Very Brief Note

Due to the ongoing campaign, I'll be changing my posting icon. Previously, it was from the famous cartoon Futurama. Anyone not getting the reference should google "all glory to the Hypnotoad".

Campaign for District 4, 2009, begins

This was posted as a response to Sharon Dooley's post at Maryland Politics Watch, "District 4 Council Race – Questions to Ponder" (February 27, 2009).

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My name is Thomas Hardman, and I filed for candidacy Friday Feb 27 2009, evidently a few minutes behind Nancy Navarro, to judge from the visitors' log.

I had about 5 years on the board of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., from about 2002-2007. In about the same time frame, I was very active in the "Mid County Neighborhood Initiative", which has done quite a lot of promotion of anti-crime efforts in Aspen Hill, especially promoting the reclamation of North Gate Park, and the cleanup of a lot of local "trash woods" where overgrowth led to crime and nastiness.

I'm particularly focused on code-violation, home overcrowding, "McMansionism", tear-downs and "over-builds". I'm focused on how sensible Urban Planning can be completely obviated when code isn't enforced and everything deviates from the plan. I oppose seeing our neighborhoods being turned into something that looks a lot like an industrial park, and I oppose people buying up houses on speculation and paying their liar-loan APR mortgages by renting out single-family detached residental homes housing as many as 20 people being charged $500.00/month rent each, generating from $6000 to $10,000 to the slumlords. I've been fighting every aspect of that since Doug Duncan was County Executive.

For some years I have been seeking ways to have some influence, to demonstrate leadership, outside of the very narrow focus of these groups. So, I have run in the last two elections held in District 19/District 4 (state/county) and I am running in this one as of now.

I'm trying to step up and do the right thing, but I'm not a Party creature and so it's a struggle every step of the way.

Visit http://www.thomashardman.com as well as http://www.aspenhillnet.net/ and http://www.district4mc.org where I have done a lot of documentation about myself, Aspen Hill, and District 4.

Coming soon, the new http://www.thomashardman.NET which will be the political site, and the Facebook presence is under development.

I am a pagan tree-hugger and demand changes in policy toward "green", solar, and slow-growth/no-growth and I am on record on Channel 19/21 video from last Special Election as being for this, and furthermore my campaign was based all around expectation of economic calamity, and it wasn't even on the radar of any of my opponents. I was a Liberal Republican then, I am a Fiscally Conservative/Social Liberal Democrat now. I am GLBT tolerant and embrace the large and under-served community of the "differently abled", especially the "special needs" community in young adulthood and beyond, whether they're gifted/talented or intellectually-disabled.

Robin Ficker, Lou August, Republicans for District 4

Robin Ficker, described by a lot of the sort of Montgomery Democrat "who never thought of a tax they didn't love" as "the most hated man in our budget deliberations", is running for Council in District 4.

Author of a controversial but successful referendum that requires a unanimous vote of 9 sitting Council to pass any tax increases exceeding the Charter limit, Mr Ficker recently relocated his residence to Fairland to conform to residency requirements.

Mr Ficker is frequently quoted as saying (paraphrased) "who's looking out for the homeowners on the County Council? Nobody! They treat the homeowners as an ATM". Mr Ficker is, of course, invited to correct me if I have misquoted him.

Also joining the fray is Lou August, a fairly recent transplant from Washington State, with a strong background in education issues and a passion for the environment.

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More to come, including some overview of the known Democrat, "third party" and Independent candidates...

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Maryland Politics Watch Abandoned By Its Public

Since Adam Pagnucco has begun mass censorship operations, almost no comments have made it past his filters at Maryland Politics Watch. We're not entirely certain whether this is because dissenting commenters are on strike, or because he won't allow dissent to be published.

Comparable objection to the "editorial" tendencies of Jennifer Deseo over at Silver Spring Penguin have been voiced:

It’s funny that the moderator relishes setting out the rules for everyone, but seems unable to follow them herself. You just told Eric not to make any personal swipes and go on to call him a troll.

Generally, I really like this blog, but this whole gestapo approach might be putting a little damper on the free speech thing. Just a thought. Peace. (ThayerD, Feb 13, 2009)

But we must give "props" to Jennifer Deseo for providing this link to the memo from County Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett to Chief of Police J. Thomas Manger outlining changes in policy for checking immigration status of certain criminal-offender suspects

Still, all of this "house organ" and "astroturfing" (astroturf is fake "grassroots") going around in the Montgomery County blogspace, one has to wonder who has any integrity left around here. Oh, there's me, but I assure you it's all self-serving, though in general the best interests of Montgomery are also my best self-interest; I do live here, ya know. Other than me, there's the most-excellent and deeply possessed of integrity blog of Dan Reed at Just Up the Pike and various others, notably Life in Scenic Wheaton and the new, and sparsely populated, blog of Sleepless in Slumburbia.

The thing is, I tend to be all over the map (and the blogosphere) with my commenting and postings, and "Just Up the Pike" is pretty much on-point as an Urban Planning and Revitalization blog with a focus on District 4 and everything along US-29 ("Columbia Pike"). "Life in Scenic Wheaton" is more about life, and the life is lived in Wheaton, but it's more about life than about Wheaton. Given the writer's ability to focus in on things, it's probably better for Wheaton that the author hasn't given full scrutiny and focus to Wheaton because Wheaton might find itself forced into a level of introspection and self-reconstruction that could, I dunno, make it a much better place. "Sleepless in Slumburbia" doesn't quite bring the focus down to neighborhood problems near the intersection of Randolph and Veirs Mill Roads, possibly because some things you can't look at without wanting to just run around screaming "what were they thinking when they let it come to this". I'd run around screaming here in Aspen Hill except that there are people here who get very controllingly psychotic when you run around screaming about how controllingly psychotic they are, and considering that there is an unfortunately large segment of the population here that likes to play with weapons, you almost can't blame the controllingly psychotic folks unless they start being less self-controlling, and more psychotic. Anyone not quite getting the references should try reading award-winning author Philip K Dick's seminal novel, "Clans of the Alphane Moon".

Schrödinger's Cat Claws Wall Street A New One

Wall Street, some have said, thrives on uncertainty, so long as the uncertainty is predictable.

Stated more intelligibly, it has also been noted that "the rich are always playing both sides of the game, they generally buy low and 'go long' but they keep a 'leveraged hedge position' ready to 'short the market' so that they can dump on the market in a downturn and bet that their dumping will drive prices lower". Thus, staying rich, if not necessarily getting richer, is a sort of balancing of equations. You get more wealth and grow that wealth as the market grows and you continue to hold what you've got, or paradoxically you can have more money as the market contracts when you dump what you've got while betting that things that you handle can be paid for with money borrowed at a lower cost than what you get paid for unloading those things right before the price drops. This is going short, and in most times it's a very risky game, and if the price goes up rather than down, you can lose a lot of money; it's generally not something that you actually own in the preferred transaction modes. But if you wind up having to pay for it, it's yours now, and you have to 'go long' or wait until the price rises, or you lose money. In a lot of ways, that's good for the market as this requires stability and growth, however slow that growth. For you, if your business is high-volume transaction skimming, suddenly you become a wealth holder with no cash-flow stream, and thus with no income. Thus, if you would rather have income than wealth, it behooves you to try to drive the market down... if you can do it fast enough to amount to transacting in short positions, rather than dumping your wealth at a loss.

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"Schrödinger's cat" is the name of an elegant thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, used to demonstrate problems with the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, in which possible states described by the mathematics of quantum theory could be collapsed from probability into certainty by the act of measurement.

More or less, Schrodinger described a cat in a box, invisible to those outside of the box, which was accompanied in the box by a device that could be electrically operated from outside of the box, which would release a poison gas that could instantly kill the cat. Leaving aside specious arguments of cruelty to animals, this experiment isn't about killing cats; it is about uncertainty.

The device in the box with the cat is electrically activated when an external counter detects a certain number of particles given off by the radioactive decay of a known quantity and quality of a radioisotope. Statistically, at a given time, you could predict that there was a 50/50 chance that a specific number of particles had been detected, and had activated the poison dispenser. Statistically, at that time, there is a 50/50 chance that the cat has been poisoned.

So, is the cat dead or not? It's neither, and it's both, all at the same time... until you look inside the box. Then, because you can see which it is -- alive or dead -- that's when it actually becomes "real". In physics jargon, "the probabilities collapsed into a certain state", a state where it's no longer probabilities or likelihood, but a cat, which is in exactly one of two possible conditions.

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The problem facing Wall Street at the moment is one of uncertainty.

Keep in mind that a lot of physicists have been employed on Wall Street recently, working their mathemagic on this market and that one. Mostly they've been involved in analysis. In effect, they've been looking at the box with the cat in it, from every possible angle and with all possible tools, including some that didn't exist until they invented them.

Part of the tookit they have brought to the market analysis business have included things analogous to counting the particles actually emitted by the radioisotope in the thought-experiment proposed by Professor Schrodinger. Of course, they can't count the actual particles emitted by the isotope in the direction of the counter; that would be cheating, but they can count all of the particles emitted in every other direction. (To pull you back to reality from the allegory, the rules in the real world against "insider trading" are comparable to the rules in Schrodinger's scenario.)

If you're turning the Schrodinger Cat experiment into a real-life business model, basically you are doing the experiment in a casino.

The real money is on exactly when is the last second that you can open the box and still have a live cat inside. If the average time that captured emissions statistically average to the number of scintillations that will trigger the poison gas is 1 hour, if you're betting that the cat will last 2 hours, you are almost certain to lose. If you are betting that the cat will be dead in 5 minutes after starting the experiment, you'll probably lose on that one, too. Betting to the extremes are sucker bets.

Thus, the interesting betting -- including side bets and leveraged bets and deriviative bets -- all happens right around the 1-hour mark, where it's just about exactly even odds that the cat will be in either state once you actually look.

There are certain rules that aren't meant to be bent, in this experiment. You're not allowed to peek in the box, there aren't any active cameras allowed in the box, and you're not allowed to listen to what's happening in the box. That would skew the betting.

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What we are seeing on Wall Street and elsewhere in the global economy is, more or less, the betting occurring from about 55 minutes into the experiment, to about 65 minutes into the experiment. It's certainly possible that the trigger went off at 55 minutes, and it's certainly possible that at 65 minutes it has not been tripped.

This is what's driving the market right now... the ticking of the clock, the slow decay of a radioisotope, a counter detecting the decay, and a cat in a box that's both alive and dead and neither, all at once.

Pretty soon now -- and all of the physicists know this -- one of the bettors is going to be driven mad by the suspense, and is going to open the box and look inside.

And at least half of the people betting -- because that's how bookmaking works -- are going to lose everything they bet, whichever way it goes.

Just keep in mind that the cat in the box might still be alive, and more than a bit ticked off at having been stuck in a box.

Then again, it might not be good for much other than as the raw material for some mittens.

Words Almost Fail Me...

Mere days after I pointed out rampant censorship and "astroturfing" (fake grassroots) over at Maryland Politics Watch, now we get a screed opposing the "Fairness Doctrine" that starts off with "[t]he Fairness Doctrine, which holds that the government has a right to mandate “balance” in broadcast media, is an oozing pimple on the face of liberalism. And like most pimples, it is difficult to get rid of and grows uglier the longer it is present. [...]"

Oy gevalt.

The comments are even funnier, up to and including the obligatory mention of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy controlling all of the media and depriving us of Liberal Talk Radio.

I can't make this stuff up, folks, you need to go read it for yourself.

Area's Most Expensive Day Care? Centro Familia Misplaces A Million

Creative Accountability is sort of like Creative Accounting.

I strongly expect to see some astonishing exercises in Creative Accountability in MoCo politics this week and month.

In a response to a remark by "Sleepless in Slumburbia to my blog entry regarding MPW Goes Partisan: Ben Kramer, Doug Duncan Slammed, "Sleepless" points out that the only way some people can stand to be Maryland Liberals is to be on drugs, and I responded with an unfortunately overlong post in which I demonstrate that voting for anyone put forward by the MoCo Party Machine is in the same moral/ethical position as a woman taking medication to deal with the depression caused by refusing to leave her abusive husband.

As over-the-top (or entirely "on point") as that might be, Epic Madness and Incompetence might explain what was observed by the Washington Post writer in John Kelly's Washington:

Here was the sentence that made me do a doubletake: "Centro Familia offers an early childhood program to about 30 preschoolers and has trained more than 300 in-home child care providers who focus on Latino children who otherwise might lack sufficient preparation to enter elementary school." Good work, I'm sure, but how much can that cost? Thirty kids, $900,000. What's that? Thirty-thousand bucks per kid? That would improve my early childhood. (And late adulthood.)

Wow, that's nearly a million dollars, and at $30,000 per kid, that ought to be some serious pre-school. What are we talking about in terms of performance, guaranteed graduate of the International Baccalaureate Program by age seven? Kids with IQ of 800 gajillion? Read and write forty languages and can do integral calculus in simultaneous sets of quantum superposition in their heads all while petting Schrodinger's Cat with a cyclotron they built themselves out of an old tire-balancer?

Well, the MoCo Office of Inspector General doesn't seem to think so (PDF). It gets thicker, of course, the deeper you wade into it, as is true of any cesspool.

Strangely enough, this is fairly old news, and why it's seeing the light of day right as Nancy Navarro of the School Board winds up for her second run for office only a year after the last one, we can't tell you.

What we can tell you is what you'll read if you download and read the letter from the Inspector General, linked to above. More or less, the Department of Health and Human Services ("DHHS") was negligent in its oversight and monitoring of payments to the "Institute for Family Development" which is noted parenthetically as "Centro Familia".

A couple of letterheads into the stack of documents, we see:

[...] With the exception of one $5,000 amount billed in June 2007 for program evaluation fees in conjunction with FY2007 Contract #664433019-AA (PO #7644330114)), Centro Familia representives could not provide the [Office of Inspector General] with documentation to substantiate specific payroll and operate expenses included on the approximately 70 monthly invoices included in our review. In addition, OIG testing of selected accounting records and supporting documentation provided by Centro Familia disclosed inconsistencies, errors, and discrepancies that, to date, have not been resolved.

But even more interesting is something that isn't at all limited to Centro Familia. In a letter dated February 13, 2009, from Uma S. Ahluwalia (Director, DHHS) to Thomas J Dagley, the Inspector General, we discover:

[...] Our contract monitors are program based and their primary focus has often been on overseeing the quality of the services provided to our customers and clients. Strengthening our fiscal and administrative oversight of contracts is essential to assuring comprehensive contract monitoring. In addition, many of our vendors are also our non-profit collaborators and partners [italics mine -thardman]. We need to work with them to assure they are fully educated on the County's Procurement regulations and procedures while respecting and preserving our collaborative relationship.

Given the volume and complexity of our contracts, these are significant challenges. [...]

Now, leaving aside the use of the word "collaborators" -- which of course has a very strong negative association to the collaborators in WWII -- I find it a little baffling to hear that the County is making use of "non-profit" organizations who might have been playing fast and loose with the rules of the County's Procurement divisions. Or perhaps they weren't playing fast and loose with the Procurement regulations... DHHS doesn't seem to know, and presumably nobody else does, either. Only since July 2008 has attendance at course covering Contract Monitoring been required, and as of March 2009 there will be a DHHS Contract Monitoring Review Committee.

I expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg here, and that a can of worms has been opened up that will be wriggling long after the Special Elections are over.

Who knows; I remember that for some years one of the County's contractors was, probably without oversight, getting away with driving vanloads of autistic adults to Aspen Hill Local Park back around 2003-2004 or so so, and herding them around the parking lot -- sometimes with sticks -- and billing who-knows how much money for this "care". I wonder what Centro Familia's "Institute for Family Development" was doing with their charges, assuming that they had any.

MPW Goes Partisan: Ben Kramer, Doug Duncan Slammed

Reposted in part from a comment left at Just Up the Pike ("does polling place consolidation hurt minority voters?", Reed, Dan, Feb 21, 2009):


Dan, if you bother to read any of the other recent entries, a clear pattern emerges.

MPW, which was formerly very partisanly Democrat in general and "progressive" in leanings -- whatever that may mean, a different thing to all different people -- is now very solidly in the Navarro camp, and is coming out of the closet as a front for the interests of the County Council as seated.

First, I get kicked off, which generally is the second clear indicator that an operation is a propaganda organ rather than honest reporting and critique. The first clear indicator is that all responses must pass the censor, and censorship of any form other than deleting SPAM or rank obscenity is anathematic to any claims to journalistic integrity.

Then the exact same person who demanded my ouster under the theory "if you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything at all", offers the following:

From Lefty:


[ ... ]
Moreover, it's not like he can rely on his record, or the support of his fellow delegates and senators. His performance in office has been abysmal. He has undercut county unity on countless occasions, most significantly during the special session, but also at other times. My sense is that there is barely repressed rage among the delegation, not only at his positions, which are best described as Republican, but even more so at his antics and the manner in which he goes about things, which is public and vitriolic.

If you see any incumbent delegates and senators supporting Ben Kramer, I suspect that it will be based on their desire to get rid of him in Annapolis, and not on any sincere belief that Kramer is actually the best candidate for the job.

As if that's not enough, I can't get a word in edgewise about anything because of my supposedly hateful race-baiting (WTF?) but the infamous "foolio" gets away with this:

recall reading in the Post sometime recently, an article about Ben Kramer ticking off the whole Black Caucus over his insensitivity to their concerns about racial impact/profiling in his "tough on crime" drive. This makes sense given your comments about his relationship with the rest of the delegation.

[Dood, you pretty much said that Ben Kramer is a heartless racist who's into abusing police power.]


Even Kevin Gillogly notices and takes offense at the coverage:


[ ... ]

More importantly the tone of this blog post and several others you come across as if you have already selected your candidate and if so then you should declare it. That is something you and I have always advocated for MPW -- to let people know who you are for.

I have not decided on a candidate for this race. I will let you know if and when I do. But this is now fourth post that you have tilted towards one candidate. Declare your support or start to write a more balanced post.


Adam Pagnucco defends himself:


[ ... ]

Last time, my union contributed to Navarro, a fact that I repeatedly disclosed. I have never contributed to her. I am not a member of her Facebook group, don't make campaign decisions for her and don't live in her district. I generally favor pro-union candidates, but that's not news to anyone who reads this blog.

I've never pretended to be completely objective. I throw out a combination of fact and opinion and regularly disclose my employment (with the Carpenters Union) and my political affiliations (with the District 18 Democratic Team). The readers know where I'm coming from. If they want to say, "He's a union guy, so we'll take his opinions with a grain of salt on union-backed candidates," so be it.



So, the focus on Navarro -- who isn't even someone that Adam can vote for, if I'm rightly reading his posting -- can't come out of Adam's own concerns or alignment with someone for whom he intends to vote.

From where, then, arises this sudden support of one candidate over all of the others, even if that support mostly consists of complaining about how the mean old Board of Elections seems to be gerrymandering under seeming guise of saving the taxpayer expenses on a Special Election that is likely to have the lowest voter turnout on record? Can we reasonably presume that he just a deeply would have opposed the gerrymandering that was openly and vociferously stated to be intended to make sure that Connie Morella could never again be elected? After all, as an Italian-American she couldn't possibly be more Latina, now could she. So I guess we can take any imputations of ethnic favoritism off of the table of discussion, and if it's not unreasonable partisanism (if it's good for Connie Morella, it's good for Nancy Navarro, eh?) and it's not based on ethnic solidarity politics, it's got to be based on something else. And watching someone who used to be widely respected for integrity suddenly do a blatant about-face and descend into harboring clear factionalists, there's got to be something behind that. And what's behind that stinks of "house organ" and "astroturfing".

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President Obama May Kick Governor O'Malley's Figurative Butt

In the Gazette, we are told that Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley intends to blow almost all of Maryland's share of the historical Stimulus (I) Package on politically rewarding pork.

Almost $500-millions of Maryland's $1.5-billion share of the Stimulus funds would go to prop up teacher retirement funds and to assure delivery of the politically essential Geographic Cost of Living Index ("GCEI").

However, today President Obama declared at a meeting of mayors of major cities and large local governments that he would "call them out" if they wasted Stimulus money on Pork projects that don't directly generate jobs.

I'm trying to figure out how spending one third of Maryland's $1.5-billions of Stimulus money on entitlements constitutes generating jobs.

Anyone making book? I'd love a ringside seat when President Obama comes on down to Annapolis and cleans the Governor's clock. I'll give 10 to 1, Obama, and if MoCo County Executive "Ike" Leggett wants to weigh in by giving so much as a cent of the Stimulus money to CASA de Maryland so that illegal aliens get jobs Americans need, I'll give the same odds, and double it the other way if President Obama looks into it and rightly sends in 10,000 Feds to clean up that trailer park over there on Crabbs Branch Way just south of Shady Grove Road.

In other words, "I'd pay money to see that".

Good money!

Planning Board: "We're Full": Growth Policy Outmoded

Various members of the Planning Board have taken a position, sensible in our opinion, that the County is no longer properly to be planned for as if it were a suburb. With less than 4-percent remaining "greenfields" available for development, it may make more sense for the Planning Board and the County growth policy to shift paradigms, abandoning previous Master Plan conceptual models of Montgomery As Suburbia. Rather, Montgomery As Urban would be the paradigm

In the Gazette's rather scant coverage, we are treated to such quotes as:

• Chairman Royce Hanson: "We're not satisfied that the existing growth policy is where we ought to be."
  
• Vice Chairman John Robinson: "The growth policy is still very much oriented to a suburban mode and the problem with the suburban mode is it is premised on the notion that there will always be more resources... Whether we like it or not, we are an urbanized county to various and sundry degrees; we are no longer a suburban county."
  
• Board member Jean Cryor: "You should never have to face [having to ask yourself, (ed, thardman)]what is the least bad thing we can do."
  

When we can find where the Planning Board is hiding their public-accessible copy of the draft report on growth policy revision, we'll post a link to it.

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Now, it is no secret that I believe in limits to Growth, and that in particular I oppose the cancerous growth of Sprawl.

I'm a pagan, as I keep telling people, and my book of faith isn't so much a book as it is a library, and unlike most belief-systems, my belief system is amenable to and in fact demands peer review. As time goes on, I firmly believe, things change, and we may change with them.

A part of my litany recaps a possibly overbroad and pessimistic view of history:

We give thanks for fire.
For fire is the first tool.
Fire bakes shaped clay.
In baked clay we smelt iron.
From iron we make tools.
With tools we shape stones.
With shaped stone, we build cities.
With cities, we build civilization.
With civilization we shape the very world.
We give thanks to fire, the first tool
And wonder if we will ever know to quit while we're ahead.

Now, I do not have any religious imperative within my belief system to "be fruitful and multiply", heaven knows (so to speak) that there are plenty of people who believe that and who are doing that; the population of the planet has slightly more than doubled just within my short life of a mere 50 years.

Quite possibly the majority of all human beings that have ever lived are now alive. We're definitely at our limits for sustainable populations, or beyond those limits. Global warming has come upon us hard and fast since I first put together klaatu's Earth Operations Central website with all of the links to NASA and other scientific data, starting back in 1995 or so.

Yet even in one of the world's most educated, left-leaning, earth-friendly, and liberal-electing political districts on the planet -- Montgomery County, Maryland -- only now are people starting to change policies of growth that practically beg for the onset of Mass Extinction of Species.

That the Holocene Mass Extinction Event -- the "Sixth Extinction" -- is ongoing and likely accelerating isn't any more a matter of debate than is Global Climate Change. That it has taken this long for the Montgomery Planning Board to start thinking that perhaps we need to start taking better care of the world around us is a matter of wonder to me.

The news has been coming fast and furious. For example, this very morning, the Washington Post reports that the "dead zones" in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere are much more persistent than expected. What the scientists aren't saying -- although it is starting to become apparent over time -- is that we have converted significant portions of the global ocean from aerobic environments into anaerobic environments, in which thrive no life that we like, and plenty of forms of life including anaerobic bacteria such as Botulism. Now, rather than the people, it's the toxic life-forms which may be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the earth, which was theirs before the rise of the oxygen-generating photosynthetic organisms such as Algae and other plants.

It's not as if the economy demands expansion, or more production, or more facilities where production can occur; indeed, as the Post reports, massive global overproduction has left the markets effectively drowning in inventory.

Speaking as an environmentalist, speaking as a longtime observer of the economy and industry, and speaking as someone whose object of worship is the creator of the world we're killing (and if one respects the creator, why not respect the creation?), I have to ask all of you, not just the Planning Board, but everyone:

Stop. Take a moment to reflect. Examine what you are doing, but even more, ask yourself WHY you are doing it.

We have enough, we have enough goods, we have enough population, we have enough Sprawl, we have enough Dead Zones in the Chesapeake.

Stop! You're Killing Me! screams the earth itself...

And thank your lucky stars that the Planning Board seems to be hearing that as a whisper in the still, small voice of their Consciences.

Woohoo! I'm banned from Maryland Politics Watch! I'm IMPORTANT!

Well, it looks like I hit some nails smack on the head.

I got banned from Maryland Politics Watch.

You couldn't ask for more or better proof that the so-called "MoCo Progressive Blogosphere" is an Astroturfing Paradise.

Talk about bogus. The "house organs" refuse to publish critique of their employers.

I suppose I can just sit over here and repost "best of" sycophancies and mock the living shit out of them. Indeed, until I get automatic 100-percent passthrough of all non-scurrilous posts to Maryland Politics Watch, I shall do exactly that.

Today's ridiculousness:

First, I post a link to Doug Duncan's exceptionally pointed piece critiquing the total lack of vision of the County County in large part and the Maryland Assembly in smaller part. Then Adam over at MPW does the same. Then I posted to his blog -- where he violates WaPo copyright by posting the entirety of the letter to the editor -- my response to WaPo's blog of the letter, adding to the list of responses.

Then, to top it off, WaPo relocates the letter.

Not to violate their copyright -- Adam at Maryland Politics Watch has already done that -- I'll just repost my response to it, following:

Mr Duncan doesn't go so far as to say "I was wrong" and in fact he wasn't wrong... for the times in which he was County Executive.

But he's right. He correctly points out that most of the sitting Council are what old sailors call "Fair Weather Freddie", which is to say, when you've got red skies at night (sailor's delight) you can let this guy steer the ship because even if he falls asleep at the wheel, you're in deep waters far from anything and the weather looks great far beyond the horizon.

In such a situation, there's nothing that Fair Weather Freddie can possibly do that can trouble the ship, outside of maybe taking an axe and knocking out the bilge scupper plug, or maybe twisting the tail of Mrs O'Leary's Cow until she kicks over a kerosene lamp.

But we've got Red Skies At Morning (sailors take warning!) and Fair Weather Freddie doesn't know how to do anything but keep the ship of State headed in one direction. If Fair Weather Freddie isn't relieved by an Able Seaman, or better yet, some salty old dog of a captain who knows the reefs and can fight his ship, that ship's going to run aground running ahead of the wind, or heel right over in an unskilled turn. No, the storms are rising fast, but Fair Weather Freddie is too clueless to even see the signs and send for the Cap'n and Mates.

It's time to bring up the folks who know where the rocks are, who can read a map, and know how to steer without shifting the load.

Doug Duncan isn't that man, but he's no Fair Weather Freddie even if he isn't an Able Mate. When he sees the whitecaps coming at least he knows to raise a holler that will be believed and bring out the crew on the double.

Believe him when he says it's time for people with skills and vision in our government, not Fair Weather Freddie dreaming as he steers asleep on his feet.

"Adrift on the seas of Fate, the Ship of Fools is piloted by the Grateful Dead."

Judging from how upset the Powers-That-Think-They-Are and the actual Powers-That-Be seem to be, I am just going to have to register my candidacy, aren't I?

After all, no less than former (and generally WORSHIPPED by County Democrats) County Executive Doug Duncan has said:

Trust and confidence in government need to be restored, and it has to start with an honest accounting about the challenges we face along with a vision of where we want to go. It's time to be truthful to the public and acknowledge that government's capabilities must be reshaped for some time to come. Can state and local elected officials get back to basics by adopting zero-based budgeting and conducting a healthy review of government's core missions and competencies? Can they decide a program is no longer affordable and then cut it entirely out of the budget? Can they get ahead of the revenue forecasts and stop changing budgets every few months? Can they redesign services to face a new economic reality?

For their reelection's sake, they better hope they can, because if they can't, the voters will replace them with others who will.

And let's say baybee, you want redesign?

I'm a system administrator and a hardcore repackager of things that are known to work.

So, you gonna restore my postings, MPW?

Offtopic: Data DVD Brand Comparison

As part of my newly launched business, I first bought one brand of DVD and any errors I had were a result of development, by which I mean, I hadn't yet got the product into a workable format. I had no problems due to media errors.

I went back to MicroCenter in Rockville and bought in bulk.

In the second batch of DVD data disc pressings, I had a 100-percent error rate of a product that pressed fine on the other brand.

In the current stock at MicroCenter, as regards Data DVDs,

Magnavox == GOOD
Memorex == CRAP.

MoCo Blogosphere Covered in AstroTurf?

From WikiPedia:

Astroturfing s a word in American English describing formal political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass, AstroTurf.

The goal of such a campaign is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt ("outreach", "awareness", etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by an individual pushing a personal agenda or highly organized professional groups with financial backing from large corporations, non-profits, or activist organizations. Very often the efforts are conducted by political consultants who also specialize in opposition research.

[ ... ]

Does this shoe fit you, local bloggers?

Even Doug Duncan Thinks You're LAME

In this opinion letter to the editors of the Washington Post -- an open letter addressed in small part to the Maryland Assembly but mostly to the County Council -- even Doug Duncan, former Chief Executive of Montgomery County, thinks you are lame, without vision, and pretty uncomprehending of the scope of current problems.

More relevant than ever in the current budget crisis.

The Cold Equations, by Tom Godwin.

Part 1: Rousting the Rousters: Time to Move On

Last month we completed a nine-part series on wacky weirdness in and around Aspen Hill, Maryland.

To recap, you may wish to freshen your memory, so here's the summary block. with links:

---

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.

---

Well, I really wasn't kidding.

Recent economic changes -- generally summarized as "global economic meltdown" -- have pretty much pulled the profit motive out from under the various loose associations of people who found themselves operating more or less as strange bedfellows, as the old saying goes. Let me detail who some of these groups are known to be, and later I will give some theories as to who some of these other groups might reasonably be thought to be. Later in the series, I will also give theories that may seem unreasonable, but then again, the reasoning (and reasons) of criminals and mentally-unbalanced individuals and groups may reasonably be expected to be unreasonable.

First, there is a move afoot in the Maryland Assembly to make it very difficult indeed to evade paying taxes by intentionally misclassifying employees as contractors. This increases the costs of doing construction, as well as assuring that the public coffers get more of what is needed to finance the public sector. But now for some exposition in logic:

With the collapse of the housing bubble and associated financial institutions and methods, we see that there is extreme slowdown in the Construction Industry.

With the slowdown of the Construction Industry, there is almost no need to hire new workers or temporary labor.

With the lack of need to hire either full-time workers or temporary workers, there is almost no hiring of day-laborers.

With almost no hiring of day-laborers, and with "contractors" getting far less work (or none at all), day-laborers and contractors who have crowded together in what amounts to "worker barracks" are finding it impossible to pay the rents. We have been hearing that as many as 12 to 20 workers may be each paying $500.00 per month to live in the basements of any such "worker barracks" house, meaning that the income cash stream to the owner of such facilities could range from $6,000.00 to $10,000.00 per month. That's more than enough to pay the note on the house. That could also pay the note on a shiny new car, or a shiny new truck, or a shiny new set of tools, or a bunch of shady new friends who can make sure that it's your workers who get hired, or a bunch of shady new friends who can make bad things happen to anyone who doesn't like you renting out your basement to 12 to 20 workers.

In summary, with the housing bubble and the Construction Industry in economic collapse, the people who were in the business of buying and maintaining worker-barracks for "contractors" and "day-laborers" are going out of business at a record pace, most commonly falling into foreclosure, and frequently finding their car repossessed as they fall into bankruptcy. And also, sadly, they can no longer afford the services of their hired muscle and bodyguards and errand boys, and goons.

They also can't afford to pay for the services of the people who made sure that there was no work for people with psychiatric disabilities. (Prior to the Invasion the vast majority of day-laborers were people with psychiatric disabilities seeking to supplement their meager Social Security disability incomes, and they represented competition to the foreign day-laborers who paid $500.00/month to live in the crowded basements of profiteering modern slumlords.)

Such people may -- or may not -- have been local-government workers or people associated with "ACT" (or "Assertive Community Treatment"), a special group attached to the Montgomery County "Core Service Agency" that has offices at 751 Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville, Maryland, just across Rock Creek from Aspen Hill, and doubtless has offices elsewhere.

From a County webpage giving some detail on "ACT":

Potential ACT clients have demonstrated a limited ability to comply with recommended medication regimes and office-based mental health treatment.

To address these difficulties, the ACT multidisciplinary staff provides treatment, case management, and support services to clients to assist them in successful community living.

ACT services delivery take place in community locations, including but not limited to the client's residence, neighborhood, place of employment or recreation, a shelter, jail, hospital or other location as deemed appropriate.

Now, this seems reasonable enough. Almost any given member of the general public has encountered someone, frequently homeless, who is clearly not in their right mind. Often you may see such people railing to themselves, not caring who hears them. The general assumption is that the person has failed to take their medication and that the monologue is nothing but the symptom of their disorder.

Yet it's worth pointing out here that if you took the most sane person you know, and robbed them, that sane person would likely be railing as much as any madman. If you took the sanest person you know, and kicked them to the curb for walking into a store, that sane person would likely be railing as much as any madman.

So, how does the sane person differ from the madman? Often, it has to do with records. If someone complains to the police that they've been robbed, the police will investigate it. They may find enough evidence to make a case, or they may not, but generally they will be able to determine whether or not a crime took place. Of course, the more experienced the criminal, the more subtle the crime. Almost nobody ever robs who has learned how to pick pockets. It's exceptionally difficult indeed for police to tell immediately whether or not someone had their pocket picked, or whether or not someone left their wallet somewhere; and pickpockets are most frequently caught because police have reason to believe that a certain area is a hunting-ground for pickpockets, and they catch them with surveillance, generally on film or video. Yet that rarely recovers the previous victim's wallet or money. As far as the law is concerned, someone reported a missing wallet, and all they can do is wait to see if there are a lot of complaints about missing wallets. They can do almost nothing on the basis of the individual complaint; the reasonable belief that there are pickpockets about is based on statistics, on prevalence of reporting.

If one person, and then another -- and then many more -- report missing wallets, the police start looking for pickpockets.

If one person, time after time after time, reports that their wallet is missing, the police start looking at that individual as if they are incompetent, at least as regards remembering where their wallet is.

Looking at the records, repeated instance of one class of event on the part of one individual, more or less, label an individual as mad. Repeated instances of an event spread out over a large number of people labels the event as likely one particular instance in a series of crimes.

But what happens if the pickpocket isn't in it for the money as much as they are in it to harass the individual?

Generally speaking, the police wouldn't consider such a possibility. Pickpockets pick pockets because they want what's in the wallet. Anything else is crazy.

But what if what the pickpocket wants is not so much what is inside the wallet, but what will be up for grabs if their target becomes discredited as insane in the eyes of law-enforcement?

---

Long long ago, I was talking to a fellow who was just awfully streetwise. I forget the exact topic, but something I said caused him to ask me, "are you sure you're not just being gaslighted". I told him I didn't understand, and he said "you know, like in that movie 'Gaslight'". I told him I'd never seen that movie. He told me I was culturally deprived. Eventually I did see the movie. And I discovered that I was, in fact, culturally deprived. If you haven't seen that movie either, you are culturally deprived.

---

"Gaslight" is the name of a movie so famous that a plot device from the film has entered the mainstream of the English language as a verb, to Gaslight, or a noun form of the verb, "gaslighting".

The mainstream definition is, more or less, "cutting someone adrift from reality by systematically withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to, the subject".

In effect, this is systematic deception with an intended result of delusion.

---

Believe it or not, I've been delusional, but in my case, it was less a case of Gaslighting and more a case of misdiagnosis and mis-medication. Adult-onset hypothyroidism often presents as one or another variety of Depression and often has features of manic. As the thyroid fails, in whole or in part, sometimes it produces more of the hormones that regulate metabolic energy. A person can feel like they've been sedated, and minutes later can feel as if they've been given a strong stimulant. This isn't good for the body or for the brain. Always, some degree of confusion results.

In the modern day this is well-known and thyroid testing is part of the diagnosic tree (differential diagnosis). At the time, it wasn't part of the differential diagnosis in most places. It certainly wasn't part of the diagnosis at a contractor to Montgomery County's public health services.

Without testing, I was placed on dangerous psychiatric medications which did nothing at all about my thyroid problem. Mental deterioration was slow but deeply ongoing for a bit more than a decade.

Eventually, I got around to taking a test of thyroid levels, and my new doctors prescribed increasing doses of thyroid medication. I felt so much better immediately, and my mind became more active. I stopped sleeping all day and most of the night, and my appetite changed as did my choices in food and drink, and when I stopped taking the medication prescribed by Montgomery County's contractors, the improvement was even more marked.

A potentially totally disabling mis-diagnosis and gross mis-medication by contractors to Montgomery County's healthcare agencies was not merely halted before my mind and health were utterly destroyed. Due to neuroplasticity ("plasticity of the brain" I am much recovered.

And if I find out that elements of Montgomery County's healthcare system -- possibly "ACT" or people formerly associated with it -- are pursuing me around the county, gaslighting random people into trying to force me to start taking their misdiagnosed poison again, god damn will there be some litigation.

---

I am rather fully recovered. As to being delusional due to gross medical malpractice, and as to the degree of my recovery, the US Patent and Trademark Office seems to think that this isn't delusional and in fact I've just pressed out a few stacks of this delusion, and it runs just fine on PCs and Macs.

---

To reiterate:

"But what if what the pickpocket wants is not so much what is inside the wallet, but what will be up for grabs if their target becomes discredited as insane in the eyes of law-enforcement?"

---

Now that I feel so much better, and having felt so bad before, I have to concern myself with the wellbeing of other people who might very well have been comparably mistreated or misdiagnosed or victimized by malpractice.

And as for those who were not misdiagnosed and/or who were not victims of medical malpractice? I can and I must feel compassion for them as well.

Letting them get hounded out of their group homes so that unscrupulous people can convert those group homes to cash-generating worker barracks for "contractors" and "day-laborers" doesn't seem, to me, to constitute "compassion".

---

And so it goes. And here in Montgomery County, I'm sitting here pressing out stacks of a demo disk of my patented delusion that runs just fine on PCs and Macs, and perhaps I'll be re-reading Breakfast of Champions.

---

And so it goes, indeed. Compassion is getting hard to afford, nowadays, what with the economy in collapse, day-laborers unemployable, despicable landlords being foreclosed upon because the day-laborers can't bring them a cash-flow of $6000 to $10000 per house per month, and perhaps those despicable landlords can't afford to pay goons to hound the crazies our of the neighborhood so they can buy up their group-homes for a song to convert to money-making worker barracks for day-laborers.

I just can't muster any compassion for those despicable landlords, and can't for a second understand how Montgomery County and the State of Maryland and perhaps even the Federal government are thinking about forestalling the richly-deserved foreclosures of those despicable landlords.

And as for the out-of-work goons who are still running around gaslighting the merchants into hounding the crazies because, well, it makes them grin to lie to people and tell them crazy stories?

We'll see.

---

By the way, there's someone who will probably never read this, and last Thursday I was standing right behind them at the Beiler's Meats stand at the Amish Market in Burtonsville and I listened to everything you had to say. I saw how you flashed some bogus ID at the little gal behind the counter who probably doesn't know whether or not to believe the piece of plastic you showed her, but like I said, I heard everything you had to say. And you have definitely earned a special place in my heart, and your face has a special place in my memory, black as your heart, sharp as your teeth, hideous as your sin.

I wonder how the local "crazies" will feel when I tell them all about you and give them a copy of your photograph. And perhaps their own sad state of affairs will become, for them, a little more clear.

It's all about compassion baybee. You need to have some to get any.

---

MORE TO COME... whenever.

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Chris Paladino, Yay!

Today I actually managed to both leave my house and bathe before I did so, and wound up doing coffee from the new Dunkin' Donuts storefront up at the Northgate Plaza Shopping Center, with County Council District 4 candidate Chris Paladino.

I was impressed by Mr Paladino ("please call me Chris") as he's young and energetic, at least compared to myself. Furthermore, he didn't do the usual thing of running screaming away from yours-truly. I have to admit that my own conversational style is almost as pedantic and boring as my writing style, but the gentleman bore with me, as the saying goes.

I gave him a brief history of Aspen Hill, for so long as I have been here (since 1963) and insofar as I remember (the 1970s remain a bit of a blur), and he listened politely without too much glazing over of the eyes, which speaks well of his ability to remain on point and focused, something for which I am not known.

He spoke of the reasons for his interest in running, mostly because he's a good administrator and enjoys constituent services, having come to enjoy picking up the phone at the American Red Cross and asking people who really need it, "how can I help you?" Evidently some of his friends thought that he was good leadership material, and I would agree.

I gave him a little speech from out of Gibbons "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", about the classic Roman virtues of "dignitas" and "authoritas", respectively worthiness and responsibility (or "command"), The Romans of the Republic thought of those two virtues as the poles of the ladder, as it were, of one's rise to being a respected person of rank and public esteem, though of course these were expected to be associated with magnanimity and acting as a public benefactor. The Romans, of course, thought nothing of successful people building public baths or bridges or suchlike, and donating them to the public, occasionally even providing for their upkeep; though clearly it was the State's responsibility to fund certain affairs and constructions, at one time perhaps the majority of the great public works were brought by individuals, But I greatly digress.

Let me digress more: the new Dunkin' Donuts is very clean, has a great view of the Northgate Plaza shopping center, and if there was a shop for cops to drink some coffee while scoping out the area, that might be the place. Plus the service is friendly -- especially by comparison to some other neighborhood shops -- and this would be a good place for anyone to stop in and get some donuts or bagels and sit a little while and drink some coffee and talk.

Mr Paladino, it seems, is stepping up because he thinks he can do the job, and he's not something spit out by the Party Machine nor for that matter by MoCo politics. Most importantly, he's a capable administrator of long experience, and it did come up in the discussion that he's got long experience of dealing with novel situations in a crisis-handling mode. So far as I know, no other candidate for the position has this last particular talent, one which is sorely needed. I think he understand the whole concept of "be prepared for a rainy day" and after my little speech about how to handle dam breakages ("the ideal thing is to learn from failures and not let it happen again, even while dealing with the aftermath in front of you at the moment") I became more convinced that he might be the one for the job. I'd say that he should be able to be a fine advocate for the Public Service agencies such as Fire/EMT and the Police, and he's said that he wants to keep and improve the level of Constituent Services. This last bit, of course, is a particular concern of mine, as I have come to trust in and to depend on the capable and experienced Constituent Services people in the District 4 office, as have a great many other satisfied customers/taxpayers.

So, folks, take a hard look and give all good consideration for Mr Chris Paladino for County Council, District 4.

How Much Is Nothing Worth? How Much Is Worth Nothing?

Today's DJIA plummeted like a stone, after a slightly off start the market listened to the plan put forth by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and thought about it for maybe ten minutes and then the bottom dropped out. We're down by 381 at the end of the day.

Some five months ago, as the problem was ramping up to massive market crash after massive market crash, I wrote a little piece on the possibility of a Techno-Socialist Bailout.

Boy, I didn't know the half of it.

The bizarre thing is, months later, about 90 percent of the problems remaining have to do with the fact that the old-line vampires of Wall Street have got their fangs in deep, and aren't about to let loose until the victim is so drained that the shuddering corpse flaps in the wind like week-old laundry in a Sahara dust-storm.

First, every time the government starts making any move that would restore order, Wall Street throws a tantrum. The financial system is playing all sorts of really cute games like declaring that they desperately need capital so they can lend, and then you capitalize them and they actually go ahead and pay out millions and millions in taxpayer dollars to the exact financial traders-in-the-trenches who moved the transactions that dragged the markets into wreckage and ruin. Then they claim that they haven't got any capital to lend. Then they get more money. Then they say that they're capitalized now, sort of, only they don't know what their tranches of mortgage backed securities ("MBS") are worth. So they can't understand their position. So they cannot lend. What's the hold-up? What is the value of those tranches of mortgage-backed securities?

Let me clarify something for you geniuses of finance.

They are worth NOTHING. They are worth nothing because the value of a thing is what it will bring on a market. When the market does not work, there is no value. If things cannot be bought and sold, nothing is worth anything other than what you might imagine in your mind it might be worth. There is no test of reality. It's all fantasy or might as well be fantasy.

The way the game is being played, the banks and financial firms all declare "oh we need this or we can't lend". You lend to them, and they go out and buy other banks and say "oh we needed their assets so we can call ourselves capitalized". Well, they bought a huge pile of fantasy valuation and it's factored into their equations, their books as they like to call them, in such a way that until that variable is isolated, every move they make comes out as adding apples and oranges but by the millions of barrels-full.

Now the sticking point is that they've got most of the apples sorted out from most of the oranges, but they refuse to loan the apples until someone buys all of the oranges, and the oranges all went seriously bad sometime around mid-September 2008. They are WORTH NOTHING. THE MARKET IS NOT WORKING. THEY HAVE NO VALUE. Nobody's lending, without lending nobody can buy, until people have loans and can buy, the market isn't working, nothing in that market has value until the market functions.

The problem is, the same sort of people who are begging for loans and then flying billion dollar bonuses out to the workers who played fast and loose with the nature of reality, this same sort of people who need to spend about the next 20 years in very bright sunshine, they are hanging onto the value of something that is valueless.

It's worse than valueless. It's worse than nothing. It's not even negative value, it's not debt, it's not anything from this universe. It's effectively ANTI-MATTER. It has to be gotten away from everything. It's a dead loss, it's worse than toxic, it's so valueless that you can't even pay people to take it even if you had all of the money in the world. It's not in the same spectrum, it's not even apples and oranges, it's apples and the Cosmic Destruction Principle. Only the apples are in barrels and so is the Inverse Big Bang. Only if anyone opens those barrels thinking they've bought apples, they unleash an antimatter black hole that doesn't suck, it blows. Nobody knows what's in either of the barrels until they open them up and these barrels are being sold, unmarked, by the barge load, or they were being sold by the barge load, until people realized that there's no money for a market, and without a market, neither apples nor anti-matter chaos in nicely-sliced sausage bombs has any value at all. That might actually be good.

The sort of crimes of incompetence we're witnessing are sufficiently punishable only by the equivalent of an Amortization Death Penalty if I must coin a phrase.

Take the paper from the people. Give them nothing for it. Shoot them if they complain.

Go bulldoze the properties so that nobody anywhere will think they have a claim to it, and nobody can claim against it, use it, charge for it, take payment for it. It has to cease to exist.

These lenders and creditors have been babbling about "how to resolve the toxic assets". They hold that resolution out of reach like someone teasing a dog to sit up and beg, and they've got the government and half of the public dancing on two legs and barking like a pool-full of rabid seals.

Once again, this is the Economy On Crack and in fact it might be better if we had a bunch of crackheads setting the policy. Because the crackheads understand something that the present economic system does not.

That shit is all GONE. So's all the money.

And either you're going to get used to it being all GONE, or you are going to go out and rob some people.

And right about now the people are dog tired of dancing and barking for a treat that isn't there, and are as tired of being robbed.

---

Those toxic assets are worth literally nothing, because the value of a thing is set by the markey, and the market does not work.

Forget a bad bank. Forget a good bank. Forget the worthless stuff that's all gone anyway.

These financiers are like a crackhead that imagines that he's dropped a piece on the floor and he'll be crawling around for hours "doing the base chicken" until he comes down and his instincts tell him what his head knew hours ago. That shit is all GONE.

And the government has to get off its knees trying to help him find his imaginary crack.

Everything anyone is trying is just fouling things up worse.

Stop telling the crackhead doing the base-chicken that there is in fact something for him to find.

---

This is where we are now: "...that strange interregnum, between the new world that refuses yet to be born, and the old world which is too confused to die".

Thank You Mr Leggett!

Details are yet to be announced, but as soon as specific policy directives can be given to all officers of the Montgomery County Department of Police, the policy will be, approximately, "be arrested for a crime of violence or for weapons charges, and you will have your immigration status queried".

Thug-ass foreign gangsters can expect a quick trip back to their origin nations next time they want to get violent on the citizens.

It has taken 12 years, but MoCo has made the first baby steps towards beginning to comply with the Immigration Reform Act of 1996.

I have suffered from their non-enforcement -- personally, on a nearly daily basis -- for a dozen years since passage of that law, and for some years before that law was passed.

The universal deportation of violent foreigners has been all of the way to the Supreme Court which passed the judgement that the law was sound, whether or not they agreed with the intentions.

That is all.

District 4 Proxy War Heats Up

The Proxy Wars have begun at Maryland Politics Watch.

Enjoy the hysteria, folks, it's in high form and on such short notice! At this rate, all involved should have burnt themselves out by the end of the campaign, leaving only smoking wreckage on a ruined landscape.

Alien Criminal Action from "Ike" Leggett

Well, where is the final and very public administrative decision from County Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett, regarding police procedure of checking immigration status of all persons charged with crimes of violence, weapons violations, and felony crimes against property?

20 days ago, Mr Leggett said that the policy would be issued in 10 days.

Mr Leggett, we have not forgotten and we demand action.

Democrat, With Misgivings

Yesterday I registered as a Democrat.

No doubt this will draw a lot of fire from County Republicans, but let's examine my reasons.

For much of my young adult life, I was an unaffiliated voter, which meant that the only candidates for whom I could vote in the general elections were those who had been selected by their own parties in the primary elections. Maryland is one of those states where you can vote only within your own party in the primary elections. The end result of this is Extremism.

How so?

Each party tries to distinguish itself from the other party, generally using so-called "wedge issues". Each candidate competes within their own party to most greatly distinguish themselves from candidates in the other part, or from the other party's issues. By the end of the campaign, rather than candidates coming before the voter as colleagues who differ in their opinions, the candidates come before the voters as adversaries. Sadly, this adversarial attitude persists beyond the elections.

In Montgomery County's Councilmanic District 4, Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 3.4 to 1, and barring something approaching divine intervention, no Republican will ever be elected to any office here. Being a member of the Republican Party here, thus, is really mostly an elaborate case of throwing away your vote on all County elections, although in Statewide politics, it's not impossible to have a say.

One of the reasons I was a Republican for so long -- however Centrist a Republican -- was because of certain social trends far to the Left in the Democrat policies. Some of these policies clearly were not working as intended and some of the policies most dear to the Democrats were not merely clear failures, but actual disasters.

As online information systems such as BBSes became global discussion forums and people could talk to each other without all conversations being either managed by organizers and hosts or distributed by a one-sided national broadcast media system, I became aware that I was hardly alone in my disaffection for such things as Stealth Socialist and the Creeping Welfare State Agenda, as such things were beginning to be called by people who only then were starting to talk amongst themselves online. When Newt Gingrich -- a young visionary at the time -- called for his Contract With America, at first I was aghast at about half of it, outside of the call to end "welfare as we know it". Having lived amid the ruins in downtown Washington DC, I had seen firsthand the end results of the Welfare Establishment. I intended to vote for, and support, anyone who would find some way to replace the monolithic failed subculture of multigeneration Welfare "families".

I could not vote for people supporting that sort of clear and obvious failure, so when I finally got around to registering for a party, I registered as a Republican.

Even after the disastrous failures of the Bush II Administration, I remained loyal to some values seen as "core" by most Republicans, values such as giving a fairly free hand to business, especially to small businesses and family-owned businesses. I still remain loyal to a value of lowering the barriers to owning and operating a small business.

Yet I have a lot of values I share with the Greens. I love our Urban Forest and seek to preserve what natural ecologies remain.

I have a lot of "Progressive" ideals, if by "Progressive" you mean a right to join or even create a Union, and also to have a right to work without having to join a Union. I support things like Worker's Compensation Insurance, Disability and Retirement funding, and that sort of thing that everyone has come to accept as a natural birthright to any and all Americans.

I am not a left-leaning Collectivist that wants to impose a Nanny State on everyone, and unlike a certain crew of local Democrats, I strongly support a strong and sovereign United States of America that defends itself from all forms of Invasion, whether armed or unarmed. I am not a Nativist, but I insist that absolutely all immigration laws should be enforced, at all levels of government, from the Federal down to the County or Town level.

I will not let myself be drawn in by, nor drawn into, bizarre rationalizations that let me pretend to feel comfortable with Party policies that simply don't work or which fly in the face of commonsense.

I will vote only for the most Centrist and "American-ist" candidates. I will not vote for any Democrat that is forgetting that "Progressive" does not mean "Socialist" in the Marxist sense of the word. I will not vote for any candidate who seems to think that "social justice" means "kill the white people". I also won't vote for any candidate who won't follow policies of complete egalitarianism towards all citizens and legal immigrants and visitors/workers on valid visas.

I won't vote for any candidate that promotes bizarre interpretations of pseudoscience or liberal-arts as justification for policy that flies in the face of commonsense.

I won't vote for any candidate that I see as being merely a figurehead for religious organizations. I believe very strongly in separation of Church and State. Would I vote for a candidate who was deeply religious? Sure, as long as their faith doesn't blind them to worldly pragmatism. I'm a deeply religious pagan, myself, but I don't let my love of Trout in healthy streams keep me from fishing in those streams, so long as I think the population of Trout is healthy enough for me to fish for them.

I will not vote for any candidate that I see as hostile to the right of women to control their own reproductive destiny, and it is here that I had the most severe differences with the mainstream Montgomery Republicans. I also will not vote for any candidate that I see as being hostile to the right of fathers to be active participants in the upbringing of their children, nor will I vote for any candidate that I see as promoting a future culture where single-parent female-headed families are seen as normal and preferred. I will not vote for any candidate that sees men as nothing more than beasts of burden or menaces to society.

I will not vote for any candidate that I see as being actively opposed to the fundamental American Right to Keep and Bear Arms. While I do believe that convicted felons and florid psychotics should be barred from access to weapons, I concur with the Supreme Court of the United States that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, and I support any candidate who supports reform of Maryland Law and County Code to provide law-abiding citizens with a well-regulated right to carry concealed handguns under a so-called "shall issue" policy.

Do you want my vote in the Democrat Party Primaries?

Support nature while supporting progress. Support men as much as you support women and give both the unquestioned right to control their own reproductive destinies. Support a strong America, and support the right of Americans and Marylanders to defend their own persons in public and in their own homes. Support the rights of people to be free from public crime, and support the rights of the people to have a good time in their own way on private property. Support keg parties with live bands. Support the right of the People to be what they want to be, not what the government thinks they should be.

Wheaton Library Proposals Public Meeting

From Carolyn McKenzie of the Mid-County Service Center:

Come and learn about the possibilities for the Wheaton Regional
Library â a renovated Library at its present location OR a new
Library as part of a revitalized Wheaton Town Center!

We need your feedback!

A meeting will be held at the Wheaton Regional Library
11701 Georgia Avenue (large meeting room) on
Monday, February 9th from
7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.


If you are unable to attend, please send your thoughts and comments
to us at midcounty.citizen@montgomerycountymd.gov .

Also, please help us get the word out to your friends, neighbors and
listserves.

Please feel free to forward this email.


Carol McKenzie
Assistant Director
Mid-County Regional Center
2424 Reedie Drive
Wheaton, MD 20902

New neighbors... when will the "walking tour of weirdos and wackos" begin?

Pulling up to the house I spotted two people I've never seen before, walking a small dog. Never seen the dog before, either. This must mean new neighbors. Or maybe it's the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos in Aspen Hill".

One of them seems to be slim or athletic build, maybe early to mid 20s. Other seemed to be a somewhat squat and overweight man at first, then on closer observation turned out to be a woman affecting something close to tough-guy style, wearing black Ray-Bans even with the overcast. Dark black hair.

I'm guessing I'll see the one with the dog in the future, but I am betting that the other one I've never seen before -- trust me, I remember bull daggers and this one hasn't been living here -- said something to the one with the dog that will have her running the other way if she sees me again. At least this time I am documenting it to blogspace the second it happens, with description.

Even More Different, Continued Or Something...

In yesterday's posting, I wrote about -- among a lot of other rambling things -- Secret Love Among Secret Feds.

Now what?

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To read yesterday's massive missive, you'd think that I know something about Feds, about Agency Lifestyles, and presumably the live and loves of people who are top-secret, secure, and probably spend a lot of time being compartmentalized, as in, shoved into tiny little boxes and worked like a Dilbert, only doing things that are actually interesting and for bosses who have no pointy hair, and who are so utterly pleased to be out of their cubicles that everyone they see prompts them to grin like Kzinti.

Well, it's not true. Here's everything I know about that sort of stuff. Astute analysts will quickly draw the conclusion that Yours Truly is disseminating fiction. Anyone with the skills to check will notice that this was written long before the creation of the popular TV show "Chuck", it was published on paper in a little fanzine called "Driver's Side Airbag". They've also published other stories of mine.

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I am tempted to test people's willingness to suspend their disbelief, and to write here in all seriousness that I never would post anything other than verbatim truth in direct reporting, and have never harbored the slightest artistic leanings towards surrealism, and that I have no sense of irony nor humor.

You probably don't want to have your children read this to you at work.

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Wilson Forbrush fortunately never had the experience of discovering that he was, in fact, a Secret Porn Star of widespread infamy and having a fan-following probably best described as "immense" only in proportion to the percentage of those who could access the underground network on which his body of work was distributed. That this network was part of a vast and octopodian network of shady backroom and dead-drop distributors of samizdat, was unknown to Wilson. That Wilson had ever been video-recorded engaging in sex -- epic or otherwise -- was unknown to Wilson. To be fair, it wasn't known to anyone associated with that sex.

Wilson had been doing his usual thing of wandering around town until he found a bar that was relatively empty and then sitting down to have a drink or three. Wilson, being the clueless if overeducated person that he was, didn't at all understand that the general reason a bar in the District is mostly empty is because the staff have run off all of the customers so as to establish grounds for a "meet". Anyone wandering in and not letting themselves get run off -- Wilson is as inept socially as he is clumsy -- clearly is part of the plot and doubtless the courier or someone assigned to observe that various transactions did or didn't take place.

Wilson's entourage never quite makes it into the bar as they normally would; they see Wilson withering under insults to traditional American sports and generic disdain of local institutions delivered in phrasing that would drive a Parisian waiter to ecstasies, and they realize that not only is Wilson a shameless wanker with no sense of team spirit, he is about to be sitting there when a deal goes down. and not a deal they had expected. Once again, Wilson has wandered the other agents of the Non-Existent Agency into new and uncharted -- and clearly interesting -- territory.

And who should arrive but the sinister but outrageously lovely person, a very elusive one, known only as Special Courier Nadia. Wilson's entourage makes a lot of phone calls and the people they call also make a lot of phone calls, and pretty soon the trap is set. There's only one hotel room left in town, once they're done, and it is at the Vista Motel, famously the site of Marion Barry's outraged utterance of "goddamn bitch set me up". But that hasn't happened yet, in Wilson's present, and he feels no misgivings -- but rather a deep and reasonable surprise -- when Special Courier Nadia drags him out of the bar only minutes after her arrival, and takes him in a cab to the only hotel room left in town... at the Vista Hotel.

Special Courier Nadia is there to deliver samples of a product of the clandestine chemistry labs of a private venture operating in a small Balkan nation not known for its scruples about human medical experimentation. Wilson, not being the actual agent to whom Nadia was to make her delivery and presentation -- that person is even at this moment being stalked for collection -- has no idea that the white powder is anything other than the ubiquitous nose-candy that saturated Washington DC. Like any gentleman, he insists that the lady go first. Special Courier Nadia knows that the product is safe when used as directed, snorts up a line, and hands a rolled-up ruble note to Wilson, who follows suit.

Wilson, unlike Nadia, just wasn't expecting the latest cocktail of something fairly close to a mixture of viagra(tm), ketamine, and a genuinely interesting mixture of amino acids and neurotransmitter and regulator peptides. Nadia, unlike Wilson, was expecting and rather anticipating spending the next 36 hours locked in the experience of a combination of mild hallucination, euphoria subjectively indistinguishable from falling in love with Someone Special, complete loss of verbal and most physical inhibitions, and recurrent intermittent episodes of profound near-priapism starting about every 3 hours.

Like Wilson, the technical surveillance team wasn't expecting it either, but boy did they have great camera angles on every last bit of it, endless miles of high-quality video tape, and quadrophonic sound.

After about the first six hours, the replacement shift arrived, along with the hastily-requested video mix team and studio director.

The audio musical dub track, they added that later.

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As mentioned elsewhere, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Then again, there's magic, and there's magic, and then there's ... magic. Plus there's magic.

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Wilson never found out about this little escapade, other than having had the experience of being there, which he never properly attributed to it being what it was: two people, and chemistry. Well, it was to that to which he attributed the experience, but for him the attribution was only a cliche.

For the people who managed to scrape up a few analyzable samples when the two passed out in utter exhaustion (not to mention dehydration and probably some nerve damage), those two people and their chemistry and the chemical all led to significant insights in neurochemistry, interrogation technique, and even marriage counseling.

All of this also led to significant increases in the balances of numbered Swiss bank accounts of various dealers in copies of the surveillance.

Surveillance video generally isn't particularly valuable in the aftermarket, unless perhaps the cinematographer is named Zapruder. For Wilson's tapes, "epic is epic" in the touting of the salesmen, and word of the product preceded its availability, driving up the price. Special Courier Nadia was more than a bit buff and for whatever he might have lacked in looks or talent, Wilson had made up in enthusiasm, endurance, and persistence, not to mention stiffness, or Nadia's moaning. The tapes circulated for the better part of a decade in the underground networks of the Eastern Bloc, where there were avid customers for anything that wasn't the broadcast propaganda. Passable porn, however plain-vanilla, was widely sought-after, and passable porn of a genuine KGB courier was worth its weight in gold. Anyplace east of Germany, Wilson was nothing but window-dressing, as it were, in the most widely-copied video pornography ever circulated behind the Iron Curtain.

To this very day, copies of this tape (or nowadays, DVD) surface. And here in the USA, in all cases, persons possessing it have always turned out to be no more than one degree of separation from semi-retired station chiefs left over from the Cold War.

Wilson Forbrush, the most famous Secret Porn Star you've never heard of, has long since retired to some godforsaken place such as Scranton or maybe Biloxi, and never has to worry -- which he couldn't do, because he doesn't know -- about whether or not he'll be running into his fans.

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