of outcome can't bother them at all.
The other psychological terrain to be navigated, of course, is that of the victims. They're crazy, right, which is why the collect a disability, right? But in what way are they crazy? You're going to find or make a way to bring their own madness to start them marching on the path you have chosen for them. You may now take a break to laugh quietly to yourself as you imagine the unfolding of your sinister plot.
Depending on how skilled you are, and how inexperienced the officer or well-equipped the force, you may wish to take the risk of getting your henchmen or minions to try to game the police. Depending on the histories and records of your henchmen and minions, and of the victims, and also depending on the information systems of the local authorities, this may be easier done than said. Enough of the right sort of complaints, coming from a wide-enough variety of sources, can overwhelm the probabilistic and statistical underpinnings of the information system, turning the police force's best asset into your best asset. The goal, of course, is to get a statistical association of name or address with complaints. Even if the complaints all turn out to be baseless, the computers will still red-flag the name or address in the calls-for-service statistics. It should go without saying that if the police discover that you are doing this, they will not be pleased with you, which is why you have henchmen and minions.
Now that you have covered all of the aspects of "identify", let's move on to "vilify".
In an example, above, we pointed out that it's pretty easy to turn some folks into informational assets. Let's say you turn a person hovering on the edge of hysteric religious delusion into your personal spy on "those mental folks". You could go two ways with that. You could tell them to just call your voicemail (associated with a stolen cellphone with a pay-as-you-go plan, a.k.a a "burn phone") and otherwise be sure to keep it a secret, can't let the word get back to them or the investigation will be spoiled, etc etc. Or you could tell them that they should spread the word far and wide, but to do it quietly. That way "those baby raping satanists" never hear the accusation, and can't ever have a chance to deny it... or start tracing your evil scheme back to you, the Dastardly Mastermind of Wily Wickedness.
This last approach will in fact vilify, and it will vilify far and wide. However, anyone hearing this from your asset is also likely to hear from your asset that the Tribulations are at hand, let us pray for salvation, brother, kneel kneel kneel, and other such things that would detract from the credibility of the rumor you are trying to spread. Thus, to create more credibility for the incredible among the only-moderately-credulous (remember, you've already gotten to most of the truly credulous and gullible, and they are your henchmen and minions by now) it is necessary that all mentions whatsoever of your victims are accompanied by the same story, and that the same story come from a wide variety of sources. Most reasonable people may be incredulous of wild slander coming from one or from a few people, yet the same wild slander coming from a wide variety of people, day after day, becomes credible even to the most skeptical. There's no vilification like pack vilification.
Now we move on to "nullify". Up to now, we as Sinister Overlords of Icky Badness (along with our minions etc.) have been ruining the reputations of people who are disabled by psychiatric conditions. Their reputation was already bad enough before you started in on a ridiculous case of overkill.
Is this all just a waste of time? After all, "those mental folks" just live in the house you covet. Isn't your real target the owner/operator of the scattered-site subsidized house?
Well, of course he is. However, keep in mind that you have to understand the cultural and psychological terrain in which you operate. The cultural terrain may fear madness, but it supports the disabled. You can't just vilify the individual disabled or the terrain will expel the individual. It's necessary to vilify all of the disabled, or at least all of them in that particular house. And the way to do that is to nullify the owner.
Go after his permits. Go after occupancy restrictions. Question credentials. Call every possible agency you can and pester them endlessly, or actually, have your henchmen and minions do it, and have them do it in the most roundabout way possible. They shouldn't call it in themselves, nor should they complain to (for example) the community association. Rather, they should identify members of the community association and get those fine upstanding civic-minded people to agitate for the community association to agitate at the government.
Why all of the (extra) sneaking around? Well, it's one thing to harass people who are incapacitated and disabled by profound mental illness. It's quite another thing to harass someone who is sane, has credentials and a widespread positive reputation, and who is used to the antics and mechanations of the insane, up to and including those of malicious paranoid sociopaths such as yourself.
Still, if you want that property to fall into your greedy little clutches, he's the one you have to take down. So how to accomplish this?
Let's go back to take a closer look at your henchmen. For top quality work, you really need a minion, someone who is less of a dupe, and more of a player, one who is playing along with you because he likes to see how the Real Talents work because he might learn something. Having learned something, as you move on to bigger and better things, he might just take over doing what you're doing, which would be something he would like.
The ideal minion for this sort of thing is someone who is at least semi-well-known in a lot of places. He's definitely going to be a shady character -- hell, he talks to you even though he knows what you are and what you're doing and why -- and he's probably fairly smart even though he's probably also a devious asshole that a lot of people barely tolerate.
Probably he's well known in a lot of places because he's what people would call "a working bum", a hometown character who won't hold a steady job and probably drifts in and out of homelessness largely for that reason. He probably subsists on the edge of the "legitimate day labor" pool of workers, meaning he can't get hired at the centers because he was kicked out for not following the few rules that even illegal alien yard workers are expected to follow. He probably does minimal maintenance and cleanup for very small businesses. For example, he might do very light landscaping at local gas stations, or junk removal at rental properties, or squeegee work at places that don't want to hire on Union window-washers. Now, there are a lot of people who have done this sort of work, and indeed, this is the sort of work that a lot of mental-healthcare outreach and assisted-living places encourage their clients to do. A lot of these clients do try to do it, but there's a problem with that. There are only so many opportunities, and so many more clients trying to do it. That leads to bum-fights. And this, your best Minion, has won a lot of these bum-fights, not so much from being a fighter, but from being a master of slander and backstabbing. Every place that could possibly offer occasional temporary unskilled work that would supplement the disability income of "those mental folks" is visited on a regular basis by this person, and whether or not he gets a job, he hangs around spreading juicy gossip about how crazy those folks living in this-and-that group home are known to be.
As a rumormonger, he has got to the point where people don't just tolerate his gossip, they ask him if he knows anything about so-and-so. He might be telling Gimbels what they're doing over at Macy's to use an old New York City phrase. He's turned himself into an intelligent asset and a bona-fide player, as long as he can mostly stick to the truth. And having come to be understood as someone nobody's caught in a lie, he can lie like a dog and have it stick, so long as he's consistent, and only does it rarely.
This is why he's your best Minion. He's playing the game the same way you are, he just has less "lofty" goals. He's just trying to make sure he's got enough odd jobs a week to eat and drink and party. You're trying to evict harmless disabled people so you can become a slumlord.
He does know a lot of people, and he doesn't mind making sure that they all know all that you want them to know about the subsidized-housing owner/operator, and all about the clients living there. And this minion doesn't mind making sure that everyone knows that it's all bad, bad, bad, and only getting worse. Why, this very morning I heard... etc. you get the picture.
Enough of this sort of talk, and the disabled clients can't walk the streets without getting abused and they definitely will find no work from people who've heard that they're all (at the very least, to hear all of the rumors) baby-raping satanists following unspeakable rituals with unimaginable practices, and not even the house owner/operator can shop for his clients' groceries without ostracism and demands that he shut down the operation and sell the property, after a nice exorcism, of course.
Next we move on, having covered Identify, Vilify, and Nullify, to...
DESTROY.
TO BE CONTINUED... and remember, at this point, it's all fiction, except for the true parts, which are the very best form of a lie.
Madmen v Migrants: Anti-Group-Home Opposition Rises Again in Aspen Hill? (Part VI)
Earlier we covered the general movement in opposition to any increase in the number of rental properties in Aspen Hill, and then we covered the opposition to "scattered site housing" -- on the taxpayer's tab -- in Aspen Hill for disabled persons. We covered, minimally, an abortive effort by some members of the local civic association to close down one of those group houses. We covered some background on mental disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill.
We also covered a couple of good reasons why people would go out of their way to turn new neighbors into the snitching watchers, and would-be evictors, of publicly-assisted mentally-disabled residents of scattered-site housing in Aspen Hill: Profit. They could buy and flip those properties or rent them out to illegal aliens as flophouses, if only those damned mental cases weren't taking up the space. Oh, and as one could propagandize to anyone who questions your motives, spending up their taxpayer dollar, unlike those hardworking undocumented laborers you'd rather were living there.
Once you have profit as a motive, all you need is opportunity, and means. Of course, it's essential that the trail can't be traced back to you.
Don't worry, anyone who is receiving a disability check for a psychiatric disability isn't likely to have the mental capacity to track it back to you, and anyone silly enough to take you seriously and do your evil bidding isn't likely to be smart enough to second guess your reasons and bust you out as a scheming sociopath trying to put the afflicted in the streets so you can run the property as a neighborhood-degrading flophouse or out-of-zone construction company office. heck, you can always recruit the people you want to rent to; it's in their best interest to kick the disabled into the street so they can have cheap rent, you know.
You've got the opportunity, or if you have succeeded in gathering your flock of henchmen and minions, they've got the opportunity, while you stay obscured in the shadows, as your kind should.
So, once you have your henchmen and minions, to what heinous tasks shall you set them?
First, it's necessary to find henchmen and minions, and there is no better resource for the procurement of henchmen and minions than the environs of various outreach programs.
Now, if you were looking to hire some day-laborers, you could always visit some of the county-funded day-labor centers operated by CASA de Maryland.
There's a huge surplus of day-laborers in the county, and their "hiring corners" get very disorganized, so the county pays CASA to run centers where they can be more organized. Leaving out of the discussion a whole raft of other issues, let's point out that CASA has certain rules, and the day-laborers who obey the rules are allowed to wait for hiring at the day-labor center.
More importantly, those who don't obey CASA's rules wind up hanging out elsewhere, still disorganized and disorderly, and they work for less than the more orderly day-laborers you will find at CASA's center.
If you want someone guaranteed to be less likely a criminal, hire at CASA. If what you actually wanted was a criminal, for example someone who won't look too closely as you load a garbage truck full of stolen goods or frozen corpses, hire from the population that got kicked out of the program for not obeying the rules. As long as you pay them, they'll be happy to look the other way. Hell, they might even turn out to be good enough to bring into your continuing criminal enterprise. They might be more than hirelings, they could become henchmen. They might even advance from the rank of henchmen to become your minions.
In the same way you could find good minions by nosing around outside the property of a CASA hiring center, picking from folks who got kicked out of the program for rule-breaking, you can find good minions for the task of rousting public-housing psychiatric disabled persons by nosing around the edges of the county's own mental-healthcare and homelessness outreach programs.
You might want to start looking right around the vicinity of the Montgomery County Board of Elections, at 751 Twinbrook Parkway, in Rockville, Maryland.
The campus of the former -- and long closed -- Edwin M. Broome Junior High school has long been converted to house various taxpayer-funded program offices. One such is the Montgomery County Board of Elections. Others include various offices and meeting rooms used for such things as meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, etc. There's an Interfaith Clothing Center ("ICC") there, and Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children (CSSAC), Outpatient Addiction Services ("OAS").
751 Twinbrook Parkway is, in fact, your shopping center for the outcasts, the weirdos, the wackos, the delusionals, the dimwits, just about everyone in the County who isn't so messed up they can't let them out on the street, they're all milling about at the bus-stop across the street in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Anyone driving by is likely to mutter "helpless, homeless, hopeless" while pointing a finger as if playing "eenie meenie miney moe", and at whomever they point as they mutter, they're likely to be right, in a sad sort of way. These are the people that most people don't want to see, who are likely to spend most of their life standing in line and not getting much, but that's all they will ever get and ever have, until and unless they can get into a taxpayer-funded housing situation.
Most people, if they bothered to think about it, might speedily come to the conclusion that it might be a lot better to have them sitting inside a house rather than milling around right across the street and around the corner from no less than two public schools.
In that milling crowd you will find an assortment of people including ne'er-do-wells, hardcore drug abusers more or less in recovery, bona-fide dope fiends waiting for their shot of Free Government Dope which could be anything from thorazine to methadone, and people who are so crazy they think their doctors are from outer-space but they keep coming to therapy sessions on the expectation that once they are worthy, they will get a free flying saucer ride to visit the Zetas who will cure them of all of the ills they claim to not have.
Good luck with getting these people to hold down regular jobs, that's what all of the passers-by say, whether only to themselves, or aloud to anyone who might be there to listen.
When these folks aren't milling around waiting for their shots or maybe a space-creature invasion of sharing/caring anal-probers, a lot of them spend their time riding free on the bus to such other places as exist to serve them, or exist to be subsidized by their disability check and associated Federal or State grants that follow them around like invisible little bags of money that the disabled never see, but which wind up paying the rent for various social-worker types.
Some of these folks leave the scene of the milling around and they do have homes to go to... and the ones who don't have homes, they get mighty jealous.
And I do mean, mighty jealous.
And if you were looking for minions, for the sort of person you can just say the right things to and get them all wound up like some sort of self-guiding rubber-band-propelled harbinger of obsessive doom and talkin'-smack, look among the folks who are mighty jealous, and convince them that if they can get those other folks out of their houses, it'll maybe be the jealous folks get to replace them.
And they're crazy enough to believe it.
MORE TO COME
We also covered a couple of good reasons why people would go out of their way to turn new neighbors into the snitching watchers, and would-be evictors, of publicly-assisted mentally-disabled residents of scattered-site housing in Aspen Hill: Profit. They could buy and flip those properties or rent them out to illegal aliens as flophouses, if only those damned mental cases weren't taking up the space. Oh, and as one could propagandize to anyone who questions your motives, spending up their taxpayer dollar, unlike those hardworking undocumented laborers you'd rather were living there.
Once you have profit as a motive, all you need is opportunity, and means. Of course, it's essential that the trail can't be traced back to you.
Don't worry, anyone who is receiving a disability check for a psychiatric disability isn't likely to have the mental capacity to track it back to you, and anyone silly enough to take you seriously and do your evil bidding isn't likely to be smart enough to second guess your reasons and bust you out as a scheming sociopath trying to put the afflicted in the streets so you can run the property as a neighborhood-degrading flophouse or out-of-zone construction company office. heck, you can always recruit the people you want to rent to; it's in their best interest to kick the disabled into the street so they can have cheap rent, you know.
You've got the opportunity, or if you have succeeded in gathering your flock of henchmen and minions, they've got the opportunity, while you stay obscured in the shadows, as your kind should.
So, once you have your henchmen and minions, to what heinous tasks shall you set them?
First, it's necessary to find henchmen and minions, and there is no better resource for the procurement of henchmen and minions than the environs of various outreach programs.
Now, if you were looking to hire some day-laborers, you could always visit some of the county-funded day-labor centers operated by CASA de Maryland.
There's a huge surplus of day-laborers in the county, and their "hiring corners" get very disorganized, so the county pays CASA to run centers where they can be more organized. Leaving out of the discussion a whole raft of other issues, let's point out that CASA has certain rules, and the day-laborers who obey the rules are allowed to wait for hiring at the day-labor center.
More importantly, those who don't obey CASA's rules wind up hanging out elsewhere, still disorganized and disorderly, and they work for less than the more orderly day-laborers you will find at CASA's center.
If you want someone guaranteed to be less likely a criminal, hire at CASA. If what you actually wanted was a criminal, for example someone who won't look too closely as you load a garbage truck full of stolen goods or frozen corpses, hire from the population that got kicked out of the program for not obeying the rules. As long as you pay them, they'll be happy to look the other way. Hell, they might even turn out to be good enough to bring into your continuing criminal enterprise. They might be more than hirelings, they could become henchmen. They might even advance from the rank of henchmen to become your minions.
In the same way you could find good minions by nosing around outside the property of a CASA hiring center, picking from folks who got kicked out of the program for rule-breaking, you can find good minions for the task of rousting public-housing psychiatric disabled persons by nosing around the edges of the county's own mental-healthcare and homelessness outreach programs.
You might want to start looking right around the vicinity of the Montgomery County Board of Elections, at 751 Twinbrook Parkway, in Rockville, Maryland.
The campus of the former -- and long closed -- Edwin M. Broome Junior High school has long been converted to house various taxpayer-funded program offices. One such is the Montgomery County Board of Elections. Others include various offices and meeting rooms used for such things as meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, etc. There's an Interfaith Clothing Center ("ICC") there, and Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children (CSSAC), Outpatient Addiction Services ("OAS").
751 Twinbrook Parkway is, in fact, your shopping center for the outcasts, the weirdos, the wackos, the delusionals, the dimwits, just about everyone in the County who isn't so messed up they can't let them out on the street, they're all milling about at the bus-stop across the street in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Anyone driving by is likely to mutter "helpless, homeless, hopeless" while pointing a finger as if playing "eenie meenie miney moe", and at whomever they point as they mutter, they're likely to be right, in a sad sort of way. These are the people that most people don't want to see, who are likely to spend most of their life standing in line and not getting much, but that's all they will ever get and ever have, until and unless they can get into a taxpayer-funded housing situation.
Most people, if they bothered to think about it, might speedily come to the conclusion that it might be a lot better to have them sitting inside a house rather than milling around right across the street and around the corner from no less than two public schools.
In that milling crowd you will find an assortment of people including ne'er-do-wells, hardcore drug abusers more or less in recovery, bona-fide dope fiends waiting for their shot of Free Government Dope which could be anything from thorazine to methadone, and people who are so crazy they think their doctors are from outer-space but they keep coming to therapy sessions on the expectation that once they are worthy, they will get a free flying saucer ride to visit the Zetas who will cure them of all of the ills they claim to not have.
Good luck with getting these people to hold down regular jobs, that's what all of the passers-by say, whether only to themselves, or aloud to anyone who might be there to listen.
When these folks aren't milling around waiting for their shots or maybe a space-creature invasion of sharing/caring anal-probers, a lot of them spend their time riding free on the bus to such other places as exist to serve them, or exist to be subsidized by their disability check and associated Federal or State grants that follow them around like invisible little bags of money that the disabled never see, but which wind up paying the rent for various social-worker types.
Some of these folks leave the scene of the milling around and they do have homes to go to... and the ones who don't have homes, they get mighty jealous.
And I do mean, mighty jealous.
And if you were looking for minions, for the sort of person you can just say the right things to and get them all wound up like some sort of self-guiding rubber-band-propelled harbinger of obsessive doom and talkin'-smack, look among the folks who are mighty jealous, and convince them that if they can get those other folks out of their houses, it'll maybe be the jealous folks get to replace them.
And they're crazy enough to believe it.
MORE TO COME
