A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 

1)  Trolley time.  Let’s start with the trolley problem.  People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts.  First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer:

A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five people.  If it hits them, they will die.  If you pull a switch, you can divert the trolley onto a different track.  There is one person on that track, and they will die instead of the five.  Do you pull the switch?



And of course you answer “yes” and then you get sucker-punched with something like this:

Five people are dying of organ failure, from different organs.  If they get transplants they will live out their normal lives,  Without the transplants, they will die.  In front of you is a healthy person who has the organs that they need.  If you kill the healthy person you will save the five.  Do you kill them?



Okay so on one hand trolley problems can be a legitimate tool for exploring values and morality.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff you can unpack with them. But on the other hand these little bait-and-switches can be, frankly, very irritating.  They’re set up to put our rationality at war with our intuitions, emotions, and habits of thought. 

Yes, that can sometimes be a useful or at least informative exercise.  But for most of us, the likely response is going to be less “Hmm, maybe deontological ethics are more appropriate here than a simple utilitarian analysis” and more “Oh, ffs.  Now you’re just being ridiculous.”



We’ll return to this shortly.  First, a short digression on living green.


2)  La Vie Vert.  Mrs. Muir and I live pretty green.  That’s a bit of a surprise to me when I think about it, but that’s just how things worked out.

We live in a small town in Germany.  We have a car, but we don’t drive a lot — public transport is a thing, and so are bicycle paths.  Mrs. Muir rides an e-bike to work when the weather is fine.  Our two older boys take the train home from university.

We have solar panels on the roof of the garage.  Several rainwater tanks.  A large backyard garden where we grow a lot of our own vegetables. We’ve got a compost pile, which I am weirdly proud of.  Probably more relevant, we don’t fly off anywhere for vacation.

We sort of fell into this lifestyle, and we’re not doctrinaire about it.  We certainly don’t proselytize, or even much discuss it.  But yeah climate change is a thing and we’re pretty aware of that.  We have four kids, aged high school through college.  We think a lot about what kind of world they’ll inherit.  So, you know, you do what you can.

(At this point someone starts prepping a comment about how riding a bike to work is meaningless, because the real cause of climate change is big corporations and government policy and putting solar panels on the garage is just a displacement activity that doesn’t address the real problems.  To which I reply,  (1)  every bit helps, and (2) we are *also* politically active, details not relevant to this blog post, and (3) the personal is political.  Of which more anon.

Right, so… green-ish by German standards, which means by US standards I’m basically Swamp Thing.


[he’s really green]

Okay, now a brief note on cars.

3)  Cars.  Cars are not great for the planet.  There’s a lot of other stuff that’s not great for the planet, but cars are actually right up there: personal automobiles account for about 11% of global CO2 emissions.  Planes get a lot of attention, but passenger cars collectively?  contribute more than three times as much as aviation.  Because the world has a lot of passenger cars.

We’ve all seen the graphics, right?


Passenger cars are just a mass of negative externalities.  The CO2 is the biggest one, but there are a bunch of others — parking, traffic, accidents, other sorts of emissions, environmental damage, you name it.

So from this we can derive some… not rules, but let’s say guidelines.  Passenger cars are sometimes a necessity, obviously.  That’s especially true if you live in the United States, which has spent most of the last 100 years designing itself to be unlivable without a car.  But you should use them responsibly, and as little as possible.  Walk, bike, or take public transportation when you can, and don’t use a passenger car for silly stuff and whim.  That’s all objectively reasonable, yes?

4)  When the Almighty gives you side-eye.  Islamic jurisprudence has a useful concept:  “makruh”.  (Makruh tanzihan if you’re being pedantic.)   Actions that are makruh are not haram — forbidden, sinful — but they are discouraged.  You won’t be punished, religiously or legally for doing something that’s makruh.  But you just… shouldn’t. 

One classic example of makruh is coming to mosque when you smell bad, either because you haven’t bathed or because you’ve eaten garlic or onions or some such.  You’re not going to Hell for that.  It isn’t a sin or a crime.  But you’re being a jerk and you shouldn’t do it.  In the opposite direction, another classic example of makruh is wasting water while cleaning yourself.  A thirty minute firehose shower might be your preferred way to unwind, but water is precious and you’re wasting it on gross self-indulgence.  You shouldn’t do that.  Basically, makruh is Not Cool, Bro.

IANA Christian ethicist, but I don’t think Christian ethics have a close analogue.  There’s venial sin, but that’s not really the same.  Venial sin is still sin; it’s just not bad enough, by itself, to damn you.  Makruh isn’t a sin and you won’t be punished for it.  But you have to imagine God looking at you and shaking Their head and being like… really, my child?  Really?

I like makruh a lot, because I think it covers ground that Christian and Christian-derived ethical systems kinda miss.  To give a particular example, I think the stuff I mentioned a couple of paragraphs above — using passenger cars unnecessarily, excessively, or for silly stuff or whimsy — would come pretty squarely under makruh.  It’s not evil, nor is it something you should be punished for.  But you just… shouldn’t.

That said…

5)  The Gearhead Gene.  So I am neither handy, nor mechanical, nor particularly interested in engines or machines.  But this was not inevitable.  My grandfather was an automobile mechanic.  My uncle was a mechanical engineer and an inveterate tinkerer.  He was the kind of guy whose basement and garage were workshops, and who was constantly messing with his car.  He had several patents.  All were for mechanical gizmos intended to be used in, on, or adjacent to internal combustion engines.

And sometimes these things skip a generation.  Our youngest son, who I’ll call Jack, got the Loves Things That Go gene. 

 

When he was small, Jack would stop and stare at interesting vehicles and machinery.  Bulldozers, backhoes?  Cherry pickers?  *Fire trucks*?  Utter fascination.  Okay, that’s pretty common for little kids.  But Jack never grew out of it.  Quite the opposite!  By the time he was ten, Jack had encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of machinery, from farm tractors to airplanes.  Jack could talk for hours about airplanes.  

And when he hit his teen years, he got into cars.  Rally cars, muscle cars, differentials, gear ratios, whatever.  If it was connected to cars, especially to how cars work, it was devoured and digested.  A little while back I innocently asked whether he thought front- or rear-wheel drive was better for a family car.  I got a twenty-minute answer, and it was basically a fast dense text-only PowerPoint presentation.  Jack had read and thought deeply on this topic, and his thoughts were organized.

Okay, so now Jack is in his late teens.  And he has just taken several years of savings, money from allowances and odd jobs, and he has bought a car.  Specifically, a 1989 two-door hatchback Honda Civic.


[Behold.]

6.  Wait, what?  

I know.  But here’s how it went down.  Jack spent hours and hours researching what the best cars were that might be in his price range.  “Best” here meant a bunch of things, but in particular reliability, simplicity, and ease of repair.  He wanted a car he could work on.  This nudged him towards an older car, because more recent models are more likely to be opaque or hostile to an amateur mechanic.  And apparently the ’89 Honda Civic is well-nigh legendary for being rugged, reliable, low-maintenance, forgiving, and both cheap and easy to maintain and repair.

Furthermore, this particular Honda was what they call a “barn find” — meaning, a car that has been sitting in a barn (or wherever) for years and years, because reasons.  Maybe the owner got too old to drive, but lived on for many years anyway.  Maybe it was in legal limbo for years because of a contested divorce or disputed inheritance.  Maybe someone just forgot about it.  These things happen.  Whatever the reason, despite being older than Amazon, Taylor Swift, Zohran Mamdani, Linux,  Photoshop, Bagel Bites, Home Alone, Friends, the Lion King, and the independent nations of Croatia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, this car had less than 100,000 km (60,000 miles) on it.

So we drove for over an hour to a used car lot, which was run by — I am not making this up — a plump, sweaty guy in a sports coat with three days of stubble and hair implants.  And then I spent two hours pacing around the lot listening to podcasts while Jack examined every square centimeter of that car, and then got on a series of intense video calls with his car-focused buddies to debate pros and cons.  I would sometimes catch odd words and phrases like “cylinder head”, “torque”, or “after-market carburetor” but then I would just pop the earbuds back in and take another lap around the lot.  There are times in life when my presence is a value-add, and this was not one.

And in the end, Jack went and haggled with Sports Coat Guy.  And got him to knock a couple of hundred euros off the price, because the after-market carburetor was putting too much torque on the cylinder heads, which might reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.  Or something.  That stuff just skipped a generation, okay?  I have other talents.

So now he has this car.

7.  The Plan.  Jack’s plan is simple.  Step one is, fix up the car.  It’s in working order — this is Germany, there are rules, you can’t sell a car that hasn’t passed inspection — but he wants it to be in excellent working order.  This has involved more long conferences with his car buddies.  Also, weirdly shaped packages have started showing up on our front porch.

Me:  So… what is that?
Jack:  It’s a tachometer!  
Me:  You found a tachometer that will fit?
Jack:  Oh, that’s easy.  You just go to EuropaCentralHyperMegaAutoPartsBay.com.  You can connect with people selling over thirteen billion distinct parts for a hundred and forty thousand different makes and model of car, going back to 1883.  They don’t do paint, though.
Me:  Huh.  When I was your age, we just had… junk yards, I guess?
Jack:  [silence that mixes incomprehension with pity]
Me:  Well okay, so… it didn’t have a tachometer… but you’re going to give it one?
Jack:  Yup!
Me:  (knowing it’s a mistake, but can’t stop myself)  Why do you want to add an tachometer?
Jack:  Well you see, with an tachometer you can see visually when the RPMs are departing from the zones specified in the manual.  Obviously even in the absence of an tachometer you can still hear that, and you just shift gears or, perhaps, adjust the choke.  But that just gives a crude approximation.  Now an analog tachometer, which this is, is accurate to within about 500 RPM.  You get that variance because there’s a magnetic coil…

[two minutes of, basically, white noise]

Jack: …pop the clutch, thereby reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.  So, really, you should have a tachometer.
Me:  That’s… that’s great, son.  Good luck with that.

So step one is fix up the car.  Step two is, road trip.







[road trip]

Jack has another interest, and that’s hiking.  Specifically, minimalist hiking, where you just take off without much gear.  Jack isn’t obsessive about it — he’ll carry the basics, a sleeping bag and a lighter, a water bottle and a knife — but he likes being able to throw stuff together in a few minutes and literally head for the hills.  The problem is, he’s mostly hiked out the (fairly modest) trails around our small corner of central Germany.  So the plan is — once he’s worked a bit more and saved up enough money —  to take off in the Honda for some serious hiking. 

He’s already poring over maps.  The Camino de Santiago?  The Seven Hanging Valleys?  The Highland Way?  Maybe some Alps?  So many possibilities!  Throw a bag in the car and hit the road, Jack.

[the mountains are calling and I must go]

8.  And back to the trolley.  Okay, so how do I feel about this?

Objectively, as a green-ish person, I should feel mild disapproval.  Passenger cars aren’t great, right?  One young man using a passenger car to drive thousands of kilometers around Europe, just so he can walk up and down some mountains, is objectively wasteful.  The personal is political, right?  It’s not a sin or a crime, but it’s probably makruh.  This is at best a self-indulgent luxury, and Jack shouldn’t be doing this.  

Okay, so I can recognize this intellectually.  But I absolutely don’t feel it.  What I feel is not disapproval, but a mixture of amusement, love and pride.  And when I probe my feelings, it feels like someone is trying to force me into one of those gotcha trolley problems.  I mean, objectively  you should kill that one dude to save five, right?  Right?

To be clear, I’m not looking for either criticism or validation of how I feel here.  (Ha ha, looking for validation online.  Who would ever do that.)  No, this is more… thinking out loud.  That trolley-problem gap between objective analysis and gut feeling is darn interesting.  I don’t know if I have anything useful to add to the conversation — there are literally people who are devoting their careers to this stuff —  but these things always get more interesting when they’re happening to our own wonderful selves, in real time.

And that’s all.

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Once upon a time, I was a hardcore gamer. I know, shocker. A white male Gen Xer into video games? Who has ever heard of such a thing? I was SUCH a gamer that I worked at EB Games, which then became GameStop. I was a manager for several years and, honestly, I loved it. I loved being around video games all day.

I stopped playing heavily when I became a stay-at-home dad, which seems counterintuitive. You’d think being at home would give me MORE time to play. Well, yes and no. I was home all day and COULD play as much as I wanted, but that came at the expense of ignoring Jordan, the newborn infant. Which, to my eternal shame, I did for a short time. At three months, babies don’t do much but sleep, eat, and poop so…I played. A lot. Specifically, World of Warcraft and Halo.

But after a few months, I realized that I was being a really shitty parent and made the extremely difficult decision to stop playing video games. Online video games, at least. Single-player games could be played in small clips, paused and saved whenever. It was online gaming that had really become a time vampire. It was unbelievably difficult to put down, and if I had been ten years younger, in my twenties, I might not have had the maturity to do it. Later, I watched more than one younger parent fail that same struggle.

I’m explaining this because when the kids were older, I started to play online again, and it was…different. Maybe 12 years had passed, and what had been a toxic environment was now radioactive.

I was in that first wave of people to play console games online. Computer gaming was a little different. At the time, those players skewed a bit older (gaming rigs were expensive), but console gaming was for anyone. So screaming adults and kids mixed it up and it was…eh. Not a lot of mature conversation to be had.

But when I went back a decade or so later? Jesus fucking Christ, it was unhinged. Almost every time I turned on chat, someone was screaming racial slurs and misogyny. Nonstop. Sometimes it was a kid, sometimes it was an adult. It was pervasive.

After a while, I got bored and stopped turning on the audio, which made it hard to play a team game. And so I drifted away from online gaming. Again. It was a lot less difficult the second time.1

Why am I telling you all of this other than to give you some insight into my life as a stay-at-home parent? Well, to give you some frame of reference when I tell you that gaming culture does not, under any circumstances, produce leftists.

• It does not produce left-leaning moderates

• It does not produce strident socialists

• It does not produce rabid Marxists

• It does not produce hardcore communists

• It does not produce class warriors intent on toppling global capitalism

• It absolutely does not, in any fucking reality, produce homicidal trans activist leftists who hunt down and shoot Nazis

Because that is quite literally what Republicans are trying to sell the public, and I am telling you that is a fucking lie.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R-Magic Underwear) has been working the cameras nonstop to get this narrative out there and the fucking legacy press has been more than obliging:

“Robinson has not been cooperating with investigators, but the people closest to him have been working with police, Cox said. So far, Robinson’s friends have painted a picture of a young person radicalized in the dark corners of the internet, according to the governor.

“Clearly, there was a lot of gaming going on, friends that have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, Reddit culture and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep,” Cox said.”

If you were to ask every reporter covering this story to name a single hardcore lefty connected to gaming culture or Reddit or online forums in some way, they would give you a blank stare and drool. But just about every single far-right killer has been linked to neo-Nazi forums or incel chatrooms or some other nasty “deep, dark internet” crap. It’s par for the course.

Let’s be perfectly fucking clear here. I am not saying video games are to blame. That’s also a pernicious lie for imbeciles, and I’ve been having THAT argument with “adults” who should fucking know better since I was like, I dunno, ten years old?

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Lil' Ogre was adorable!

Video games do not make people into homicidal assholes. Here’s some actual data to back that up:

If video games or online gaming culture made people into homicidal lunatics, Japan and South Korea would be drowning in mass murders. But they’re not. Why? A lot of it has to do with our gun culture. A lot MORE of it has to do with our white nationalism problem.

It’s really important to understand that white nationalists have deliberately made online gaming MORE toxic. It was already bad, but they inject as much poison as they can. Why? So they can recruit. Neo-Nazis have been using video games as recruitment for quite literally decades:

Games Elevate Hate to Next Level

Hate groups are increasingly using racist and anti-Semitic computer games to recruit young people, the Anti-Defamation League charged in a report released Tuesday.

Ethnic Cleansing, Shoot the Blacks and Concentration Camp Rat Hunt were some of the titles studied by the group. The objective of these first-person shooters are predictably similar -- to kill as many non-whites, Jews and everyone else they hate as possible.

The proliferation of so-called "white power games," which can be bought or downloaded online, is part of a larger strategy by extremists to recruit younger members, said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the ADL.

That was 2002. Fucking 23 YEARS ago. You know what article has never once been written?

Marxists Elevate Class Warfare Through ‘Call of Duty’

or

‘SimCity’ Champions Socialism, Parents Worried

or

Is The Zombie Apocalypse in ‘The Last of Us’ A Secret Communist Recruitment Tool?

Young white men do not go deep into gaming culture and fall down the rabbit hole into the deep, dark, Reddit corners of the internet and come out screaming for universal healthcare and equal rights for the LGBTQ community.

That. Does. Not. Fucking. Happen.

When young white men go down that rabbit hole, they either laugh it off and go on with their lives or they are warped into rabid, violent right-wing hatemongers.

I know this. The FBI knows this. The fucking legacy press goddamn well knows this. They KNOW it because they’ve written that story so many fucking times, it’s practically a template on their computers. Along with, “Nation mourns dead schoolchildren but Republicans refuse to act2 Washington/Congress/both parties paralyzed by infighting.”

But that’s not the narrative they want because, like I explained yesterday, if they tell the truth about who Kirk’s killer is and why he did it, they would have to talk about who the American right REALLY is. And they would rather put the lives of hundreds of thousands of trans people at risk. They would rather enable a fascist regime to demonize “the left” than admit the American right is a violent death cult. They would rather lie and lie and fucking lie to the public rather than admit their role in bringing America to the brink of disaster.

After all, as long as there’s someone else to blame, trans people, antifa, immigrants, “radical loony leftists,” the press can keep making money and pretending they’re not part of the genocide machine they set in motion.

But they can play make-believe all they want. When the regime falls, and it will, they are going to fall with it. Nazi propagandists were held accountable. I don’t see any reason not to do the same here. These rat fucks are going to get trans people killed simply to protect the martyrdom of a Nazi weasel piece of shit like Charlie Kirk? Fuck that and fuck them.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 48 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

I really don’t know how George Orwell did it. He wrote his magisterial novel, the truths of which we have been living for three quarters of a century, in 1949. As a title, he arbitrarily chose a year, “1984,” which seemingly passed us by when we weren’t looking. He presciently came up with the idea of “thought police,” which at least one dictionary defines as “a group of people with totalitarian views on a given subject, who constantly monitor others for any deviation from prescribed thinking.”

Which is what has been going on at full gallop since the middle of last week, when you know what happened to you know who. I hesitate to use either the name or the occurrence. The thought police are listening…or reading…or watching…or whatever they’ve decided to do to, well, let’s turn to White House presidential aide and Thinker of Great Thoughts Stephen Miller for his definition of who he is talking about:

“There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence — violence against those who uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”

Stephen Miller and the thought police of the Right have declared war on anyone who has dared to exercise freedom of speech in a way that does not please Donald Trump. The Washington Post just fired Karen Attiah, an editorial page columnist and its Global Opinions Editor for a series of posts on Bluesky that she wrote after the killing of you know who. The posts do not directly reference you know who. Instead, she takes on the scourge of gun violence, decrying that “We live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence. Not just accepts, but worships gun violence.” She continued, “Political violence has no place in this country…but we also do nothing to curb the availability of the guns used to carry out said violence.” She asked her readers to “Remember two Democratic legislators were shot in Minnesota just last year. And America just shrugged and moved on.”

But then Karen Attiah made the mistake that the Washington Post, in firing her, called “unacceptable” and “gross misconduct,” and endangered “the physical safety of colleagues,” because, you see, she had the temerity to quote you know who’s words on one of his podcast shows: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go stealing a white person’s slot.” She put the name of you know who just below his disgusting quote.

By the way, Attiah is a black woman.

The Washington Post, of course, gave the game away by accusing Attiah of endangering “the physical safety of colleagues,” the assumption being that, because she used a quote from you know who, not in the pages of the Washington Post but in a third party social media app called Bluesky.

That is how afraid the Washington Post is of Stephen Miller, who in a Friday appearance on Fox News told host Sean Hannity, “we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” promising that “The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

Since I wrote my last column on Saturday, the firing of people from all walks of life for writing posts, usually on social media, about you know who has continued. People are said to be taking down social media posts they put up over the last few days, “sanitizing,” in the words of one report, anything that could be construed to be insufficiently attuned to what the thought police think is acceptable commentary on subjects that would appear to include political violence, gun control, the killing of Democratic Party lawmakers and a score of other touchy subjects being monitored from the White House.

Yes, I just wrote that sentence. They are monitoring all of us from the White House. They are sharpening their knives and preparing indictments and ordering underlings at the Department of Justice to come up with the basis for lawsuits that will take away our money and take away our freedom.

I really don’t know what to say about this escalation of the fascist crackdown on freedom of speech and political action in this country. For a brief time, it was thought that the Supreme Court would come to its senses and protect us from this sort of excess. However, a report over the weekend pointed out that since mid-July, the Court has granted 16 emergency applications on its shadow docket, giving the Trump administration victories in the areas of transgender service members, immigration rights, firings of the members of independent agencies, and withholding appropriated funds against the laws of Congress. So there goes that hope.

The things Trump has been doing are so unpopular -- from stonewalling on the Epstein files, to tariffs causing price increases, to cuts in medical care, to radical changes in vaccine policy, to his continual caving in to Putin on Ukraine – that he is scrambling around trying to come up with something that will get him out of the hole he’s dug in time for the midterm elections. Trump and his minions have seized on the assassination of you know who and are doing their best to turn him into a martyr and crank up the drooling base into a froth of hatred and racism and xenophobia.

Today, it was announced that references to race and slavery will be removed from multiple national parks in a move to scrub them of “corrosive ideology,” including a historic photograph of a slave showing the scars of lashing on his back.

They’re cracking down not just on speech, but on thoughts. They are whitewashing history to remove all the “bad” stuff so they can sell the “good” stuff to the masses.

The way to fight back is to refuse to be bullied into thinking their thoughts instead of yours.

The name of you know who is Charlie Kirk. I will not be cowed. I will not bend. I will stand up and be counted and be damned with Stephen Miller and his thought police.

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In the end, news ending the two-day manhunt with the capture of the Charlie Kirk killing suspect – Tyler Robinson – could not escape threats of partisan recriminations, religious overtones and the apparent daily requirement to lavish praise on Donald Trump.

Rather than feeling relief that a gunman had been caught, we were left with open threats of more violence by one half of the country or the other against the other half.

Trump’s raw emotional kinship for Kirk, a magnet for rightist causes, prompted White, Christian righteousness and the need for the spotlight to overshadow what should have been routine, if self-congratulatory announcements of the arrest — something that should have provided enough drama itself.

In the end, it was not some hard work or magic of FBI investigation, it was family and a family friend who basically turned in the suspect, believed and charged as acting alone. So far, there are state charges, with federal counts undoubtably to follow.

Instead, we had Donald Trump preempting any FBI or Utah law enforcement by blurting out partial truths on a Fox and Friends morning tv show, skipping over the niceties of any pending trial to call for the death penalty.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox slathered prayer and Christian faith references over what seemed a minority call for civility in “a country where politics feels like rage.”  FBI Director Kash Patel, who should have been apologetic about his own job performance this week, had to once again schmear praise for Trump over the press conference about an arrest.

Importantly, the motivation of shooting suspect Tyler Robinson, 22, remains unclear. Even as authorities listed physical evidence, including “Hey fascist! Catch!” writing on bullets still in the rifle, just what his politics might be was confused.

Nevertheless, it was impossible to miss that Trump World holds political opponents to blame for the killing. Certainly no one was talking about gun limits — which may not have applied in this case anyway.

Promises of Recrimination

The rising tide of further recrimination and a dictatorial tone among MAGA speakers advocating attacks against the Left could not be ignored.

MAGA voices were calling for “war” (Jesse Waters) or attacking anyone who “glorified” the slaying (Laura Loomer). Secretary of State Mario Rubio said visas should be pulled of anyone who appeared to “celebrate” the death in online posts.

Trump doubled down on blaming the “radical left” for much of the political violence in the country, most on the extreme right were driven there because “they don’t want to see crime.” Trump told his tame Fox interviewers that “we have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”

Though Trump invoked Kirk’s memory to urge supporters to refrain from retaliatory violence, he said his aim is an end to a movement bent on the destruction of the American way of life — anyone he calls a “radical leftist,” apparently.

Dangerously, Trump said — with no question asked — that he wants to push the legal system to more quickly prosecute those accused of crimes, saying that the United States should become more like China. “We have to have quick trials,” he said.

Of course, Trump said the opposite when he faced criminal charges, seeking as much delay, appeal and legal maneuvering as humanly possible for himself. It is a hypocritical blurt of the worst of authoritarian rule, and one oblivious to his own history of calling for the death penalty years ago of the exonerated Central Park Five.

Interestingly, the Supreme Court in Brazil upheld guilty rulings for former president Jair Bolsonaro, 70, for conspiring and conducting a Jan. 5, 2021-like election coup that mirrored Trump’s allegations. Bolsonaro is going to jail for 27 years. Trump is talking about summary trials for political foes.

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The post The Message in the Arrest of Tyler Robinson appeared first on DCReport.org.

Guarding Fragile Legacies

Every culture holds treasures that live not in gold but in ink and parchment. Rare texts carry the thoughts of centuries and the fragile whispers of authors long gone. Many of these works once faced the risk of fading away through fires wars and the slow erosion of paper. Today a shift has taken place as e-libraries step in as guardians. They transform the brittle into the durable and allow fragile voices to be heard beyond the walls of locked archives.

The preservation of knowledge has always walked a thin line. A single flood could erase a lifetime of scholarship. In a world that demands constant access people who teach themselves often use Zlib to keep learning. By doing so they also remind us of the vital role that digital vaults play. These vaults do not just store books but also preserve heritage with care and precision that old shelves can no longer guarantee.

Tools of Preservation

Rare manuscripts once rested behind velvet ropes with only a few scholars granted entry. Now high resolution scanning and careful digitization protect these texts from the wear of eager hands. The fibers of ancient pages may crumble under touch but the digital copy will remain intact for generations. This balance between access and protection allows rare works to survive in a form that feels both timeless and modern.

At the heart of this effort stands a simple truth. Knowledge must remain alive. Preserving the words of early scientists historians and poets means keeping open a door to the past. Without these doors the future becomes poorer. Every scanned letter or stored volume is more than a file on a server. It is a candle passed through time.

This duty takes shape in different ways:

• Careful digitization

Skilled teams use scanners that avoid harsh light and pressure to capture every detail without harming the page. This process may take longer but it protects the manuscript from irreversible damage. Each scan is checked for clarity since even a faint smudge can hide meaning. Once stored the file can be shared widely which reduces the need for anyone to handle the fragile original.

• Metadata and cataloging

A digital copy without context risks becoming a lost ship on a vast sea. Cataloging provides the compass. Archivists add detailed information on authors origin and condition. This helps researchers find what they need without guesswork. It also creates a map of connections showing how different texts influence each other across borders and time.

• Secure storage

Digital files are not safe on a single hard drive. Secure storage means multiple backups in different locations. Some institutions use cloud systems others use private servers locked behind layers of protection. This spread reduces the risk of loss and ensures that even in crisis the rare texts remain safe.

Through these methods preservation gains a body of steel around a heart of paper. Yet the story does not end here since access matters as much as safety.

Access Beyond Walls

A library no longer needs a marble hall. When a rare text enters the digital space it gains a freedom unknown to earlier generations. Scholars in remote towns can explore works once held in distant capitals. Artists can draw on forgotten tales. Historians can check details without boarding trains or planes. In this way the walls of knowledge fall down and doors open where once there were none.

Z-library stands as one of the e-libraries that have made this reach possible. It extends the life of rare texts by ensuring they are not only stored but also discovered. The presence of such collections changes the way learning spreads across regions. The rare and the fragile become part of everyday study rather than relics hidden away.

Keeping the Past Alive

E-libraries remind us that memory is not only human but collective. When a rare text moves into digital form it becomes part of a larger story. The story is not of hoarding but of sharing. The act of preservation here is not about freezing time but about carrying it forward. The words of an ancient poet or the notes of a forgotten scientist continue to echo because they have been given a new voice.

Books once endangered now find themselves in safer company. They live in the balance between tradition and innovation. They stand as bridges between centuries and cultures. In this way the rare texts are not only saved but also allowed to keep speaking across the endless corridors of time.

Photo: Mikhail Nilov via Pexels.

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The post How E-Libraries Safeguard Rare Texts appeared first on DCReport.org.

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🖕FUCK THE LEGACY PRESS!🖕

Last week was a real eye-opener for me. I honestly did not think my opinion of the mainstream media could plunge any lower. These were the pieces of shit that have been suckling Donald Trump’s diseased balls for the last decade. The obnoxious pricks that admonished Barack Obama for not reaching across the aisle while lavishing praise upon Republicans for making obstruction their entire political platform.

These were the same fucking cowards so eager to examine every minute detail of Joe Biden’s health but couldn’t bring themselves to ask a single question about President Tussauds McMeltyface when he forgot to hide what clearly looks like a stroke:

I despise these people with the power of a thousand exploding stars. So it was a very unpleasant surprise for me to discover they had new depths of depravity to reach. And “depraved” really is the only word one can use to describe the orgy of whitewashing we watched last week as the press publicly masturbated in praise of an objectively horrible person.

We’re going to skip over the right-wing media praise of Kirk. Their fellating of his corpse is not relevant here. As far as they’re concerned, a dead Nazi martyr is the best thing ever for the fascist cause.

But the legacy press couldn’t wait to hump Kirk’s dead body like a dog in heat as they dutifully lined up for their turn. He was “influential” and “a young activist.” They really played up how “young” he was. Kirk was 31. It’s important to recall that Michael Brown was 18 when he was killed by a racist cop a decade ago. The press did not call him “young” but made sure to emphasize that he was an adult at every opportunity because, you see, only white men are forever granted the innocence of youth. Honestly, do not be surprised if you see some weeping MAGA moron call him a “kid.” 31 fucking years old.

Anyway, Kirk was an “activist,” and he reached out to college kids. He was a “strong voice” on the right. A huge Trump supporter. Unafraid to debate college kids. Bla bla fucking bla. Praise praise more empty fucking praise. “Controversial.” Yadayadayada circle jerk.

A real special shout-out to Ezra Klein, a truly craven fuckstick, who had the gall to write an op-ed “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.” Which way was that, you little shitstain? The lying? The astroturf part, where he was funded by billionaires? The call for mass murder? The attacks on democracy and the marginalized? The demonization of Democrats to the point of lunacy?

And THAT is what was missing from all of this reporting on Chalrlie Kirk: What the fuck he actually said and what the fuck he actually stood for. By and large, the press twisted itself into pretzels to avoid talking about that. The Guardian, however, did not. Must be nice not to have to bend the knee to American fascists.

On race

If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024

Sure is weird how the press has spent days heaping praise on the ventilated meatsack of a virulent racist asshole. Imagine a Black politician or activist saying something even a fraction as insulting as this about white people. Hell, imagine Joy-Ann Reid or Barack Obama accurately pointing out that the overwhelming majority of serial killers are white men. Or that most pedophiles are white men. Or that most rape, murder, corporate crime, child abuse, etc. etc. etc. is carried out by white men.

The press would lose its fucking mind and scream in outrage for weeks on end. But Charlie Kirk was an “activist.” He was just “controversial.”

On gender, feminism and reproductive rights

Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.

– Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.

– Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024

Please pay attention to how the press ran to Democrats and demanded to know if they need to tone down the rhetoric. After all, accurately calling Republicans “fascists” might be the reason people are becoming worried that they’re fascists!

No such tone policing has ever happened in the decades Republicans have been getting abortion providers firebombed and killed. Where were these brave fucking gatekeepers of public discourse when people like Charlie Kirk were calling us pedophiles and groomers and literally accusing the left of killing children after raping them?

Oh, right. The press was busy marveling at how effective and clever GOP messaging was. Remember, lying about the left is “messaging.” Telling the truth about the right is “dangerous.”

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre is VERY dangerous...

Here’s a fun piece of data we should all completely ignore because it's not at all fucking relevant (if you’re Ezra Klein and the New York Fucking Times):

On gun violence

I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

– Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023

How can I capture my exact feelings over this particular quote in light of Charlie Kirk dying the same way he so blandly brushed off because he assumed it would always be little, unimportant people doing the dying and not a main character like himself? If only there were the perfect video clip…

On immigration

America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024

It’s been a vital part of the whitewashing of Charlie Kirk to erase his white nationalism as well as his fascism. The press took great pains not to talk about his calls for violence or his calls to end democracy. Not only did the press not talk about what Charlie Kirk actually believed, but they also punished people who did.

I’m no fan of Matthew Dowd, in fact, he’s absolute fucking trash, but he was fired for saying true things. Not even “controversial,” which I thought we were celebrating, but actual, literally true things. But that’s not the narrative we want, so fuck off, Dowd, No truth-telling here! This is the fucking American media!

Worse, the very same fucking scumbags who have been wringing their hands over “cancel culture” for YEARS eagerly lapped up the GOP waging a purge of anyone who spoke ill of Kirk. I’m old enough to remember the press deriding soft and weak college cancel culture. People should be allowed to speak their minds! Unless, of course, it makes the right have a Big Sad. Then we have to cancel every last one of those motherfuckers.

Why Are These Assholes Doing This?

Ezra Klein was pretty clear when he said he was envious of what Kirk had built. Meaning Klein wants access to the billionaire funding and all the money and clout that came with it. Maybe that’s why he’s been increasingly pushing right-wing trash disguised as “progressive” thought. He wouldn’t be the first mediocre white man to follow the money. I’m looking at you Glenn Greenwald and Cenk Uygur and Matt Taibbi and Jimmy Dore and and and.

But, really, it’s not JUST about the money. A lot of this has to do with the fundamental cowardice of the press. If the press talked about who Charlie Kirk really was and what he really stood for, they would have to explain why he was so beloved to the right. And that’s a problem.

I’ve talked about how the press protects the GOP a lot, so many of you should already have some idea where I’m going with this.

A core function of the American press is to obfuscate the true nature of the American right wing. To do this, they throw up smoke and mirrors. They use “bothsiderism.” When cornered, they simply lie. They either lie by omission or they lie by “just asking questions” they already know the answer to. But they ARE lying.

Because if they DIDN’T lie, they would have to pick a side. It is impossible to accurately report on who and what the American right wing is and NOT pick a side.

The American right wing is, without exaggeration, a theocratic fascist death cult. We know this because of what they do, what they say, and, more importantly, what they openly say they want to do.

• They openly talk about how they want to ethnically cleanse America of tens of millions of brown people

• They openly talk about how they want to send millions of Jews to Israel so they can trigger WWIII as part of their End Times prophecy

• They openly talk about stripping women of all their rights in the same way the Taliban and Iran have

• They openly talk about putting children, young children, back to work in factories that will maim and kill them

• They openly talk about concentration camps and genocide

• They openly praise Hitler and the Nazis

These are not fringe nobody weirdos in the dark corners of the internet. They scream these things at CPAC and Trump rallies and their non-stop QAnon treason tours.

There is nothing like this on the left. Even digging through the most radical feminist man-hating chat rooms will not give you a fraction of the rage and hate speech you can find on Fox News on your average Friday afternoon:

Just a casual suggestion to murder 770,000 people, including 150,000 children. No big deal. Nothing to see here. Totally normal. Both sides are extreme, y’all.

Behold the culmination of decades of whitewashing right-wing violence. Matthew Dowd was crucified for mentioning. correctly, that Charlie Kirk spread hate. Brian Kilmeade called for mass genocide, and he was forced to issue a public apology. Oh my. Will his career ever recover from this?

This is why the press will not, CANNOT, speak the truth about who the right is and destroys any of its own who do.

To speak the truth means to admit that they are violent animals bent on murder on a scale that would make the Nazis weep for humanity. The Third Reich killed 11 million people (6 million Jews, 5 million Roma, LGBTQ, handicapped, political dissidents, and others) in the camps. Laura Loomer, Trump’s close personal mushroom harvester,1 is already joking about killing 65 million in the GOP’s camps.

Please note the press did not demand Republicans answer for this. No tone policing here. There never fucking is. Republicans are not held ot a lower standard. They’re held to no standard at all.

But this is what the press does. They simply move on to the next story and look away from what Republicans say and do. And when they do something particularly evil, they find a way to blame everyone. Because when everyone is guilty, no one is. Or they simply pretend it’s not actually evil, just “controversial” or “questionable” or some other bullshit contrived euphemism. Anything to avoid looking reality in the face.

Because choosing a side means they can’t pretend to be neutral or above it all anymore. They either have to defend the rule of law and risk losing their jobs, or openly go fash and face the music when the regime falls, which it will. Right now, the press is hoping they can protect the GOP as they have been for decades, and still walk away unscathed. But that time has come and gone.

The whitewashing and gaslighting stop when the regime is destroyed. We owe it to this country to rebuild a press that fulfills its constitutional role in protecting democracy, not enabling fascist filth.

We see what they are doing, and my job is to explain WHY they are doing it. Because once the fascist regime is dragged down and burned to the ground, the press will immediately work to absolve itself of all culpability, and that cannot be allowed. Collaborators must be held to account. Outlets that protected the regime and lionized a Nazi little shit like Charlie Kirk have to be put out of business. Weasels like Ezra Klein have to be driven from the public square, their financial ties to the fasciosts exposed and shamed into never showing their faces again.

We deserve a press that works for the people, not themselves, and, goddamit, we are going to have it.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 49 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.