The Production Meeting started with more than the usual half-somnolent uproar. It is Wednesday, the day we are supposed to start pulling together the weekly Weather Report. The coffee hadn’t kicked in yet, and as a group, we relied on our pre-existing biases to stay oriented.
Where some of us lived, for a while, in the Orient, which we think we can still say without offending anyone. But that is why Legal sends Melissa over to sit at the end of the picnic table when the weather is nice. She can correct some of the wilder perceptual anomalies before they get printed and could subject Socotra House to legal jeopardy.
She has a big list of disclaimers posted on the corporate website. In short, none of us work here, though we do mooch the coffee, and would accept a bagel if anyone remembered to stop and get some on the way to the meeting. Since we don’t work here, we think we can say what we think. Or at least we used to. Which is why the morning started out with some unsure footing.
She cleared her throat. “You guys can mention general topics, and we can discuss some of the details here, so long as you make no accusations or assertions about anyone in particular or their motivation for doing so.”
We all nodded. It is something we have gotten used to over the last few decades, but it has been slow to penetrate the reality that the government is actually now in the business of prosecuting citizens for saying what they think.
Splash wanted to talk about the Zuckerburg story this morning. The Z-man used to run Facebook, or Twitter, or something. Apparently the Government leaned on him to suppress stories about the contents of some guy’s laptop he had forgotten about. It had all sorts of stuff on it that seemed like either lewd or criminal behavior. Or both. Federal law enforcement looked at it and discovered it was valid data. Then they told the Z-man to shut down discussion.
He apparently resents it now, or is saying so for some reason we do not yet understand.
There was some laughter and a few bemused looks. That was just the first of the topics de jour. Rocket had the bit about the LawFare re-ignition. The Special Prosecutor who was found by a judge to have been inappropriately appointed to spend money not appropriated to prosecute a prominent politician has re-filed the charges that were dismissed. We are simple people, but the timing of this in the tumult of a very emotional campaign could certainly be viewed as a quest for justice, which we generally support, but also, in plain words, looks like government funded election interference.
We would normally expect the President to quash that sort of thing, but he is on vacation again, having left the last one for that late-night appearance at the Convention that nobody saw in order to return to a vacation in Yorba Linda or someplace. We understand the Collapse of the West is kind of stressful, and we want our Chief Executive at his best for it.
Which led to Vic and his portfolio on the military stuff. He used to be in the business and got energized about the campaign thing that happened just down the block at Arlington National. That was the wreath-laying for the 13 Americans killed by a suicide bomber in the hasty evacuation of Kabul three years ago. At the time, we saw that as a major screw-up, since there was no threat to the city at the moment, and no reason not to have an orderly departure.
He rubbed his neck and stubbed out a Marlboro. “But that was only the scene-setter for the other minor story of military mischance, which was that $232 million floating pier that was supposed to solve the humanitarian crisis brought on by the Hamas attack from Gaza on a music concert on the Israeli side of the border. Officials from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) feared that bad weather and recurring security problems, the $230 million pier operated for only 20 days over a two-month span, delivering a fraction of its intended aid, the USAID inspector general report found. Instead of delivering enough food for 500,000 Palestinians each month for three months, the pier only delivered enough aid for 450,000 for a single month.”
That led to a general discussion about who is actually running all this. It is so nuts that it can’t be accidental. Splash laguhed. “School is starting, and there are reports all that controversy will mark the return to campus for our rising generation of new leaders. Many are camping out on the greensward iin the middle of their school grounds, some shouting “Death to America!” That seems to reflect something we noticed when we were protesting the draft or the war or something, we forget what.
Meat is our Marketing guy. He said: “This is a cultural problem on the campuses…. It’s a culture on the campus that encourages anti-Americanism, encourages antisemitism, encourages anti-westernism…. There are faculty members who egg this on and who act as advisors on this.”
The election thing is sensitive, since we are not supposed to do anything except accept. We have been told the last general election was the safest ever, and we shouldn’t worry about the next one. We are comfortable with that, and naturally trust the same government that appears to be undermining it in the courts.
Rocket wasn’t done. He slammed down his iPad on the table hard enough to make it shake. A lady named Kim Brooksis is a data scientist who has been working on the Georgia voter rolls in Georgia for a year. She realized that names she had cleared- you know the reasons: dead, felon, stolen ID, living at a seasonal campground for twenty years, duplicate, moved out of state, 200 years old and that stuff would come back on the rolls within a month.”
He took a swig of luke-warm java. “She found the Georgia voter registration database was methodically adding them back through the DMV. That worked through the AVR, or automatic voter registration [aka “motor voter”], and is being used to register migrants. They will not vote, but their names are entered into the Voter Registration database when they apply for a driver’s license and their vote will be voted for them. In 2020, twenty states used operation AVR.”
Vic snorted and put down his mug of Chock Full O’ Nuts. “Texas just finished a major cull of its voter rolls. They removed over 1 million names. Almost half of them were dead people. Another large chuck were people who’d moved out of state, plus ineligibles,- mostly criminals or non-citizens.”
“That is just Georgia and Texas, Right?”asked Splash with a grin.
There was general laughter to that one. There was some general discussion that ensured, but Melissa said we ought to keep that private. While we can, anyway.
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