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“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

— Luigi Mangione via Ken Klippenstein

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The Flame Deluge from "A Canticle for Leibowitz"

It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines of war such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell, and that God had suffered these magi to place 'the weapons in the hands of princes, and to say to each prince: "Only because the enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike. See to it, m'Lord, that thou fearest them as much as they shall now fear thee, that none may unleash this dread thing which we have wrought." But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy those others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.

Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge. Within weeks-some said days-it was ended, after the first unleashing of the hell-fire. Cities had become puddles of glass, surrounded by vast acreages of broken stone. While nations had vanished from the earth, the lands littered with bodies, both men and cattle, and all manner of beasts, together with the birds of the air and all things that flew, all things that swam in the rivers, crept in the grass, or burrowed in holes; having sickened and perished, they covered the land, and yet where the demons of the Fallout covered the countryside, the bodies for a time would not decay, except in contact with fertile earth. The great clouds of wrath engulfed the forests and the fields, withering trees and causing the crops to die. There were great deserts where once life was, and in those places of the Earth where men still lived, all were sickened by the poisoned air, so that, while some escaped death, none was left untouched; and many died even in those lands where the weapons had not struck, because of the poisoned air.

In all parts of the world men fled from one place to other places, and there was a confusion of tongues. Much wrath was kindled against the Princes and the servants of the princes and against the magi who had devised the weapons. Years passed, and yet the Earth was not cleansed. So it was clearly recorded in the Memorabilia. From the confusion of tongues, the intermingling of the remnants of many nations, from fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing. Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought this crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before. Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again. So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever persons the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become.

Nothing had been so hateful in the sight of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tried to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds "bloodthirsty simpletons." Joyfully the mobs accepted the name, took up the cry: Simpletons! Yes, yes! I'm a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We’ll build a town and we'll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they'll be dead! Simpletons! Let's go! This ought to show 'em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is! To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to any sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks' robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived and could be reoccupied, for the religious were less despised by the mob except when they openly defied it and accepted martyrdom.

Sometimes such sanctuary was effective, but more often it was not. Monasteries were invaded, records and sacred books were burned, refugees were seized and summarily hanged or burned. The Simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as can occur only when the last traces of social order are gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were-not merely to forget-but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurred sporadically even through the fourth generation after the Deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.

Isaac Edward Leibowitz, after a fruitless search for his wife, had fled to the Cistercians where he remained. in hiding during the early post-Deluge years. After six years, he had gone once more to search for Emily or her grave, in the far southwest. There he had become convinced at last of her death, for death was unconditionally triumphant in that place. There in the desert he quietly made a vow. Then he went back to the Cistercians, took their habit, and after more years became a priest. He gathered a few companions about him and made some quiet proposals. After a few more years, the proposals filtered to "Rome," which was no longer Rome (which was no longer a city), having moved elsewhere moved again, and still again-in less than two decades, after staying in one place for two millennia. Twelve years after the proposals were made, Father Isaac Edward Leibowitz had won permission from the Holy See to found a new community of religious, to be named after Albertus Magnus, teacher of Saint Thomas, and patron of men of science. Its task, unannounced, and at first only vaguely defined, was to preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed. Its earliest habit was burlap rags and bindlestiffs-the uniform of the simpleton mob. Its members were either "bookleggers" or "memorizers," according to the tasks assigned. The bookleggers smuggled books to the southwest desert and buried them there in kegs. The memorizers committed to rote memory entire volumes of history, sacred writings, literature, and science, in case some unfortunate book smuggler was caught, tortured, and forced to reveal the location of the kegs. Meanwhile, other members of the new Order located a water hole about three days' journey from the book cache and began the building of a monastery.

The project, aimed at saving a small remnant of human culture from the remnant of humanity who wanted it destroyed, was then underway. Leibowitz, while taking his own turn at booklegging, was caught by a simpleton mob; a turncoat technician, whom the priest swiftly forgave, identified him as not only a man of learning but also a specialist in the weapons field. Hooded in burlap, he was martyred forthwith, by strangulation with a hangman's noose not tied for neck-breaking, at the same time being roasted alive-thus settling a dispute in the crowd concerning the method of execution. The memorizers were few, their memories limited. Some of the book kegs were found and burned, as well as several other bookleggers. The monastery itself was attacked thrice before the madness subsided. From the vast store of human knowledge, only a few kegs of original books and a pitiful collection of hand-copied texts, rewritten from memory, had survived in the possession of the Order by the time the madness had ended.

Now after six centuries of darkness, the monks still preserved this Memorabilia, studied it, copied and recopied it, and patiently waited. At the beginning, in the time of Leibowitz, it had been hoped-and even anticipated as probable-that the fourth or fifth generation would begin to want its heritage back. But the monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton” meant the same thing as citizen meant the same thing as "slave."

The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wildboy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit is to learn at least a minimum of knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday-someday, or some century - an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again . So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, an it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years, for they, though born in that darkest of ages, were still the very bookleggers and memorizers of the Beatus Leibowitz; and when they wandered abroad from their abbey, each of them, the professed of the Order-whether stablehand or Lord Abbot-carried as part of his habit a book, usually a Breviary these days tied up in a bindlestiff.

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Opinion | Luke O’Neil: Keep Kirstjen Nielsen unemployed and eating Grubhub over her kitchen sink - The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe

· by Luke O’Neil April 10, 2019

ONE OF THE biggest regrets of my life is not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon. I was waiting on the disgraced neoconservative pundit and chief Iraq War cheerleader about 10 years ago at a restaurant in Cambridge and to my eternal dismay, some combination of professionalism and pusillanimity prevented me from appropriately seasoning his entree. A ramekin of blood on the side might have been the better option, come to think of it. He always did seem really thirsty for the stuff.

I was reminded of that episode this week when Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, the purportedly reluctant triggerman for Donald Trump’s inhumane policies of ethnic cleansing, announced she would be stepping down from her post at the president’s request. The news comes a little over a year since she took the job, and about nine months since she was infamously shame-marched out of a restaurant — a Mexican one of all things — in Washington, D.C., by a group of protestors just as the news of our official policy of separating families at the southern border was first being reported on. What a delight it was to see.

Around the same time, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others in the administration or associated with Trump — such as Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Mitch McConnell, and white nationalist and dirty coward from the zombie movie who gets everyone else killed Stephen Miller — were themselves being shown the door at restaurants and movie theaters around the country.

It was the last time I remember being proud to be an American. It was also one of the only times it seemed like any of the architects of this ruinous xenophobic pre-pogrom might be forced to contend, however briefly, with the consequences of their policy decisions.

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And then, well, you remember what happened: The cops arrived, by which I mean the invertebrate lanyard-clutching submissives of the Beltway class, who scolded the protestors for violating the standards of civility.

President Trump in recent weeks had asked Nielsen to close the ports of entry along the border and to stop accepting asylum-seekers.

“Kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on Left who applauded the expulsion of @PressSec and her family from a restaurant,” David Axelrod tweeted, echoing a common refrain across the media spectrum from CNN to Fox News to the Twitter pages of very concerned legacy media pundits with no-show jobs. “This, in the end, is a triumph for @realDonaldTrump vision of America: Now we’re divided by red plates & blue plates! #sad.”

“I guess we’re heading into an America with Democrat-only restaurants, which will lead to Republican-only restaurants,” said Ari Fleischer at the time, who like his war horny peer Kristol likely prefers his steak bloody, echoing a common refrain across the media spectrum from CNN to Fox News to the Twitter pages of very concerned legacy media pundits with no-show jobs.

“Do the fools who threw Sarah out, and the people who cheer them on, really want us to be that kind of country?” he added.

Yes. I do anyway. Then again, I am not a part of the sinecure media class, which is really what that sort of fear about escalating direct action was about. Ideology is one thing, but we can’t have the rabble feeling emboldened to confront people like us, they as much as said.

Sadly, the scolding seems to have done its job. It’s been a while since we’ve been treated to a soulless Trumpist going viral for going hungry, and the sacristy of the restaurant seems to have held.

Writing in an otherwise solid piece about what should become of Nielsen in the New York Times this week, Michelle Goldberg called for the barring of the former Secretary from a cushy corporate or academic landing.

“Nielsen did not create Trump’s monstrous policy of separating migrant families, but she should be known forever as the person who carried it out. She put babies in cages, traumatized children for life, and then appears to have lied to Congress about what she had done. She did this evil work with either blithe incompetence or malicious sloppiness, failing to create a system to properly track kids who were ripped from their families.”

She was not saying, she made clear, that people should “scream at Nilsen in restaurants.” Heaven forbid.

Over the past two years, at least 22 immigrants have died in ICE detention centers; rape and sexual assault against vulnerable people in our custody, including crimes perpetrated by ICE and DHS officials, have run rampant; and the numbers we have about them are likely wildly underreported. Numerous suicides have been reported. Thousands of families have been separated at the border, and over a thousand plus more have been lost or misplaced. Uniting them ever again may not even be “within the realm of the possible,” the administration itself admitted in February. The Government Accountability Office found in October that the administration took no steps and had no plans for how to reunite families. The cruelty, as has often been said with anything when it comes to Trump, is the point.

Yes, much of our mistreatment of migrants was ongoing long before the Trump gang came along. Throw the Obama-era lot in prison too, for all I care. At the very least, throw them out of a restaurant.

If recent anonymous administration officials quoted in news reports are to be believed, Nielsen wasn’t always comfortable with Trump’s and Jeff Sessions’ draconian tactics — which are sure to get somehow even worse once her replacement takes over. Regardless, Nielsen carried her orders out dutifully. I’m not sure which is more disgraceful: being a true-believer in the white ethnostate like Miller, or merely getting along and going along, like Nielsen is said to have done, all the while lying about it along the way. No matter, the intentions don’t really do much to assuage the pain we’ve caused so many human beings.

A petition has been circulating from a coalition of progressive groups called Restore Republic Trust calling on corporate CEOs around America to refuse to give jobs to former members of the Trump administration going forward. “The cruelty of the [separation] policy was matched only by the incompetence of its execution,” they wrote in an open letter.

That’s a nice start, and we can certainly add our names to the list, but it shouldn’t be all we do. Living in Boston, we’re no strangers to visitors from any administration, whether they’ve been given a lecture role at a school like Harvard — which doesn’t seem to have any compunctions about welcoming literal comic book-style villains to campus — or of any of a number of other prestigious tech or academic institutions in the area. Invariably the bad guys, like the rest of us, will have to eat. And when they show up in our restaurants, you have my permission, as an official member of the mainstream media, to tell them where to go and what they can do with themselves when they arrive there, but, you know, said in a more specific and traditional Boston colloquialism.

As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble. You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later.

Related

Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen steps down

Devra First: Don’t let them eat in peace

Luke O’Neil is a journalist from Massachusetts who writes the newsletter “Welcome to Hell World”

Follow him on Twitter

@lukeoneil47

The Boston Globe · by Luke O’Neil April 10, 2019

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This image is of the blood vessels in a pigeon’s head. It was captured by Scott Echols as part of the Grey Parrot Anatomy Project, which aims to develop ways to aid diagnosis & treatment for a host of animals, from birds to humans. It won the 2017 Wellcome Image Award.

via Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris

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Balenciaga

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That’s right, Ice... MAN. I am dangerous

The ice man. Houston, 1928.

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minidisc

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Rediscovering the classics © 1950

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Lonnie Bao

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Paul F. Tompkins reacting to the revelation that David E Kelley writes his scripts longhand (from the Lake Placid episode)

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(via History in Moments on Twitter: "The plague mask was designed in 1619. The beak housed sweet scents to protect doctors from foul odors. https://t.co/dO2lATWDmP")

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by Rafael Varona