Picture the exact same car crash happening in two different states. Same intersection layout, same weather, same injuries, same dashcam footage. Most people would assume the legal outcome would be completely identical in both places. In reality, the results could look surprisingly different.

That’s because every state writes its own unique rulebook for civil cases. Deadlines, fault rules, evidence standards, and damage rules can all vary. A detail that sinks a claim in one state might barely matter just a few miles across the border.

For anyone involved in a lawsuit, that means location isn’t a minor detail. Where a case is heard can shape how fault gets assigned, what evidence a jury sees, and how much compensation is even possible. Geography quietly sits in the courtroom alongside the facts.

Why State Laws Can Change the Outcome of a Case

Each state builds its civil justice system through statutes passed by the legislature and decisions handed down by its courts. Those rules govern everything from who can be sued to how damages are calculated and proven. The details really do add up.

Georgia’s legal climate  is shaped by that same mix of statutes, appellate decisions, liability rules, and procedural requirements. Some of these rules are decades old, while others have changed quite recently, which means Georgia cases can play out differently from similar disputes in neighboring states.

Local practice adds another layer. Different courts may handle scheduling, motions, and trials in slightly different ways, even within the same state. Lawyers who regularly practice in Georgia courts tend to know those patterns, which can influence strategy from the very first filing.

The Hidden Role of Comparative Fault and Damage Rules

Fault rules alone can make or break a case. Georgia follows a modified comparative fault system. An injured person’s damages can be reduced by their share of responsibility, and someone found 50 percent or more at fault generally can’t recover anything at all.

That threshold differs from state to state. Some states allow recovery even when the injured person is mostly at fault, while a few bar recovery for nearly any share of blame. The same facts can produce very different results depending on the rule.

Damage rules matter just as much. States differ on how medical expenses are proven, whether certain damages are capped, and what evidence a jury can consider. Those rules can significantly shape both settlement negotiations and the size of any final verdict a jury returns.

Why Court Procedures Can Be Just as Important as Evidence

Even the strongest evidence won’t help if a case is filed too late. Georgia generally gives people two years to file a personal injury lawsuit, though exceptions exist. Deadlines are unforgiving. Missing that deadline can end a valid claim before it even starts.

Discovery rules shape what each side learns about the other’s case. Requests for documents, depositions, and expert disclosures all follow specific procedures. A missed deadline or a poorly handled request can seriously limit the evidence available when it matters most at trial.

Evidentiary rules decide what a jury actually hears. A piece of evidence may be powerful, but if it isn’t properly authenticated or falls under an exclusion, the jury may never see it. Procedure often determines whether even strong facts ever reach the courtroom at all.

How Legal Changes Can Reshape an Entire State’s Court System

Laws don’t stand still. Legislatures pass reforms, and appellate courts  issue rulings that change how earlier laws are applied. A rule that controlled cases for decades can shift almost overnight, changing how lawyers evaluate and try cases. Lawyers have to keep up.

Georgia saw this firsthand in 2025, when major tort reform legislation was signed into law. Among other changes, it made seat belt evidence admissible in many car crash cases, restricted certain pain and suffering arguments, and changed how medical expenses can be presented.

Changes like these ripple through the entire system, affecting settlement values, trial strategy, and how quickly cases move forward. Because the law keeps evolving, anyone dealing with a Georgia claim should make sure they’re relying on current rules rather than outdated assumptions or old advice.

Conclusion

Two nearly identical cases can unfold very differently depending on where they’re heard. State statutes, court decisions, and local practices all shape how disputes are resolved, sometimes as much as the evidence itself does in the courtroom. Location really is that powerful.

Fault rules, damage rules, strict filing deadlines, and procedural requirements can each change the course of a case. Georgia’s modified comparative fault system and its recent legal reforms show just how much state-specific rules can influence outcomes in real cases involving real people.

That’s why it pays to look closely at the legal environment before making decisions about a claim. Knowing the current rules, deadlines, and procedures in the right state helps set realistic expectations and protects the ability to pursue a case effectively from the very start.

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Picture a counselor who spent years holding private sessions over secure video from a closed room. Now she’s on a crowded floor, headset on, trying to keep a client’s story to herself while the person one divider over argues with a vendor on speakerphone. Since the order bringing federal employees back to their desks five days a week, accounts like that have become common. Some workers have reportedly started taking calls in their parked cars, just to get a door that closes.

Noise is only part of it. The bigger problem on these floors is that a conversation at one desk is perfectly understandable three desks away. Agencies can’t conjure private offices overnight, but they can change how far a voice carries across a floor – and that’s where sound panels for office  spaces start to matter, even if they’re only part of the answer.

Let’s be clear from the start. Panels won’t turn a cubicle into a closed room. What they can do is shrink the distance at which a conversation stays intelligible, and on a packed floor that difference is real.

What Changed When Federal Offices Filled Back Up

The return-to-office push arrived alongside an effort to shed federal leases and consolidate space. So in many buildings, more people came back to fewer square feet. Teams that used to be spread across floors, or across home offices, now share open areas that were planned for a fraction of that headcount. Employees have described missing desks, overflowing parking garages and nowhere to go for a private call.

For most staff, that’s an inconvenience. For people whose work runs on confidential conversations, it’s a different kind of problem. Think of counselors and health staff talking with clients, caseworkers handling benefits claims that involve medical or financial details, HR specialists dealing with complaints, investigators interviewing witnesses by phone. Their work didn’t change when their seats did. The room around them did.

Why Speech Carries Across an Open Floor

To fix speech privacy, it helps to understand why it breaks down. Most open floors are built in a way that sends voices further than anyone expects.

Hard Surfaces and Low Dividers

Look up and down in a typical government office. Hard ceiling tiles or exposed concrete, thin carpet or bare flooring, painted drywall, glass along the windows. All of it reflects sound. Cubicle dividers usually stop around shoulder height when seated, so a voice goes over them, bounces off the ceiling and lands neatly at the next workstation. Add a quiet HVAC system and nothing else to cover speech, and a normal phone voice travels across a good part of the room.

Absorb, Block, Cover

Acoustic consultants tend to approach open offices with three moves. Absorb sound so it doesn’t bounce around. Block it with taller dividers, walls or distance. Cover it with low background sound so stray speech is harder to pick out. Each one handles a different piece. Panels belong to the first group, and they make the other two work better, since a room full of reflections defeats both dividers and background sound.

What Sound Panels Can and Can’t Do

Honest expectations matter here, especially for people whose clients are counting on discretion.

Where Panels Help

Fabric panels on the inside faces of dividers catch a voice before it reflects back out. Wall panels near desks that handle a lot of calls cut the echo that carries speech along a wall. Panels hung from the ceiling over the open area – often called clouds – stop the over-the-divider bounce that sends a conversation two rows away. Together, those changes make the floor calmer and shorten the range at which someone can follow what a neighbor is saying. Callers often hear the difference too, since the speaker’s microphone picks up less room echo.

Where They Fall Short

Panels absorb sound; they don’t stop it. A divider lined with panels is still open at the top and sides, so a determined listener a few feet away will hear plenty. For conversations that genuinely need to stay confidential – clinical sessions, sensitive personnel matters, anything involving protected personal information – an enclosed room with a door is still the answer, and panels inside that room simply make it work better. Anyone promising that panels alone will make an open desk private is overselling them.

Practical Setups for Shared Floors

Most offices can’t rebuild their layout mid-year. These are changes that work on a floor as it is.

Grouping Call-Heavy Desks

Put the people who handle confidential calls together, ideally in a corner away from main walkways, printers, and break areas. Then concentrate the acoustic treatment there: panels on the dividers, on the nearby walls and overhead. Treating one zone well often does more than spreading a few panels thinly across the whole floor. It also gives everyone else a clearer sense of which area needs a lower voice.

Turning Spare Corners Into Call Rooms

Most buildings have a few spaces nobody quite uses – an empty small office, a former supply room, a conference room booked twice a week. With panels on the walls and a door that closes properly, any of those can become a bookable call room. It’s a modest fix. Still, it beats sitting in a car in the parking garage with a laptop balanced on the steering wheel.

Raising the Issue With Facilities

If you work on one of these floors, or manage people who do, the quickest route to change is usually a specific, written request. Note which desks are affected, at what times the problem peaks, and what kind of work is being overheard – without sharing any of the confidential details themselves, obviously. Mention whether there’s an unused room nearby that could be converted. Facilities teams deal with a long queue of complaints, and a request that names the space, the work and a possible fix tends to move faster than a general note that the office is loud.

When the conversation turns to products, it can help to look at what specialists offer, for example, Sound Pro Solutions , a company focused on acoustic and soundproofing products, office panels included.

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More than a century after the Armistice of 11 November 1918 brought a halt to fighting on the Western Front of the Great War, after a second round of World War, and decades of Cold War the catastrophes it spawned continue, in Ukraine, Iran and Gaza. Today would be a great day for Putin, Trump and whoever succeeds Netanyahu to call a halt to their pointless and bloody wars, but of course it won’t happen.

One week after we filled the Gulf of Talarico with the blood and tears of the Republican Party, we’re starting to get an idea of what the regime will look like over the next two infinitely long years. Donald Trump is out there making apologetic mouth noises to Ross Douchehat on the now-last-place CBS.1 But even as he’s lying about moderating and working with Democrats, Stephen Miller is now Chief of Staff, making him the de facto ruler of the White House.

Please note I did not say “de facto President of the United States.” Miller is not interested in running the country any more than Trump was. He is interested in ethnically cleansing it and almost certainly a bit of warmongering on the side. Even as Trump mumbles and slurs his way through pretending he will dial back the campaign of racial terror, Miller is guaranteed to be planning an expansion. Cutting our losses in the Middle East? That’s not going to happen. What parts of the Constitution are not yet shredded? Miller will have his scissors ready.

Stephen Miller is a violent fascist monster. Easing up on his white nationalist dream of America purged of Those People is not going to happen. Walking away from a chance to destroy Iran? Also not going to happen. Miller will double and triple down on cruelty and hate and war because he knows this is it. This is his last chance. The regime has two years left, and Miller will never hold power in this country again. He might never see the light of day in this country again. He knows that he will either spend the rest of his life in prison or in exile in a country with no extradition treaty. I hear Russia is a very nice place to stay. Lots of open windows…

If you don’t mind taking a pause from imagining the sweet, sweet image of Stephen Miller being pushed out a window by an FSB agent, I’d like to very politely ask for your support. This newsletter has no sponsors and considering how, ahem, opinionated I am, I probably never will. That means I rely 100% on you, my amazing audience of wickedly smart and abnormally attractive readers.

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Anyway! Miller knows that he has two years left and the chances of a military auto-coup are vanishingly small. Pete Hegseth was too stupid and incompetent to complete his mission: Turning the United States Military into a White Christian Nationalist weapon the regime could wield against the country.2 With time running out, Miller will try to speed-run America’s New Holocaust. Purge as much of America as possible and maybe give Miller’s beloved white race more time to rise up and fight back against the Great Replacement blablaba.

The next two years will be violent. Sadistic. Beyond illegal. Cruel beyond anything we’ve seen before. And that’s saying something. This will be very bad for the country.

It will be far worse for the Republican Party. We will survive.3 They will not.

It’s important to understand what just happened to the GOP. They didn’t lose simply because they did not deliver on their economic promises. They lost because the country is tired of state-sanctioned murder and rape and kidnappings and concentration camps and unaccountable masked killers terrorizing our streets.

They’re tired of wars of choice in the Middle East making everything more expensive. They’re tired of the rich getting richer while the price of groceries goes through the roof and stays there. They’re tired of their elected officials pouring billions into their bank accounts while our wages fail to keep up with inflation, and then fucking bragging about it

Miller will do nothing to remedy a single one of these missteps. He will exacerbate them because he believes the office of the president is unshackled by the law or the Constitution. Miller believes HE is unshackled by the law or the Constitution. Donald Trump is an all-powerful God-Emperor, and Stephen Miller gets to control him like a meat puppet.

Again, this portends VERY bad things going forward for America. But just like the midterms, everyone will know who is to blame come the 2028 election. The regime doesn’t do careful and nuance. It doesn’t think things through. It smashes everything and assumes that no one will ever hold them accountable. Drunk on power doesn’t even begin to describe their attitude, and Miller will be completely unhinged.

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So what happens in 2028? Republicans were already in trouble before the midterms. Trump is old and dying. For all the little dog yapping about Trump running for a third term, one month of campaigning in a handful of states almost killed him. Even in safe red states, the audience was…not as receptive as they used to be. Now that he’s a lame duck loser of historic proportions? I would give up a kidney for him to be the nominee again. But he won’t. He’ll pardon himself and flee the country.

Who is left as heir to the shit-spackled throne of the GOP?

• Rubio never had the charisma to begin with, and his utter failure in Iran ended any hope he had.

• Ron DeSantis is making a big comeback! But still has the personality of a dead fish, and no one liked him outside of Florida.

• Tucker Carlson will absolutely make a play for the white nationalist vote with help from Cenk Uygur and the rest of the ratfucking alt-left. Trump won’t like that, and he’ll still be able to tank anyone he wants.

• JD Vance…AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! No. As we’ve discovered, all the Silicon Valley money in the world and manipulation of social media will not save the GOP.

Really, there is no one to take up the banner of the Republican Party. They made the GOP into a Cult of One, and the country fucking haaaaates that one person with a blinding fury. Not a good long-term strategy but here we are.

Miller, as the puppetmaster of the regime going forward, will almost certainly try to arrest Democrats and have them declared a domestic terrorist organization. He’ll finally declare martial law and invoke the Insurrection Act, two things he’s been desperate to do for years. He believes this will make him the undisputed ruler of America, and he’ll just disappear or shoot anyone who disagrees.

How long do you think that’s going to last? Do you think even this Supreme Court is going to hand absolute power over to Stephen Miller? Nah. But he’s going to try anyway because Stephen Miller is a certified psychotic who is keenly aware this is the extinction burst of American fascism. Go big or go home, right?

In the end, Miller is going to engender a backlash so fierce, last week’s biblical flood will be “the good ol’ days” for the remaining Republicans.

That’s before Democrats continue the gerrymander wars the GOP started. With Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now under blue trifecta control, Democrats can erase another dozen seats. If New York, California, and Virginia redraw their maps as well, that’s several more seats. Republicans already had zero chance to take back the House. Add more gerrymandering to the blue wave, which I am going to dub “Miller’s Folly,” and Republicans are looking at a Democratic supermajority in the House.

The Senate is not much better. The only seats Republicans can flip are in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, which all now have those pesky trifectas. Bye-bye every drop of Republican election rigging. Sherrod Brown just flipped Ohio. Maybe they can get rid of him in two years (it was a special election), but during another blue wave? I wouldn’t bet on it. How about Raphael Warnock in Georgia? Georgia is steadily becoming blue, and with a Democratic governor and secretary of state, no one will be “finding” the votes to flip that seat. Tough days for the GOP. Couldn’t you just cry?

Last week was almost an extinction-level event for the party of pedophiles, grifters, and Nazis. Stephen Miller is going to do everything possible to finish the job. He won’t be able to stop himself. He’s consumed by hate and arrogance, and he’s going to snuff out any hope the GOP had of recovering. It will be a privilege to watch the Republican Party kill itself and chronicle its death in real time.

Now, we need a sidebar here about how to view the coming suicide of the GOP. As desirable as their end is and as much as we’ll be wallowing in the schadenfreude of self-immolation, this was not “worth it.” It was not worth the cost in lives lost to destroy the Republican Party.

• Thousands of women (if not more) have died because of the GOP’s sadistic misogyny. Tens of thousands of women have been forced to suffer unspeakable pain. None of them able to access the reproductive care that is their right as human beings.

• Hundreds of thousands of people are dead throughout Africa, more than half of them children. All because Elon Musk wanted to gut agencies that could regulate his illegal businesses.

• AIDS, one steadily declining, will surge globally. Millions of children will be born infected and die. Again, because Republicans decimated foreign aid.

• Millions of Americans no longer have access to healthcare. Children are going hungry. Rural hospitals are closing, and food banks do not have enough to help their communities. All directly because of the Trump regime.

• The Trans community has been demonized. Teens are committing suicide at a higher rate because of the attack on their healthcare and very existence. These are children.

• Immigrants have died in concentration camps. Children are being raped and tortured by the tens of thousands in prisons run by white nationalists. We’ll never know how many have been “disappeared” by the pedophile traffickers of the right.

Tens of millions of lives have been upended and destroyed in just the last two years. No, it was not “worth it” to bring the GOP to its knees and ready the guillotine. We could have started this process in 2016. We could have kept it going in 2024. We have a chance not to make this same mistake a third time in 2028, but never, for one second, think that it was “worth it.”

The only people who will say it’s “worth it” are the people who do not see the dead and dying and those still suffering as people. They see politics as a game to be won, and if some sacrifices have to be made? That’s “worth it.” Those are the people who were never at risk. Who would never miss a meal or be cut off from healthcare. Who would never worry about being killed by an ICE agent because their skin was too dark or they spoke with an accent. Whose nice, safe white neighborhoods were not invaded and turned into a warzone by a fascist regime hell-bent on triggering riots.

It’s always easy to call for sacrifice when yours is not the blood spilling in the streets.

To anyone saying all of this was “worth it”: Fuck you. You’re no better than the monsters we’re fighting.

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This is what spy agencies do. They have schools to teach spies to accomplish exactly what Alice Huang, the apparent Chinese spy, has done with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. Get close to a powerful person, in this case, the CEO of the four trillion dollar chip powerhouse that according to reports builds 90 percent of the processors used in the development of AI that is driving markets, and voters, crazy. Then, use the closeness to your target to get information that goes beyond the target, in this case, all the way into the Oval Office, and captures intelligence right from the very top.

Stop and think about that for a minute. Alice Huang is very likely an intelligence agent for the People’s Republic of China. If such an agent has achieved the connections that this one has – Jensen Huang has admitted to a sexual affair with her, and that is the gooey center of the so-called “honey-pot” approach by an agent – her reports are going straight into the office of the Xi Jinping, who Trump said yesterday he will meet next week at the APEC leaders summit in Shenzhen, which Reuters described today as China’s “southern tech hub.”

Let that sink in for a moment. Trump is going to meet the Chinese president, in his country, in the Silicon Valley of China, and Xi will come to his meeting with the American president armed with all the intelligence that Alice Huang has been able to get out of Jensen Huang and from him, on Donald Trump, since the two Huangs became closely acquainted over two years ago.

Two years of pillow talk about the semiconductors made by an American company that are essentially driving the world economy and that China wants to get its hands on so they can keep up with AI development in this country.

As I pointed out above, Russia and China have schools to teach intelligence agents exactly how to penetrate targets Jensen Huang. Meet your target at an industry conference somewhere, which is apparently what happened between the two Huangs. There was a report in the New York Times on Friday that said Alice Huang “was recruited…by Beijing’s top spy agency to learn more about American A.I. chips and potentially influence the company to push for its most advanced chips to be made available to China.”

Ha! It’s more like she was hand-crafted for that task. Does anyone believe that China is not in the business of becoming the world’s biggest superpower both militarily and economically for the long haul? Does anyone think that people like Alice Huang drop into their lap? If they recruited her, it was when she was in college, and from then, she was trained-up to do exactly what she has done. It is likely that the company of which she is CEO, Megaspeed, is a wholly created creature of the Chinese government. The Times reported that Megaspeed “has been building data centers in Southeast Asia and then renting their computing power to Alibaba, the giant Chinese internet firm.” Do you think a single nail is driven or a cupful of concrete poured to build one of these datacenters that serves China’s most important “internet firm” without the Chinese government okaying it and probably providing the cash money to pay for it?

Hmmmm…let’s think for a moment and see if we can come up with anyone else Alice Huang has been able to get close to through her extra-marital relationship with Nvidia chief, Jensen Huang. Who’s that familiar face standing in the background of the photo I saw of Huang today? Is that Elon Musk? Why, yes it is! Was Musk at the White House tech-mogul meetings that Jensen Huang has attended? Why, I think he was!

And whose pillow did Jensen Huang put his head down on after these tech-mogul meetings, and computer conferences and AI conferences he and Alice Huang attended? Gee, give me a minute…I’m trying to think of who that might have been…I’ve got it! Jensen Huang followed Little Jensen right into a luxury hotel suite where the beautiful Alice Huang was waiting for him, just as she had been taught at spy school in China.

Then Jensen Huang flew home to his wife, Lori, whom he has been married to since they met in an engineering lab in college at Oregon State University.

But man, what a catch this guy has been for the eager Chinese deep-cover agent Alice. Huang got his start in the world of ultra-fast chips working at Advance Micro Devices, AMD, and from there went to work for Sun Microsystems. He’s been around Silicon Valley almost as long as there has been a Silicon Valley. He knows everybody. But it gets better. Huang is a relative of Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO and chairperson. He is close to Taiwanese billionaire Charles Liang, the co-founder of Supermicro. Huang was born in Taiwan and is a dual citizen of that country and the U.S. Nvidia chips are made in – you guessed it – Taiwan, along with practically every other chip that is used in U.S. designed and U.S. owned electronic devices.

Let me see, there’s something familiar here I think I’m missing. Oh, I’ve got it! Taiwan! Isn’t that the island nation right off the coast of China that President Xi thinks China owns, that Xi’s navy is constantly running military exercises around, that Xi’s air force is constantly buzzing the skies off its coast with its fighter jets, which are carbon copies of the fighters produced by the good old U.S.A.? Why, I think it is!

So, there appears to be an icing on this little intelligence cake that China’s had in the oven since they trained-up Alice Huang – which is her Americanized name, by the way, her Chinese name being Huang Le. China set her up with Megaspeed in Singapore, so she can run the company out of an allegedly neutral country, while all its business is back on the homeland of China. Megaspeed has a subsidiary in Malaysia called Speedmatrix – they do love the root word “speed” don’t they. A recent New York Times story said that a Commerce Department official visited a Speedmatrix facility in Malaysia and found “massive quantities” of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPU) still in their boxes rather than installed in server units as the Commerce official thought they would be. The Times reported that this led to a suspicion that the Nvidia chips were being routed through Speedmatrix, the Megaspeed subsidiary, into China.

To which I would say, gee, ya think?

The discovery of the boxes of Nvidia chips in Malaysia is what led to a Commerce Department investigation of Nvidia, which I would be delighted to report to you is where we find ourselves today. But, as with all things Nvidia, and all things Huang – both Huangs, it seems – it ain’t that easy. Today we learn, again in the New York Times, whose reporting on this scandal has been excellent and absolutely essential, that the Commerce Department investigation of Nvidia’s relationship with Megaspeed “came to a sudden halt” after the general counsel of Megaspeed sent an email to Commerce Department investigators “seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.”

Now, let’s examine this little development. This happened last year, according to the Times. L’Affaire Huangs, if I may, was ongoing last year, out of the glare of scandal which now illuminates it. The Times looked a little deeper into the email from Megaspeed, sent last year, and found that the general counsel of Megaspeed informed the Commerce Department investigators that Jeff Kessler, a top official at Commerce, “had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.”

That’s sounding just a teensy-bit cozy, isn’t it?

Kessler reports directly to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whom we have discovered is one hell of a lying bastard, in that he lied about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, lied about his financial arrangements with him, lied that he had never visited his island…and on and on. Also, Lutnick is one of Trump’s favorite house-poodles, and likely the source of inside information that the Trump sons, and thus Trump, have traded on to make the $3 billion or so that Trump admitted to 60 Minutes he has accumulated since taking office, the source of which he claimed not to know, because it’s all handled by his “very smart” son.

You’ll never guess what they did with the Commerce Department investigation into Nvidia and Megaspeed and Speedmatrix and all the other Chinese firms run by…uh, what was her name again?...oh, that’s right! Pillow-whisperer Alice Huang, who was busy pillow-whispering with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the subject of the Commerce Department investigation, back when the email was sent from Megaspeed’s general counsel to the Commerce Department investigators.

Our government suddenly decided to transfer the investigation of Nvidia and Megaspeed and all the other Speeds to the Department of Justice, which is run by Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who has played THE key role in sitting on and blacking out and withholding and otherwise concealing all the files on, yep, Jeffrey Epstein, well known friend of both Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick.

Deeper and deeper it goes, and right at the center of it is our Honey Pot du Jour, Alice Huang, CEO of Megaspeed and its subsidiary Speedmatrix, and pillow-whisperer of Jensen Huang, whose company was being investigated by one department of the U.S. government and is now being investigated by the man who calls himself “Donald Trump’s lawyer.”

Let me tell you what. I’ve written five novels, and I spent 15 years in Hollywood writing for TV and movies, and if I had pitched this plot during any of those years to any studio or book publisher, I’d have been told not to let the door hit me on my way out.

Watch what’s going to happen now. The Guardian reported today that “Alice Huang’s current whereabouts are unknown,” and that her “current relationship” with Megaspeed is “unclear.”

Youbetcha.

Alice Huang is the Maria Buttina of AI chips. She’s going to disappear down a Chinese rabbit hole, and we won’t be hearing anything about her until some new guy in China overthrows Xi and wants to trash him with a scandal that will make the new guy’s career in China and improve relations with the U.S. For now, she’s gone, but the other Huang, Jensen, is still running Nvidia, because his PR people have got every major mainstream media outlet reporting how “essential” he is to the company, and how Nvidia couldn’t run without him, yet another genius worth hundreds of billions of dollars who got led around by his Little Jensen into a gigantic wad of trouble that we’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun watching him try to dig himself out of.

Stay tuned. This one’s got it all — Big Huangs, Little Huangs, Honey Pots, Whisper-Pillows, Donald Trump, and megabucks galore.

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Boy, that one’s a mystery, isn’t it? The short answer is, I don’t know. I doubt if his parents even know. There is a certain kind of person, if you look into their eyes, all you see is a dark hole. That’s Stephen Miller. His eyes don’t betray anything about him, because there is nothing to betray.

He comes from a family that was saved by immigration to the United States from certain destruction in what is now Belarus but then was part of the Russian empire. And yet now he is the single most virulent xenophobe in an inherently xenophobic administration. He hates immigrants, and he very probably does not even know why.

What I’m going to do tonight is try to illustrate what that hate is, and how it comes from exactly nothing.

When I lived in the deep South in the 1980’s, I had someone over to my house who was a friend of a friend, who bought him along when I invited him for dinner. The man was from Mississippi. I was living in New Orleans.

During dinner, he made a few racist comments. Ordinarily, I would have thrown him out of my house for talking the way he did, but in deference to my friend, I abstained from that extreme solution and decided instead to take the opportunity to interrogate him about his racism.

I lived in the French Quarter, and after dinner, we went outside and sat on the balcony to drink coffee and have an after-dinner drink. I decided not to waste any time, and started right in, asking him why he had used the N-word to refer to Black people every time he spoke of them. He seemed a little shocked. It occurred to me that he had never been asked that question before. He said something like, I don’t know, I just do.

I asked him if he knew the word was offensive to Black people, and to others as well, including me. He allowed as how he understood that. Doesn’t that give you pause, I asked him. I’ve got freedom of speech, like anybody else, he replied.

With that, I decided to ask him if he thought Black people were inferior. He did. I asked him why. He answered that it was obvious to anyone who paid attention. I asked him if he thought Black people should not have the right to vote. He answered that they shouldn’t.

I wasn’t going to argue the Civil Rights laws and the Voting Rights Act with him, so I pressed on. I wanted to know where his racism came from, so I asked him if he had ever had a conversation with a Black person the way we had spoken with each other earlier at the dinner table. No, he hadn’t. I asked him if he had ever had a Black person over to his house as a guest. The answer again was, no. I asked him if he had gone to school with Black people when he was young. No, he went to an all-white “academy.” I asked him if there had been Black people in the university he attended. He said yes, but he didn’t have anything to do with them.

I asked if any Black person at his college, or in the town where he lived, had ever done anything to offend him personally. He said something like, being there, and chuckled. I asked if he had gone to Black restaurants in the town where he lived – I was thinking specifically of a steakhouse owned by a Black woman that was famous throughout southern Mississippi. He said he had gone there, and the steaks were good. I asked if it offended him to eat at a restaurant owned by Black people where Blacks were eating at nearby tables. He said no, long as they keep to themselves.

I asked if he had ever been the victim of a crime committed by a Black person, such as a mugging. No, he hadn’t been mugged, but everybody knew they stole money taking welfare, and that was out tax dollars. I pointed out that the number of Whites and Blacks on welfare in Mississippi was almost exactly proportional to their numbers in the state’s population. He said everybody knew that welfare was started for Black people – he used the N-word – and without them, there wouldn’t be any welfare. I didn’t argue the history of public assistance with him, realizing that his answer reflected political rhetoric on the Right, especially in the deep South.

Realizing that I had reached the end of my search for specific reasons for his racism, I shifted my approach and came right out and just asked him where it came from. He looked at me as if I had asked him whether gravity was real, if the planets circled the sun. It’s just the way things are, he said.

I hadn’t gotten into it with him about either the scientific or moral lies of white supremacy, thinking that would lead into a rabbit hole useless to argue. In fact, I hadn’t argued with him at all. I was looking for a reason behind his racism and had found nothing. He didn’t come right out and say that he was “raised that way,” but clearly that had contributed to his beliefs, if not been at the root of them.

Even that would not have been a real answer. You can be heavily influenced as a child and having reached adulthood decide to go against your upbringing. I knew people whose racism was essentially erased by their experiences in the Army. For several of them, it was the first time in their lives they had personally come to know a Black person.

There isn’t any answer to the source of racism. I suspect the same is true about Stephen Miller’s xenophobia. It has no root in his family history. It doesn’t come from having grown up in Santa Monica, California. There is no evidence that someone from an immigrant background kept him from being admitted to a prestigious university. In short, Miller seems not to have suffered any damage personally from immigration in general or from an immigrant specifically.

He has made a career out of being anti-immigration, and the way he has overseen the Department of Homeland Security and its ICE policies seems to reflect a sadistic streak in him. But though psychology could help explain certain behaviors in a person, it’s not enough with Stephen Miller, and it’s not enough with deeply entrenched racism.

I do believe that people are not “born this way” when it comes to beliefs that fly in the face of logic and come from the dark corners of prejudice. Bigotry is learned and can also be inherited, but Stephen Miller seems not to have inherited his intolerance. Every time he opens his mouth, it is obvious that he enjoys it. Hatred has that effect on some people. For reasons we will perhaps never understand, it’s like a drug. Hate feels good to them. I suspect that like addiction, they can never get enough of it. Stephen Miller is such a person. He’ll go to his grave hating people who are seeking the same thing his ancestors sought and found here in this country: life itself and the freedom to live it.

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