Snowy today and very cold. The cold is supposed to continue for the next week which means I won't be going out myself and carefully looking at the weather for when I should order groceries. I may not have to until late in the week. We'll see. We had enough snow that the snow plows and salt spreaders will be out and the people our landlord hires should get the public walkways somewhat cleared. I just put some mini-quiches into the oven and have some ground beef and chorizo to thaw so I can cook up a big pot of chili. That should take care of our suppers for the next week--especially since I have two small casserole dishes of tuna casserole and one of meatloaf in the freezer.

Well, another day and another murder on the streets of Minneapolis perpetrated by ICE. You can find news stories all over the internet so I won't be linking any. Once again the Federal officials are 1) insisting that the victim was to blame for carrying a firearm (for which he had a valid concealed carry license), 2) that he was "brandishing" the weapon as he approached the agents and, in Bovino's words, "intending to massacre the agents, 3) have insisted the investigation will be handled privately in house and won't name the agents, and released what they claimed was filmed proof. And every f###ing bit of that is a bald-faced lie. I watched the various videos and 1) didn't see anything in the victim's hands but a cell phone which he held over head, and 2) there was nothing threatening about his movements. This weapon had been taken away from him before those thugs beat the hell out of him before pumping ten shots into him. 

A couple of interesting sequelae to the story: first, one of the legal experts made a remark that doesn't bode well for the Administration's spin machine. He noted that when Trump began this second term he took the Administration's announcements at face value. But so many of those claims have been proven false that he no longer does so and waits to see what new information will come out to either confirm or contradict the slant the Administration puts on events. A number of books and articles over the last forty (or more years) have examined the rise of images and staged events for particular effect in American society. And we can see how important images and presentations are for the Trump minions by how attentive they are to appearance and props: Cash Patel demanding a certain kind of FBI jacket when appearing at the news conferences concerning the Charlie Kirk murder, how Kristi Noem tries the cowboy look to appear tough, and how agents try to intimidate bystanders who are using their phones to film their activities. Many of the pundits expressed the worry that the world of 1984 is coming true. But that commentator's remarks makes me hope that there are limits to the influence of manufactured events and spin.

Michael Goldfarb at FIRST DRAFT OF HISTORY on substack wrote this piece which make a number of points--some of which I agree with. He cited "John Burn-Murdoch," who "had this helpful possible explanation for how the leader of what is still called the West came to be a moronic, narcissistic, corrupt, psychopath (he does NOT suffer from dementia, he’s crazy. Know the difference." That brought up a stray memory of long ago when the notion of MAD (mutually assured destruction) in the discussion of nuclear weapons. I speculated the that it was not a bad gambit for a world ruled by reasonable people, after all what sane person would want to play chicken with nukes. However, if some ideologically or religiously driven madman might consider the destruction a good bargain.

I read a good bit of history trying to fill in the deficiencies of my own education. That might be a strange thought since I have a Bachelor's and Master's in history. But I find a lot of details are ignored or skipped over and the details are important. Also the history is presented as a story of progress and continual improvement which makes what has happen seem inevitable. Throughout I read about various crises which were traumatic to the people living through them and which represented a rupture with a political and social order with which people were comfortable--until circumstances changed and it no longer worked. But a new order grew organically our of the crisis and it wasn't anything like what either the rulers of the pre-crisis period or those who rebelled against it wanted. I suspect that the same will happen this time. I wonder what will change, what will be lost and what threads will continue into the future.

So some Democrats are insisting they will not approve the new spending bill with increases in ICE funding. Let's see if they follow through. Given what Trump has with the government so-called budgets I am not sure having the Fed shut down again will have all the disastrous effects predicted. I would feel sorry for those who will be fired or furloughed.