[Part II] Bring Your Own Handcart to MoCo

The recent historic election in Honduras, following a coup and the ouster of Presidente José Manuel Zelaya Rosales forced me into a slight detour for some research.

I had forgotten one of my own classic dicta about how emotionally invested a lot of our "immigrants" -- legal and otherwise -- are in the politics of which ever Beloved Homeland caused them to leave it.

[...] it cannot be sufficiently stressed that these immigrant communities retain extremely strong cultural and linguistic ties to their former countries, and certainly to their own local community. There is in many of these communities a powerful drive to form Enclaves and to remain isolated culturally from the rest of local America. These isolated foreign subcultures are -- due to the adherence to their own particular language and cultural norms, and the gossip and scandals that circulate within -- essentially huge intelligence apparats, and there is no question that within these communities there are those who manipulate the foreign cultural weltgeist to their own political ends, whether directly for the advancement as special-interest of that particular foreign subculture, or to polarize that particular foreign subculture against their personal enemies, or to essentially alert the whole foreign subculture to collect information [...]

Well, that's a bit over-long and a bit over-involved, but let's just say that every time some military officer in Botswanaland picks some lint out of his navel, I get chased down the street by the Tonton Macoutes, evidently on the suspicion that I know something about something.

Of course, I never can figure out who the hell are this-week's foreign crazies who are screaming at me until a day or two later, when I see something in the paper that tends to offer a plausible explanation.

As for Honduras, regardless of who the vote-counters declare to be victor, they've got problems of their own, such as their immense problem with Child Gangs versus Police Death Squads.

Here in the States, we don't have police death squads, right? But we definitely have Honduran gangsters here. And all things considered, notably where they come from, I don't suppose I can blame them for not wanting to be there, but rather to be here.

Yet I am not one of the folks who likes to let my bleeding-heart liberalism get in the way of practicality. If the child gangs of Honduras are an outrage and a horror, let them be an outrage and a horror in Honduras, not in Eastern Montgomery County, Maryland... which is where I am unfortunately required to live.

But what is going on in Honduras?

"President Maduro was elected because he promised our people a 'Zero Tolerance' crime policy --- meaning the eradication of gangs and other criminal elements. Alas, this strategy has failed. The police have misinterpreted the spirit and corrupted the letter of this mandate. Gangs as a whole have not been eradicated but many of their members are being exterminated. Apparently, since there are no rehabilitation centers for delinquent youths, the easiest way to neutralize them is to eliminate them. What is immensely sad, I believe, is that Honduran society has turned a blind eye toward violence. Extrajudicial executions have become as common as bread and butter. Ironically, exterminated or not, the gangs still control the streets and whole neighborhoods in their grip. Nothing has really changed." (Peña, Billy, 2004, Tiempo)

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During the recent economic meltdown, the construction industry effectively shut down, with the exception of a few major capital projects which were so close to completion that it made no sense to stop, or public works projects which were already funded and "shovel ready".

The vast majority of non-degreed adult immigrants in the region -- especially those who are illegally present in the US -- worked in construction. Effectively there is 100-percent unemployment in this population. Those who most recently arrived are those who suffer the most and indeed a fair number of those appear to have returned to their homelands, taking with them everything they can carry.

Yet there is another population here which deserves mention and some credit: the US-born and US-raised children of immigrant parents.

For long years I have pressed for actual enforcement of immigration laws, and for long years very little has been done. The only thing that could ever cause people to leave, to better yet to never come, has occurred in the form of an economic calamity which has left about 15-percent of all American citizens unemployed. Shutting down the "jobs magnet" means there isn't a lot of incentive for foreigners to sneak into the country... unless of course they are either on the run from the law in their homeland, or on the run from gangs in their homeland, and in many cases being on the run from one means you are also on the run from the other. See the references above and link to the Tontons Macoutes.

Yet in these long years, the babes-in-arms of the "refugees" have grown up, and many of them have acquired citizenship status, or having been born here, always were citizens. And those who have jobs are keeping them, and have become the breadwinners for their families. The parents who could send them to Catholic school back during the construction boom are no doubt glad of their investments... but a lot of the jobs filled by the young bilinguals are jobs as counter clerks. They don't get paid much, not enough to support their families.

Back in the Beloved Homelands that the parents fled "for a better life" here in the States, jobs often were obtained and held only through variations on either the "patronage system" where people paid kickbacks and bribes all over the place and to practically everyone they ever encountered, or jobs were obtained and held by incapacitating other applicants to the positions. Someone's trying to get the same job as you? Well, if you can whack off their hand with a machete, they're not going to be holding a shovel. This sort of literally cut-throat competition inevitably led to a system of patronage, where the "caudillos" (literally, those who cut off the tail of the bull after a bullfight) and their henchmen could promote workplace safety at gunpoint if necessary.

Here in the States, a far descendant of that system is embedded in our legal codes, in our laws against workplace discrimination, in our very culture. Beating someone because they're applying for the same job is generally thought to be beneath any standards of decency... unless the job applied for is with a criminal gang.

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The children of immigrants are frequently "bi-cultural", but in most of this nation's history, the children of immigrants were very quick to mostly abandon most of the culture of their parents' origin nations. After all, in almost all cases, America was the destination of choice, preferable to the origin culture, and it was widely understood that it was the laws and the culture of America which made it such a desirable destination.

In many cultures, there's a saying equivalent to "Don't bring old dirt into a new house".

That saying should be the guideline for all immigration to the USA, and for many years, it was the guideline.

For example, after the Second World War, you didn't see a whole lot of Russian Jewish emigrants espousing Communism. You didn't see a lot of West German emigrants espousing Fascism, you didn't see a lot of Japanese emigrants espousing Shinto Imperialism. And even if the parents were silly enough to do such a thing, the children ignored their parents. After all, the children were Americans and America was where they lived and where they intended to remain. The old country ways didn't work so well, or they would be there, not here, right?

So the question remains: what, if anything, has changed?

Do the American children of the Latin-American "immigrants" (legal or otherwise) remember "don't bring old dirt into a new house"? Will they simply get on with being plain old Americans in America? Or will they cling to their identity of being foreigners?

Look at it this way: for a long long time, and even in the modern day, the German government did its level best to promote a sense of "german-ness" in Americans of Germanic ethnicity. And we Americans of Germanic ethnicity saw this for what it was: a transparent attempt to divide loyalties. Had it worked, the Second World War might have been a bit less-easily won, and in fact, it wasn't until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that public opinion turned -- against even Nazis --sufficiently to support militarism against Germany. The US government and public policy was still hindered by the way they had treated German-Americans during the first World War, and after that abusiveness, the post-war German government had continued to try to exploit that.

Yet we German-Americans generally knew where our loyalties should be: with our homeland, the United States. We're not Germans. We're Americans.

I can only hope that the Americans whose families came from Central America will feel the same way.

But hopes are not realities.

How are they behaving, what evidence do they give us of their actual loyalties, these US-born children of "immigrants"?

With whom do they ally? With their fellow Americans, or with foreign gangsters who just happen to resemble these new Americans?

Time will tell, and We Shall See.

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More to come?

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[Part I] The Road to Hell Is Paved In MoCo

Every now and then I decide that it's time to throw caution to the winds and this seems like a time to do so.

I'm seeing this thing happening all over the County, thought of course it's worst in low-rent places like East Aspen Hill or Wheaton-Glenmont.

Here's the start of how it works.

Some national-scale or more-or-less national-scale retailer with a fairly well-established customer base -- or near-monopoly level market segment domination -- wisely decides that it would be good to comply with Federal regulations regarding employment of disabled persons, legal immigrants and/or legal work-visa grantees, and "persons of color".

This is all well and good so far, admirable, etc.

However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that road to hell ordinarily is best avoided once you start to see where it leads.

But there are people in life -- abundant in numbers and those numbers are only growing or so it seems -- who have finally done the math and who have decided that they will be the ones who put others on the Road to Hell, rather than being stuck on it themselves.

How did we get to this place?

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Since the early 1980s, global population has doubled.

This isn't just me talking. This is a fact.

In the USA, we are a civilized nation of civilized people, and since the introduction of the Birth Control Pill in the 1960s, we have restrained our rate of reproduction to the point where we should have had little or no population growth after about the Year 2000. Indeed, absent out-of-control immigration -- legal and otherwise -- we should actually be seeing a slight population decline here on the even of the Year 2010.

With growth in population, of course, there is a growth in consumption of resources.

Even without the current economic downturn, the USA has become a land with no surpluses.

With the current economic downturn, we are indeed a land with such a debt burden that we will probably never again have any form of surplus.

Heretofor, we have been able to tax the wealthy to support a lot of social programs to ease the plight of the poor.

With these social programs such as Welfare, we were able to offer such effective basic support that almost nobody would ever truthfully say "I did not choose a life of crime and violence, it was forced upon me as a necessity of survival. Without living a criminal life, I could not eat".

Yet crime continued to grow, in some places, and fine tuning of the Welfare and social outreach systems had to occur, and it did.

That this beneficial change happened at the consecutive peaks of some of the greatest economic "bubble" booms seems to have been overlooked.

That people didn't get involved in widespread crime, that's a result of the fact that most people will always take the road that has the best perceived combination of ease and little risk. When there's a "help wanted" sign on every storefront window, and when it's easier to take home a decent paycheck than it is to burglarize your neighbors and fence the loot, the vast majority of people will work a job and take a paycheck. Anyone who does not, in such conditions, is almost certainly psychologically defective. Nobody other than sociopaths or other varieties of the criminally insane would choose crime when it is far more profitable -- not to mention safe -- to work a job or run their own legal business.

But when times get tough, even decent people from good backgrounds and of decent moral character, even these people can find that hunger is now a constant companion, that need only increases, that they are at the edge of homelessness, and that between them and every hope of employment are a vast cadre of hate-filled foreigners, many of whom are here illegally and who ran businesses from the shadowy underground of political patronage and backroom pay-offs and slickly skating past the checks-and-balances which all of the honest people honored because for the honest people, it was the right thing to do, the proper way to run a community or nation.

In the best of times, people are willing to look the other way as some people skirt the rules and live off of the fat of the land. When you have plenty of money, nobody complains too much about an increase in taxes, taxes needed to fill the gaps.

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I like to watch birds.

I don't make a big deal of it, sneaking around in the woods with binoculars looking for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker or whatever.

I just put out a bird feeder and watch the local birds flock in.

The Robins are seasonal, of course, and they also are carnivorous; they don't care about bird-seed one way or the other. The Cardinals, Nuthatches, and even some of the woodpeckers, they come around for the seed.

Usually, squirrels will eat what they can steal from the feeder, but it's not essential for their survival. They're just greedy; they usually have plenty of acorns.

Acorns aren't just food for the squirrels, deer rely on them during the winter.

Last year, and this year, there are no acorns. The oak which usually buries the back yard nearly an inch deep in acorns has failed to fruit for the second year in a row, and the rest of the nut trees were similarly fruitless, or nearly so. This may relate to the catastrophe in bee-keeping which continues to unfold around us.

So, if I don't keep the bird-feeder full, the birds can fly away and find some better place... but the deer will starve, and so will the squirrels.

Yet so long as I feed the squirrels, and the deer, I also feed the birds...

And I also feed the RATS.

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Obviously, I don't want to feed the rats. While the squirrels will stay outside in their nests, the rats insist on coming inside.

And as we all know, when the rats come into your house, they invite all of their friends...

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More to come.

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Post-Prandial Paralysis, or,

How I Stopped Eating Turkey and Became One

Happy day after Thanksgiving, I guess.

I'm not a big fan of holidays. This is doubtless a personal peculiarity, though I know I'm not alone in feeling that the main reason that most holidays exist is so that the whole family can be got all in one place at one time to put their dysfunctions on parade. I long ago decided that to the degree I can duck out on family functions, I should. Trust me, by the time the dinner is actually on the table, the last thing anyone should want would be me with a carving knife in my hand.

Maryland Must Ban SEXTING While DRIVING

Once again, the British are leading us in Traffic Safety Public Service Announcements.


Don't let this happen to your teenager!

Taking It Back A Piece At A Time, Or

Now In Prison These Guys Can Join A Real Gang

In Emerging Trends in Mid-County Crime, or
Territoriality and Racism Escalate from Harassment to Violence, I covered a little background on the subject of Vigilantism and the rise of "unofficial security companies", which are commonly known as gangsin Aspen Hill.

In my usual meandering and unreadably rambling way, I noted that now and then you see lots of really sketchy looking people taking up positions suitable for conducting observation and launching attacks.

Well, it's a bit like Oscar Wilde's characterization of Fox Hunts, "the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible". Sometimes it's hard to tell whether the hard-faced men and women dressed in hoodies and cheap sneakers are in a gang determined to break the law, or to enforce it. Usually you can't ever really tell -- and thus all should be feared and avoided on the presumption that what looks like a gangster probably is a gangster -- until there's some sort of press release.

The US Department of Justice put out this press release:

Nineteen Alleged Latin Kings Gang Members Indicted on Federal Racketeering Conspiracy Charge
Defendants Allegedly Conspired to Commit Murders, Assaults, Robberies and Arson

A federal grand jury in Greenbelt, Md., has indicted 19 alleged members of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (Latin Kings) for conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise. The indictment was returned under seal yesterday and unsealed today upon the arrests of the defendants.

"Gangs, like the one charged in this indictment, may be relentless in protecting their turf, but we will be relentless in taking it back," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer. "As this case demonstrates, the Justice Department will use all of its authority – including the RICO statute and the federal conspiracy laws – to dismantle gangs, from the lowest-level members to the highest-ranking leaders. Working together with our partners in the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, as well as other federal, state and local agencies, we will make our communities, our neighborhoods, and our children safer by prosecuting these gangs with resolve and determination."

"This case is part of a series of federal racketeering and conspiracy prosecutions in which federal, state and local agencies have joined to target leaders and key members of violent gangs operating in Maryland," said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. "Today’s indictment alleges that the Latin Kings gang is an organized criminal enterprise with leaders and members who commit violent crimes. Other federal racketeering cases are pending in Maryland against MS-13, Black Guerilla Family, PDL Bloods and TTP Bloods, and additional gang investigations are ongoing with the support of federal, state and local partners. We believe that this coordinated approach to gang prosecutions is contributing to the reduction in violent crime in Maryland."

"Today we executed the enforcement action on a very violent group of criminals who call themselves the Latin Kings," said ATF Deputy Director Kenneth Melson. "We dismantled a large part of the Latin Kings organization whose members allegedly used violence to secure the sanctity of their private society. We have made a serious impact on violent crime and gang violence. This case is a great example of the efforts of ATF and our law enforcement partners to fight violent crime nationwide."

According to the indictment, the defendants were members of the Latin Kings, a violent street gang with members operating in Maryland since at least 2007. The traditional power centers of the Latin Kings are predominantly located in the Chicago and New York metropolitan areas, with thousands of members scattered across the United States and overseas.

Members of the Latin Kings greet each other using a set of hand-signs, each intended to evoke the shape of a crown, according to the indictment. In addition, Latin Kings often greet one another by exclaiming "ADR" or "Amor De Rey," which means "King’s Love" in Spanish. The Latin Kings use symbols depicting three- or five-pointed crowns, lions and Inca- or Aztec-inspired artwork to demonstrate their affiliation. The colors associated with, and often worn by, the Latin Kings are black and gold.

At the local level, groups of Latin Kings are organized into "tribes." The indictment alleges that in the spring of 2007, Miguel Cruz and Erick Roman established the Maryland Latin Kings, calling the tribe the Royal Lion Tribe of Maryland. The indictment charges that from a date unknown to the present, the Latin Kings members conspired to commit attempted murders, robberies, witness tampering and arson to further their racketeering scheme.

For example, the indictment alleges that Latin Kings members stored guns for Erick Roman, and gathered materials for a firebombing ordered by Roman. Gang members allegedly hunted for rival MS-13 members to shoot; kicked and stabbed a suspected MS-13 member near the Marylander Condominiums in Langley Park, Md., in December 2007; and in January 2009, fired shots at MS-13 members at a night club in Queens, N.Y. Latin Kings members allegedly robbed the home of a drug dealer at the Marylander Condominiums and a prostitute at a motel in Laurel, Md.; assaulted and stabbed two victims in Wheaton, Md.; agreed to murder a security guard at an apartment complex near the Marylander Condominiums; and burglarized a gun shop. In the summer of 2009, Francisco Ortiz, Leuri Read and other alleged members attempted to murder a victim by beating him with a wooden object and by stabbing him.

Gang members also allegedly attempted to shoot a victim in the leg for wanting to leave the gang; beat alleged fellow member Joseph Deleon and held another at gunpoint, slicing him with a knife, as punishment for violating Latin Kings rules; created a hit list containing names of Maryland Latin Kings members; and agreed to run background checks on new members and members under investigation. Ortiz, Read, Remy Heath and Brandon Smith allegedly agreed in January 2009 to kill a female gang member for "snitching" on Latin Kings members who had just been sentenced in federal court in Maryland for possession of an unregistered destructive device.

Latin Kings members communicate with members of their own tribe and with members across the country through the Internet and telephone. In October 2008, a member ordered all other members to take down any pictures of "hammers {guns} and knives," on their MySpace pages, due to his belief that the police wanted "to do RICO" on the members. Another member cautioned against talking about shooting people over the telephone.

The indictment charges the following defendants with conspiracy to participate in the racketeering activities of the Latin Kings:

Erick Roman, a/k/a "Erick Javier Sierra," "Malian-T," and "King Malian-T," age 33;

Miguel Cruz, a/k/a "Skibee" and "King Skibee," age 44;

Matthew Aguilar, a/k/a "Mateo" and "King Mateo," age 24;

Miguel Castillo, a/k/a "Colombia" and "King Colombia", age 22;

Joseph Deleon, a/k/a "Spirit" and "King Spirit," age 28;

Andres Echevarria, a/k/a "B-Boy" and "King B-Boy," age 22;

Remy Heath, a/k/a "Remy," "King Remy" and "King Mello," age 25;

Jorge Kilgore, a/k/a "Murda" and King Murda," age 20;

Erick Martinez, a/k/a "Eazie" and "King Eazie," age 19;

Melvin Carlos Nolasco, a/k/a "Joker" and "King Joker," age 22;

Senni Nolasco-Rodriguez, a/k/a "Cano" and "King Cano," age 20;

Francisco Ortiz, a/k/a "Francis Gabriel Ortis," "Pone" and "King Pone," age 25;

Roddy E. Paredes Jr., a/k/a "Guate," "King Guate" and "Walter," age 27;

Leuri Read, a/k/a "Kampana" and "King Kampana," age 21;

Alejandro Ivan Rodriguez, a/k/a "Sombra" and "King Sombra," age 32;

Nelson Santos, a/k/a "Nelly" and "King Nelly," age 26;

Chinua Shepperdson, a/k/a "Nu," "NuNu" and "King Nu," age 27;

Brandon Smith, a/k/a "Little One" and "King Little One," age 25; and

Hugo Soto-Moran, a/k/a "Vision" and "King Vision," age 22.

The defendants face a maximum sentence of life in prison. The defendants are scheduled to have their initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt today starting at 11:00 a.m. One defendant, Remy Heath, is a fugitive.

An indictment is not a finding of guilt. An individual charged by indictment is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Emily Glatfelter and David Salem, and Trial Attorney Lara M. Peirce of the Criminal Division’s Gang Unit. The case is being investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the Montgomery County Police Department; Montgomery County State’s Attorney Office; the Prince George’s County Police Department; Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Office; the New York City Police Department; the Gaithersburg Police Department; the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office; the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office; the Maryland National Capital Park Police - Prince George’s County Division; the Maryland State Police; the U.S. Secret Service; and the Internal Revenue Service - Criminal Investigation.

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Hugo Soto-Moran and Miguel Castillo, allegedly at the instigation of Erick Roman, were charged in the botched gang firebombing in the 13800 block of Parkland Drive -- right down the street from me -- which took place on January 8, 2008.

The typical look and colors of the Latin Kings of MoCo is all over the internet, if you know where to look. Just google for the "street names" of the indictees listed above.

More images are available here at this cheap MySpace knockoff site. Get 'em while they're hot, they're yanking them down as fast as they can. Keep in mind, "G", if you're bold enough to put your face on Da Web, the feds -- and even stupid civilians like me -- are smart enough to find it.

For example, some Latin King (or "Lion King Tribe") mindset and cultural insight can be had at the website of El Malian-T promoting for "Latin Outlaw Records".

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In any case, I feel much better now, knowing that at least some of the sketchy-looking types hanging around clearly taking up positions may now be explained -- some of them, at least -- as Federal authorities and their associates getting into position to do something Montgomery County Police seem generally unwilling to do: bring down some dangerous thug gangstas that are known to be working in my neighborhood.

Thanks fellahs!

A Brief Note On Forcing Me Out Of Town

Someday, my poor old mother will pass on. While she lived here, she created a reservation of natural Maryland forest ecology, as much as can be said to exist anywhere in second-growth Montgomery and Aspen Hill. We have worked hard over about 40 years to preserve and create a place of beauty that should promote harmony. It was originally my intention to carry forward this laudable task. Yet if I cannot enjoy this as a bequest, because jealous or hateful people don't like me living here, once my poor old mother's time on this earth is past, I have plans on disposition of the part of the estate that should come down to me.

I will aggressively move to establish full ownership of the property in Probate.

Once this is done, should anyone in the neighborhood convince me that my only path to survival and prosperity is to move out of the neighborhood, I shall do so, while taking the following steps:

• Cut down every last tree and shrub on the property.
  
• Pave the yard from property line to property line.
  
• Sell the house at a dead loss, at approximately half the valuation it should have. This will drastically affect the market valuation of all neighbors.
  
• I will do extensive research on both potential buyers and the desires of the neighbors, and sell the house at half price to the biggest asshole I can find who is also most likely to remain resident longest.
  
• Articulate my Last Will and Testament to require at least this level of scorched-earth policy in estate resolution. Should people decide that it's better to kill me than force me to move, they'll get worse results.
  

Emerging Trends in Mid-County Crime, or

Territoriality and Racism Escalate from Harassment to Violence

With the recent restoration of the 911-calls-for-service logging feed to crimereports.com we see a change in pattern developing.

For one thing, while the incidence of "theft from vehicles" remains about the same, there appears to be a significant increase in reports of Assault. In the Aspen Hill area, of course, crime tends to be concentrated in and around the so-called "BelPre-Hewitt Focus Area", which is a designated grant recipient area under the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention's Collaborative Supervision and Focused Enforcement ("CSAFE").

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Noted in passing, the Governor's Crime Control and Prevention office ("GOCCP") homepage has a link to crimereports.com on it. The GOCCP officially supports such mapping as an excellent tool promoting public safety and citizen awareness.)

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Life in this part of the country is predictable in many ways, and unpredictable in many other ways, because of a varity of cycles imposed by forces originating outside of the area.

Obviously, there are the influences of weather. The hot and humid Dog Days of mid-August often bring a peak in certain types of crime, notably those caused by momentary surges of passion, when tempers flare in the intolerable heat. And in deep winter we tend to see increases in robberies and thefts of valuables, especially around the Holidays, and especially near shopping centers. Nothing says "Christmas" like a pile of toys you didn't have to pay for because you stole them, eh? The people who repair windows see high volumes of business at this time of year, especially from people who leave their shopping bags in the passenger compartment of their vehicles, rather than securing them out of sight in the trunks of the cars.

Other cycles are less definable. Some of these come from downtown in the District, or for that matter may originate at the Pentagon. Wars, and rumors of wars, deployments abroad and redeployments back home can cause significant disruptions in the area. For example, the original National Guard call-ups immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001 resulted in a near decimation of uniformed police officers, moreso in some districts than in others. A very high percentage of police are also subject to National Guard or Army Reserve call-ups. Somewhat surprisingly, various units of the Maryland National Guard are in instant high demand when hostilities erupt abroad. The Astute Reader can of course discover the reasons for this... but the end result is that shots fired overseas leave less police on our streets. One of the best ways to increase crime in Aspen Hill is to fire up an insurgency in Iraq.

And then there's "PCAT", or the "police community action teams". For short time periods, comparatively quite large numbers of officers can be concentrated in fairly small areas which are seen as hotspots of criminal activity.

Most of the PCAT personnel are sworn officers from Montgomery County. However, in the same way that large sporting events can see the temporary redeployments to arena grounds of officers from several local jurisdictions or even several nearby States, sometimes PCAT can field a lot of personnel who aren't merely not from Montgomery County, but who also aren't technically police.

"CSAFE" is "collaborative supervision and focused enforcement", and in the original conception, the idea was to reduce the incidence of crime by reducing the ability of recidivists to return to their previous criminal habits. By adding funding for overtime hours of parole and probation officers, more surprise home visits could be made, more spot checks of actual presence at alleged employers could be made, in general there was more opportunity to supervise those whose criminal nature was already a matter of court records of convictions of offenses.

Yet law-enforcement is not exclusively the province of police nor even the bailiwick of sheriffs. There are other forces in play, and some of them are more than a little bit scary.

For instance, there was the infamous 2004 Aspen Hill case of the Bounty Hunter Rampage in which out-of-control bounty hunters kicked in doors and held uninvolved third-parties prisoner at gunpoint. Allegedly they were seeking a Brazilian illegal alien who had escaped from a previous capture.

There are other possible players who tend to pop into the area on a recurrent basis. For example, on a schedule not easily understood -- the better to surprise the targets -- the Department of Homeland Security occasionally launches mass-raids seeking the apprehension of Criminal Aliens under their Secure Communities Initiative.

Sometimes you might have the occasional agent from the FBI investigating curious diversions of taxpayer funds and you might also have the occasional NCIS investigators tracking down stolen laptops.

Most of these occasional irruptions of massed law-enforcement presence are single-instance, but now and then you get cycles of varying length all occuring at the same time.

Imagine, if you will, that PCAT picks Aspen Hill as their operational venue for the month. At the same time, DHS decides that it's time for a sweep for mass-arrests of criminal aliens.

DHS's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are very well aware that the official policy of Montgomery's Department of Police come about as close as is possible without active violation to a policy of aiding-and-abetting illegal aliens to remain and work here, insofar as they aren't actually arrested for handgun violations or certain crimes of violence.

So, in our hypothetical scenario, DHS ramps up for a significant sweep in the area, and goes out of their way to not inform the local police. Further, to make up for the manpower they would ordinarily "borrow" from the local forces, they bring in a lot of US Marshals and professional bounty-hunters.

And locals like me find themselves wondering WTF is going on and who the hell are all of these out-of-towners dressed in plainclothes -- generally like panhandlers or sketchy biker types -- and clearly concealing weapons about their persons? And why are they just as clearly setting up operations centers at various local stores?

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I've seen this sort of thing appear and disappear on a number of occasions.

Once, in perhaps 2003 or so, I was at a meeting where a high-ranking police official was present, and I asked them if there was a PCAT action going on or something comparable. Keeping in mind that I am not even in my own imagination a law-enforcement officer nor anyone who could reasonably expect full disclosure of sensitive operational information, I'm keeping also in mind that street-level publicity of PCAT sweeps is seen by many police as a very good way to suppress crime, or to at least make a lot of criminals so noticably wary that their increased furtiveness is as good as a flashing beacon in terms of attracting attention.

The response I got was something to the effect of "nope, no PCAT, nothing I can tell you about". I was feeling like being an asshole or something, so I muttered "so at least now I know whose government these guys are not from..."

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Now and then, I need to add, various organizations which are decidedly not law enforcement set up shop in the neighborhood.

For example, it's well known that in the same way that the old New York Italian Mob frequently had top-level management meetings disguised as dinner parties in restaurants, the transnational gangsters of Mara Salvatrucha ("MS-13") almost always have their meetings in public parks in the guise of a friendly game of soccer.

Aspen Hill's "Aspen Hill Local Park" has an ongoing problem with nearby homeless camps. In previous years, we've seen what appears to be MS-13 clique meetings taking place in this park, with significant attendance and with many of the attendees leaving these meetings along paths leading to the homeless camps.

And then there are the party or parties unknown who were associated with the "Dust Wars" of 2007, in which large numbers of out-of-state and out-of-county vehicles circulated widely engaging in very counterproductive activity that was starting to resemble the outbreak of a widespread terrorist attack using weaponized dusts by the time it ended. It is unknown at this juncture what started this, or who and what ended it. My most reasonable conjecture is that this was some sort of illegal vigilante squad or squads engaging in harassment and "area denial" activity.

---

Vigilante activity may be understood to be, possibly, both a reaction to and a cause of increased reporting of assaults, particularly in the BelPre-Hewitt Crime focus area monitored under the GOCCP/CSAFE grants and programs.

The 2004 "Bounty Hunter Rampage" may reasonable be viewed as a result of a widespread perception and expectation that lawlessness in the area of their activity was such that they bounty hunters themselves could, with reasonable expectations of impunity, act more than a bit outside the bounds of law and order.

This is one of the worries that develops as crime increases in any given area: that people start organizing their own "vigilance committees". In many of the countries from which we draw our wonderful diversity, such organizations take the place which in the US is reserved for duly authorized organizations for law-enforcement. And this is nothing more than another way of saying "where we pay taxes to support police, in other countries they pay tithes to gangsters, to provide public safety".

It's my opinion that we are at the same crossroads, confronted by the same dilemma, as we had in 2000 or so when we first formed the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative and pursued funding from the GOCCP and CSAFE (at that time, the Hot Spots program).

So-called "problem people" are being illegally excluded from access to local commercial facilities.

It's extremely illegal -- at Federal, State and County levels -- to discriminate against people for disability, real or imagined, of whatever kind. It's also illegal to exclude people on the basis of race, perception of race, religion, perception of religion, etc. Yet it seems that at several shopping centers in the vicinity of Aspen Hill, illegal vigilantism is specifically targeting individuals -- and groups -- for exclusion. The preferred method for enforcing a ban appears to be clandestine application of violence and in some cases the application of violence isn't even all that clandestine.

Over the next week or so, I'll try to give more detailed dissertations on the subject of "how Aspen Manor became the official ghetto scum shopping center" and of how the same battle -- which in the case of Aspen Manor resulted in racist near-warfare to exclude everyone who was neither Korean or "hispanic" -- is presently being waged at Plaza del Mercado shopping center, where "vigilance committees" are operating outside of any discernable legitimate police sanction, and in contravention of at least three layers of law.

CrimeReports.Com 911 Feed Restored: Officials Bow to Public Demands

We, the citizens, won one this week.

The feed to crimereports.com has been restored... but all of the data has been reset. At this point in time, no data prior to November 13 2009 is visible, at least not in the general vicinity of Aspen Hill.

Thank you citizens! -and thank you, officials.

Now we can just look at a map and know where to avoid the criminals... or at least we will know which places report lots of crime.

Time will tell and help us sort out which are the truly dangerous places... the places where crime is frequent... and frequently unreported, mostly because crime is the norm and the police are deprecated.

Desperate MoCo Authorities Censor CrimeReports.Com

A recent development!

Desperate to conceal a massive outbreak of certain types of crime, Montgomery County officials have closed access to their 911 Calls For Service.

A look at CrimeReports.Com in a view centered in Aspen Hill would give the impression that there isn't any crime here. I will certainly attest otherwise; racist harassment and even assaults have been my sorry lot for the last 10 days or so.

Look at that map, and start zooming out... and you see that every single surrounding jurisdiction lights up.

Given the generally sparse population in Frederick County, and the fact that most of that is fairly middle-class and not particularly criminal in nature, we can use the incidence of calls for service in that jurisdiction as a lower bound for much more populous Montgomery.

What would we be seeing if the desperate MoCo officials weren't going all Red China on us with their suppression of data for the InterNet? Frankly, I think we'd see Crime, Crime, Crime, Crime and more Crime.

In particular, I'm about certain that they are desperate to keep a lid on the incidence of crime in low-rent places like Aspen Hill.

For example, a May 2008 data sheet indicates that within a 1-mile radius of "downtown Aspen Hill" (Aspen Hill Road and Connecticut Avenue), the per-capita income is slightly under $28,000/year. That's significantly below poverty, and about half of the national average mean income of about $52,000/year. In expensive Montgomery, if you aren't already a homeowner due to long residence, you simply cannot live here on $28,000/year without very significant government handouts. Living here on $52,000/year would be difficult. Meanwhile, foreclosure continues to accelerate here, and vacant houses litter the neighborhood.

Obviously crime is way up. And we the citizens deserve to know.

I think this is an intentional news blackout by the officials. For nearly a decade, officials refused to release descriptions of suspects, but when they were sued by newspapers for that information, we all saw in print what we knew already. The vast majority of suspects in all crimes (outside of "traditionally black" neighborhoods) were "hispanic". Interestingly enough, once this information became common knowledge, people knew against whom to guard.

Can it be that the County is trying to make sure that people thinking of buying foreclosed properties at bargain prices can't find out that those properties are in high-crime districts? You know, like Wheaton Central Business District's immediate surrounding suburbs? Or, for example, like Aspen Hill?

MoCo should be ashamed of itself! It's only adding fuel to the raging fire of distrust. Now there's no statistics that could show that Aspen Hill is a great place to live, even though for all ages under fifty, the neighborhood is overwhelmingly "latino". Now, instead of being able to see that there's hardly any crime here, potential buyers will drive into the neighborhood and say "my g_d, it's a fucking Barrio!" and spit on the ground in front of the realtor as they curse them and drive away.

Perhaps the information suppression explains the emboldened gangsters staffing "CVS 1499 up at Plaza del Mercado, which I frankly rate with my worst rating ever: Risk of Murder.

If there's a massive crime wave at places like Plaza del Mercado, in the same way we citizens deserved to know that most crime was by "latinos" and thus could avoid them, we deserve to know where crime is concentrated so that we can avoid those places.

Shushing the citizens and starving them of information they need to SAVE THEIR LIVES is despicable. If the merchants and property-managers can't keep down the crime in their stores and mall parking-lots, send in enough cops to actually do the job. Keeping staffing the same and letting the citizens increasingly be victimized because they can't read a map and know where to avoid, that's despicable.

I'm not running for office again, but that's almost silly of me. But maybe it's not silly: as a candidate, people expect "leave no incumbent unseated" from me. But speaking as a citizen? Ah, maybe that's what this is about: they're removing the proof of their incompetence from the citizen's research, and they'll be calling people liars and saying "there's no proof that calls for service is up", but hiding that proof is like hiding evidence of a crime: additionally criminal.

Gang and Gang-like Activity Up in Aspen Hill?

Dear Diary: as the Astute Reader would say, if there were any readers at all of this blog -- according to SiteMeter -- Gangs and the activities of Gang Affiliates are a real problem all around the area.

A recent incident gives even the most Liberal of Democrats a bit of a clue about how "cultural norms" of illegal aliens express themselves here in the enlightened and upscale Montgomery County Maryland.

An outrageous and despicable case of Hate Crime Fag Bashing -- by MS-13 affiliates Cinder Tobar-Campos, 23, of the 1200 block of Knoll Mist Lane in Montgomery Village; William A. Mendoza, 30, of the 7300 block of 23rd Avenue in Hyattsville; and Felix Arevalo-Cantarero, 24, of the 3400 block of Farthing Drive in Wheaton -- has recently made it into the news.

The sudden disappearance of a notable Wheaton blog by a notable Wheaton lady-lover, exactly at the time that this incident occurred, lends credence to the theory that Foreign Gangsters -- who are well known to use MySpace and YouTube -- identified, tracked, and assaulted with attempt to murder this well-known and highly-respected blogger and her friends, who included a transvestite man dressed as a woman. Police later arrested the three individuals who were charged with Attempted Murder as well as other offenses, hopefully including the new Federal charges of Hate Crime.

---

Meanwhile, at various local shopping centers, notably the Plaza del Mercado Shopping Center, we are seeing an upsurge in crimes that appear to be not so much the activities of actual transnational-scope Gangs such as MS-13, but seem to be more the activities of local "crews", ad-hoc multiracial/multinational neighborhoods gangs.

Specifically, the so-called "Hot Boyz/Shoot Em Up gang" is known to be operating in Aspen Hill, and also known to specifically target people who are, or who are believed to be, "mentally challenged".

Now, I frequently shop in the Plaza del Mercado CVS and in recent months, my visits to that CVS have led to my increasing awareness of anti-white and anti-American racism. The racism seems to be pretty pervasive through several stores in that shopping center, and this is nothing new. What's new is the level of both organization and a sort of display of a sense of entitlement.

Of course, it's illegal as hell for any store to discriminate against people on the basis of race or perception of disability, or for that matter for their exercise of the Constitutional right to freedom of expression.

But keep in mind that a lot of these folks staffing the stores here come from countries where the sort of hate-crimes perpetrated by the MS-13 Fag Bashers are considered not merely acceptable, but to be encouraged.

The really worrisome thing is that probably most folks who feel abused will simply go somewhere else. In that case the Terrorists Have Won. The people who need to be ousted aren't the handicapped or "mental", the people who need to be ousted are the people who organized to abuse the disabled.

Don't be fag bashing. Don't be bothering people because you think they're mental. Don't be bothering anyone, for that matter.

MoCo A Hotbed of Espionage, Part II, or

Even the Gazette Admits We're Knee Deep in Spies

Coverage is here.

And this is only the ones we managed to catch, generally believed to be perhaps no more than 1 in 100.

A Quick Recap of the Story So Far, or

Sneaking In Spies Before the Diplomats Arrive

Ah yes, nothing like a good Alien Invasion story.

For some reason, this whole idea -- of the arrival of large numbers of aliens who seem too good to be true, who then turn out to bring a whole raft of unexpected problems and dangers with them -- attracts the attention and develops the interest of Americans. According to the polls, V had the second largest audience of any new TV series season opening night.

Leaving aside the many people of my age who saw the original series and wanted to see how the new version compared, there's a whole new potential audience who clearly is both sick to death of "reality shows" -- which after all emerged only because of a massive strike of the creative talent that writes actual plot and scripts -- and is equally attuned to the fact that we now live in the 21st Century.

We all grew up on a variety of First Contact stories.

Most of those came out of the "Star Trek" franchise, and aside from the "pre-Federation era" shows of "Enterprise", after the original series, the Star Trek franchise had mostly become a sharing caring multicultural free-for-all of "how can we possibly find a way to be more nice to aliens".

Not surprisingly, a lot of people got kind of fed up with this.

While the film and television industry kept on pumping out SF with the message "so what if they're from space, they're all our multicultural diversity and we must welcome them because they are only ever good for us", the print writers in SF tended to have a slightly more dark, if not outright dismal, view of things.

---

One Hal Colebatch -- one of Australia's best living writers (in my humble opinion) -- has been making regular contributions of very high quality to the "shared universe" of "Known Space, originally created by Larry Niven.

The most popular and best-developed "shared universe" sector is, of course, the Man-Zkin Wars.

Hal Colebatch's contributions have been most excellent, not merely because of the quality of his writing, but also because of the tone> of his writing.

Writing in a tone which shows a classically Australian mix of Liberalism and Conservatism, Colebatch tends to use characters who are very well entrenched in the service of the government, all of whom seem to be generally quite happy or at least secure in their positions and understanding of the way the world works, who find themselves confronted with things far outside of their experience, or even of their conceptions of what is possible.

In his stories which are set in times and places before the Kzinti are known for what they are -- highly intelligent and extremely aggressive cat-like carnivores with an immense empire of conquered civilizations and species, and technology much higher than that of humanity -- Colebatch sets a most creepy tone. In the 1995 novella "the Colonel's Tiger", we see something of a re-write of the classic "the Most Dangerous Game" (Connell, Richard, 1924). As the old pioneers used to say of the risks of hunting Bear, "some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you".

In 2002-2003, Colebatch began to publish a series of connected stories which dealt with the coming of the war to Wunderland, a human colony in the Alpha Centauri system.

This beginning piece in Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War is exceptionally creepy in parts. In particular, it's creepy as heck when the protagonist finds himself in a strange game of stalking a quarry that it seems may be stalking him.

Of course, the reader knows that the strange tiger-like creature isn't just some kind of large but not-too-smart carnivore not previously discovered by the human colonists on their new world. We all know it for what it is: an advance scout, a spy.

Yet there's no denying that the Kzin is a Kzin; it's not exactly possible for a creature the size and mass of a very large tiger to pretend to be a human being.

However, in some of the most popular theatrical and television renditions of conflicts between Humanity and Others, that's the biggest problem with the aliens: they look and can act just like us... except when they're killing us.

---

If you haven't yet seen the first episode, and hope to do so, you might want to not read further. SPOILERS lurk.

In the opening scenes, the Visitors arrive to the accompaniment of earthquake-like tremors, and their immense ships take up station over the major cities of the world. They hover, seemingly effortlessly, like small cities in their own right.

Military aircraft in the vicinity of the arrivals are disabled by complete electrical failures and crash.

The Visitor craft use their surfaces of their craft as if they were giant telescreens and "Anna" announces the peaceful intentions of the Visitors, and their desire to trade some of their technology in return for water and an unspecified chemical which they will tell us how to manufacture.

Intentions to open formal diplomatic relations are announced.

With a lot of time compression in the presentation, we see how the Motherships are opened up for tourism and how the Visitors open up "cultural exchange" facilities and operations. People experience their advanced medicine and other "blessings" and in general the public accepts and enjoys the way their world has changed.

Indeed, a lot of the younger folks become devoted to the aliens, who seem to utterly human (if technologically more advanced) and who also tend to be very attractive. They flock to "Friends of the Visitors" associations which the Visitors are quick to establish.

Yet there's an undercurrent of something being seriously amiss.

First, the Visitors show themselves to be adept at a very humanesque style of media manipulation, of presentation, of "spin".

Secondly, even as the arrival of the Visitors confuses and suppresses the activities of almost all known terrorist cells and operations in the US, one cell seems to have not been suppressed, but rather activated, by the arrival of the Motherships.

One Federal agent finds herself drawn deeper into investigating this, along with a seemingly unrelated murder and discovery of massive caches of explosives, even as her son becomes a devotee of all things Visitor.

As it develops, the Visitors haven't just arrived for the first time. The agent winds up finding her way to a meeting where the leader announces that some Visitors have been here, hidden among us, for years if not for decades, and have been prepositioning themselves and infiltrating all aspects of commerce and industry. Furthermore, we are told, the intentions of the Visitors will result in the death of all of Humanity.

Our agent has been insufficiently cautious, but how could she know? Her own partner is one of the Visitors who have infiltrated the highest levels of law-enforcement and government... and now that he knows about the meeting, he calls in a Visitor hit squad.

Few escape, including the agent and the Resistance leader. In the battle, the agent sees the truth at last: the aliens are indeed reptiles living inside a false skin of cloned human flesh, and they're vicious fighters who give no quarter.

And the Resistance leader also discovers that an old ally from long ago, who had been trying to avoid re-recruitment by saying "that part of my life is long over", is in fact himself an alien Visitor... a dissident in opposition to the plans of the Visitor forces, a "fifth columnist", one of a number who had defected from the advance forces.

---

So far, so good.

Let's deconstruct this a bit.

At Anna's first press conference, she is asked "how is it that you evolved to look exactly like us [humans], our scientists all tell us it's totally impossible". And indeed it is! Anna's response is "our scientists tell us it's possible to look just like you", but having ducked the question in that manner, she doesn't elaborate further.

Well, the aliens aren't mammals, and indeed one has to ask how it is that they can breathe our air without immediately succumbing to infections or allergic reactions. Keep in mind at all times: the thing about aliens is that they are, well, ALIEN. Their ancestors spawned in different oceans on planets circling other stars.

Well, convergent evolution happens on earth, when totally different species/genera live in extremely similar niches. Given that the constraints forcing the evolution of intelligence might be very similar anywhere, one might reasonably expect that given similar homeworlds, the intelligent species from each might be about the same size, and both could be expected to have senses equal to or in some ways superior to those of their homeworld's creatures, and they could be expected to have manipulating appendages whereby to create tools and systems, etc etc.

Yet given those similarities of beings which are intelligent enough to travel into space, their fundamental chemistry is likely to be extremely different, not to mention the specifics of the forms evolving from that chemistry. The sweat of alien visitors -- if they control their body temperature by sweating, which on our world is actually unusual -- might give humans the sort of reaction we'd expect from poison-ivy or immersion in caustic or acid fluids. They might think our breath smells like a factory waste stream.

No, these Visitors are going to huge extremes to convince humans that "everyone from everywhere is the same". The Visitors aren't going that far, however; they've announced that Humanity is the first intelligent species they've encountered. They haven't announced, however, from which star-system they have come... nor have they explained why their culture has gone to the astonishingly huge expense of building and outfitting several dozen city-sized spacecraft with interstellar travel capacity.

We don't know too much about the Visitor technology, other than that they have a practical form of gravity control. Considering that they can hover motionless over our cities, one presumes that they have to have a practical means of generating vast amounts of power for their gravity control, reliably and over very long periods of time.

We also don't know much about any weapons they might have, other than their electromagnetic-pulse weapons (which might be an unavoidable side-effect of their descent into position, though it should have affected computers, cellphones, radios, TVs etc if that were the case) and a sort of compact UAV they can use for both surveillance and attack.

One reasonably presumes that if the Visitors have an effective electromagnetic-pulse weapon that can be directed against specific targets -- for example bringing down a modern jet fighter while not bringing down all nearby telecom systems -- that sooner or later someone might attack one of their motherships with aircraft not dependent on solid-state electronics. For example, someone might try to load a manually-detonatable fission bomb onto a WWII-vintage propellor plane and ram a mothership. One presumes the Visitors would be prepared for this (or for other purely ballistic weapons) with some sort of laser-like weapons, or perhaps a directed-beam version of their gravity control. I guess future episodes with either reveal this or leave us guessing.

Questions also remain about the time-frame, from the initial incursion of Visitors operating as advance scouts, to the time of open arrival of the fleet of Motherships. Questions also remain as to how exactly any such long-stay Visitors might have remained healthy, especially considering that their different evolution might leave them at risk of vitamin/mineral deficiencies in Earthly food. One also has to ask how they might keep their cloned human flesh disguises healthy.

I guess one just has to be willing to suspend one's disbelief over the tiny details, and get ahead with enjoying the program.

For me, I think it's off to a great start, and if it gets to mining a lot of ideas from "the greats who have gone before", I won't mind that too much. They can probably find some rather old remarks of mine online, in the UseNet group alt.alien.visitors.

Looking forward to next Tuesday for Episode Two!

A Change of Tone, or

Less Boring and More Space Creatures

Dear Diary: since a fair amount of my income depends on getting people to view my writings, I think I will do a few things.

First, I will have to block all access to this blog by browsers that don't automatically download the advertising content. Secondly, I think I will stick to topics that will bring in traffic from all around the world, rather than merely posting endless reams of self-referential and gloomy crap that isn't of interest to anyone but my stalkers in the neighborhood.

So, what do I know about, other than local politics, urban planning as applied to local politics, batshit crazy local freaks on a rampage of driving each other insane in incitatory preparation to yet-another mass eruption of genocide against imaginary beings (which will hurt a lot of unsuspecting normal people), and general topics on the not-entirely-unrelated fields of personality disorders and counterintelligence theory?

Well, believe it or not, for some years I have been considered "a expert voice of reason" on the topics of Extraterrestrials (all hypothetical, of course), and of Vampires In English Literature.

Since I am about dead fucking tired of goddamn vampires on television and in the theaters -- not to mention the squads of Foreign Teen Ninja Vixens who all want to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer and don't mind getting carried away and "acting out" against Goths, Darkwavers, and Emos -- I think I'll steer clear of the topic.

Instead, I think I'll try to attract some fine, fun, and fearless discussion and traffic of the new show V.

This is shaping up to be really deep, dark, nasty, and convoluted, as all decent SF-Horror works should be.

The Astute Reader will be reminded that SF-Horror is where I live, what I love, and what I'm good at... and I'm as good at the creepy horror as I am at the hard-core fact-based science that should be at the heart of all Science Fiction.

So get ready: I intend to creep out some folks and bring in some traffic. And very little of this is going to be all about me...

But a lot of it might be doing my very best to convince anyone cruising through the neighborhood that there are in fact a lot of really scary infiltrators all over the place... and it might not be a question of "what country did you sneak in from, dude?", it might be a question of "from what planet did you invade, lizard-breath?"

Always remember, folks...

There's more than one kind of Illegal ALIEN.

And I am against them ALL.

My How Time Flies, and

How the World Changes

Dear Diary: Of course I'm sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting for tonight's premier of the re-make of the classic V:

In the meantime, the SyFy Channel ran the original versions, both mini-series and "V: the Series".

One of the things that struck me was a line from the original series. This hit me hard.

---

When the original series aired, it was 1983, and I was instantly a fan. For one, as science-fiction it originally wasn't utterly bad, at least not in the initial mini-series episodes; the aliens had advanced technology but nothing that could exceed the speed of light. There had been some recent excellent SF from some hot young authors, which had the premis that humanity as an intelligent species was an aberration, because if Earth hadn't been hit by an asteriod, the dinosaurs and their descendants would likely have evolved to intelligence and the mammals would probably never have evolved much past the size or intelligence of lemurs. Thus, assuming that evolution would take the same course elsewhere as it took here, minus the asteroid strike, all or almost all intelligent extraterrestrials would inevitably be reptilian, or "Reptoid". And as it turned out, that's what the alien Visitors were... reptilian humanoids disguised as human beings.

Then it got fairly silly fairly quickly, in terms of science-fiction. First, they here to steal our planet's water. Why? They must have noticed that the rings of Saturn contained far more water exists in the oceans of our Homeworld. They could have taken that, and probably nobody here would have noticed until it was all gone, and there wouldn't have been much we could have done about it.

But "V" wasn't really about science fiction; it merely had the trappings of science-fiction. "V" was about Resistance Movements. It was about how oppression may arrive at your door all smiles and helpfulness, and the next thing you know, you're living in a technological fascist police state with friends and neighbors being "disappeared".

In terms of that sort of plot, "V" has everything: evil alien overlords, a "fifth column" operating in the alien ranks, an emerging Resistance Movement, human Collaborators, and millions upon millions of clueless victims.

---

Just in case nobody's ever noticed, I have a mindset which once was quite valuable. I am what is referred to as "an informed paranoid with strong fact-checking instincts". If I ever experienced a moment when I was not deeply suspicious and always assessing risk -- and also assessing my ability to assess (danger lurks at this crux of the syndrome) -- I would know that either I was on lots of extremely powerful drugs, or perhaps that I'd died and gone to heaven and there was nothing more that could be of concern.

How did I get this way? Just lucky, I guess.

I do happen to love the sort of fiction where this sort of mindset turns out to be an asset, a survival skill.

That means that I like creepy horror, spooky stuff, and nothing is as thrilling a read for me as a good old fashioned subterfuge-and-invasion story.

You know, the sort of thing where it starts out with a few Hard Working Illegal Alien Yardworkers filtering into town, and the next thing you know, no American citizen is allowed to have a job unless they speak fluent Spanish, so they can take orders from the new overlords.

But I digress.

---

"V" -- the 1983 version -- has a moment when the Resistance movement is discussing whether to attack the main Mothership and risk either total victory or global annihilation by the Visitor's self-destruct "doomsday device".

One of the characters says "I don't feel like I'm able to gamble with the lives of Three Billion People..."

This was practically shocking.

In 2009, only a quarter century later, the world population is above Six Billion People.

At this rate of population increase, in 2045 or so, we'll have Twelve Billion People.

Of those, only about 700 million will be American or Canadian. About 500 million, at most, will be European. About 900 million will be Chinese. About 1.5 billion will be on the Indian subcontinent. The remaining 8 billion will be about evenly divided between Africans and Latin Americans.

---

In 1983, when the first "V" was televised, with a global population of only 3 billions of people, if the fictional Visitors had used some super ray gun to wipe out our technology, after a period of adjusting to going back to horse and oxen for power, about 2 billion people would still be alive and eating fairly well, on average.

In 2009, if the fictional Visitors used some super ray gun -- or simply electromagnetic pulse weapons -- to wipe out our technology, a minimum of 4 billion people would either starve to death or have to resort to eating each other.

If the fictional Visitors came in 2045 or so, and carried on as above, about 10 billion people would either starve to death or have to resort to eating each other.

And about 2060 or so, we won't need any Visitors to turn off the electricity, since that is about when all of the planet's accessible oil will be effectively exhausted.

And given the same rate of population expansion as seen between 1983 and 2009, that would be some 18 billions of people, all of whom would be fighting over each other's scraps, and the scraps of each other.

---

Completely Uninteresting, or

I Find Accounting More Entertaining Than This

Dear Diary: Here's hoping that everyone had a happy Hallowe'en.

This was the first year since about 2003 that I skipped my annual visit to the Jefferson Memorial for the Samhain Drumming. Samhain is, in any case, more of a marker of time for me and less of a specific spiritual observance. Yet I too took time to remember friends and family who passed on in the preceding year.

In recent weeks, my mother's younger sister passed on, of complications of a stroke. She had lived a long life, having survived her husband, a former Air Force officer and WWII veteran, and having raised three children and having seen her grandchildren and many nieces and nephews raised to adulthood. For many years she was a devoted public servant at her township's library, I seem to recall. While she and my mother haven't been particularly close in the last few decades, still one grieves when one's siblings pass, and my mom is taking this fairly hard. It's even worse for her in that my mother is a devoted church lady and my aunt was not, and the funeral rites were not in the church and were private and unostentatious and not the sort of thing that calls for big family reunions. For the earth was made of the ashes of dying stars, and from the earth we are raised, and in us burns a holy fire, yet only for a time. We return to the earth which gave us life, and our remains nourish new life; our elements are not our own, only our holy fire. Through the air travel echoes, but our light travels forever, and our influences remain.

As for me, when I'm done, spread my ashes over the roots of the trees in the center of my back yard. Ash, beech, gum, oak, and sycamore are the five points of the grove and their roots intertwine to hold the soil in place and I've spent most of my life under their shade. And as in life, so in death. My elements will feed the trees and as the year turns once again, when the squirrels play, my elements will be part of it all. As they always were and forever shall be. Though the holy fire departs, the circle remains unbroken.

---

Moving right along, Centro Familia, Montgomery County's most expensive daycare, evidently is under FBI scrutiny.

The FBI, like any decent investigative agency, has its up and downs, weeks or months or years where they've run out of high-profile things to do such as arresting 300 Mexican drug cartel members or foiling terrorists plots.

So, is that why the FBI is investigating Centro Familia? They've run out of interesting things to do?

Or has someone downtown finally had a rare -- rare for the FBI -- fit of sanity and wakefulness, and realized that they've finally got a shoehorn jamming open a window of opportunity for some glimpses into the workings of taxpayer-funded foreign intelligence operations?

---

There once was a day when the primary function of the FBI -- aside from tracking down interstate fugitives and bank-robbers -- was counterintelligence.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union not long after the opening of the Berlin Wall nearly two decades ago, the FBI pretty much took a holiday on counterintelligence until September 11, 2001. From then on, sadly, their focus in counterintelligence was almost exclusively dedicated to rooting out terrorist threats.

Almost everyone who has ever had any encounters with these guys has come away from that experience with exactly one conclusion, that you're probably better off being the victim of a terrorist attack than having the FBI ever hear of you. While it makes perfect sense for investigators to check the bona-fides of their informants, failing to check the bona-fides of the people interviewed pursuant to getting the bona-fides of the original informant does not make much sense, yet it happens.

That this has in past times resulted in circuses -- of the type where agents actually have asked people trafficking in human cargo (fraudulent asylum application mill operators specializing in the western African trade) whether or not a potential informant was "reliable" -- doesn't seem to concern the agency. Rather than have the agency embarassed, the default operation imposed from the top down has generally seemed to be to focus on destroying all leads (and not infrequently the investigators) rather then seeing where they go. I needn't remind people about the fiasco where upper-level management prevented an August 2001 arrest of Al Qaeda terrorists at a flight school where they were training for their September hijackings ("Angry FBI agents joked about al Qaeda mole at HQ", Seper, Jerry, Washington Times, May 25, 2002).

Well, of course, this will be one of the few blog postings I write that will actually have an Astute Reader, who at the moment probably just said something like "Yo, Maurice, get a load of this asshole who thinks that Centro Familia is going to blow up the Pentagon" to their co-worker in the next cubicle. Actually, I didn't say any such thing and I don't actually think any such thing, it's just that now and then I feel like it might be sensible to lay a google-bomb on Carnivore.

The one thing at which the FBI does truly excel is accounting. They've got some very special agents who are astonishingly good at following the paper trail despite some exceptionally brilliant and inventive white-collar criminals' best efforts to muddy the waters, so to speak.

I'm guessing that the auditors at the Montgomery County Inspector General's office ran into some Creative Bookkeeping at Centro Familia that was a little too obfuscated to follow, asked for some help "off the record" from one of the accounting geniuses down in the Hoover Building, and the accounting genius recognized a caliber of conniving that pretty much screams "seasoned professional" and furthermore screams "seasoned professional" in a foreign language. And that, my Astute Reader friends in your drab beige cubicle, ought to kick things out of the accounting department and upstairs to counterintelligence, where one hopes they have at long last learned to find their ass without someone having to hand it to them on a silver platter.

I'm not holding my breath, though. In any case, the entire national field staff isn't sufficient to clean out a quarter of the foreign intelligence (and/or transnational criminal organization, or both, it's a fuzzy zone) staff in the suburban counties contiguous to the District.

Then again, it wouldn't take all that many people to start digging through the paper trail and see to whose campaign financing accounts some of this creative accounting leads. But be careful! When you get to the part about your field offices being built by construction companies well and truly staffed with "seasoned professional" accountants and trusted secretaries from the FMLN, it better stay better-buried than the story about the August 2001 ineptitude that enabled September 11 2001. At least it better stay kind of quiet until the indictments are unsealed.

Remember, without that "enabling" environment, foreign intelligence doesn't have such an easy time. But with the current environment of "enablers", counterintelligence cannot possibly function to the necessary degree. National Security or Political Correctness? Which matters more, and to whom?

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