I am fortunate that I don't suffer from chronic major depression.
This doesn't mean that I never get depressed.
For example, I once had a pet cat that was very dear to me. You know, people get attached to pets, this isn't news. But even as a long-time girlfriend was dumping me and I was losing all of my friends because of an ugly breakup and me falling to pieces in the emotional wreckage of aftermath, the cat was there, and my animal companion didn't care about who allegedly did what to whom or he-said-she-said. The cat still demanded cat food and a lap to sleep on after dinner, and even as I learned to harden my heart, I still had to clean the cat box, and to remember to praise the cat for her frequent gifts of dead mice.
I got into a situation where I couldn't really care for her properly, and the neighbors took her on. Yet anytime I was at home, here would come kitty, looking to talk a little cat talk and get the inside of her ears cleaned.
One night I made it home after a bout of major partying and I was sitting around outside trying to recover, and wondering why I hadn't seen the cat. The neighbor pops over and says, more or less, "...and oh by the way, your cat died."
Now that made me pretty depressed. It wasn't totally a shock, the cat had some sort of heart problem that was pretty well fixed but we all knew that she probably wasn't going to live a full span. Still... it took maybe a month to sink in that the cat would never come strolling over to meow and flop over on her back to get her belly rubbed. And for a few minutes I was really sad and tears came and went and as the tears dried I decided that I should be happy that she was in kitty heaven, so to speak.
Letting go of bereavement -- hey, even after I dumped the cat, so to speak, she still liked me and came calling, so of course I felt bad -- is an essential stage in emotional recovery. Bereavement isn't depression, though they have the same symptoms and feeling. Bereavement is something from which people usually recover. Yet, you are depressed as hell, and rightly so. You lost something near and dear, and you will never get it back.
I suppose I am a victim of instincts.
Dogs, in general, have an instinct to bark. Cats, in general, have an instinct to pounce on things that move in a certain way. These instincts are useful to people and so we have adopted these species; they live among us, as members of the family in most cases. Yet it isn't all the simple pragmatism -- the calculus of expense and benefit -- that causes us to herd sheep or cattle.
Some cats have special instincts for which they were bred. Siamese cats, for example, have been bred for thousands of years to be extremely aggressive to strangers and to like to sit in high places. In the temples where they were bred, they spent much of their day crouched in niches carved over the doorways, and if anyone they didn't know were to pass unescorted through that doorway, the cats would reach down and hook the strangers' eyes out. In the modern day, the American breed of siamese cat is bred to be less aggressive, yet they're still very "talkative". And they still expect you to talk back; when they ask "who goes there", they expect a response. The American Siamese Cat differs from the traditional Thai Temple Cat in that it isn't bred and trained to go clawingly ballistic when it hears the wrong password.
My last name is an Americanization of a German "craft name". Much in the same way that the English "Smith" is a family name deriving from the trade a family followed for generations -- the trade of blacksmith -- a Hardtmann was someone in the family tradition of making hardware, things such as hinges or hasps. Usually this hardware was very useful stuff and it could make the difference between eating and being clothed, or starving naked. We made traps.
As a family, we did it well enough to make a good living, for generations. As naturally as it comes to a Siamese to sit in a high place and demand that you identify yourself, it comes naturally to me to make things that block unauthorized access, or catch anything that tries it.
Hence, I have a patent for software that does both.
It can sit in high places, like a Siamese cat, to metaphorically compare a cyberspace creation's operation to a real-world animal. And if you don't answer it correctly, it will hook your eyes out, and howl like a demon as it does it.
But for whom, exactly, did I create a high-security toolkit?
The main crew that has much use for it is the military-industrial complex... and as the natural world evidences a traditional natural enmity between dogs and cats, the human social world evidences a traditional natural enmity between jocks and nerds. We despise them because they like to beat us up, and they despise us because when we get tired of that, we outsmart them with traps.
This has had some unfortunate Darwininian consequences.
Rather than breeding a more peaceful and tolerant jock, this has only bred a smarter and more paranoid jock.
The repercussions of that have also tended to breed a stronger and more aggressive nerd.
Now imagine the strange offspring of the unholy unions of those two clans.
And those last, my friends, are my customers.
The modern US is a culture which historically depended on having a rather large military. Yet with the end of the Second World War, the role of infantry and even cavalry has faded to insignificance when compared to the role of technology. For many years, the overwhelming power that could be brought to bear in conflicts between nation-states was a strong deterrent to militarism, and militarism traditionally has expressed itself in the form of a large standing army and military logistical and armament systems. Yet in an age where large depots and large armies only make appealingly large targets for intercontinental ballistic missiles, the forms of militarism have had to evolve. Thus, even in the midst of a rapidly changing war which has thus far lasted about twice as long as the Second World war, we have one of the lowest percentages of population under arms of any large nation.
In past times, it was necessary to have a very large percentage of the population be "jocks", or physically fit males characterized by innate aggressive tendencies and strong peer-bonding instincts. Now, that population has very little to do in terms of the physicalities for which they evolved, and the culture of peer-bonding in large groups seeking aggression against similar groups is either changing to challenge these instincts and capabilities in other ways, or we tend to call them "gangs". Fortunately most such persons are fairly easily distracted into athletics, whether by active participation, or vicariously through the media.
Indeed, we have become a society to oriented to the technological, and frequently to the invididually studious. The ability to create something new -- in a society already chock-full of, and built upon, good ideas -- is usually well-rewarded. Culture has changed a bit, though not much. Does Bill Gates get respect for being Bill Gates? No. Bill Gates gets respect because he's filthy rich and can pay people to make sure that he gets respect... from most people. We nerds respect him for his technical accomplishments, but moreso we respect him for promoting an industry that keeps us working, and working for and with our own kind.
Yet I'd like to see how much respect he'd get if he walked, incognito, into some jock-filled "sports bar".
This is the sort of respect I get, which is to say, scant at best, every time I walk out of my house. My life is lived as if I were Bill Gates in a jock bar, outnumbered by aggressive physically-fit individuals who operate as a group, with their group positions and rankings constantly being tested and adjusted by the human social equivalent of a pack of wolves biting each other in the ass until they can figure out who is "alpha". Woe to the poor housecat tossed into such a scene, and woe is me.
Yet it would be even more woeful if I could not understand the language, and if the pack of jocks was armed and invading in the uniform of another country, so when I make traps for jocks I am basically stuck selling them to "my" jocks to use against "their" jocks.
The absurdity of this strikes me to the core: Why do I bother?
Because it's my instinct?
It's not because I think they'll maybe accept me in their sports bar. I may be having an existential crisis but I'm not going to actually delude myself.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
[Part I] Aspen Hill Renewal: Wheaton Woods
(Updated May 29, 2009, fixed link.)
Wheaton Woods is scheduled to be the target of a program of renewal lasting from 3 to 5 years, according to the Gazette.
The Wheaton Woods neighborhood was built, generally speaking, in the early 1950s, though of course the entire neighborhood was built over time in a patchwork of developments of subdivisions. Aspen Hill, in general, was effectively "built out" with all streets in place by the mid-1970s at the very latest. For all intents and purposes, Wheaton Woods -- with the general final build-out time-frame of the early-mid-1960s -- might reasonably be considered to be a neighborhood in its fifties, and long overdue for a significant overhaul.
According to the Gazette, one Thomas Pogue of Renew Montgomery, a Montgomery Department of Transportation program, brought the message that general infrastructure upgrades will be ongoing.
This message was delivered at the biannual general membership meeting of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., of which I am a dues-paying member, but of which meeting I was not notified.
Astute readers of this blog -- and of other blogs dealing with the area -- will remember my long activism seeking infrastructure repair in Aspen Hill in general and in Wheaton Woods in particular. No doubt many will also recall that I got tired of complaining about the constant housing code violations, especially home overcrowding and people turning their yards into paved parking lots where over-occupied houses functioned as worker barracks with illegally parked work fleets. Rather than waste my breath complaining, I simply took pictures and mounted them at my Page of Shame.
I need not point out that the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., has a board of directors in which professional Realtors are significantly over-represented. I shall, at future meetings of the civic association, move for a general vote that no more than one director may be a Realtor or be the spouse or "significant other" of a Realtor, and that no Realtor may be the chair of the board. For years, excessive concern for personal income in the matter of recurrent home sales has both driven the thrust of the civic association's ostensible representation of the members, and limited the willingness of the civic association leadership in zealously pursuing a course of action which would have limited the unrestrained crapification of Aspen Hill, but also would have restrained the ability of Realtors to realize very significant income potential through commissions on the rapid flipping of houses.
Be that as it may: it's very good, indeed, that Wheaton Woods will be getting a major makeover. Parts of Parkland Drive south of Aspen Hill Road are visibly falling apart, as are other major roads in the Wheaton Woods neighborhood.
But who will be the major beneficiaries of this massive upgrade, this long-overdue remedy of the ongoing "slumburbification"?
A hint may be found at the website of the State of Maryland 2008 State Report Card website:
Read the graph, and check the enrollment stats.
Links to more information on Aspen Hill area schools -- including links to their enrollment and demography -- may be found at Aspen Hill Network's Schools listing.
It would seem that if enough people of one kind move in and turn the place into a slum and drive out another kind of people, the ones who drove out all of the others get new streets and sidewalks. Those who are driven out get nothing, except bitterness in their hearts.
Definitely more to come.
Wheaton Woods is scheduled to be the target of a program of renewal lasting from 3 to 5 years, according to the Gazette.
The Wheaton Woods neighborhood was built, generally speaking, in the early 1950s, though of course the entire neighborhood was built over time in a patchwork of developments of subdivisions. Aspen Hill, in general, was effectively "built out" with all streets in place by the mid-1970s at the very latest. For all intents and purposes, Wheaton Woods -- with the general final build-out time-frame of the early-mid-1960s -- might reasonably be considered to be a neighborhood in its fifties, and long overdue for a significant overhaul.
According to the Gazette, one Thomas Pogue of Renew Montgomery, a Montgomery Department of Transportation program, brought the message that general infrastructure upgrades will be ongoing.
This message was delivered at the biannual general membership meeting of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., of which I am a dues-paying member, but of which meeting I was not notified.
Astute readers of this blog -- and of other blogs dealing with the area -- will remember my long activism seeking infrastructure repair in Aspen Hill in general and in Wheaton Woods in particular. No doubt many will also recall that I got tired of complaining about the constant housing code violations, especially home overcrowding and people turning their yards into paved parking lots where over-occupied houses functioned as worker barracks with illegally parked work fleets. Rather than waste my breath complaining, I simply took pictures and mounted them at my Page of Shame.
I need not point out that the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., has a board of directors in which professional Realtors are significantly over-represented. I shall, at future meetings of the civic association, move for a general vote that no more than one director may be a Realtor or be the spouse or "significant other" of a Realtor, and that no Realtor may be the chair of the board. For years, excessive concern for personal income in the matter of recurrent home sales has both driven the thrust of the civic association's ostensible representation of the members, and limited the willingness of the civic association leadership in zealously pursuing a course of action which would have limited the unrestrained crapification of Aspen Hill, but also would have restrained the ability of Realtors to realize very significant income potential through commissions on the rapid flipping of houses.
Be that as it may: it's very good, indeed, that Wheaton Woods will be getting a major makeover. Parts of Parkland Drive south of Aspen Hill Road are visibly falling apart, as are other major roads in the Wheaton Woods neighborhood.
But who will be the major beneficiaries of this massive upgrade, this long-overdue remedy of the ongoing "slumburbification"?
A hint may be found at the website of the State of Maryland 2008 State Report Card website:
Read the graph, and check the enrollment stats.
Links to more information on Aspen Hill area schools -- including links to their enrollment and demography -- may be found at Aspen Hill Network's Schools listing.
It would seem that if enough people of one kind move in and turn the place into a slum and drive out another kind of people, the ones who drove out all of the others get new streets and sidewalks. Those who are driven out get nothing, except bitterness in their hearts.
Definitely more to come.
Monday, May 25, 2009
[Part II] Prozac Nation Adopt-A-Teen
We just covered the subject of relatives with depression-axis disorders.
Now, we report that the Washington Post says that soon, all teens in the US will be screened for depression.
The Post article tells us how Candace Downing, a very young teenager, was put on Zoloft, and then hanged herself.
More to come...
Now, we report that the Washington Post says that soon, all teens in the US will be screened for depression.
[...] Last month, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federal group that makes public health recommendations, said that all adolescents between ages 12 and 18 should be screened for major depression. In March, the Institute of Medicine, which advises Congress on scientific matters, told policymakers that early screening was key to reducing the financial and medical burden of mental disorders in the United States.
[ ... ] (The Depression Test: By screening all teens, doctors hope to identify those with mental disorders, Vedantam, Shankar, the Washington Post, May 26 2009, downloaded 2009 May 26)
The Post article tells us how Candace Downing, a very young teenager, was put on Zoloft, and then hanged herself.
More to come...
[Part I] Prozac Nation Comes to Visit
Some people have wondered why exactly it is that I have so much focus on mental health-care issues when it's clear that I'm not exactly incapable of logical thought or keeping a fairly even keel even under occasionally outrageous pressures.
Well, I'm used to dealing with mental health-care issues because there are people close to me who have these issues.
My own problems are pretty much cured with a daily thyroid pill. Without it, I will always feel very cold, and otherwise will have symptoms almost identical to severe depression: lethargy, poor appetite, and very muddled thinking. Yet it's medically quite easy to distinguish between a thyroid problem with that set of symptoms, and major depression. You do a blood test for thyroid hormone stimulating hormone, and if there's a shortage of that, you treat with synthetic thyroxin. If, after the thyroid levels stabilize, there are still other problems, you treat those as a separate issue.
Everyone in my family, myself excepted, has been diagnosed with depression at one time or another, and treated for it. Most of them responded very well and are not merely successful by most standards, but happy by any objective and by most subjective measures.
I had a lot of different diagnoses before someone finally got around to checking my thyroid. Why nobody ever did, I can't imagine. Yet it's amazing how quickly appropriate treatment will clear up this sort of thing. I might add, in passing, that treating a thyroid deficiency with antipsychotic drugs might help with symptoms but do nothing about underlying problems, and untreated thyroid conditions tend to lead to lasting and potentially-permanent organ damage, in the adult-onset variations of the disorder. Juvenile thyroid deficiency has a classic and easily-recognized syndrome. As many as 1 in 20 adults have an undiagnosed thyroid disorder.
Dealing with people with major mood disorders can be a challenge. With certain depressive disorders, it's particularly challenging when they are effectively unaware of the degree of their disturbance, when they have no insight into their condition at the moment. Depression is both a disturbance of mood, and of thinking processes. One thing I've had to learn to deal with is that a lot of modern medications will do a lot to help the mood problems, but not much to deal with the cognitive defects.
We've all read stories about so-and-so who seemed to be doing so well on Luvox, well, until they went batshit crazy and killed dozens of students at Columbine High School.
It seems to be unfortunately common.
As I see it, there's the classic problem of people on Prozac, which as best I can tell works by suppressing the cortex of the brain that produces the higher mammalian emotions. This, of course, mostly leaves the reptilian cortex in charge of emotion, and reptiles are pretty much noted for caring about little other than guarding territory and eating anything they can fit in their mouths and digest.
I know lots of people who are taking medications for depression. Almost all of them are very intelligent, many are artistically talented as well. Usually they have excellent educations along with all of this.
But I have had to learn, from every last one of them, that you simply cannot take for granted that they'll react to anything in a reasonable way, nor that they'll act in a reasonable way even with nothing to which to react.
I know, I am a close relative of, someone who once said "I got so tired of people asking me 'what's the matter' that now I just keep a happy face on all of the time".
To them, that's making them feel a little better knowing that they're not making other people concerned for them.
To me, that means that I cannot tell from looking at their face whether they are feeling pretty good today, or are entering the emotional domain of the homicidally insane.
Conversations with most people who are drunk, or who are using recreational chemicals to get high, tend to be characterized by a lot of non-sequitur changes in subject, free-association taking over the direction of conversation as this or that thought flits past like some shiny butterfly at which the disordered mind must, if only for a moment, reach.
I've spent so much of my life around people being treated for depression -- and many of the anti-depression long-term medications have this exact same effect -- that for perhaps most of my life, I thought that this constant flitting from one thought to another was normal.
Literary traditions make use of this sort of thing, with foreshadowing, flashbacks, changes of viewpoint, or multiple threads following various characters, in synchrony, in different places and in different situations until their paths are crossed by the plot to generate the conflicts and resolutions so fundamental to storytelling.
Normal thinking -- at least before the so-called "ten second attention span" was forced on us by radio sound-bites and television advertising -- was characterized by linearity. The real story of our real life had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in between those points, ideally it was the smooth segue of one moment into the next, along a continuum of emotion and experience generally as predictable as the day itself. Yet as the modern pace of life evolved, the pace and structure changed from a fairly relaxed affair (with linear structure) into a jerky and semi-random clock-driven thing. A woman might wake as a wife and within two hours be deep in a boardroom power-struggle, but only after 45 minutes spent as a super-mom getting breakfast into the kids and the kids onto campus. At lunch she might be flirting with a new love interest and an hour later she'd be eating her dead (so to speak) after taking no prisoners at a sales conference where the next six months of production hang in the balance along with her hopes for promotion or continued employment. And in the evening, you run the household at full speed until bedtime and then you have to take Ambien and hope you don't wake up in the next county.
So, increasingly, the flitting from one task to another, from one emotional state to another, from one cognitive style to another, from one milieu to another... people are living their lives in the same way that people on drugs, or with major depression, think. And somehow, despite the fact that this flitting around is diagnostic, this has become normal.
How did this happen?
And if this way that we live our lives, is in the exact mode that is diagnostic for mania and manic-depression, shouldn't we all be on lithium or something?
More to come, as long as I have relatives, I guess...
Well, I'm used to dealing with mental health-care issues because there are people close to me who have these issues.
My own problems are pretty much cured with a daily thyroid pill. Without it, I will always feel very cold, and otherwise will have symptoms almost identical to severe depression: lethargy, poor appetite, and very muddled thinking. Yet it's medically quite easy to distinguish between a thyroid problem with that set of symptoms, and major depression. You do a blood test for thyroid hormone stimulating hormone, and if there's a shortage of that, you treat with synthetic thyroxin. If, after the thyroid levels stabilize, there are still other problems, you treat those as a separate issue.
Everyone in my family, myself excepted, has been diagnosed with depression at one time or another, and treated for it. Most of them responded very well and are not merely successful by most standards, but happy by any objective and by most subjective measures.
I had a lot of different diagnoses before someone finally got around to checking my thyroid. Why nobody ever did, I can't imagine. Yet it's amazing how quickly appropriate treatment will clear up this sort of thing. I might add, in passing, that treating a thyroid deficiency with antipsychotic drugs might help with symptoms but do nothing about underlying problems, and untreated thyroid conditions tend to lead to lasting and potentially-permanent organ damage, in the adult-onset variations of the disorder. Juvenile thyroid deficiency has a classic and easily-recognized syndrome. As many as 1 in 20 adults have an undiagnosed thyroid disorder.
Dealing with people with major mood disorders can be a challenge. With certain depressive disorders, it's particularly challenging when they are effectively unaware of the degree of their disturbance, when they have no insight into their condition at the moment. Depression is both a disturbance of mood, and of thinking processes. One thing I've had to learn to deal with is that a lot of modern medications will do a lot to help the mood problems, but not much to deal with the cognitive defects.
We've all read stories about so-and-so who seemed to be doing so well on Luvox, well, until they went batshit crazy and killed dozens of students at Columbine High School.
It seems to be unfortunately common.
As I see it, there's the classic problem of people on Prozac, which as best I can tell works by suppressing the cortex of the brain that produces the higher mammalian emotions. This, of course, mostly leaves the reptilian cortex in charge of emotion, and reptiles are pretty much noted for caring about little other than guarding territory and eating anything they can fit in their mouths and digest.
I know lots of people who are taking medications for depression. Almost all of them are very intelligent, many are artistically talented as well. Usually they have excellent educations along with all of this.
But I have had to learn, from every last one of them, that you simply cannot take for granted that they'll react to anything in a reasonable way, nor that they'll act in a reasonable way even with nothing to which to react.
I know, I am a close relative of, someone who once said "I got so tired of people asking me 'what's the matter' that now I just keep a happy face on all of the time".
To them, that's making them feel a little better knowing that they're not making other people concerned for them.
To me, that means that I cannot tell from looking at their face whether they are feeling pretty good today, or are entering the emotional domain of the homicidally insane.
Conversations with most people who are drunk, or who are using recreational chemicals to get high, tend to be characterized by a lot of non-sequitur changes in subject, free-association taking over the direction of conversation as this or that thought flits past like some shiny butterfly at which the disordered mind must, if only for a moment, reach.
I've spent so much of my life around people being treated for depression -- and many of the anti-depression long-term medications have this exact same effect -- that for perhaps most of my life, I thought that this constant flitting from one thought to another was normal.
Literary traditions make use of this sort of thing, with foreshadowing, flashbacks, changes of viewpoint, or multiple threads following various characters, in synchrony, in different places and in different situations until their paths are crossed by the plot to generate the conflicts and resolutions so fundamental to storytelling.
Normal thinking -- at least before the so-called "ten second attention span" was forced on us by radio sound-bites and television advertising -- was characterized by linearity. The real story of our real life had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in between those points, ideally it was the smooth segue of one moment into the next, along a continuum of emotion and experience generally as predictable as the day itself. Yet as the modern pace of life evolved, the pace and structure changed from a fairly relaxed affair (with linear structure) into a jerky and semi-random clock-driven thing. A woman might wake as a wife and within two hours be deep in a boardroom power-struggle, but only after 45 minutes spent as a super-mom getting breakfast into the kids and the kids onto campus. At lunch she might be flirting with a new love interest and an hour later she'd be eating her dead (so to speak) after taking no prisoners at a sales conference where the next six months of production hang in the balance along with her hopes for promotion or continued employment. And in the evening, you run the household at full speed until bedtime and then you have to take Ambien and hope you don't wake up in the next county.
So, increasingly, the flitting from one task to another, from one emotional state to another, from one cognitive style to another, from one milieu to another... people are living their lives in the same way that people on drugs, or with major depression, think. And somehow, despite the fact that this flitting around is diagnostic, this has become normal.
How did this happen?
And if this way that we live our lives, is in the exact mode that is diagnostic for mania and manic-depression, shouldn't we all be on lithium or something?
More to come, as long as I have relatives, I guess...
[Part I] No Back Roads: Connecting the Grid
A really interesting discussion has erupted over at Dan Reed's Just Up the Pike, subsequent to the article on the subject of whether or not the ICC can justify high-density development.
As this concerns a proposed 262-home neighborhood where the ICC will meet Georgia Avenue and Norbeck Road, various people have weighed in on this one, including former District 4 Democrat candidate and Montgomery Civic Federation past-president, Cary Lamari, a longtime resident and activist in the Norbeck neighborhood.
The discussion is certainly worth reading, but I want to try to stick close to a point I raised, and have raised before and will doubtless raise again, that of "back road connections", or as the Urban Planning contingent would put it, "grid network" or "grid connectivity".
One might question the idea of "urban grid" as applied to Montgomery in general, and District 4 in particular, especially as people seem to have this notion that anything much north of Leisure World is pretty rural. That's not the case, even though there's a fairly large stretch of "unoccupied land" north of Norbeck Road (MD-28) and south of Batchellor's Forest Road. Well, it used to be unoccupied, but no longer. That stretch of "countryside" is in fact the right-of-way of the Intercounty Connector ("ICC"), and most of the woodlands there have been flattened, and the fields are about to be paved.
From Georgia Avenue (MD-97), the ICC will travel east-southeast before taking a turn more to the southeast to cut across Norbeck Road between the eastern leg of Bailey's Lane and Wintergate Drive.
Looking at a Google Map of the area, to the north and east of the ICC route is the Allenwood-Gayfields-Gaywood Estates community. Interestingly, Gayfields has something like an urban grid pattern, though on a large scale. Yet despite its internal connectedness, connections other than to Layhill Road are limited to one connection to Norbeck Road via Drury Road/Tierra Drive. Contiguous neighborhoods such as Allenwood have connections only to Layhill Road, although it wouldn't be difficult to connect Graylake Drive to Drury Road. The nearby Chester Mill community could easily be connected to Allenwood, from the cul-de-sac at the north end of Chapel Hill Road, via a small bridge across Batchellor's Run to the intersection of Narrows Lane and Narrows Terrace, though you might have to sacrifice a house to do that. Yet with excellent connectivity to Norbeck Road, the community served by Woods Center Road lies sprawling at low density between Chapel Hill Road and Drury Road.
Now, to the west of Drury Road is the community served from Norbeck Road via Radwick Lane and Twin Valley Court. Twin Valley Lane provides some back-road grid pattern to the neighborhood. Were it not for the placement of one house west of the intersection of Tierra Drive (the southern leg of Drury Road) and Flint Hill Road, Twin Valley Lane could be extended to that intersection, giving back road grid interconnectivity to most of the communities that lie in the triangle bounded by Layhill and Norbeck Roads and the Intercounty Connector.
More to come...
As this concerns a proposed 262-home neighborhood where the ICC will meet Georgia Avenue and Norbeck Road, various people have weighed in on this one, including former District 4 Democrat candidate and Montgomery Civic Federation past-president, Cary Lamari, a longtime resident and activist in the Norbeck neighborhood.
The discussion is certainly worth reading, but I want to try to stick close to a point I raised, and have raised before and will doubtless raise again, that of "back road connections", or as the Urban Planning contingent would put it, "grid network" or "grid connectivity".
One might question the idea of "urban grid" as applied to Montgomery in general, and District 4 in particular, especially as people seem to have this notion that anything much north of Leisure World is pretty rural. That's not the case, even though there's a fairly large stretch of "unoccupied land" north of Norbeck Road (MD-28) and south of Batchellor's Forest Road. Well, it used to be unoccupied, but no longer. That stretch of "countryside" is in fact the right-of-way of the Intercounty Connector ("ICC"), and most of the woodlands there have been flattened, and the fields are about to be paved.
From Georgia Avenue (MD-97), the ICC will travel east-southeast before taking a turn more to the southeast to cut across Norbeck Road between the eastern leg of Bailey's Lane and Wintergate Drive.
Looking at a Google Map of the area, to the north and east of the ICC route is the Allenwood-Gayfields-Gaywood Estates community. Interestingly, Gayfields has something like an urban grid pattern, though on a large scale. Yet despite its internal connectedness, connections other than to Layhill Road are limited to one connection to Norbeck Road via Drury Road/Tierra Drive. Contiguous neighborhoods such as Allenwood have connections only to Layhill Road, although it wouldn't be difficult to connect Graylake Drive to Drury Road. The nearby Chester Mill community could easily be connected to Allenwood, from the cul-de-sac at the north end of Chapel Hill Road, via a small bridge across Batchellor's Run to the intersection of Narrows Lane and Narrows Terrace, though you might have to sacrifice a house to do that. Yet with excellent connectivity to Norbeck Road, the community served by Woods Center Road lies sprawling at low density between Chapel Hill Road and Drury Road.
Now, to the west of Drury Road is the community served from Norbeck Road via Radwick Lane and Twin Valley Court. Twin Valley Lane provides some back-road grid pattern to the neighborhood. Were it not for the placement of one house west of the intersection of Tierra Drive (the southern leg of Drury Road) and Flint Hill Road, Twin Valley Lane could be extended to that intersection, giving back road grid interconnectivity to most of the communities that lie in the triangle bounded by Layhill and Norbeck Roads and the Intercounty Connector.
More to come...
Noted in Passing, North Korea Goes Ballistic
Noted in passing, North Korea is once again attempting scare people.
North Korea, at least, has a perfectly legitimate answer if they ever ask themselves "how did we, as a society, ever get so crazy".
Let's see, a half-century of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world will do that to you. Testing nuclear devices shortly after firing missiles near to -- or even overflying -- neighboring nations, that only confirms the complete insanity of the Pyongyang regime.
North Korea, at least, has a perfectly legitimate answer if they ever ask themselves "how did we, as a society, ever get so crazy".
Let's see, a half-century of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world will do that to you. Testing nuclear devices shortly after firing missiles near to -- or even overflying -- neighboring nations, that only confirms the complete insanity of the Pyongyang regime.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
[Part V] Word Gets Out: Start Making Sense
Earlier we contrasted and compared between the madness of people who conduct driving tours to point out the neighborhood "crazy" people (including, allegedly, Yours Truly), and real dangerous things more worthy of concern. For example, the 18th Street Gang, early in 2009, surrounded and abducted a 15-year-old boy from a bus-stop and stabbed him 72 times and then dumped the body cross-county.
Next, we discoursed of Men and Mockingbirds. Mockingbirds make an immense amount of trouble in the world of birds, and carloads of gangsters circulating around Montgomery County can do the same. You'd never suspect either a mousy little bird, or crappy late-model Nissan Sentras and Civics full of young central-americans to capable of so much hell-raising, and that's how they get away with it.
In Part III we covered heinous crimes here -- and elsewhere -- which were clearly gang-related, and pointed out that our pattern detector indicates that most of the most-heinous crimes in recent months have been committed by illegal aliens, most of which had at least loose associations with notorious gangs of transnational scope.
In Part IV, with much use of the literary technique of weaving together a lot of different story lines, including a bit of foreshadowing and inclusion of seemingly-unrelated anecdote and even the inclusion of an illustrative analect from Confucius, we tried to lay out an explanation of why, exactly, Thomas Hardman is what he is and does what he does, and has the variety of reputations that he has. Towards the end of that entry, we laid out all of the clues necessary for the astute reader to understand without qualification that almost everything I do, think, or say, is motivated by a very few concerns, and almost all of those are rooted in my need to increase public safety by any reasonable means.
I find it difficult to understand, at times, how actions of mine -- which clearly reveal my deep concern for public safety -- can be twisted by thoughtless observers or wicked revisionists to suit their own wild fantasies, or political or business agendas.
Throughout the mid and late 1990s, I agitated in a variety of ways including lots and lots of discussion on the InterNet, to restrict access to driver licenses for illegal aliens and even temporarily-admitted legitimate visa-holders. I declared, endlessly, that no good could come from the policies then in place, and indeed that the extant policies placed us all at profound national security risk.
I endured a variety of endless attacks, everything from being called a racist to a nativist to a jingoist, and often enough online acrimony spilled over into Real Life. Yet as much as it horrified and saddened me, I considered myself vindicated by the dreadful attacks of September 11, 2001. Had any of the policies I have long recommended been followed, those attacks might never have occurred, and could have occurred only with a great deal more effort... effort of the sort that would likely have been incapable of escaping notice. Yet the prevailing attitude was "it is good to be lax". I beg to differ, as do the "9/11 Families".
Aside from the terrorism which has launched us into, thus far, eight years of full-scale overseas military operations, there has been another frightening trend, one very well documented. It is the growth of gangs, both here in the USA and in almost all nations outside of the US.
Ask any agent with the Border Patrol, or with any of a variety of Federal agencies that have missions which inevitably involve the border, or contraband that transits the border. These gangs are as well funded as comparably-sized US military units, and often have better equipment, at least in their units that do the "grunt work" of smuggling contraband ranging from illicit narcotics and other drugs, to trafficking in human cargo. The distribution networks are generally very well organized, and are immense, stretching from the "stash houses" at or near the border zones, into our own neighborhoods.
The recent abduction and stabbing of a 15-year old Langley Park boy are believed to be the work of the Mexican Mafia's subsidiary gang, the 18th Street gang. This should give the astute reader some idea of the scope and reach of these transnational crime corporations.
Assistant State's Attorney, Jeffrey Wennar, recently was interviewed by Gazette:
Yet neither Wenner, nor the Gazette, have made it clear how many of the 10 persons suspected of kidnapping and murdering a 15-year-old boy had valid Maryland Driver's Permits.
Astute readers may properly fail to make the inference that non-astute readers, and clueless fuckwads as well as disingenuous deceivers, may impute. Some might suggest that actually I just hate Mexicans, and the rest of this is all me just reaching for any excuse to slag on "Latinos".
Let's now put all of that sort of tripe and poppycock to rest.
I graduated Robert E Peary HS in Aspen Hill in June of 1976. As a very young adult, I emerged from school directly into one of the primary battlegrounds of the Cold War, though one of the more frosty-cool rather than one of the hot "proxy war" zones. Fortunately for me, I was out of town for most of the next four years. I "finished growing up" in a boom town which was all-American all of the time, when it wasn't too busy being so definitively Texan.
As time went on, and the Cold War deepened and changed from something characterized by proxy wars -- such as Vietnam or revolutionary or civil wars in places like Argentina or El Salvador or Nicaragua -- and it evolved into something far more characterized by feeling out the capabilities of the opponents without actually testing them militarily. I came of age in the dark shadows cast by the looming specter of global thermonuclear war and many of those shadows, it seemed, tended to hover right around Aspen Hill and Silver Spring Maryland, no less than they hovered around various nearby military and government facilities or beautiful downtown McLean Virginia.
Illegal aliens from El Salvador, Nicaragua, or even Argentina, they are not required to offer any proof of their legal presence in the USA, before they will be issued a license to drive, and motor vehicle registrations, in Maryland, at least until June 1 2009.
Neither are any of the people who have been illegally in USA since I graduated from high-school into the middle of the Cold War.
When I say I am deeply concerned for national security and public safety, it's not "all about Mexicans". Far from it. They're just a huge layer of icing, so to speak, lathered on top of a rather small, but exceptionally dangerous core of cake.
You could, in a lot of ways, think of MS-13 and 18th Street and Mexican Mafia gangsters, permeating the suburbs of Washington DC, as nothing more than window-dressing... or nothing more than a distraction.
When Maryland finally goes "REAL-ID Compliant", completing the process in 2014, that means that no foreign spies will have a license to drive here, at least not real ones that will show up in the system as bona-fide and verified.
Nor, I am happy to say, will any of the illegal-alien gangsters.
Next, we discoursed of Men and Mockingbirds. Mockingbirds make an immense amount of trouble in the world of birds, and carloads of gangsters circulating around Montgomery County can do the same. You'd never suspect either a mousy little bird, or crappy late-model Nissan Sentras and Civics full of young central-americans to capable of so much hell-raising, and that's how they get away with it.
In Part III we covered heinous crimes here -- and elsewhere -- which were clearly gang-related, and pointed out that our pattern detector indicates that most of the most-heinous crimes in recent months have been committed by illegal aliens, most of which had at least loose associations with notorious gangs of transnational scope.
In Part IV, with much use of the literary technique of weaving together a lot of different story lines, including a bit of foreshadowing and inclusion of seemingly-unrelated anecdote and even the inclusion of an illustrative analect from Confucius, we tried to lay out an explanation of why, exactly, Thomas Hardman is what he is and does what he does, and has the variety of reputations that he has. Towards the end of that entry, we laid out all of the clues necessary for the astute reader to understand without qualification that almost everything I do, think, or say, is motivated by a very few concerns, and almost all of those are rooted in my need to increase public safety by any reasonable means.
I find it difficult to understand, at times, how actions of mine -- which clearly reveal my deep concern for public safety -- can be twisted by thoughtless observers or wicked revisionists to suit their own wild fantasies, or political or business agendas.
Throughout the mid and late 1990s, I agitated in a variety of ways including lots and lots of discussion on the InterNet, to restrict access to driver licenses for illegal aliens and even temporarily-admitted legitimate visa-holders. I declared, endlessly, that no good could come from the policies then in place, and indeed that the extant policies placed us all at profound national security risk.
I endured a variety of endless attacks, everything from being called a racist to a nativist to a jingoist, and often enough online acrimony spilled over into Real Life. Yet as much as it horrified and saddened me, I considered myself vindicated by the dreadful attacks of September 11, 2001. Had any of the policies I have long recommended been followed, those attacks might never have occurred, and could have occurred only with a great deal more effort... effort of the sort that would likely have been incapable of escaping notice. Yet the prevailing attitude was "it is good to be lax". I beg to differ, as do the "9/11 Families".
Aside from the terrorism which has launched us into, thus far, eight years of full-scale overseas military operations, there has been another frightening trend, one very well documented. It is the growth of gangs, both here in the USA and in almost all nations outside of the US.
Ask any agent with the Border Patrol, or with any of a variety of Federal agencies that have missions which inevitably involve the border, or contraband that transits the border. These gangs are as well funded as comparably-sized US military units, and often have better equipment, at least in their units that do the "grunt work" of smuggling contraband ranging from illicit narcotics and other drugs, to trafficking in human cargo. The distribution networks are generally very well organized, and are immense, stretching from the "stash houses" at or near the border zones, into our own neighborhoods.
The recent abduction and stabbing of a 15-year old Langley Park boy are believed to be the work of the Mexican Mafia's subsidiary gang, the 18th Street gang. This should give the astute reader some idea of the scope and reach of these transnational crime corporations.
Assistant State's Attorney, Jeffrey Wennar, recently was interviewed by Gazette:
The bloody feud between 18th Street and MS-13 traces to the streets and prisons of Mexico, El Salvador and California, said Assistant State's Attorney Jeffrey Wennar, one of the county's lead gang prosecutors.
"It's a historic rivalry. … There is that ongoing rivalry that merits them attacking each other without provocation," he said in an interview. "… Although they are both under the umbrella of the Mexican Mafia, they are archrivals."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that 18th Street has between 30,000 and 50,000 members active in 44 cities and 20 states nationwide, according to the FBI's 2009 gang threat assessment.
While MS-13 has garnered more local headlines and attention, 18th Street has "been around for a real long time" in Montgomery County, Wennar said.
Yet neither Wenner, nor the Gazette, have made it clear how many of the 10 persons suspected of kidnapping and murdering a 15-year-old boy had valid Maryland Driver's Permits.
Astute readers may properly fail to make the inference that non-astute readers, and clueless fuckwads as well as disingenuous deceivers, may impute. Some might suggest that actually I just hate Mexicans, and the rest of this is all me just reaching for any excuse to slag on "Latinos".
Let's now put all of that sort of tripe and poppycock to rest.
I graduated Robert E Peary HS in Aspen Hill in June of 1976. As a very young adult, I emerged from school directly into one of the primary battlegrounds of the Cold War, though one of the more frosty-cool rather than one of the hot "proxy war" zones. Fortunately for me, I was out of town for most of the next four years. I "finished growing up" in a boom town which was all-American all of the time, when it wasn't too busy being so definitively Texan.
As time went on, and the Cold War deepened and changed from something characterized by proxy wars -- such as Vietnam or revolutionary or civil wars in places like Argentina or El Salvador or Nicaragua -- and it evolved into something far more characterized by feeling out the capabilities of the opponents without actually testing them militarily. I came of age in the dark shadows cast by the looming specter of global thermonuclear war and many of those shadows, it seemed, tended to hover right around Aspen Hill and Silver Spring Maryland, no less than they hovered around various nearby military and government facilities or beautiful downtown McLean Virginia.
Illegal aliens from El Salvador, Nicaragua, or even Argentina, they are not required to offer any proof of their legal presence in the USA, before they will be issued a license to drive, and motor vehicle registrations, in Maryland, at least until June 1 2009.
Neither are any of the people who have been illegally in USA since I graduated from high-school into the middle of the Cold War.
When I say I am deeply concerned for national security and public safety, it's not "all about Mexicans". Far from it. They're just a huge layer of icing, so to speak, lathered on top of a rather small, but exceptionally dangerous core of cake.
You could, in a lot of ways, think of MS-13 and 18th Street and Mexican Mafia gangsters, permeating the suburbs of Washington DC, as nothing more than window-dressing... or nothing more than a distraction.
When Maryland finally goes "REAL-ID Compliant", completing the process in 2014, that means that no foreign spies will have a license to drive here, at least not real ones that will show up in the system as bona-fide and verified.
Nor, I am happy to say, will any of the illegal-alien gangsters.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
[Part IV] Word Gets Out: From the Top Down
(typos corrected, May 22.)
Earlier we contrasted and compared between the madness of people who conduct driving tours to point out the neighborhood "crazy" people (including, allegedly, Yours Truly), and real dangerous things more worthy of concern. For example, the 18th Street Gang, early in 2009, surrounded and abducted a 15-year-old boy from a bus-stop and stabbed him 72 times and then dumped the body cross-county.
Next, we discoursed of Men and Mockingbirds. Mockingbirds make an immense amount of trouble in the world of birds, and carloads of gangsters circulating around Montgomery County can do the same. You'd never suspect either a mousy little bird, or crappy late-model Nissan Sentras and Civics full of young central-americans to capable of so much hell-raising, and that's how they get away with it.
In Part III we covered heinous crimes here -- and elsewhere -- which were clearly gang-related, and pointed out that our pattern detector indicates that most of the most-heinous crimes in recent months have been committed by illegal aliens, most of which had at least loose associations with notorious gangs of transnational scope.
I beg the reader's indulgence -- and beg them to cultivate an attention-span capable of handling a lot of subtle nuance of complex thought -- and beg pardon in advance for a bit overmuch seeming "circumstantiality".
If you have time, read the digressions, if not, go to the Main Article.
People say I'm crazy, but it's not the people who meet me here and there around town. People who I meet randomly, with whom I have ordinary conversations about the topics that are in the news, probably come away thinking that I'm pretty well-informed, actually think about what I've read or seen in media, and that I'm struggling to emit proper grammar above a slight speech impediment. Well, I cannot read their minds and so I can not say for certain that this is the impression they have, but they generally seem to be willing to continue the conversation as time will allow and either of the parties interest can be maintained.
The people who say I'm crazy -- as in, dangerously disordered and perhaps criminally insane -- are people I've never met, for the most part. The vast majority of mental health professionals will say. when they hear someone else using the word "crazy", "crazy isn't a word that we professional use. It's more than a bit imprecise, and has so much stigma attached to it that it is far more of an insult and an incitement than it is a diagnosis".
From this, one would conclude that anyone actually using the word "crazy" is in no way enough of an authority to have an opinion on the subject.
Many of the people that I meet at random, while shopping or wandering around on my various errands -- with whom I exchange bits of conversation long or short -- are pretty relaxed once they understand that I can and do speak with some depth on matters of timely topicality, national newsiness, and even local politics. Here we may agree to disagree but we disagree agreeably. Such is the nature of civil discourse.
Many of the people I meet in fairly predictable places -- such as various retail stores, etc. -- frequently evidence a change in behavior between our first encounters and subsequent encounters. Where before they had been initially a little tense and then relaxed somewhat as the strange became familiar, now they exhibit the cautious artificial relaxedness, a sort of forced "pretend everything is normal" sort of stance, as if they are trying to not give away that they're ready for anything.
For a long time, I encountered this for so long that I just assumed that this was how everyone was at all times: all keyed up, trying to act casual, but expecting to have who-knows-what break loose with little or no warning. And I wondered how long society could last like this, with everyone on guard against everyone else, and it was at this time when I began to wonder how, exactly, it was that we as a society came to be so fucking crazy.
I must digress yet again: there is a famous story about the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius.
A powerful prince heard of Confucius's reputation, and insisted that he take a long and dangerous journey overland to come to the court of the prince. Confucius and his retinue had no choice but to comply.
Yet when Confucius was at the court of the king, he was seated near the prince in a position of middle rank of honor, generally reserved for wealthy guests who were permitted to attend and observe, but who would almost never speak, and who were not to be approached. Confucius attended for many days, but he was never addressed by the prince, nor for that matter by anyone. Confucius felt misused, being brought all of this way simply to sit there and do nothing.
Confucius began to whisper to his retinue, "so-and-so has just entered; he is wearing a lovely brocade in green and gold. So-and-so has now entered, he is wearing fine silk garments in gold and red. The ornaments are lovely throughout the court, the hangings of the most superior workmanship, the calligraphy is very learned," etc etc. Confucius did this at all times when he was in the court.
Eventually, after most of a month, Confucius begged for leave to depart, and leave was granted, and even as he begged leave and took his leave when departure was granted, he carried on with a monologue of description.
Out on the road, the wise man ceased his monologue. One of his retinue asked him, "Master, when we were at the court, you carried on a descriptive monologue. Yet we were there, we had thought, so that the prince might question you and learn from your wisdom. Yet he never did, and you merely stood in one place and, unbidden, described all who came and went. Why?"
And Confucius said, "regarding my descriptions of all who came and went, this is traditional when in the company of the blind."
As appendage to my digression, let me note that another, later, wise man once said "there are none so blind as those who wish not to see."
I would update this, in the modern day, to add "...other than those who both wish not to see, and who have been prejudicially misinformed".
How did we, as a society, get to be so fucking crazy?
Perhaps it was by listening to wandering packs of unqualified bozos who carry slanders to the reputations of others, rather than forming our own opinions of those others over time.
Who the hell are these people?
More importantly to your own sanity, why do you listen to them as if they knew whereof they speak?
To digress even further -- I'm feeling very digressive today -- I should point out that most people aren't interested in buying a weapon unless they feel that they have reason to fear for their lives or for the lives and safety of their loved ones.
In the same way, it might be a little difficult to maintain levels of taxpayer funding for mental health-care clinics and outreach programs if you don't have a widespread public fear of mental illness. If you don't have widespread perception of "crazies wandering the streets", mostly people don't much care about the funding of mental care and outreach. Homeless people only concern most taxpayers when those homeless are seen everywhere, begging at storefronts and intersections and sleeping in public places.
So, if you think that there is insufficient widespread public apprehension of mentally-ill persons at large in the community -- and thus that you won't be getting the funding you want to spend -- all you have to do is to send a few of your staffers out into the community to "alert the locals".
Nothing like a nice Witch Hunt to drum up business for your clinic! At least you'll see dividends on your stock investments in local hospitals if the "alerted locals" put your witch-hunt targets in the Emergency Room and they wind up getting billed at rates for the uninsured, usually about four times the rates of insured persons.
Once again, despicable misuse of reputable office -- for personal profit -- provides plausible motive, means, and opportunity. Now all you need are targets such as people in subsidized group homes.
Digressing even more: You can take a perfectly sane cat that has a long tail. You can put a perfectly sane cat into a small room that is filled with rocking chairs. Put people in the rocking chairs to rock the rocking chairs.
The first time the cat moves his tail wrong, a rocking chair will squish its tail. This will make the cat rightly angry, and it will lash its tail to indicate its displeasure. Of course, the more the cat lashes his tail, the more the cat gets his tail caught in the rockers. Before too long, that cat will be crazy with pain, with anger, and -- if it can think clearly enough -- rage for whoever put it in this ridiculous situation.
But this cat isn't actually crazy, although anyone might think so who lets it out of the room and then tries to pick it up. It's not crazy, it's just been through a lot. It has been repeatedly traumatized. The cat isn't crazy, not so much as the situation it was in was crazy. Far crazier than the cat, if you stop to think about it, was the person who set up the experiment, and the people who kept rocking their rocking chairs even though they had to understand that all they were doing by rocking was torturing some poor cat in a madman's cruel experiment.
Stop rocking the chairs, or move the cat out of the room with the rocking chairs, or move the rocking chairs out of the room with the cat.
In any case, since it's clear that harm is being done, and no good can come of it, stop doing that.
Digressions complete!
Now let's get to the meat of the article.
First, the Gazette reports the suspects list for the murder of a 15-year old abducted from a bus-stop and stabbed 72 times has grown to 10 individuals.
I suppose that when you do the math, that's only 7.2 stabs per individual, which makes it merely viciously-criminal, rather than criminally-demented as if one individual stabbed some teenager 72 times. Face it, if one person stabs one other person 72 times, that's either deeply personal hatred or seriously-psychotic serial-killer sex-substitute or something equally twisted. Ooops, that's right, only one weapon was involved and they went home and used to to spread ketchup on their meatloaf.
Secondly, the Gazette further reports that new Driver License Rules go into effect June 1. though it will be 2014 before the very last illegal alien's valid Maryland license expires, this is a great day for which many Marylanders have worked long and hard, myself among them. I have been fighting for public safety through deportation of illegal aliens since the mid-1990s, when the Mexican BOLSA stock-market collapsed and the first mass wave of invasion saw nearly a million people illegally cross the border in just the first half of 1994.
Indeed, astute readers will remember my letter to the editor to the Gazette in which I pointed out that since half of 2008's murders of citizens were by illegal aliens, with different immigration-status-checking policies in place, the County government could conceivably have cut the murder rate of 2008 in half. Much public outcry was added to my own, and all persons arrested in Montgomery for crimes of violence and for weapons violations are to have their immigration status checked against the databases of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But, as in the title, From the Top Down, we find wonderful news from the Obama Administration, in a Washington Post article, U.S. to Expand Immigration Checks to All Local Jails: Obama Administration's Enforcement Push Could Lead to Sharp Increase in Deportation Cases (Hsu, Spencer S, Washington Post, May 19, 2009).
I'm looking forward to seeing how Montgomery Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett can possibly analogize demands for increased county assistance in enforcing Federal Immigration Law to slavery, as he has done in the past. Further, I'm anxious to see how he can make very thinly veiled attributions of Racism as the sole motive, considering that the President himself has been widely hailed in Montgomery political circles for being the "first black president". Really, I'm waiting.
I've been at this fight for re-establishment of national sovereignty -- a nation that cannot control its borders is not truly sovereign, nor will it long remain a nation -- for 15 years now. I can wait a little longer to see what hoops Mr Leggett and his appointed law-enforcement personnel will jump through. Will Mr Leggett continue to condemn demands for local assistance (or even mere enabling) of enforcement of immigration laws as being rooted only in diversity-hating racism and Republican extremism from the Reactionary Right? Or will he finally get the message that even the First Black President thinks that enough is enough and that it's time to put public safety first?
Or will they wait until another Tai Lam gets shot dead on a bus, or until another Guzman-Saenz gets stabbed dozens of times, or another elderly lady gets her house burnt down around her, or another elderly lady gets tied up and beaten to death in her own home in a burglary gone murderous?
More to come? Tune in tomorrow, I might even tell you exactly how "crazy" I am. Hint: as crazy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs... and for about the same reasons.
Earlier we contrasted and compared between the madness of people who conduct driving tours to point out the neighborhood "crazy" people (including, allegedly, Yours Truly), and real dangerous things more worthy of concern. For example, the 18th Street Gang, early in 2009, surrounded and abducted a 15-year-old boy from a bus-stop and stabbed him 72 times and then dumped the body cross-county.
Next, we discoursed of Men and Mockingbirds. Mockingbirds make an immense amount of trouble in the world of birds, and carloads of gangsters circulating around Montgomery County can do the same. You'd never suspect either a mousy little bird, or crappy late-model Nissan Sentras and Civics full of young central-americans to capable of so much hell-raising, and that's how they get away with it.
In Part III we covered heinous crimes here -- and elsewhere -- which were clearly gang-related, and pointed out that our pattern detector indicates that most of the most-heinous crimes in recent months have been committed by illegal aliens, most of which had at least loose associations with notorious gangs of transnational scope.
I beg the reader's indulgence -- and beg them to cultivate an attention-span capable of handling a lot of subtle nuance of complex thought -- and beg pardon in advance for a bit overmuch seeming "circumstantiality".
If you have time, read the digressions, if not, go to the Main Article.
People say I'm crazy, but it's not the people who meet me here and there around town. People who I meet randomly, with whom I have ordinary conversations about the topics that are in the news, probably come away thinking that I'm pretty well-informed, actually think about what I've read or seen in media, and that I'm struggling to emit proper grammar above a slight speech impediment. Well, I cannot read their minds and so I can not say for certain that this is the impression they have, but they generally seem to be willing to continue the conversation as time will allow and either of the parties interest can be maintained.
The people who say I'm crazy -- as in, dangerously disordered and perhaps criminally insane -- are people I've never met, for the most part. The vast majority of mental health professionals will say. when they hear someone else using the word "crazy", "crazy isn't a word that we professional use. It's more than a bit imprecise, and has so much stigma attached to it that it is far more of an insult and an incitement than it is a diagnosis".
From this, one would conclude that anyone actually using the word "crazy" is in no way enough of an authority to have an opinion on the subject.
Many of the people that I meet at random, while shopping or wandering around on my various errands -- with whom I exchange bits of conversation long or short -- are pretty relaxed once they understand that I can and do speak with some depth on matters of timely topicality, national newsiness, and even local politics. Here we may agree to disagree but we disagree agreeably. Such is the nature of civil discourse.
Many of the people I meet in fairly predictable places -- such as various retail stores, etc. -- frequently evidence a change in behavior between our first encounters and subsequent encounters. Where before they had been initially a little tense and then relaxed somewhat as the strange became familiar, now they exhibit the cautious artificial relaxedness, a sort of forced "pretend everything is normal" sort of stance, as if they are trying to not give away that they're ready for anything.
For a long time, I encountered this for so long that I just assumed that this was how everyone was at all times: all keyed up, trying to act casual, but expecting to have who-knows-what break loose with little or no warning. And I wondered how long society could last like this, with everyone on guard against everyone else, and it was at this time when I began to wonder how, exactly, it was that we as a society came to be so fucking crazy.
I must digress yet again: there is a famous story about the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius.
A powerful prince heard of Confucius's reputation, and insisted that he take a long and dangerous journey overland to come to the court of the prince. Confucius and his retinue had no choice but to comply.
Yet when Confucius was at the court of the king, he was seated near the prince in a position of middle rank of honor, generally reserved for wealthy guests who were permitted to attend and observe, but who would almost never speak, and who were not to be approached. Confucius attended for many days, but he was never addressed by the prince, nor for that matter by anyone. Confucius felt misused, being brought all of this way simply to sit there and do nothing.
Confucius began to whisper to his retinue, "so-and-so has just entered; he is wearing a lovely brocade in green and gold. So-and-so has now entered, he is wearing fine silk garments in gold and red. The ornaments are lovely throughout the court, the hangings of the most superior workmanship, the calligraphy is very learned," etc etc. Confucius did this at all times when he was in the court.
Eventually, after most of a month, Confucius begged for leave to depart, and leave was granted, and even as he begged leave and took his leave when departure was granted, he carried on with a monologue of description.
Out on the road, the wise man ceased his monologue. One of his retinue asked him, "Master, when we were at the court, you carried on a descriptive monologue. Yet we were there, we had thought, so that the prince might question you and learn from your wisdom. Yet he never did, and you merely stood in one place and, unbidden, described all who came and went. Why?"
And Confucius said, "regarding my descriptions of all who came and went, this is traditional when in the company of the blind."
As appendage to my digression, let me note that another, later, wise man once said "there are none so blind as those who wish not to see."
I would update this, in the modern day, to add "...other than those who both wish not to see, and who have been prejudicially misinformed".
How did we, as a society, get to be so fucking crazy?
Perhaps it was by listening to wandering packs of unqualified bozos who carry slanders to the reputations of others, rather than forming our own opinions of those others over time.
Who the hell are these people?
More importantly to your own sanity, why do you listen to them as if they knew whereof they speak?
To digress even further -- I'm feeling very digressive today -- I should point out that most people aren't interested in buying a weapon unless they feel that they have reason to fear for their lives or for the lives and safety of their loved ones.
In the same way, it might be a little difficult to maintain levels of taxpayer funding for mental health-care clinics and outreach programs if you don't have a widespread public fear of mental illness. If you don't have widespread perception of "crazies wandering the streets", mostly people don't much care about the funding of mental care and outreach. Homeless people only concern most taxpayers when those homeless are seen everywhere, begging at storefronts and intersections and sleeping in public places.
So, if you think that there is insufficient widespread public apprehension of mentally-ill persons at large in the community -- and thus that you won't be getting the funding you want to spend -- all you have to do is to send a few of your staffers out into the community to "alert the locals".
Nothing like a nice Witch Hunt to drum up business for your clinic! At least you'll see dividends on your stock investments in local hospitals if the "alerted locals" put your witch-hunt targets in the Emergency Room and they wind up getting billed at rates for the uninsured, usually about four times the rates of insured persons.
Once again, despicable misuse of reputable office -- for personal profit -- provides plausible motive, means, and opportunity. Now all you need are targets such as people in subsidized group homes.
Digressing even more: You can take a perfectly sane cat that has a long tail. You can put a perfectly sane cat into a small room that is filled with rocking chairs. Put people in the rocking chairs to rock the rocking chairs.
The first time the cat moves his tail wrong, a rocking chair will squish its tail. This will make the cat rightly angry, and it will lash its tail to indicate its displeasure. Of course, the more the cat lashes his tail, the more the cat gets his tail caught in the rockers. Before too long, that cat will be crazy with pain, with anger, and -- if it can think clearly enough -- rage for whoever put it in this ridiculous situation.
But this cat isn't actually crazy, although anyone might think so who lets it out of the room and then tries to pick it up. It's not crazy, it's just been through a lot. It has been repeatedly traumatized. The cat isn't crazy, not so much as the situation it was in was crazy. Far crazier than the cat, if you stop to think about it, was the person who set up the experiment, and the people who kept rocking their rocking chairs even though they had to understand that all they were doing by rocking was torturing some poor cat in a madman's cruel experiment.
Stop rocking the chairs, or move the cat out of the room with the rocking chairs, or move the rocking chairs out of the room with the cat.
In any case, since it's clear that harm is being done, and no good can come of it, stop doing that.
Digressions complete!
Now let's get to the meat of the article.
First, the Gazette reports the suspects list for the murder of a 15-year old abducted from a bus-stop and stabbed 72 times has grown to 10 individuals.
I suppose that when you do the math, that's only 7.2 stabs per individual, which makes it merely viciously-criminal, rather than criminally-demented as if one individual stabbed some teenager 72 times. Face it, if one person stabs one other person 72 times, that's either deeply personal hatred or seriously-psychotic serial-killer sex-substitute or something equally twisted. Ooops, that's right, only one weapon was involved and they went home and used to to spread ketchup on their meatloaf.
Secondly, the Gazette further reports that new Driver License Rules go into effect June 1. though it will be 2014 before the very last illegal alien's valid Maryland license expires, this is a great day for which many Marylanders have worked long and hard, myself among them. I have been fighting for public safety through deportation of illegal aliens since the mid-1990s, when the Mexican BOLSA stock-market collapsed and the first mass wave of invasion saw nearly a million people illegally cross the border in just the first half of 1994.
Indeed, astute readers will remember my letter to the editor to the Gazette in which I pointed out that since half of 2008's murders of citizens were by illegal aliens, with different immigration-status-checking policies in place, the County government could conceivably have cut the murder rate of 2008 in half. Much public outcry was added to my own, and all persons arrested in Montgomery for crimes of violence and for weapons violations are to have their immigration status checked against the databases of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But, as in the title, From the Top Down, we find wonderful news from the Obama Administration, in a Washington Post article, U.S. to Expand Immigration Checks to All Local Jails: Obama Administration's Enforcement Push Could Lead to Sharp Increase in Deportation Cases (Hsu, Spencer S, Washington Post, May 19, 2009).
I'm looking forward to seeing how Montgomery Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett can possibly analogize demands for increased county assistance in enforcing Federal Immigration Law to slavery, as he has done in the past. Further, I'm anxious to see how he can make very thinly veiled attributions of Racism as the sole motive, considering that the President himself has been widely hailed in Montgomery political circles for being the "first black president". Really, I'm waiting.
I've been at this fight for re-establishment of national sovereignty -- a nation that cannot control its borders is not truly sovereign, nor will it long remain a nation -- for 15 years now. I can wait a little longer to see what hoops Mr Leggett and his appointed law-enforcement personnel will jump through. Will Mr Leggett continue to condemn demands for local assistance (or even mere enabling) of enforcement of immigration laws as being rooted only in diversity-hating racism and Republican extremism from the Reactionary Right? Or will he finally get the message that even the First Black President thinks that enough is enough and that it's time to put public safety first?
Or will they wait until another Tai Lam gets shot dead on a bus, or until another Guzman-Saenz gets stabbed dozens of times, or another elderly lady gets her house burnt down around her, or another elderly lady gets tied up and beaten to death in her own home in a burglary gone murderous?
More to come? Tune in tomorrow, I might even tell you exactly how "crazy" I am. Hint: as crazy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs... and for about the same reasons.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Brief Interlude: Taste of Wheaton
Briefly, I was up at the Taste of Wheaton event. I got there late, but ran around and sampled as much as I could, and along with a lot of favorites that I've known for a long time, I tried "SAIGONese Restaurant" offerings. They're right there in the Wheaton Triangle, straight across the center parking lot from Marchone's. I tried their curry chicken, and the BBQ chicken, and both get my rating of "mmm yummy!" Stop in and give them a try.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
[Part III] Word Gets Around: Homegrown Hosers and Imported Murderers
Earlier we covered the contrast between the madness of people that seem to feel the need to drive tour parties past my house and point me out as the neighborhood "crazy" person, real dangerous things more worthy of concern: the 18th Street Gang, early in 2009, surrounded and abducted a 15-year-old boy from a bus-stop and stabbed him 72 times and then dumped the body cross-county.
Next, we discoursed of Men and Mockingbirds. It may seem that there's a world of difference between Mockingbirds and carloads of gangsters circulating around Montgomery County, but a little contrast and compare leads to advice to police, not that they would either want or need advice from me.
Montgomery County, Maryland, is of long standing a generally peaceful place, so much so that we have a shortage of home-grown murderers. Thus, we've had to import them; illegally, if necessary.
According to Montgomery County police, the (alleged) murderers of 15-year-old Dennys Guzman-Saenz stabbed him 72 times and then headed home for a hearty meal, using the murder weapons in food preparation.
(Back when I used to live in the District, I'd hear people talk about relatives who were so mean that "that mother so mean, he drive by and shoot a mother eleven times and say "that remind me" and pull in at the next hot dog stand, order a chili cheese with extra ketchup". People would usually respond, "Yeah, damn, he cold alright...")
Inexplicably, the Washington Post coverage manages to both mention the escape from prison in El Salvador by one of the (alleged) murderers, and also to not mention anything about the immigration status of those charged in this heinous crime. Well, either they are citizen criminals or they are inadmissible alien criminal if they aren't citizens. Participation in crimes of violence -- or moral turpitude -- disqualify aliens from being present in the USA, unless of course they are locked up nice and tight like these piece of shit thug-ass gangstas.
Also locked up nice and tight, Jose Garcia-Perlera, 34, was convicted of murder and other charges related to at least four home invasions. The homes invaded were those of elderly women ranging in age from 63 to 92 who all lived alone.
Yet another predator taken off of the street. Specializing in the most defenseless people he could find who weren't actually in wheelchairs or on crutches, Perlera was unfortunately typical of a certain type of nasty illegal alien criminal. Astute readers will recall our coverage of the heinous Arson-Murder last Thanksgiving. Illegal aliens, also. And then before that was the infamous Hallowe'en murder of 15-year-old Tai Lam. Are we starting to notice a pattern here? Oh, wait, there was that stabbing murder in Aspen Hill, even more foreign gang violence. I do believe that the pattern-detector system is starting to work.
And then there are the Homegrown "Hosers", as a Canadian might say: Take off, eh, you hosers?
To digress: I was living in Denver, Colorado, back in 1994 or so, when their gang problem really started to take off. There was one particularly sad case when some fool was "sagging" at the Capital Hill King Soopers grocery store, and someone remarked on how stupid he looked, and the sagger shot him dead.
At least at this time, "sagging" wasn't a fashion statement, but a challenge. The economy had taken a pretty severe downturn, and a lot of out-of-work Californians had migrated to Denver to look for work; Denver was growing rapidly at the time and had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. Part of that migration was both Crips and Bloods as well as other national-scope gangs, and "sagging" was part of the process of battling over turf. If someone could "sag" in their colors and not get shot, they could claim it as their own turf. Capital Hill in Denver was on one side of the infamous Colfax Avenue, and on the other side were the seriously infested Five Points and Skyland neighborhoods, which were mostly local crews who stayed out of Capital Hill due to long histories with the local police. The newcomers just didn't care, or more likely, didn't know where they were, or what balance they were upsetting.
Of course, the largest and most entrenched gangs here in the DC area are college fraternal organizations. University of Maryland, College Park, is nationally notorious for their willingness to riot at the drop of a hat.
About graduation time every year, Aspen Hill gets infested with, well, people who are probably too damned old to be sporting their frat hats, but there you go, some people never get forced to grow up.
Frequently, we get such things as "Dust Wars" on a fairly widespread scale. Basically, imagine that some guy comes home from college out of state, and as soon as he gets here, his homeboys tell him all sorts of stuff, some true, some not, and probably with most of it exaggerated for purposes of excitement in story-telling. Next thing you know, he's out with the posse patrolling "da hood", much to the discomfiture of people who actually live here and are sick to death of this bullshit.
To make matters worse, generally when they do this sort of thing, they piss off the immigrant gangstas and they retaliate in kind, and the next thing you know, everyone's escalating as best they can. Most of the locals have enough sense to go inside and stay out of the way of something conceptually comparable to the scenes from old Western Movies where a bunch of cowboys have just come in from the trail with pockets full of pay and proceed to get blind drunk and then shoot up the town when the saloons kick 'em out. Where's a decent sheriff when you need one?
Some 22 years ago, this annoyed me enough to write a work of fiction, though readers are strongly advised to keep in mind while reading that truth can be far stranger than fiction, and that this is a story about deception, and a slow descent into madness under the onslaught of asymmetric non-lethal weapons being used in a low-intensity conflict in urban terrain.
Please enjoy (or be terrified by) Strangers in Town.
More to come?
Next, we discoursed of Men and Mockingbirds. It may seem that there's a world of difference between Mockingbirds and carloads of gangsters circulating around Montgomery County, but a little contrast and compare leads to advice to police, not that they would either want or need advice from me.
Montgomery County, Maryland, is of long standing a generally peaceful place, so much so that we have a shortage of home-grown murderers. Thus, we've had to import them; illegally, if necessary.
According to Montgomery County police, the (alleged) murderers of 15-year-old Dennys Guzman-Saenz stabbed him 72 times and then headed home for a hearty meal, using the murder weapons in food preparation.
(Back when I used to live in the District, I'd hear people talk about relatives who were so mean that "that mother so mean, he drive by and shoot a mother eleven times and say "that remind me" and pull in at the next hot dog stand, order a chili cheese with extra ketchup". People would usually respond, "Yeah, damn, he cold alright...")
Inexplicably, the Washington Post coverage manages to both mention the escape from prison in El Salvador by one of the (alleged) murderers, and also to not mention anything about the immigration status of those charged in this heinous crime. Well, either they are citizen criminals or they are inadmissible alien criminal if they aren't citizens. Participation in crimes of violence -- or moral turpitude -- disqualify aliens from being present in the USA, unless of course they are locked up nice and tight like these piece of shit thug-ass gangstas.
Also locked up nice and tight, Jose Garcia-Perlera, 34, was convicted of murder and other charges related to at least four home invasions. The homes invaded were those of elderly women ranging in age from 63 to 92 who all lived alone.
Yet another predator taken off of the street. Specializing in the most defenseless people he could find who weren't actually in wheelchairs or on crutches, Perlera was unfortunately typical of a certain type of nasty illegal alien criminal. Astute readers will recall our coverage of the heinous Arson-Murder last Thanksgiving. Illegal aliens, also. And then before that was the infamous Hallowe'en murder of 15-year-old Tai Lam. Are we starting to notice a pattern here? Oh, wait, there was that stabbing murder in Aspen Hill, even more foreign gang violence. I do believe that the pattern-detector system is starting to work.
And then there are the Homegrown "Hosers", as a Canadian might say: Take off, eh, you hosers?
To digress: I was living in Denver, Colorado, back in 1994 or so, when their gang problem really started to take off. There was one particularly sad case when some fool was "sagging" at the Capital Hill King Soopers grocery store, and someone remarked on how stupid he looked, and the sagger shot him dead.
At least at this time, "sagging" wasn't a fashion statement, but a challenge. The economy had taken a pretty severe downturn, and a lot of out-of-work Californians had migrated to Denver to look for work; Denver was growing rapidly at the time and had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. Part of that migration was both Crips and Bloods as well as other national-scope gangs, and "sagging" was part of the process of battling over turf. If someone could "sag" in their colors and not get shot, they could claim it as their own turf. Capital Hill in Denver was on one side of the infamous Colfax Avenue, and on the other side were the seriously infested Five Points and Skyland neighborhoods, which were mostly local crews who stayed out of Capital Hill due to long histories with the local police. The newcomers just didn't care, or more likely, didn't know where they were, or what balance they were upsetting.
Of course, the largest and most entrenched gangs here in the DC area are college fraternal organizations. University of Maryland, College Park, is nationally notorious for their willingness to riot at the drop of a hat.
About graduation time every year, Aspen Hill gets infested with, well, people who are probably too damned old to be sporting their frat hats, but there you go, some people never get forced to grow up.
Frequently, we get such things as "Dust Wars" on a fairly widespread scale. Basically, imagine that some guy comes home from college out of state, and as soon as he gets here, his homeboys tell him all sorts of stuff, some true, some not, and probably with most of it exaggerated for purposes of excitement in story-telling. Next thing you know, he's out with the posse patrolling "da hood", much to the discomfiture of people who actually live here and are sick to death of this bullshit.
To make matters worse, generally when they do this sort of thing, they piss off the immigrant gangstas and they retaliate in kind, and the next thing you know, everyone's escalating as best they can. Most of the locals have enough sense to go inside and stay out of the way of something conceptually comparable to the scenes from old Western Movies where a bunch of cowboys have just come in from the trail with pockets full of pay and proceed to get blind drunk and then shoot up the town when the saloons kick 'em out. Where's a decent sheriff when you need one?
Some 22 years ago, this annoyed me enough to write a work of fiction, though readers are strongly advised to keep in mind while reading that truth can be far stranger than fiction, and that this is a story about deception, and a slow descent into madness under the onslaught of asymmetric non-lethal weapons being used in a low-intensity conflict in urban terrain.
Please enjoy (or be terrified by) Strangers in Town.
More to come?
Friday, May 15, 2009
[Part II] Word Gets Around: May and the Art of Overlooked Assholes
Earlier we covered the contrast between the madness of people that seem to feel the need to drive tour parties past my house and point me out as the neighborhood "crazy" person, and the fact that there are real things to worry about. Such as: the 18th Street Gang driving around by the carload, to surround and abduct a 15-year-old boy from a bus-stop in Langley Park and drive him to Gaithersburg, dumping his body in a stream after stabbing him 72 times.
Ah, May, sweet month of new flowers and green leaves. Not so cruel as April, where warm breezes may lure the early blooms only to crisp them like lettuce with unexpected hard frosts.
May is the time when the last of the migratory birds seem to settle into place, and when the robins have long since stopped looking so starved and are now plump enough to fight for nesting space, then come the pouncing birds that love small insects that hatch only after a week or so after the final frosts. These are the birds that I find most entertaining. The antics of the catbirds as they flutter from high point to high point and zoom down on unwary beetles are amusing. Yet what most amuses me are the antics of the mockingbirds.
Mockingbirds are, to most people, some sort of symbol of the extravagance of how many songs one little gray bird can remember. Well, they are certainly adept at uttering a huge number of distinct melodies, some of them quite complex.
Yet anyone who knows much about birds knows why they sing. Although we find their songs enjoyable, to the birds themselves, much of their singing is just declaring their territory, marking off space for themselves, so to speak. To the birds, what we hear as sweet music, they hear as roaring challenges. One bird might be thinking "here would be a good place to have a nest", but then they hear the song of a bird that sounds much larger than themselves, and they go elsewhere. Or they hear the song of another of their kind, and they come together either to fight, or to watch the fights to choose the victor.
The mockingbird, thus, has an extremely large voice for such a small bird. Not quite 3/4th the size of a robin, it can sing almost twice as loud, and when it imitates the call of a robin looking for a battle, it sounds like the biggest robin ever. Any robin hearing that is struck with fear of the legendary giant robin... but if it were ever to see what was making the sound, it would laugh, if birds could laugh. That sound is coming from an insignificant gray bird, not a proud robin with its red breast and long sharp beak. So, to complete its deception, the mockingbird sings very loudly, but only from a hiding place, which it very frequently changes.
Joel Yonathan Ventura-Quintanilla, 22, recently escaped prison in El Salvador, where he had been held for homicide and weapons trafficking. His escape was reported as August 2, 2008.
And of course, where does an escaped murderer in El Salvador feel most safe from the long arm of the law? Montgomery County, Maryland, of course.
Does anyone remember the four kids who were knelt down and shot in the heads, execution style, in New Jersey a few years ago? Their murderer fled to... suburban Maryland.
Does anyone remember the man who fled Mexico with the cash proceeds from the biggest meth-lab bust in Mexican history? And where did he flee to? Why, to Wheaton, where else?
People are not mockingbirds, this is a fact. But the mockingbird is a tiny little thing that has a very powerful weapon in his voice, which can broadcast deception and thereby fear. But he must do it from hiding, so he is small, and a mousy gray, with little black eyes, and no markings. You'd never look twice at him unless he opens his mouth and cuts loose with an immensely varied repertoire of calls, all done at ear-wrecking volume.
Mockingbirds are not people, that's a fact. But the central-american gangster is a tiny little thing that has a very powerful weapon in the fact that he is so unremarkable, you'd never look at him twice. He hides in crowds, but that is how you find him, by looking for what makes him so very dangerous: gangsters never go anywhere alone.
If you want to find a mockingbird that is singing, you have to look in the shadows. You will have to look in a lot of shadows, because the mockingbird knows that the other birds will lose their fear of its song if they see it, and so he moves all of the time.
If you want to find gangsters looking for trouble -- usually because they intend to cause as much as they can -- you need only look for groups of a certain size, of a certain type, and they are usually traveling because if people ever know where they are, and who they are, people who do not like danger but who are prepared to remove danger will come and remove the gangsters. So they hide, and they move frequently, and this means that all you have to do to find them, especially here in Maryland and Montgomery, you just drive around and you will encounter them in their favorite hiding place: their cars.
It's easy to find a mockingbird. You listen for their song.
It's easy to find a gangster driving his carload of homeys around. They have a look on their face like they're getting away with murder and nobody can ever stop them.
Too bad there's no law against that thug face, that leering smirk and the hand illegally outside of the exterior of a moving motor vehicle, or there'd be a perfect excuse to pull 'em over and run their IDs.
After all, there's no place that an escaped murderer from El Salvador feels more assured of being immune to recapture and prosecution than Montgomery County Maryland. Thus, we probably have a higher concentration of them here than in El Salvador, or Honduras, or Nicaragua, etc etc etc. Thus, the odds are also higher that any given vehicle packed full of thug-faced gangstas will have at least one with significant wants-and-warrants. For a cop, it's a no-lose proposition. Pull the fools over for "limb outside of vehicle" and then ID everyone. Your odds of getting major arrests only increases, as will public safety.
Of course, if you don't, the odds are, that you get very dangerous people easily circulating, thinking they are invisible and invincible until they get so full of themselves that they start kidnapping and murdering the children of your taxpayers. Ventura-Quintanilla, after all, was riding around with his homeys for almost a year before he finally got caught.
More to come?
Ah, May, sweet month of new flowers and green leaves. Not so cruel as April, where warm breezes may lure the early blooms only to crisp them like lettuce with unexpected hard frosts.
May is the time when the last of the migratory birds seem to settle into place, and when the robins have long since stopped looking so starved and are now plump enough to fight for nesting space, then come the pouncing birds that love small insects that hatch only after a week or so after the final frosts. These are the birds that I find most entertaining. The antics of the catbirds as they flutter from high point to high point and zoom down on unwary beetles are amusing. Yet what most amuses me are the antics of the mockingbirds.
Mockingbirds are, to most people, some sort of symbol of the extravagance of how many songs one little gray bird can remember. Well, they are certainly adept at uttering a huge number of distinct melodies, some of them quite complex.
Yet anyone who knows much about birds knows why they sing. Although we find their songs enjoyable, to the birds themselves, much of their singing is just declaring their territory, marking off space for themselves, so to speak. To the birds, what we hear as sweet music, they hear as roaring challenges. One bird might be thinking "here would be a good place to have a nest", but then they hear the song of a bird that sounds much larger than themselves, and they go elsewhere. Or they hear the song of another of their kind, and they come together either to fight, or to watch the fights to choose the victor.
The mockingbird, thus, has an extremely large voice for such a small bird. Not quite 3/4th the size of a robin, it can sing almost twice as loud, and when it imitates the call of a robin looking for a battle, it sounds like the biggest robin ever. Any robin hearing that is struck with fear of the legendary giant robin... but if it were ever to see what was making the sound, it would laugh, if birds could laugh. That sound is coming from an insignificant gray bird, not a proud robin with its red breast and long sharp beak. So, to complete its deception, the mockingbird sings very loudly, but only from a hiding place, which it very frequently changes.
Joel Yonathan Ventura-Quintanilla, 22, recently escaped prison in El Salvador, where he had been held for homicide and weapons trafficking. His escape was reported as August 2, 2008.
And of course, where does an escaped murderer in El Salvador feel most safe from the long arm of the law? Montgomery County, Maryland, of course.
Does anyone remember the four kids who were knelt down and shot in the heads, execution style, in New Jersey a few years ago? Their murderer fled to... suburban Maryland.
Does anyone remember the man who fled Mexico with the cash proceeds from the biggest meth-lab bust in Mexican history? And where did he flee to? Why, to Wheaton, where else?
People are not mockingbirds, this is a fact. But the mockingbird is a tiny little thing that has a very powerful weapon in his voice, which can broadcast deception and thereby fear. But he must do it from hiding, so he is small, and a mousy gray, with little black eyes, and no markings. You'd never look twice at him unless he opens his mouth and cuts loose with an immensely varied repertoire of calls, all done at ear-wrecking volume.
Mockingbirds are not people, that's a fact. But the central-american gangster is a tiny little thing that has a very powerful weapon in the fact that he is so unremarkable, you'd never look at him twice. He hides in crowds, but that is how you find him, by looking for what makes him so very dangerous: gangsters never go anywhere alone.
If you want to find a mockingbird that is singing, you have to look in the shadows. You will have to look in a lot of shadows, because the mockingbird knows that the other birds will lose their fear of its song if they see it, and so he moves all of the time.
If you want to find gangsters looking for trouble -- usually because they intend to cause as much as they can -- you need only look for groups of a certain size, of a certain type, and they are usually traveling because if people ever know where they are, and who they are, people who do not like danger but who are prepared to remove danger will come and remove the gangsters. So they hide, and they move frequently, and this means that all you have to do to find them, especially here in Maryland and Montgomery, you just drive around and you will encounter them in their favorite hiding place: their cars.
It's easy to find a mockingbird. You listen for their song.
It's easy to find a gangster driving his carload of homeys around. They have a look on their face like they're getting away with murder and nobody can ever stop them.
Too bad there's no law against that thug face, that leering smirk and the hand illegally outside of the exterior of a moving motor vehicle, or there'd be a perfect excuse to pull 'em over and run their IDs.
After all, there's no place that an escaped murderer from El Salvador feels more assured of being immune to recapture and prosecution than Montgomery County Maryland. Thus, we probably have a higher concentration of them here than in El Salvador, or Honduras, or Nicaragua, etc etc etc. Thus, the odds are also higher that any given vehicle packed full of thug-faced gangstas will have at least one with significant wants-and-warrants. For a cop, it's a no-lose proposition. Pull the fools over for "limb outside of vehicle" and then ID everyone. Your odds of getting major arrests only increases, as will public safety.
Of course, if you don't, the odds are, that you get very dangerous people easily circulating, thinking they are invisible and invincible until they get so full of themselves that they start kidnapping and murdering the children of your taxpayers. Ventura-Quintanilla, after all, was riding around with his homeys for almost a year before he finally got caught.
More to come?
Thursday, May 14, 2009
[Part I] Word Gets Around: Wackos & Weirdos Tour, Reprised
Astute readers will recall previous dissertations on the so-called Welcome Wagon Walking Tour of Weirdos and Wackos.
That was in the context of something not too far from the old practice of Blockbusting in which fear of "outsiders" (in the historical context, black home-buyers) was used to try to either drive "outsiders" out of the neighborhood as fast as they could move in -- allowing the same property to be "churned" or resold multiple times in succession by the same realtor for repeated commissions -- or to convince residents fearful of "outsiders" to move out, generally selling in a hurry for far less than the property was actually worth.
But sometimes this sort of thing happens because of long-standing feuds, where groups such as church groups, civic associations, or even Cults such as Midtown Alcoholics Anonymous, etc., have decided that some individual, individuals, group, or "type" must be ousted.
The really sad part about this sort of thing is that it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and every time you track down one aspect of it and drag it out from under its rock to bleach in the light of day, another aspect of it pops up. It's like playing whack-a-mole. This is the sort of crap that police see year after year; you shut down an open-air drug market on one corner, and it starts up again down the block and two streets over.
One thing never changes. Someone with the motivation -- a feuding neighbor, a church group, greedy realtors, we've all seen this movie -- gets some gullible newcomer and feeds them lies to make them into a patsy. The goal is for the target to have no idea what the patsy has against them, and to waste time dealing with the patsy, rather than tracking back the cat to the ultimate original actor. If the aggressor plays it right, they can involve the patsy in a crime against the target, which means that the patsy can't disengage themselves or rat out the perpetrator without themselves risking legal (or other) repercussions.
There are a lot of manipulative people out there for whom recruitment of a "cat's paw" is either inherent second nature or the result of long practice, or merely of observing other people play this sort of game. Look, don't anyone try to tell me that there's no such phenomenon as skulduggery, black-balling, snitching, scamming or vicious group operations in the suburbs. This is as old as time, we don't even have to talk about the KKK or the Black Panthers or even the so-called "Shower Nuts".
So, today, after an afternoon trying to help one of my neighbors get her overgrown boxwood hedge back into a passable condition, I'm sitting around on the porch cooling off and having a smoke, watching the birds at the bird-feeder, watching traffic, etc.
A truckload of Latinas drives past, and this isn't unusual. What's unusual is that one of them is doing the hand-waving thing and pointing at me, and the whole truckload -- a deep red or purplish 4x4 thing, huge, almost a "Suburban" -- are all staring at me. And someone in the car is yelling something like, "he crazy, I tell you, he's seriously crazy".
I have, sadly, become accustomed to this over the years. However, that I have become accustomed to such outright slander and abusiveness by drive-by pointers-out-of-weirdoes makes it no less scandalous, reprehensible, nor legally actionable... if I can ever find out who they were.
At least some sanity and decency remains in the world, as one of the passengers had to yell over the hysterical harping of the other, "okay, so he's crazy, but is he dangerous? Tell me how he's dangerous".
What, me, dangerous?
And as in recent postings here, I must once again ask, "how did we, as a society, get so fucking crazy?"
Look, try to have some sanity rather than utter hysteria, lady? Or, you know, is it not hysteria, but histrionics? The art of the actor rather than the heartfelt abhorrence of the so-called "normal" people for "weirdos", "freaks", and "outsiders"?
I'd easily chalk it up to politics.
But even for Aspen Hill, for District 4, even for the freakin' ghetto, this is outside the pale of politics. I can't imagine even some of the wackier staffers that hang out around commenting on the blog Maryland Politics Watch carrying on like this in the Real World, but then again, you never know.
We live in a day when (allegedly) groups of a Mexican prison gang -- 18th Street Gang -- noted for being composed mostly of illegal alien violent felons from Mexico have declared war on their long-time rival, MS-13, and (allegedly) assemble a posse from three States and the District and then abduct a 15-year-old boy at a bus-stop and then stab him 72 times.
Hey, I have a bus-stop in my front yard, and supposedly someone got robbed at knife point there over the summer.
Maybe that's why she thinks I'm crazy, for sitting on my porch ready to call the police if someone else gets robbed there?
If that's the case, to whom could I be "dangerous", to the robber, maybe?
How, as a society, did we get so fucking crazy that some hysterical -- or histrionic -- woman in a very nice late-model deep-red SUV drives by my house this evening at about 5:35PM screaming "he's crazy he's crazy" and pointing at me?
How did we, as a society, get so crazy that she can do that and her friends don't call an Intervention for her?
More to come?
That was in the context of something not too far from the old practice of Blockbusting in which fear of "outsiders" (in the historical context, black home-buyers) was used to try to either drive "outsiders" out of the neighborhood as fast as they could move in -- allowing the same property to be "churned" or resold multiple times in succession by the same realtor for repeated commissions -- or to convince residents fearful of "outsiders" to move out, generally selling in a hurry for far less than the property was actually worth.
But sometimes this sort of thing happens because of long-standing feuds, where groups such as church groups, civic associations, or even Cults such as Midtown Alcoholics Anonymous, etc., have decided that some individual, individuals, group, or "type" must be ousted.
The really sad part about this sort of thing is that it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and every time you track down one aspect of it and drag it out from under its rock to bleach in the light of day, another aspect of it pops up. It's like playing whack-a-mole. This is the sort of crap that police see year after year; you shut down an open-air drug market on one corner, and it starts up again down the block and two streets over.
One thing never changes. Someone with the motivation -- a feuding neighbor, a church group, greedy realtors, we've all seen this movie -- gets some gullible newcomer and feeds them lies to make them into a patsy. The goal is for the target to have no idea what the patsy has against them, and to waste time dealing with the patsy, rather than tracking back the cat to the ultimate original actor. If the aggressor plays it right, they can involve the patsy in a crime against the target, which means that the patsy can't disengage themselves or rat out the perpetrator without themselves risking legal (or other) repercussions.
There are a lot of manipulative people out there for whom recruitment of a "cat's paw" is either inherent second nature or the result of long practice, or merely of observing other people play this sort of game. Look, don't anyone try to tell me that there's no such phenomenon as skulduggery, black-balling, snitching, scamming or vicious group operations in the suburbs. This is as old as time, we don't even have to talk about the KKK or the Black Panthers or even the so-called "Shower Nuts".
So, today, after an afternoon trying to help one of my neighbors get her overgrown boxwood hedge back into a passable condition, I'm sitting around on the porch cooling off and having a smoke, watching the birds at the bird-feeder, watching traffic, etc.
A truckload of Latinas drives past, and this isn't unusual. What's unusual is that one of them is doing the hand-waving thing and pointing at me, and the whole truckload -- a deep red or purplish 4x4 thing, huge, almost a "Suburban" -- are all staring at me. And someone in the car is yelling something like, "he crazy, I tell you, he's seriously crazy".
I have, sadly, become accustomed to this over the years. However, that I have become accustomed to such outright slander and abusiveness by drive-by pointers-out-of-weirdoes makes it no less scandalous, reprehensible, nor legally actionable... if I can ever find out who they were.
At least some sanity and decency remains in the world, as one of the passengers had to yell over the hysterical harping of the other, "okay, so he's crazy, but is he dangerous? Tell me how he's dangerous".
What, me, dangerous?
And as in recent postings here, I must once again ask, "how did we, as a society, get so fucking crazy?"
Look, try to have some sanity rather than utter hysteria, lady? Or, you know, is it not hysteria, but histrionics? The art of the actor rather than the heartfelt abhorrence of the so-called "normal" people for "weirdos", "freaks", and "outsiders"?
I'd easily chalk it up to politics.
But even for Aspen Hill, for District 4, even for the freakin' ghetto, this is outside the pale of politics. I can't imagine even some of the wackier staffers that hang out around commenting on the blog Maryland Politics Watch carrying on like this in the Real World, but then again, you never know.
We live in a day when (allegedly) groups of a Mexican prison gang -- 18th Street Gang -- noted for being composed mostly of illegal alien violent felons from Mexico have declared war on their long-time rival, MS-13, and (allegedly) assemble a posse from three States and the District and then abduct a 15-year-old boy at a bus-stop and then stab him 72 times.
Six men and three women, all affiliated with or members of the 18th Street gang, have been arrested in connection with the abduction and stabbing death of a Langley Park teen whose body was found four months ago near a stream in Gaithersburg.
Montgomery County Police are continuing their investigation into the slaying of Dennys Guzman-Saenz, 15, of 14th Avenue, who was abducted from a bus stop Jan. 18, driven to a Gaithersburg park and stabbed 72 times by a group that included a convicted murderer who had escaped from an El Salvadorian prison, according to prosecutors and court records.
[ ... ] ("Nine arrested so far in teen's grisly death", Montes, Sebastian, Montgomery Gazette, May 13, 2009 downloaded 2009 May 14)
Hey, I have a bus-stop in my front yard, and supposedly someone got robbed at knife point there over the summer.
Maybe that's why she thinks I'm crazy, for sitting on my porch ready to call the police if someone else gets robbed there?
If that's the case, to whom could I be "dangerous", to the robber, maybe?
How, as a society, did we get so fucking crazy that some hysterical -- or histrionic -- woman in a very nice late-model deep-red SUV drives by my house this evening at about 5:35PM screaming "he's crazy he's crazy" and pointing at me?
How did we, as a society, get so crazy that she can do that and her friends don't call an Intervention for her?
More to come?
18-Inch Paratroopers: Tactical & Strategic Deception
UPDATED with film link, below.
Operation Husky was the codename for the Allied Invasion of Sicily during the Second World War.
Tactical Deception and Psychological Warfare operations were exceptionally useful in the ramp up to the invasion. My father was one of the so-called Beach Jumpers, a special unit that did nothing but tactical deception in furtherance of psychological warfare. They also did limited incursions against various outposts. These were almost exclusively feints used to draw Axis troops (mostly German but some Italian as well) away from actual targets.
One of the classic operations was that of the "18-inch paratroopers". My dad helped with this.
Click here to view archival film!
Half-sized dummies with half-sized parachutes were dropped from extreme altitude to points near the major strongholds and their observation posts. The Germans had a fairly primitive RADAR system which they calibrated by means of direct visual observation.
Half-sized dummies appeared to the calibrators to be twice as far away as the radar said they were. The Germans re-calibrated their equipment, with the effect that things were actually half of the distance from them than they were estimated to be. This tended to cause the Germans to far overshoot their targets when real raids came.
The "Beach Jumpers" used other tactics as well. One of the most successful of these was to flood the German technical observation systems with technical noise. For example, a few small boats with extremely large and powerful speakers, operating fairly close to shore, could simulate the sound of distant operations of a large fleet, and by radiating significant fake communications emissions from a small platform on a long cable near the position that the sounds seemed to come from, the Germans were again misdirected to re-deploy and re-allocate their resources.
Units operating in close association with the Beach Jumpers, and sometimes the Beach Jumpers themselves, would engage in systematic skirmishing actions which were, to the degree practicable, meant to look to area commanders and widespread false reporting, or "jitters" by officers at remote outposts such as beach highland observation posts. Such lightly-manned outposts might be hit hard by Navy commandos, generally as silently as possible, and being sure to leave a survivor or three to report a scene carefully constructed to appear as if very large numbers of infantry had already passed by, but were no longer in the area, presumably headed inland. If reports were believed, it would cause the Germans to re-deploy. If reports were discounted as "jitters", that means that the German commanders were learning to dismiss the information from their outposts and observers. If the German commanders began to disregard all information from those outposts, all the better.
One story dad told was that when an element of his outfit had taken one such outpost, they reported to the German command post that all was quiet, pretty much giving the punchline of the old joke: "Nobody here but us chickens". The German commanders felt confident that this area was secure, when in fact it was already in the hands of the enemy and had been converted to the use of directing incoming landings. Concurrently, feints and technical deceptions were used to give the impression of landings where there were none, drawing resources away from areas where actual attacks on a main scale would soon begin.
Operation Husky was the codename for the Allied Invasion of Sicily during the Second World War.
Tactical Deception and Psychological Warfare operations were exceptionally useful in the ramp up to the invasion. My father was one of the so-called Beach Jumpers, a special unit that did nothing but tactical deception in furtherance of psychological warfare. They also did limited incursions against various outposts. These were almost exclusively feints used to draw Axis troops (mostly German but some Italian as well) away from actual targets.
One of the classic operations was that of the "18-inch paratroopers". My dad helped with this.
Click here to view archival film!
Half-sized dummies with half-sized parachutes were dropped from extreme altitude to points near the major strongholds and their observation posts. The Germans had a fairly primitive RADAR system which they calibrated by means of direct visual observation.
Half-sized dummies appeared to the calibrators to be twice as far away as the radar said they were. The Germans re-calibrated their equipment, with the effect that things were actually half of the distance from them than they were estimated to be. This tended to cause the Germans to far overshoot their targets when real raids came.
The "Beach Jumpers" used other tactics as well. One of the most successful of these was to flood the German technical observation systems with technical noise. For example, a few small boats with extremely large and powerful speakers, operating fairly close to shore, could simulate the sound of distant operations of a large fleet, and by radiating significant fake communications emissions from a small platform on a long cable near the position that the sounds seemed to come from, the Germans were again misdirected to re-deploy and re-allocate their resources.
Units operating in close association with the Beach Jumpers, and sometimes the Beach Jumpers themselves, would engage in systematic skirmishing actions which were, to the degree practicable, meant to look to area commanders and widespread false reporting, or "jitters" by officers at remote outposts such as beach highland observation posts. Such lightly-manned outposts might be hit hard by Navy commandos, generally as silently as possible, and being sure to leave a survivor or three to report a scene carefully constructed to appear as if very large numbers of infantry had already passed by, but were no longer in the area, presumably headed inland. If reports were believed, it would cause the Germans to re-deploy. If reports were discounted as "jitters", that means that the German commanders were learning to dismiss the information from their outposts and observers. If the German commanders began to disregard all information from those outposts, all the better.
One story dad told was that when an element of his outfit had taken one such outpost, they reported to the German command post that all was quiet, pretty much giving the punchline of the old joke: "Nobody here but us chickens". The German commanders felt confident that this area was secure, when in fact it was already in the hands of the enemy and had been converted to the use of directing incoming landings. Concurrently, feints and technical deceptions were used to give the impression of landings where there were none, drawing resources away from areas where actual attacks on a main scale would soon begin.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Democrats for Robin Ficker?
Anyone? Nah, I think I'll vote for the Union/Developers candidate that wants to expand programs and give out raises in an economic calamity. She'll double the cost of my cigarettes and beer again and if I own a house she's going to tax me until I have to violate housing and fire code by illegally renting out the basement to no less than 15 people in order to pay the taxes.
What a pathetic excuse for a General Special Election this is. Why choose the lesser of two evils? I think I'll write in Cthulhu as my choice.
What a pathetic excuse for a General Special Election this is. Why choose the lesser of two evils? I think I'll write in Cthulhu as my choice.
Paved Yards and Houses Built of Leftovers
At least two top-notch photoessays are to be found at Life in Slumburbia.
"Slumburbia" is a widely accepted term for aging suburbs that aren't adequately maintained.
"Slumburbia" is a widely accepted term for aging suburbs that aren't adequately maintained.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Guilty Flee, Though None Pursue
Talk about proverbs! That's one I'm too busy to look up, though it's somewhere there in Scripture. The usual word is "furtive", though sometimes a furtive effort attempts to disguise its speedy retreat under a fusillade of faux bravado.
Take for example the recent rhetorical thrust over at Maryland Politics Watch.
Just as Ebeneezer Scrooge was haunted in Dicken's novel by "the Ghost of Christmas Past", I'm guessing that on the few occasions Adam Pagnucco gets to sleep -- he's a new parent and doubtless a lot of what he's been doing is best ascribed to sleep=deprivation -- he is haunted by the Ghost of Former Integrity.
In his latest missive, Mr P declares that the editorial staff of the Washington Post, or at least part of it, is out to get him. Well, actually, the Post endorsed his own candidate's main rival for office in the recent Special Elections for District 4's County Council seat.
Yet let's digress for a moment to contrast and compare the dignified silence coming from the camp of former candidate Ben Kramer with the shrill gloating coming from the Navarro camp and the pointless sniping coming from the pages of 'Maryland Politics Watch".
A Post staffer, or someone pretty credibly representing themselves as such, mentions:
"Shepherd" goes on to mention what I have definitely experienced:
There is no doubt in my mind that this is exactly what's been going on.
For example, responding about halfway down this thread I responded:
The remarks on Ms Trachtenberg, mentioned above, included such as this: "[...] This was the second bout of erratic behavior from Trachtenberg in less than a week. [...] The meeting’s organizers stood by helpless to stop her. [...]"
It's not just "Xavier Shepherd" who has noticed the fact that MPW has abandoned integrity to the winds. For example, longtime local and political observer Rocky Lopes observes:
Well, Mr Lopes, everyone has come to realize that MPW is little more than a PR site that is sacrificing its remaining credibility by relentless refusal to allow expression of actual dissent, while hosting "discussions" among a group of very one-sided -- indeed, monomaniacal -- pundits who every day more increasingly resemble sock-puppets. So nobody bothers discussing much on MPW, and indeed they don't much want to discuss it anywhere online. That doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Why not discuss it online? Why, here's a clue from a wannabee totalitarian who has converted his formerly-respectable blog into nothing more than a press-release site for the Nancy Navarro-Laurent campaign:
So, not only does this propaganda site stick mostly to trying to steer discussions and only have discussions be about an extremely one-sided and blinkered view, they've got backers with enough money and connections to aggressively cyberstalk critics.
Here's the latest press-release from the Nancy Navarro-Laurent campaign, or at least the part where her campaign manager brags about the massive support from Special Interests:
The title for this release was "Maryland Democrats Unite Behind Nancy Navarro", and you can read the whole thing at the MPW post entitled: Democrats Unite Against Ficker... Except the Kramers.
Do me a favor, Adam Pagnucco: don't even imply that I support Nancy Navarro. She got elected, fair and square, by an exceptionally narrow margin in an election characterized by extremely low turnout. She's likely to have about exactly one year in office before she is fully embroiled in campaigning to the degree where she cannot effectively represent the people of District 4.
And as for
Mr Robin Ficker: While he may be the most abrasive man in Maryland politics as well as the most feared heckler in mid-Atlantic sports, he and I shared one campaign position which I still hold: the citizens of Montgomery County are being taxed to their limits, especially homeowners.
And Mr Ficker, for what it's worth, uses his own name in his campaign.
Why doesn't Nancy Navarro use her married name? Is she ashamed of the name of her husband, Reginald Laurent, of RHG Group, Inc? (a.k.a. "Regent Hospitality Group, Inc") Is it because you can dig for all of the information you like under the name of Nancy Navarro and all you find is a flood of positive PR from MPW? But what would you find if you searched court records, under "Laurent, Nancy"? Baltimore City Maryland Circuit Court lien 24L08000788, book page 00029/00133, for $19,959.84? What's that all about? Well, you'll never know if you go looking for Nancy Navarro. Nancy Laurent, however...
Take for example the recent rhetorical thrust over at Maryland Politics Watch.
Just as Ebeneezer Scrooge was haunted in Dicken's novel by "the Ghost of Christmas Past", I'm guessing that on the few occasions Adam Pagnucco gets to sleep -- he's a new parent and doubtless a lot of what he's been doing is best ascribed to sleep=deprivation -- he is haunted by the Ghost of Former Integrity.
In his latest missive, Mr P declares that the editorial staff of the Washington Post, or at least part of it, is out to get him. Well, actually, the Post endorsed his own candidate's main rival for office in the recent Special Elections for District 4's County Council seat.
Yet let's digress for a moment to contrast and compare the dignified silence coming from the camp of former candidate Ben Kramer with the shrill gloating coming from the Navarro camp and the pointless sniping coming from the pages of 'Maryland Politics Watch".
The Washington Post may be ignoring our exposing its use of out-of-state intern Steve Stein to write its Maryland editorials, but Stein is not. The Boy King launched an undercover operation against Maryland Politics Watch that we are now exposing, starting today. (Adam Pagnucco, May 12 2009)
A Post staffer, or someone pretty credibly representing themselves as such, mentions:
It's irrelevant whether staff editorials are written by the editor-in-chief or the night watchman. If they are printed, then they reflect the opinion of the staff and of the paper as a whole. ("Xavier Shepherd")
"Shepherd" goes on to mention what I have definitely experienced:
At first I wondered why your blog posts have so few comments attached to them. Admittedly, the average number of reactions to your postings hovers somewhere just above zero. Now I understand-- as a moderator, you simply don't approve any comments that disagree with you.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is exactly what's been going on.
For example, responding about halfway down this thread I responded:
Adam, what are you talking about.
After the way you tore into her about two weeks ago, how can you possibly
claim to think well of Duchy Trachtenberg.
And BTW, you and everything you've written in the last few weeks gives proof positive to the idea of thinking of Unions as "special interests".
Your disingenuity is rising to new levels here. The whole concept of "union" is by definition "special interest", that special interest being, as you say, putting food on the table.
Whether that's to be seen as a "beneficial" special interest, or a detrimental or a neutral one, leave that to the eye of the beholder. But try to not fly in the face of commonsense and start arguing like the pigs in Orwell's "Animal Farm", or we'll all start referring to you as "Snowflake".
The remarks on Ms Trachtenberg, mentioned above, included such as this: "[...] This was the second bout of erratic behavior from Trachtenberg in less than a week. [...] The meeting’s organizers stood by helpless to stop her. [...]"
It's not just "Xavier Shepherd" who has noticed the fact that MPW has abandoned integrity to the winds. For example, longtime local and political observer Rocky Lopes observes:
[...] The silence in the District since the primary has been deafening. Lots of people have asked me "what's going on? Are they still having an election?" [...]
Well, Mr Lopes, everyone has come to realize that MPW is little more than a PR site that is sacrificing its remaining credibility by relentless refusal to allow expression of actual dissent, while hosting "discussions" among a group of very one-sided -- indeed, monomaniacal -- pundits who every day more increasingly resemble sock-puppets. So nobody bothers discussing much on MPW, and indeed they don't much want to discuss it anywhere online. That doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Why not discuss it online? Why, here's a clue from a wannabee totalitarian who has converted his formerly-respectable blog into nothing more than a press-release site for the Nancy Navarro-Laurent campaign:
Finally, our readers should know that we have been unable to locate any voter registration, property ownership, telephone number or consumer bureau information for anyone named Xavier Shepherd in Maryland, Virginia or the District. The only data on individuals by that name applies to residents of Georgia, California, Michigan, Missouri and New York.
So, not only does this propaganda site stick mostly to trying to steer discussions and only have discussions be about an extremely one-sided and blinkered view, they've got backers with enough money and connections to aggressively cyberstalk critics.
Here's the latest press-release from the Nancy Navarro-Laurent campaign, or at least the part where her campaign manager brags about the massive support from Special Interests:
The numerous Democratic state and county officials were joined by a broad coalition of endorsers, including representatives from diverse constituency groups, the Sierra Club of Montgomery County, local labor unions, and the Montgomery County Business PAC.
The title for this release was "Maryland Democrats Unite Behind Nancy Navarro", and you can read the whole thing at the MPW post entitled: Democrats Unite Against Ficker... Except the Kramers.
Do me a favor, Adam Pagnucco: don't even imply that I support Nancy Navarro. She got elected, fair and square, by an exceptionally narrow margin in an election characterized by extremely low turnout. She's likely to have about exactly one year in office before she is fully embroiled in campaigning to the degree where she cannot effectively represent the people of District 4.
And as for
Mr Robin Ficker: While he may be the most abrasive man in Maryland politics as well as the most feared heckler in mid-Atlantic sports, he and I shared one campaign position which I still hold: the citizens of Montgomery County are being taxed to their limits, especially homeowners.
And Mr Ficker, for what it's worth, uses his own name in his campaign.
Why doesn't Nancy Navarro use her married name? Is she ashamed of the name of her husband, Reginald Laurent, of RHG Group, Inc? (a.k.a. "Regent Hospitality Group, Inc") Is it because you can dig for all of the information you like under the name of Nancy Navarro and all you find is a flood of positive PR from MPW? But what would you find if you searched court records, under "Laurent, Nancy"? Baltimore City Maryland Circuit Court lien 24L08000788, book page 00029/00133, for $19,959.84? What's that all about? Well, you'll never know if you go looking for Nancy Navarro. Nancy Laurent, however...
Monday, May 11, 2009
A Break From Boring Madness and Strife
Ah yes, yesterday was a beautiful day. I felt it necessary to spend most of it outside, as the long rains had stopped for long enough for me to cut the overgrown lawn. Besides, I had slept the morning away, this being one of my techniques for dealing with the likelihood of hangover. Saturday night I did indeed tie one on, as the saying goes. I suppose I should be grinning like the cat that ate the canary, but since I let that canary go, I'll just grin like the Cheshire Cat instead... long after that cat had faded, according to "Alice Through the Looking-Glass", the grin remained.
I've been boring people endlessly, and evidently beating a dead horse to the point where nobody notices, with the recent critique of our society going -- to various degrees depending on who and where you are and what you do or don't do -- more than a bit nuts and adrift from its historic moorings, again, to the point where nobody much notices, or if they notice, can't seem to make themselves care.
Well, I notice, and I care. I care deeply, so no doubt I'll be returning to the issue now and then, or at least harking back to it, riffing on a theme as they say in the musician business. But I hope I'll feel far less need, in the future, to point out that sometimes when "birds of a feather flock together" those birds may have gone so far around the bend that they no longer just circle around up in the sky looking for easy pickings, they're muttering to each other "patience my ass, let's go kill something".
If you frequently drive through the northern part of Aspen Hill, cutting through on Bauer Drive or Parkland Drive or Heathfield Road, it's quite possible that you have seen some person standing or sitting on a porch, probably smoking a cigarette.
Now, you very likely have driven past and seen this scruffy individual just standing around, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers. You may have driven past for years and years and every day it's the same thing, if the weather is nice enough -- and sometimes when it is not -- there he is, standing on the porch.
Why doesn't he have a job? -some people ask, and some people make other remarks. Well, based on observations, that is a bum, no doubt about it. Stalk him a while, and it's clear that he's got no job, doesn't shop much, definitely doesn't shop in the finer shops for upscale clothing. Goddamn waste of protoplasm, right? Taking up space and breathing other people's air, right? Almost certainly a mental case living large on the public teat in subsidized housing, for sure! Goddamn leeches, eh?
Well, that would be Yours Truly. Wave next time you drive by, I'm as friendly as you are.
This house has been mortgage free for over thirty years. The lawn is immaculate when the weather's cooperating. We pay lots of taxes and pay them on time, and we own other properties that are as well-maintained, and we rent them out to people.
There's an old story about a fellow who gets hired to work on the line in a factory.
He works as hard as he can, and he gets paid, and as time goes on, he gets paid a little better and he works a little harder. He's not the brightest thing but he's punctual and doesn't take much sick leave so he stays on the job, working working working.
And over across the factory, there's this room with this man in it. The man is there every day, basically sits there with his head in his hands, looking down at something. Every now and then he takes a break, gets up and drinks a cup of coffee, and then sits back down, head in his hands. Doesn't do a damn thing other than drink coffee and sit there with his head in his hands, and the guy working on the factory line is getting madder and madder. One day he just can't stand it any more and starts raising a ruckus with his supervisor.
"Here I am working my fingers to the bone all day, every day, and there's that man over there, he don't do nothin' 'cept sit there with his head in his hands and drink some coffee now and then. I've 'bout had it, I'm fixing to go over there and ask him who he thinks he is over there bein' all lazy and stuff, while we're all out here working our fingers to the bone!"
And the supervisor tells him, "you know, you got the wrong idea. He's doing a job the rest of us can't do".
"And what would that be, I'd like to know!" says the disgruntled worker.
"He's thinking up the products that we manufacture. That's this company's founder and chief engineer. When he's got his head in his hands like that, he's working harder than all of the rest of us, doing a job we cannot do, and the reason you are working at all is because of him sitting there with his head in his hands. He's why I'm working, why you're working, why we have customers for our products and why our products have customers."
"So why ain't he all dressed up like a fancy lawyer or something?"
"I asked him that once, myself. He said he thinks better when he doesn't have a leash tied around his neck, and anyway, who here in this factory would he be trying to impress?"
I get kind of bored with sitting around with my head in my hands, every now and then. And sometimes I've had too much coffee, and too much inside air, and I want to go out and stand around and smoke a cigarette. I like to look over the neighborhood, and see who's passing by.
I also like to see the changes that are, as time passes, ongoing. Some are things of beauty. (Sorry about the "Mister Rogers" voice-over.)
Some things are NOT things of beauty.
A few years ago, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., I went riding around with another such and took lots of pictures. The result was a somewhat infamous page, the General Crapification of Aspen Hill page. It's chock full of images, especially with paved-over yards, ridiculously big houses built over and around the original small structures, general hideousness caused by people parking their working cars on the lawn because of all of the wrecks they have parked in the streets, etc.
Well, back to holding my head in my hands, not visibly working, and only much ever seen from the street when I step out to have a smoke or maybe to maintain my very own yard.
I've been boring people endlessly, and evidently beating a dead horse to the point where nobody notices, with the recent critique of our society going -- to various degrees depending on who and where you are and what you do or don't do -- more than a bit nuts and adrift from its historic moorings, again, to the point where nobody much notices, or if they notice, can't seem to make themselves care.
Well, I notice, and I care. I care deeply, so no doubt I'll be returning to the issue now and then, or at least harking back to it, riffing on a theme as they say in the musician business. But I hope I'll feel far less need, in the future, to point out that sometimes when "birds of a feather flock together" those birds may have gone so far around the bend that they no longer just circle around up in the sky looking for easy pickings, they're muttering to each other "patience my ass, let's go kill something".
If you frequently drive through the northern part of Aspen Hill, cutting through on Bauer Drive or Parkland Drive or Heathfield Road, it's quite possible that you have seen some person standing or sitting on a porch, probably smoking a cigarette.
Now, you very likely have driven past and seen this scruffy individual just standing around, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers. You may have driven past for years and years and every day it's the same thing, if the weather is nice enough -- and sometimes when it is not -- there he is, standing on the porch.
Why doesn't he have a job? -some people ask, and some people make other remarks. Well, based on observations, that is a bum, no doubt about it. Stalk him a while, and it's clear that he's got no job, doesn't shop much, definitely doesn't shop in the finer shops for upscale clothing. Goddamn waste of protoplasm, right? Taking up space and breathing other people's air, right? Almost certainly a mental case living large on the public teat in subsidized housing, for sure! Goddamn leeches, eh?
Well, that would be Yours Truly. Wave next time you drive by, I'm as friendly as you are.
This house has been mortgage free for over thirty years. The lawn is immaculate when the weather's cooperating. We pay lots of taxes and pay them on time, and we own other properties that are as well-maintained, and we rent them out to people.
There's an old story about a fellow who gets hired to work on the line in a factory.
He works as hard as he can, and he gets paid, and as time goes on, he gets paid a little better and he works a little harder. He's not the brightest thing but he's punctual and doesn't take much sick leave so he stays on the job, working working working.
And over across the factory, there's this room with this man in it. The man is there every day, basically sits there with his head in his hands, looking down at something. Every now and then he takes a break, gets up and drinks a cup of coffee, and then sits back down, head in his hands. Doesn't do a damn thing other than drink coffee and sit there with his head in his hands, and the guy working on the factory line is getting madder and madder. One day he just can't stand it any more and starts raising a ruckus with his supervisor.
"Here I am working my fingers to the bone all day, every day, and there's that man over there, he don't do nothin' 'cept sit there with his head in his hands and drink some coffee now and then. I've 'bout had it, I'm fixing to go over there and ask him who he thinks he is over there bein' all lazy and stuff, while we're all out here working our fingers to the bone!"
And the supervisor tells him, "you know, you got the wrong idea. He's doing a job the rest of us can't do".
"And what would that be, I'd like to know!" says the disgruntled worker.
"He's thinking up the products that we manufacture. That's this company's founder and chief engineer. When he's got his head in his hands like that, he's working harder than all of the rest of us, doing a job we cannot do, and the reason you are working at all is because of him sitting there with his head in his hands. He's why I'm working, why you're working, why we have customers for our products and why our products have customers."
"So why ain't he all dressed up like a fancy lawyer or something?"
"I asked him that once, myself. He said he thinks better when he doesn't have a leash tied around his neck, and anyway, who here in this factory would he be trying to impress?"
I get kind of bored with sitting around with my head in my hands, every now and then. And sometimes I've had too much coffee, and too much inside air, and I want to go out and stand around and smoke a cigarette. I like to look over the neighborhood, and see who's passing by.
I also like to see the changes that are, as time passes, ongoing. Some are things of beauty. (Sorry about the "Mister Rogers" voice-over.)
Some things are NOT things of beauty.
A few years ago, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., I went riding around with another such and took lots of pictures. The result was a somewhat infamous page, the General Crapification of Aspen Hill page. It's chock full of images, especially with paved-over yards, ridiculously big houses built over and around the original small structures, general hideousness caused by people parking their working cars on the lawn because of all of the wrecks they have parked in the streets, etc.
Well, back to holding my head in my hands, not visibly working, and only much ever seen from the street when I step out to have a smoke or maybe to maintain my very own yard.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
[Part V] The Man Come, and Say He Gonna Take You Away
You better stop, children!
What's that sound?
Everybody look
What's goin' down?
On May 3 we covered some history and geography that paints a sort of bulls-eye on the general vicinity of MD-28 and Rock Creek for the Midtown Alcoholics Anonymous Sex Cult.
We then covered some basic morality as it relates to taking actions and living with outcomes.
Then we did some digressive exposition on Alcoholism, Cultism, and Neighborhoods Gone Bad.
We did some exposition on the philosophy of Jefferson separating Church and State, on pseudo-science as formally entrenched in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual version IV, and how Mystics are seeking to penetrate the systems of government and society by offering Cultish Religion and Pseudo-Science as an alternative to incarceration.
I very frequently find myself asking myself, "how did we, as a society, get so fucking crazy?"
I once wrote a science fiction story in which terrorists infected the water-supply with a genetically-engineered bowel parasite that had been altered to take up residence in the human bowels -- giardia does that quite well in its natural state -- and then produce subclinical levels of ergotamines, precursor chemicals to lysergic acid diethylamide.
In that silly piece of science fiction, everyone exposed to this goes slowly -- or not so slowly -- out of their mind. Don't worry, our water supply is safe and abundant.
Yet, how did we as a society get so crazy? How did we as a society get so crazy?
Today, I was at the dedication ceremony for the Matthew Henson Hiker Biker Trail, which also was the dedication of a pavilion-and-memorial for Idamae Garrott, an influential Montgomery County politician, instrumental in the development of that park.
I go to a lot of this sort of event.
After all, I have lived in this neighborhood since 1963, and this park is a big deal in our neighborhood, as well as in adjoining neighborhoods.
Also, since about 2002 or so, I have been involved in a lot of things in the neighborhood. I have been a member of the board of directors of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc. I have been a longtime member of the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative, a rather broad-based "community policing" anti-crime initiative. After all, Aspen Hill does in fact have significant crime problems.
On about four occasions over the last five years, I have encountered a certain uniformed officer. I always say hi to this officer, as I think it's proper to be civil to our law-enforcement people. The last time I saw this officer, and a variety of other law-enforcement personnel I've met over six years of once-monthly meetings in pursuit of making Aspen Hill a safer place, was at a Town Hall meeting addressing perception of danger in the Wheaton/Aspen Hill "mid-county crime corridor". I was a candidate for County Council and so it seemed reasonable to me to attend, especially since an e-mail invited me to come.
So, today, I said hi to this officer. This officer said something to the effect of "we meet again, are you following me around", and I said something -- after some pause to think -- that having citizens follow police officers around was rather a reversal of the usual order of things. This officer remarked to the effect that "not really, you'd be surprised by the number of police wannabees out there". I remarked that, actually, that doesn't surprise me at all. (See also, thematically, the entire content of this multi-part series and the preceding series.)
The Montgomery County Department of Police has been promoting "community policing", a public outreach program inviting the community of concerned citizens to develop contacts with, and pass information to, local law-enforcement. Can we reasonably interpret this as the County attempting to find, and make friends with and informants of, "wannabees"? Is that what this uniformed officer was telling me?
If the contempt that I heard in this officer's voice -- and as the officer was in uniform I presume that it was a professional voice -- was for citizens co-operating with police in pursuit of a safer and more-secure neighborhood, I have to wonder why this "community policing" program is being pursued, much less why it is being funded. I am not a cop, and I am not a wannabee. I am a concerned citizen who actually lives here in the neighborhood where I have encountered this person four times over five years. I live here. The officer's visiting, albeit on the job.
I'm a local, active in local politics and in community, and I am a journalist if not an official media journalist. If you don't see this as journalism, why the hell are you reading it? I've been spending cash-out-of-pocket for years and putting in a lot of sweat equity cleaning up local parks and looking for glaring problems to report under the "community policing" theory of operation. If that makes me a "wannabee" and properly the object of open contempt at a gathering featuring "everyone who's anyone" in Montgomery County politics at both the County and State level, perhaps that explains why the general public isn't living up to expectations in terms of joining in the whole "community policing" thing.
And again, I ask you: how did we, as a society, get so fucking crazy?
As in my little science fiction story, I'd love to blame it on terrorist tampering with the water supply. In the story, it was an infestation with a genetically-engineered bowel parasite, giardia. That would actually be nice... there's a cure for that.
But this isn't terrorists... We did it to ourselves.
It's one thing when you've got crazy people infesting the neighborhoods around the local addiction clinic and homeless-handout center:
Leggett's proposal to move facilities is a result of meetings with residents who live near Broome at 751 Twinbrook Parkway and have said that the clinic's location in a residential neighborhood, next to Meadow Hall Elementary School and near Rockville High School, is inappropriate.
The clinics, which have been located at Broome for more than 20 years, offer services for people dealing with substance abuse and mental health disorders and a re-entry program for those released from prison.
"I know that I'm outraged and it sounds like the council members don't really believe it's as bad as it is," said Jennifer Espinoza, who lives across the street from the clinics.
County officials responded with short-term solutions, including hiring part-time security guards during the hours when children are walking to and from school and installing security cameras. ("County elections board to move to Gaithersburg: Fate of neighboring drug addiction and mental health clinics remains uncertain", Crisostomo, Contessa and Montes, Sebastian, Montgomery Gazette, May 6, 2009downloaded 2009 May 9)
I've been to 751 Twinbrook Parkway on many occasions. It's where you register your candidacy for County Council. And like Ms Espinosa, I am familiar with the problems there.
[ ... ]
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. [...]
[ ... ]
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.
[ ... ]
As I asked earlier...
How did we, as a society, and how did we, as individuals, get to be so fucking crazy.
More to come?
