Stacking Up the Pieces

So it's just edged past the witching hour and for a variety of reasons I've slept little these past few days. Around 10:00 or so, after a day busier with the cognitive busy-work of academia than I've been in a while I finally had a chance, in my bleary, bug-eyed state to check up on the headlines at which point, of course, I saw that some crazy retard had just flown a small plane into an IRS building in Texas.

Only a couple of people were killed in the resulting fire, out of the 200 or so who were inside at the time, which good fortune we can attribute perhaps to the building somehow failing to fall despite the aerial impact event. You may argue that a Piper Dakota is no 747 but neither is a little IRS office block the World Trade Center. Physics is physics, people: if a big plane can take down a big building, a small plane can cause the collapse of a small building. QED.

But hallelujah we're beyond the realm of physics and dealing with miracles here. Emergency services were there in minutes, preceded only by a fully tricked out hazmat unit that was fortuitously there in advance, having deployed to the city the previous night and, with even greater luck, just happened to be setting up - oh for an exercise no doubt - right near the IRS building the very morning of the event. It's nice when things just sort of work out like that, don't you think? When all the pieces are in place.

Oh, and did you hear yet (I'm sure you did) that the pilot was a disgruntled software engineer who - having been tossed aside by Corporate America and facing the prospect of his financial carcass being picked over by their government - apparently went off the deep end of Tea Party-dom, posting a suicide note cum rambling anti-government rant that (I'm sure) will be full of conspiracy theories. Those conspiracy theorists, I tell ya: dangerous lunatics they are. No telling what they might do and some of them might, just might be terrorists. Right?

Right.

And that's scary, isn't it? I mean it's one thing if it's just a buncha sand-niggers and we can bring the fight to their heathen haji asses over in their medieval moonscape countries but ... white Americans turning to terrorism against their own kind? Why that might lead to open martial law by the by. Only way to keep things together in such a situation is to bring the fight to them, you know, and this time that'll mean bringing the fight right to your doorstep.

And this will justify and maybe even encourage just a bit more of that nonsense. You can almost hear the law-goblins skittering around in the great machinery of our legal code, getting ready to set the cyclopean gears grinding that will result in Firewall America. All sorts of petty, silly new restrictions will be put in place as a result of this: the police state will clamp down a little more tightly, the propaganda will get yet more shrill, and for now the majority of the population will shrug and figure it's all for their own safety. Like frogs who think that nice man's turning up the temperature in the pot because he's concerned about their comfort.

Well, my reaction to this isn't so much one of fear. I'm certainly not terrified of the Tea Party-errorists nor (as one of the erstwhile conspiracy nuts who gets lumped in with them by the lumpen proles and those in 'control') am I particularly frightened of a clamp-down on my civil liberties. I long ago decided that no matter what laws they pass, I do not have liberty. Liberty is what you're allowed to have. No, I am free simply because I am me and they aren't, more or less. Everyone else is just as free for the same reason, but figuring that out, that's the trick. I wish people would and ... I think they will.

No, what I'm getting off this right now is more annoyance (for whatever small hassle I will no doubt indirectly incur along the way as a result actions justified by this), as well as amusement: that those who did it believe they will get away with it.

They pulled this stunt in Austin, Texas. Let's pause over that: they had the colossal hubris and gall to try and put something like this over on a city with more tinfoil hat-cases than probably any other part of U.S. (except maybe the Texas back-country). What most people think is, "Yeah, Texans are crazy retards," but no, this isn't going to be like that. Think about it: I bet you the Texas police, emergency services, government, not to mention the general population, they're so shot through with exposure movement sympathizers that not a single step in this drama was taken, that was not observed. Such people keep their eyes open, they keep notes, and they keep in touch. This small army of swarming info-warriors will collate their numerous observations on the blogs and the forums of the Free Internet, they will throw a blinding spotlight on this story, and whatever the shape of the truth that takes form in that light it will devastate the plans of those who planned this.

This is going to be fast and brutal, but not in the way it was meant to be. Brace yourselves. And remember "First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win."