9/11/2026

Fifteen years old today I wrote a blog about 9/11, at that time, ten years prior.

I wrote this here back on June 7, 2010, arguing for surgical special-ops warfare over mass troop deployment. 

Bin Laden was still alive. ISIS didn't exist yet. I'm reposting it as-is today, on the 25th anniversary, because it's a time capsule of where my thinking was—not because I got everything right. The "secret war" approach I was pushing for became the dominant U.S. counterterrorism strategy through the 2010s, and it did not turn out to be as clean as I argued below. 

Worth saying that up front. Admit your mistakes, do better next time. The idea I had was sound. What was missing was never the tactic—it was an accountability structure that no administration, including the one I trusted to run it, ever built, because the legal architecture available to them was designed for the opposite. 

Now, all bets are off. We're watching an administration whose motives and mechanisms we can't verify—and what surfaces is often worse than what we feared. Or could ever have imagined, on both sides.

Don't act like this current administration whenever you make a mistake, you foolishly double down and dare people to correct you in a corrupt autocratic playbook format of being an "American" presidential administration. 

History is going to shred this period of our shared history, no matter how much this administration tries to divide us for purposes of power and corruption.

But first, today:

Today, all four living former presidents stand together at Ground Zero for the 25th anniversary.
Same soil, same names read aloud, same silence at 9:37.
The sitting president was not there.
He was at the Pentagon instead—a venue with one microphone, one audience, and zero other former presidents standing nearby for comparison.
No New Yorkers who clearly despise Donald Trump, his lies about everything, and 9/11—where he did not bring a crew with him on that day, as he incessantly repeats the lie, unneeded, undesired, un-American.
The reported reason, per the Times last week, is a dispute over a speaking slot in New York, which he denies.
Denial or not, the outcome is the same.
One ceremony seats four presidents shoulder to shoulder in front of the cameras that built their legacies.
The other seats one, with nobody around to share the frame, to highlight what he isn't and can never be:
A decent American, a decent man, a great president.
Controllable is not a character flaw. It's a production choice.
Some stages just have fewer people who can upstage you—simply by existing.

---

Monday, June 7, 2010
U.S. 'secret war' expands globally?

The Washington Post had a June 4, 2010 article titled: "U.S. 'secret war' Expands Globally as Special Operations forces take larger role." It would seem that the Obama Administration is using more and more secret teams to go in and take out dangerous radical groups.

Is this bad?

I had been proposing this since 9/11. I brought this up again and again, at least to family and friends, back when we entered Iraq under the pretenses of having information leading to Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction and there being a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; a contention I never bought, nor understood. Even when the Bush White House said they had intelligence indicating this to be true I didn't believe it. I thought, well I suppose its possible, but I found it hard to believe for obvious reasons. Why did Congress?

My contention then, as it is now, is that we should not send in mass amounts of troops. What we needed were smaller, specialist hit squads. Yes, this sounds scary. Yes, these have been misused the world over by dictators, terrorists, war lords, crime bosses. But which makes more sense: sending in many American troops to lose their lives on blanket, shotgun-like approaches to taking out the bad guys? Or sending in small teams, with proper intelligence, to mark and remove only those individuals that would best serve our goals and save the most lives?

You can argue all kinds of things about this. It could go over limits. How do you control it? Are there moral or ethical implications? On and on.

But look at what we have now. How many have been killed on both sides? How many innocents? Wouldn't it have been better to send in the smaller teams, targeting specifics, than using bombs, war theater tactics, shooting missiles from afar and using drones? Even if specialist squads killed a few innocents (which I'm thoroughly against, but that's yet another topic), how many have we killed now, using our current tactics? I doubt we could even approach the current numbers.

This is not political assassination. This is targeting specific individuals or groups, to strategically and surgically take out those who are actively supporting the killing of people outside the intent of their goals. My point in that statement is: when a group wants the US out of their country, killing US citizens, or their own—and typically innocent people—is outside the intent of their goals.

Terrorists justify their murderous actions because they are too small, too poor, too powerless, and so they use larger-than-life actions to draw attention to their group, their goals, or their issues, in order to get their way or bring popular or media attention to their cause.

But this has gotten out of hand. Frequently, their original goals change over time, or they lose track of their intention, or their core beliefs, and begin to rationalize. Since they do NOT have a centralized government to guide them, it is easy for them to lose their way. Yes, it can be easy for a state-governed group to lose sight of its origins; but far easier for those run by a small rag-tag committee, or a war lord, or a rich, deluded ex-national businessman.

Mostly these people are lost, missing something in their lives, and want to subvert process to attain goals through any means possible. That might be understandable. But it is just as understandable that someone would want to stop them. Once a terrorist organization kills innocent people, they lose the right to be justified and righteous.

The same is true of a nation state. And they should be called to task by the world stage, the UN, and their allies. But terrorists have none of this. So they need to be put down as swiftly as possible, by any means possible, just as they do it. But care needs to be used in not harming innocents.

Not harming innocents is the core concern in all of this.

So, let's start bringing back the troops. Less talk, more action.

Those in charge of these teams need to be conscious of the need to do right, to execute with need and justice, and avoid at nearly all costs the loss of innocent life. Because once they start killing innocents, they are out on the same limb as those rotted and diseased souls who have lost their way themselves.

Back to today, 25 years after 9/11 and we have what? Abused America for electing an erudite decent black man, twice? Elected a career criminal and failed TV game show mob boss type, twice?

9/11 did more damage to use than even the Republican Party and what have we accomplished?

We have set ourselves up repeatedly for more and worse to happen under this administration, under the current ruling party who is under the autocratic criminal thumb of this (and no, it cannot be stated to much, or two often) corrupt president.

We have a lot of work today ahead of us.

Work that will have to now also tackle the issue of a too strong Executive (something both parties have indicated now for decades and then when back in power, did nothing to rectify it, weakening Congress one administration after another), with a corrupt ruling parry and a SCOTUS who seems to have no relationship to that Court's past or America's present.

We CAN obviously do better. We will. 

America... 

Good health to you, to us all and to a better America through the next two election cycles.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

A Field Guide to LgN Productions

Most catalogs get organized by year, or by genre, or by whichever award sounds best on a poster. This one doesn't sort cleanly that way, and it shouldn't. What holds LgN's work together isn't a category — it's a set of obsessions that keep resurfacing: memory that won't stay buried, complicity that hides in plain sight, and the gap between what people say happened and what actually did. 

A war anthem written from inside the mud. 

A weapons dealer whose real crime isn't the one you think. 

A public-access relic that turns out to be the whole company's origin story, thirty years hidden in a box.

This is a walk through that catalog by throughline, not by résumé.

Before the beginning. LgN Productions — originally "Last good Nerve Productions" — was founded in 1993 for a single public-access documentary about Lost in Space, produced on borrowed equipment with a crew of friends. Films now on either YouTube or at the LgN Screening Room.

JZ Murdock served as its uncredited executive producer, writer, and editor. 

The LIS documentary aired twice on Seattle cable in early 1994. During postproduction the tape editor at the Viacom studio on Roosevelt Street in Seattle, broke mid-post, most of the music dropped out on broadcast, and then the company went dark for over two decades for a variety of reasons, mostly personal.

When Murdock started making films again decades later, he didn't start a new company. He picked LgN back up. 

Everything below is what happened after that.

The Features

Pvt. Ravel's Bolero (2022; remastered 2025) is the anchor of the catalog, and its festival run — 80-plus wins — is the reason there's now a deliberate policy of not listing all of them. A visceral anti-war meditation, it imagines composer Maurice Ravel forging the relentless rhythm of Bolero while serving as a truck driver amid the horror of World War I. Built from archival imagery, surreal overlay, and Ravel's internal reflections, it refuses the polish of a conventional documentary in favor of something rawer and harder to look away from — a tribute and a warning at once.

The film has its own footnote in history: in February 2022, a Ukrainian festival selected Murdock's horror short Gumdrop as an official selection days before the invasion began, and within a week a Russian festival nominated Bolero — an anti-war film — for Best War Film. Two governments moving toward war; two festivals, on opposite sides of it, choosing the same filmmaker's work. It's the kind of coincidence that says more than a mission statement could.

"Gumdrop," a short horror (2020) picked up 17 awards of its own, and it earns its place next to Bolero on theme, not just as a genre pairing. Sampson, a meticulous underground weapons supplier, moves product through clients using a coded word — "gumdrop" — while flashbacks from a fractured childhood bleed steadily into his present. What looks at first like a portrait of a damaged middleman turns, in its final act, into something rooted in crimes that once existed outside of fiction. It's a film about what a person can normalize when the alternative is remembering. From the short true crime story, "Gumdrop City" (2012).

The Frontier

Two of the newest additions to the catalog don't fit the fest-circuit mold of the shorts above — they're closer to experiments in how a story gets told at all.

Light Snowflakes: America's Second Orbit (2026) builds an entire immersive documentary around a single object: a rare 1962 vinyl record carrying the unedited audio of astronaut Scott Carpenter's Aurora 7 mission. Restored footage, research, and context surround that recording, educating the viewer so thoroughly that by the time the raw audio plays again at the film's end, it lands differently than it could have for anyone listening in 1962.

Travels (2025) is the outlier on purpose. An experimental short built from AI-generated stills and an AI-composed score, guided by a screenplay Murdock wrote at university in the early 1980s, it follows a woman moving through shifting, dreamlike landscapes where memory, technology, and selfhood collide. It's less a departure from the catalog's themes than a stress test of them — the same questions about identity and buried history, run through tools that didn't exist when the script was written.

World Explorers Program (2026) goes back further than any other title in the catalog — to a set of records Murdock received as a child in the 1960s, part of a monthly series that introduced kids to different countries through vinyl, printed materials, and small keepsakes. He kept them his whole life. 

The film doesn't illustrate them with new footage; it turns the original audio itself into the image, using oscilloscope-generated waveforms so the sound becomes something you watch as much as hear — voice, music, and narration rendered as a moving trace across the screen. It's restraint as a formal choice: no modern imagery standing in for a childhood that arrived entirely through listening and imagination. As a kid, Murdock never knew whether these recordings captured real travel or a studio reconstruction of it; decades later, restoring them, the honest answer turned out to be both at once.

(LgN's catalog isn't limited to film — Murdock also publishes prose under LgN Press, including the award-winning Death of Heaven. That's a separate story for another day.)

Unproduced

The Teenage Bodyguard, a screenplay grounded in a true-crime basis, has picked up 17-plus awards on the strength of the page alone — proof that a script doesn't need a camera behind it to prove itself. It's the clearest evidence that LgN's throughline lives in the writing first, production second. Two producers are interested if the money can only be found. It would have been made three times with three different directors that one name producer found, but they just didn't have the right...vision.

What's Next

Three shorts are currently under consideration at Life is Short and HorrorHound TV: 

Eagles & Crows, a Fable (a 4 min allegory), "Gumdrop", a short horror, and The Rapping. 

Eagles & Crows is a minimalist allegory — loosely drawn from the symbolic roles of eagles and crows in Native American traditions — about a forgotten act of kindness between the two birds that calcifies, generations later, into a ritual no one remembers the reason for. 

The Rapping, shot in stark black and white and built partly from real NASA InSight Mars lander audio, follows a man alone with an insistent, rhythmic sound he can't place — inside his house, or inside his head. Elements of it were later folded into Gumdrop, linking the two films into a shared psychological universe.

Alongside the submissions, a film companion book to Bolero is being considered at a UK publisher — expanding the film's found-poem approach to Ravel's war into something longer-form.

A Body of Work, Still in Progress

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

China, Tibet; Russia, Ukraine. Humanity? Kind of Sucks

In 821-822 CE, Tibet and Tang China concluded a peace treaty, commemorated on stone pillars (rdo ring) erected in Lhasa, the Tang capital Chang'an, and the border at Gungu Meru.

The treaty proclaimed "Tibetans shall be happy in Tibet, and Chinese in China. Both shall not intrude into other's territory."


The Lhasa pillar still stands.

In October 1950, China invaded again breaking the pact, most significantly, when 40,000 Chinese troops invaded Tibet, the event the Tibetan government-in-exile and most Western sources refer to as the Chinese invasion/annexation of Tibet.

No new treaty. No renegotiation. Just violation.

Since then: forced sterilization campaigns targeting Tibetan women.

Mass Han in-migration reshaping the demographics of Lhasa and other Tibetan cities.

Tibetan children removed into state boarding schools designed to erase language and culture.

Genocide by birthrate of foreign national invaders.

1,129 years of a written commitment, broken in a season, followed by 75 years of dismantling the people the treaty was meant to protect.

The documented drivers of the original invasion were more plural:

securing a strategic buffer against India,

asserting PRC sovereignty over former Qing/Republican-era territorial claims, and

ideological consolidation of the "five races" into one state.

China's stated reason: humanitarian rescue. Backward, primitive Tibetans, in need of liberation from feudalism.

What "liberation" actually offered:

no referendum,

no aid freely given,

no autonomy preserved.

Just 40,000 troops, then Han settlement, then dispossession.

What it delivered instead, over seven decades:

mineral and timber extraction,

hydropower projects for mainland China, mostly

and

water diversion on Tibetan rivers,

resources flowing outward while Tibetans were displaced.

Humanitarian concern doesn't require an army.

It doesn't require replacing the population you claim to be rescuing.

The water and power stay in China's system, the fiscal and construction benefits are structured in ways that reinforce settlement patterns, and the same infrastructure doubles as military hardening on a contested border. That's mechanism-first and doesn't require one to assert intent—the design speaks for itself.

Abuse of another country you claim as your own for your own country’s benefit, regardless the harm you inflict, or the demands you impose.

Sounds a lot like Russia’s intent in Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Different border, different decade, different cover story. Same mechanism: claim the land as always yours, extract what's underneath it, replace who's on top of it, call it help.

Tibet got a UN resolution and silence.

Ukraine got a coalition.

The mechanism didn't change. The world's willingness to name it did.

We, as a planet—kind of suck.


Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Having a bad day? Compared to what? Ever gone sky diving?

This is a repost from May 31, 2010, that I chose to reshare today, on my birthday, August 30, 2026,

Mom was born on my birthday (long story, but funny). She passed in 2017. Love you mom.

I also have a pretty fascinating post out yesterday on my Substack about a very weird birthday I had, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, some decades ago with my girlfriend at the time. 

On a roll here--here's another birthday I had in 2014 in Bellingham, where one of my kids was living at the time, in my old university town from where I graduated in 1984 (what a year to graduate in, huh?). 

So...

Hi! How has your weekend been? Your week? Your year? Not too stressful, I hope.

[Boy! Does THIS have a different meaning now than it did in 2010 when I first wrote this article!]

Also, an old 2011 blog I did on when I was a USAF Parachute Rigger.

Thun Field, Pierce County Airport,

(FAA identifier PLU) 

1960. 16915 103rd Ave Ct E, Puyallup, WA

Mine has been quite over the top. 

Some of my "customers" are very high stress and they find it easiest to put some of that stress directly upon my head. My costumers are IT related, vendor related, sometimes other departments or other states of our four-state plan. I've long been on a high-level front-line IT team for a "Cadillac" type BlueShield health insurance company (yeah, I know). Some place that stress rightfully so, some I've been told, not so much. Or more precisely, not at all.

Just how stressful HAS this week been? Or last week for that matter, with this one giving it a good run for the money? How so? How can I explain? How can I draw this out and yet keep talking to you till you realize this was just another attempt to talk about strange and unusual times from the past? How can I even keep your attention for that long? Let's see.

I'll just say, this week has been slightly more stressful than I remember feeling one day years ago (harp music), while plummeting to the ground from about 3,000 feet up, having just foolishly let go of a perfectly good airplane, on one fine summer day. It was about just then that I had noticed my parachute was kind of open above me but had not quite really opened as I had been lead to expect it would. It was just flapping in the wind like a streamer held out a car window.

First, I really should mention, this experience I'm about to relate, took place the day after my High School friend Rod's birthday at his house. He had just turned eighteen. I was still seventeen. I woke after a night of very strange things, my ex-girlfriend I had JUST broken up with and my soon to be new girlfriend both being there, doing a variety of inebriates I had done and had yet to do, drinking at a kegger and the next morning waking on the couch in the living room, to a hangover and the murderous sounds--of all things--of someone dumping and counting, jar after jar of coins there on the living room floor. It was Jimmy, Rod's older brother.

I said, "HEY, knock it OFF!" Jimmy said, "Sorry, but I have to."

I said, "Why?" and he said, "Because, I'm going sky diving." 

Then he said, "I'm done. Later." and he ran out the door.

Shortly after the door slammed shut, Rod came down the stairs from his bedroom, rather quickly, and asked, "Where'd Jimmy go?" I told him and he kind of lost it.

"WHAT! Oh Hell, he told me he'd take me! I'm going!" I asked him, "What? Hey! Then I'm going."

On the way there, Jimmy realized he didn't have enough money. So, Rod and I gave him what we had to cover him. Then when we got there, I said I wanted to jump too but I had given Jimmy all my money. 

But I was now broke or at least didn't have enough. 

Jimmy felt bad and between him and Rod, we got the $30 together for me and we now all hand enough. We could start our five and a half hours of training, still miserably hung over and at times, jumping from a platform five feet up from the dirt out front of the dive loft where they stored and packed the parachutes.

We were learning "PLFs", Parachute Landing Form, which didn't feel none too good while doing them. PLFs are what they teach you, so you don't do, FKHF form (Feet, Knees, Hands, Face). Doing them hungover and dehydrated, only made it much, much worse. But were were also trying to hide being hung over.

Once I found I didn't need parent's permission, as I wasn't eighteen (I thought I did it and my mother previously made it quite clear she wouldn't give her permission), I really had to do it. 

Finally, we were ready to go, our hours of training complete, we suited up, packed up and climbed into the plane with two others, the three of us and Jesse our Jumpmaster. And the pilot, of course.

I remember someone asking, "Do you know what position you are in?" As we were all scrunched up together in the cramped cargo space, on our knees, in order to get the most jumpers on a dive as possible. 

I said, "No" and they replied, "The preying position." Ha ha. Everyone laughed, Jesse grimaced at the newbie abuse. Very funny. Dive humor. First timer/veteran dive humor.

After our training was done, still on the ground, the three of us noticed Jesse walking by and we all noted how attractive she was. It was hard not to be attracted to her, even though she was a bit older than us. One of the jumpers walked by, noting our interest (the guy who made the "praying position" joke later in the plane as we took off). He joked a long with us about how attractive Jesse was. Then dropped the bomb.

"You know (he smiled), her husband packs your chutes." 

We all looked at each other and swallowed (being dehydrated, with some difficulty). No more looking at Jesse with anything but respect and uh, respect, from then onward. Not that we didn't have respect from the beginning. She knew her stuff.

Skipping forward...I drove out to go jump one day without Rod and Jimmy. Not sure why, maybe they were busy.

The cloud ceiling was low, too low. Newbies like me couldn't jump, you had to be certified for that low of a jump. While I was there, a twin blade, heavy Army Chinook helicopter landed. The crew had wanted to have lunch at the restaurant by the airstrip, a bit off from the loft. Thirteen jumpers with military ID got to step off out of it that day. It was quite a site and quite a story that day. But that for another time...

But the next time I went out to go jump, I got to go. 

And it was an event... 

I jumped, static line snapped, chute was not inflating above me, slowing my descent nominally. Making things worse, I could not actually see it. The risers connecting me to the canopy had crossed against the back of my neck so I could only stare at my chest, where lay my chin just above where the emergency chute sitting all nice and tightly secured to me, ready for instant deployment which I was now supposed to use; oh, and of course that hard ground 3,000 feet below, beyond the chute on my chest, with its great grouping of tiny, tiny fenced off meadowland that was currently floating gently up toward me at about maybe 100 miles an hour. 

I could see it all between my dangling feet. But that was then.

Back to Jimmy's, Rod's and my first jump... 

After you jump out of the plane, you're supposed to take proper form to keep from tumbling terribly out of control, like Jimmy had just done, almost potentially hanging himself on the fifteen-foot static line that pulls the chute out as you fall away from the plane, for those of us not yet certified for free fall. 

You took your first long class, did your first jump, then some more jumps and eventually become certified for free fall. 

In those days, you didn't attach yourself to a jumper. It just wasn't done. It was, "weird" to consider. But the newer way doesn't tend to lose new jumpers, so... 

The two veteran jumpers (including the jokester) went first. No problems, no issues. 

Jimmy looked pretty scared as he got situated in the open door. He looked up at me and the look on his face was one I'd never seen before, or after. But hey, he didn't hesitate, she hit his leg, said, "Go!" and he jumped. However, as he existed, Jesse nearly leaped out the door, freaking both Rod and I out. She hung there for a while staring at--something. It was freaking me out. What the hell was going on with Jimmy?!!

Finally, she noticeably relaxed and pulled herself back in. Looking back at us, saw the looks on our faces. We asked what happened. She hesitated, then leaned in toward us and, maybe saw it as a learning moment. 

"He did what we taught you not to do," Jesse said. "He didn't flare properly and started to tumble. I was afraid he'd wrap up in the static line. I've seen it before. If that happens you can get it around your foot, or worse, around your neck and get dragged. If it doesn't kill you, you're just being dragged behind the plane."

"Then what?" I asked. She said, "Then the jumpmaster, me, has to climb down and clear you for hopefully a good fall. But he cleared the line and his chute opened. He's fine. OK. So...next." She looked at Rod. He looked back at me with a big smile on his face, the worry he'd had for Jimmy now washed away.

Rod crawled over to the door. I always held Jimmy in high regard, maybe a bit intimidated by him being the older brother, but he was always the nicest guy. I had assumed that day that he'd bravely exit the plane, and Rod might be the one feeling a bit tenuous about jumping. 

I don't know why I thought that. I think it was more about Jimmy being one way, than Rod being another. But Rod got just into position, then turned once situated outside the plane, looked Jesse, then back at me with absolutely no fear on his face, just great gusto and a big smile. 

I'm not now sure if he did, but I remember him giving a big thumbs up and then focused on thee task at hand, outside the plane. Jesse said something to the pilot, he responded. She looked at Rod and nodded, he nodded back and finally hit him on the leg, and said "GO!"

And he was gone. Mind you, being almost last wore on one's nerve. Seeing what I had just seen, also had. I think had I gone first, or before Jimmy, I would (maybe) have been fine.

Jesse closely watched Rod release his grip in fearlessness, and in perfect form. She turned to me and gave me a thumbs up and a smile. All was good. Just the opposite of what I would have expected as Jimmy always seemed fearless to me. I felt a great relief, except that, I suddenly realized, I was next. 

That shifted the entire world for me in that moment.

For myself, it wouldn't normally be a problem. I'd hung off cliffs in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, and all kinds of crazy stuff years before in Civil Air Patrol on search and rescue maneuvers. I had my SCUBA license. SCUBA takes a different kind of bravery. As does repelling down a cliffside. Or climbing up one. But I'd always been like a fish in water, as my mom liked to say. 

So, I climbed out of the plane, finding it harder than I'd expected to place my foot on that tiny, TINY footpeg, hanging outside the plane, my right leg just dangling there in the propwash of the plane at a slow 100MPH, and looking down through 3,000 feet of--nothingness. 

Then Jesse our jumpmaster hit my leg and said, "GO!" Good grief.

So, of course, bravely I did what all courageous types did. Right? I hesitated, then--looked back up at her from what I found an awkward and uncomfortable position and said bravely, "WHAT!?" It was the only thing I could think of to distract and delay from my position.

She looked at me--incredulous. But fully understanding what stage of fear I was involved with at that moment. Mind you, every second of delay puts a jumper either closer to, or farther away from the LZ (landing zone), and that 10' circle of pea gravel that is the target everyone wants to land on. And few do.

Also, my delay changing the calculus for where I will land, was also changing her own. Something not quite on my mind at that time.

"GO!" she said and knowingly hit me again on the back of my thigh. I pulled my eyes from hers and looked forward, seeing my hands gripping the strut and the spinning propeller further forward, and thought, "I am NOT losing that 30 bucks because I rode the plane back down." That seemed to move me more than anything else. Then I wondered how to trick myself to do what I wanted. I thought, "I only need to relax one of my fingers and then the next..." That didn't work.

Then I thought, just go limp, stop gripping. Make your hands go limp and--it happened.

The plane leaped forward, out of my grasp as my grip failed and I realized I had let go and the plane was gone. 

Swimming back toward the plane, it quickly didn't appear to be working. I looked up for what I was trying to achieve (the plane) and realized was already out of my site. That subsumed my thoughts. Where the hell did the plane go? Which was when I realized that the static line had snapped and the chute was pulled out. 

However....

It was all quite hard to miss, the culmination of all that drama.

As I fell away form the plane, I remember, Count. "One thousand one. One thousand two. One... oh screw it!" My eyes were shut tight. I hoped for an opening. I heard the snap, an odd sound of the canopy deploying in a stream of nylon and then, the chute inflating and a slowing down. I opened my eyes. I looed up at a beautiful fully inflated canopy, and smiled. 

Then I looked below me and realized I was like 3,000 feet in the air dangling my feet. It was terrifying. But nothing bad happened. I breathed. After a minute I realized the absolute silence. The beauty all around me. I relaxed and enjoyed the ride that seemed to take forever. I noticed the tiny fenced areas of the farmland. I feared being lost. How the hell would I know which to aim for?

As I descended, I was eventually able to pick out the pea gravel LZ and people and I was headed right for it. The groundmaster was moving his arms, guiding me in. I manipulated my toggle left and right I could clearly see no one had landed in the LZ but off to the side. Except for me.

Which actually went quite smoothly and I actually hit the ten foot wide target of pea gravel. I was exhilarated. After all, I was the only one that jump who hit the target. The other more experienced jumpers already on the ground had all missed. And Jimmy and Rod, of course. Which happens, as the jumpmaster in the plane can only zero in on one or a few jumpers to hit the target as the plane is continuing on in a line at about 100 miles per hour. The new "square" chutes make this less an issue now a days.

When I realized the ground was coming up faster than I expected hitting pea gravel is a definite and softer benefit. As I found out on my second jump. The groundmaster nodded and said, "Gather your chute." So I did. But before I got my harness off, I knelt down and kissed the ground. I thought it funny, but also kind of meant it. I was glad to be on the ground. I looked over at the groundmaster who had a very disgusted look on his fast as he turned and walked back to guide our Jumpmaster Jesse down. 

I got my harness off and--first jump completed. I walked over to Rod and Jimmy and needless to see, we were all pretty pumped up and pleased with ourselves. No one felt our hangovers. That came after the adrenalin wore off.

But getting back to that second jump...

Once out of the plane, this time I was proud of myself that I counted the full 6 count. Then tried to look up to assure myself the canopy I heard deploy, was fully inflated and function. But something wasn't letting me look up. I couldn't move my head upward. That was weird.

What I missed most seeing was what that chute above my head was doing because. And frankly, I didn't seem to be slowing down. Count to six, look up, check the chute opened, make a decision. 

You either relax and enjoy the ride down. Or do some emergency stuff like cut away from the failed chute, releasing the connectors to the risers connected between the harness and the canopy, then just pop the emergency chute by pulling the ripcord handle on the canvass wrapped bump of nylon on your chest.

I began to consider feeling stressed out, but I had been told you only have about ten seconds to make a decision on what to do in a situation like that and at that altitude. So I really didn't have the time to stress out. Or be afraid. Which I thought I would save for either just before I impacted the ground, or just after I landed and somehow, continued living against all odds. 

Which, actually, I was kind of counting on.

Also, my hangover seemed to magically dissolve away. I guess adrenalin does that.

I remember thinking I needed to break away, pop the emergency chute; but then a thought broke into my consciousness. The realization that if I pop the chute, "I don't have $2.50 for an emergency chute repack." That would be embarrassing. So, I thought...I bet I could fix this. It's just twisted. If I could just get this one to work, the deployed one, I mean, it's just sitting there, out, but not inflated, then; no sense in being embarrassed. And that would really suck." 

Right. OK, then.

I did the obvious thing, what anyone might do. Right? No?

I tried to pull apart the risers so I could snap my head back. It was then I realized just how much strength it took to keep the risers apart for more than a second or two as they were supporting all my weight. It was too much. I had to let them snap back into place. My head still down. Pinned down, taking my agency from me, out of my control. I refused to let that defeat me and I was rapidly running out of time. 

At which point, I put all my strength into it and pulled them apart enough I could slip my helmeted head back and it went back further than I'd expected and I had to let the risers go. They snapped into place and now I found I was now staring straight up at the streaming tube-like, "cigarette roll" (as they call those malfunctions); a funny looking arrangement of a Hell of a lot of 1.1 rip-stop nylon NOT inflating and there, far beyond that, a truly beautiful, silent, blue sky.

Technically, this type of "function" as they liked to call them (I discovered a few years later with PJs when I was a parachute rigger in the USAF), is known as a "compression twist", but at the time, I really wasn't caring what the correct technical term for it was. 

Apparently, it can happen when you twist the chute as you put it into the pack during repack, so when it extracts it spirals and compresses, holding itself in a tube shape, so it can't inflate as air has no entryway into the canopy.

I noticed that it was really quite quiet falling like that through the sky. 

Except for this one noise, and what was that anyhow as it was getting quickly getting louder as I fell? I thought about it for a moment (just part of a second, don't worry) and realized finally that it was me, passing through the air, at drag decreased terminal velocity only 100 miles an hour (go ahead, stick your head out the window of your car at 100 mph some time, and you'll see what I mean). Full termina velocity is around 120MPH, but the tube above me was causing drag, slowing me down a bit.

There were some other minor sounds from material flapping, or loose harness webbing, but other than that, just the screaming of the air shooting past my ears that seemed to take up the majority of my attention. 

Funny how time slows as you're about to die...

At about that point, head was stuck back, the risers were holding my helmet back, I realized that I could have it either way, head forward and down or back looking up, but not easily transition between the two extremes. I hadn't expected that. 

So, I figured, well? I might as well try to fix it. I may have no choice at this point. Besides, I didn't really want to watch my knees being shoved up into my hips should it come to that. Wait, no, I wouldn't be able to see that, would I, not in this position.

I figured I'd feel it either way though. No sense in evoking sensory overload, ya know?

It was at that moment that I thought to put into play all my brilliance and act accordingly. So, I did the only thing I could think to do, what I thought in the first place, and pulled the risers apart as wide as I could with all my strength for as long as I could and hope that worked. Seemed like it should.

So the chute above me could then open at the bottom to inflate and I could just sit there happily and relaxed and watch the show of a colorful spectacle of yards of nylon spinning rapidly around up above me, so that it could open to its full and glorious (likely a) 32-foot modified round, TU-slotted flat circular, standard static-line gear of the day). I was surprised as I pulled them apart, that I was actually able to hold them far apart after a certain distance when it got easier, and again, I think some of it was the adrenalin. 

And that was when the amazing happened. But shouldn't have been the surprising. A parachute nickname is "air anchor." Should I have expected the chute to spin? Or... 

I wasn't considering a small, overlooked item. That being physics. You see, when you have above you an "air anchor" and try to move it against that of say 180 pounds of dead weight plus gear, well, the larger "air anchor" wins every time and the dead weight (yes, me) spins instead.

At which point I began to spin uncontrollably as the inflating parachute above instead got to watch my spectacle with feet flying out from centrifugal force as I did a strange little meat puppet twirl.

Unbeknownst to me, not so far below on the ground, down there beneath me at the LZ, the other jumpers, and our groundmaster--were watching in shared fascination and sheer horror. But I wasn't thinking of them. I was busy on my carnival ride.

"Why in the Hell isn't he cutting away and deploying his reserve!" The groundmaster wondered. He who controls guiding you in and the ground LZ, as Jesse handled the issues in the planet leading up to the jump.

Fascinated, they watched the display of me spinning, after having not broken away from the malfunctioning main chute sooner and using the reserve chute; and in horror at having lived moments that felt like hours to the more experienced jumpers as they watched the far more inexperienced sky diver (my esteemed self) not breaking away from the "compression twist" (something that has killed many sky divers and especially first-time parachutists for nearly a hundred years or more).

The groundmaster saw EVERYTHING and was not pleased with me. Something he made painfully clear once it was understood I was good and back on the ground, alive, mostly.

I had a grand finale as I snapped to and stopped spinning quite suddenly. I was a little dizzy and I had to let my eyes catch up to my head and allow my vision to focus again, but I was very happy to note that I no longer heard any high speed winds, and that above me (yes, I could now look up quite easily through the now uncrossed risers) there was finally a beautiful open and fully inflated canopy doing what it was meant to do: slow descent to a reasonable and much more fun speed.

I was now able to enjoy a quiet, and incredible view of a descent, with a massive panorama of the entire region below me with Mt Rainier in the distance. It seemed to last forever, until I got within about 40-50 feet of the ground at which point, things seemed to increase in speed and the culmination of the jump. That being, the landing.

Remember, on my first jump I was the only one who hit the pea gravel. So of course, I wanted to do it again. I was headed right for it. The groundmaster was guiding me not in the direction I wanted so I did what I wanted. I could see he was gesticulating frantically but I was concentrating on my pulling the risers and I overshot the pea gravel, something he knew clearly, I was going to do. 

I pulled hard on one riser and I thought I could spiral down back to the target gravel. But I kept going forward too much and as I spun around a wind caught the chute and spun me harder. Think bucket of water on a rope you spin around and centrifugal force keeps the water in the bucket.

But essentially what it meant for me was that I was gaining momentum in that spin at the end of those ropes until the road running through the meadow was rising to meet me far to fast. I slammed into it, but at an angle. My combat boot encased feet hit first, as they hit the ground the split down the sides, my body hit at such an angle there was no good way to cushion my slamming into the rocks and dirt of that road. 

After creaming into the road, I lost my happy feeling pretty quickly as the pain spread throughout me from my feet to my upper body. I just lied there in pain. The groundmaster ran over to me and asked if I was OK. Embarrassed I said yes, but do something about this chute! He said just pop a riser. I did and the chute deflated. I asked if he could help get my helmet off and he did. I just lied there in the dirt feeling like an idiot. A painful one at that. 

He asked if I was OK. I said, yes. He asked if I I was sure. I just yes, I'm fine, it hurts, but I'm OK, just let me lie here for a while. He asked again, are you sure you're OK? I looked at him oddly and said, Yes, why? He pointed at my boots. I looked down and say the leather had split down the sides. I was surprised but I just said, Yeah I don't know what that's about but I'm good.

He nodded and said, "OK, but when you're ready, I want to talk to you." I just nodded and put my head back in the dirt, staring at the sky as he walked away.

After about fifteen minutes, I got up, humiliated and walked over to the groundmaster wherein he "tore me a new one," and made it clear as you approach the LZ the groundmaster is in control and you DO whatever he indicates. He asked if I knew there was a draft running along that road. I said no. He said that's why you got slammed into the ground. I said I just wanted to turn and hit the pea gravel. He said you never had a chance at that, I was giving you your best path down. ALWAYS LISTEN TO YOUR GROUNDMASTER! Got it!?"

Yeah, I got it. I also didn't walk right for a week or so after that. I didn't need a better reminder.

Then he asked what I was thinking in not breaking away from a defective deployment. I said I thought I could fix it. He made it clear, you don't fix it you break away. Safety first. I wanted to explain to him I wasn't just some 17 year old who didn't know anything but I'd been in a lot of dangerous situation and trained to fix problems in real time. I had first responder first aid training. All kinds of things like that but--thought it best to bite my tongue and just, nod yes.

Also, I said, I didn't have $2.50 for an emergency chute repack. 

That stunned everyone within hearing range. Jesse had landed a few minutes before and was nearby packing up her chute and leaned over to me and said don't do that again. OK? She made it clear, that rather than go through what they just witnessed, with a new jumper (again, no tandem jumps back then), they would all have been happy to pitch in to pay the cost of a repack for the emergency chute. I was humbled looking around and everyone was nodding in agreement. 

Once again, Life was good.

Thinking back on it, that wasn't as stressful as this past week has been for me; that week that I would one time experienced, some several decades later.

No matter how intense things feel right now? You can almost always count on them getting more intense later.

Makes you think.

You know?

Oh. And here's the funny thing. 

I looked up who Jesse was and is today and found her! She's a world-class record-breaking sky diver who at 77 made her 23 when I knew her:

It's just total freedom': At 77, Washington skydiver Jessie Farrington sees no need to quit.

The Budget Was Never the Point

Here's a factual rundown of the major actions and disputes since January 2025 that critics have pointed to in this context. 

Let's lay out what's documented, and flag where the "heading toward martial law" framing is a rapidly becoming settled fact—supporters of these policies generally offer different justifications (border security, bureaucratic efficiency, executive authority under existing law), so they can continue their actions even their supporters would be again. It offers them cover, as thinly veiled as it is to most of us.

Executive power and independent agencies

• Trump fired multiple independent agency officials without the "for cause" protections Congress had written into their statutes (e.g., FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter). The Supreme Court's June 2026 ruling overturning Humphrey's Executor upheld this, significantly expanding presidential removal power over agencies previously insulated from direct White House control.
• Large-scale reclassification of career civil servants under "Schedule F"-style rules, stripping job protections from tens of thousands of federal employees and making them easier to fire for political reasons.
• Mass firings/reductions across federal agencies (including inspectors general removed early in the term without the statutorily required 30-day notice to Congress).

Military and law enforcement deployment domestically

• National Guard deployed to Los Angeles in June 2025 over the objection of California's governor—the first time since 1965 a state's Guard was federalized without gubernatorial consent. This is the single most-cited data point in "martial law" discussions, since the Insurrection Act (not invoked here, but discussed publicly as an option) would be the legal mechanism for a much broader military role in domestic law enforcement.
• Increased ICE enforcement activity, including reports of ICE personnel near polling places ahead of the 2026 midterms, which the White House press office did not directly deny when asked.

Courts and judicial independence

• Arrest of a sitting Wisconsin state judge (Hannah Dugan) by federal authorities in April 2025—the first arrest of a sitting judge by the FBI since the 1930s—after she allegedly obstructed an immigration arrest in her courtroom. Judicial independence groups called this an alarming precedent regardless of the underlying facts.
• Public attacks on judges who ruled against administration policies, and instances of the administration slow-walking or contesting compliance with court orders in immigration cases.

Press, universities, and civil society

• Funding fights and settlement pressure campaigns against universities (Harvard being the highest-profile case, ending in a reported $1 billion settlement) over civil-rights and DEI-related disputes.
• Law firms that represented Trump's opponents or handled cases against the administration faced targeted executive orders threatening their federal contracts and security clearances; several firms cut deals to avoid this.
• Detentions of foreign students/green-card holders over pro-Palestinian campus protest activity (Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia among the most publicized), which immigration and civil-liberties groups characterized as speech-based retaliation.

Immigration enforcement expansion

• Expanded use of expedited removal, narrowed asylum eligibility (including for claims based on domestic/intimate-partner violence), and reported use of racial profiling in enforcement, according to human rights organizations.
• Termination of Temporary Protected Status for large populations (e.g., Haitian TPS holders), which rights groups project will sharply increase ICE activity.

Election-related

• Public statements from Trump and allies (including commentator Steve Bannon) raising the possibility of contesting 2026 midterm results in advance, and pushing for a national voter-ID executive order tied to the SAVE Act if Congress didn't pass it—moves election-integrity watchdogs flagged as groundwork for disputing results they don't like.

A note on the framing itself

The specific claim that these actions are "meant to lead to martial law" is an interpretation advanced by advocacy groups (Human Rights Watch, Protect Democracy, the ACLU-adjacent press, and opinion writers)—it isn't something the administration has stated as intent, and no formal martial law declaration or Insurrection Act invocation has occurred as of this writing. 

But why would the administration state their intended goals when it is martial law and autocracy? 

Why even bring that up under these conditions?

That's a fair epistemological point, and it deserves a real answer.

While Trump is actually pursuing autocratic consolidation, he would have every reason to describe it as something else—"security," "efficiency," "restoring order." Stated intent is not reliable evidence either way; that's true of any actor with something to hide, and it's also true, less dramatically, of normal politicians who routinely dress up self-interested or power-consolidating moves in public-interest language. 

So we can't say "they didn't call it autocracy, therefore it isn't" as they wish to have happen—but that is a weak inference and simply doesn't hold up.

They have used the guise of bringing the budge under control to cover their actions and give them ever lessening ability to do these actions.

There's a real, documentable version of that argument, worth laying out plainly:

DOGE-style cuts and Schedule F reclassification were framed as fiscal efficiency, but the practical effect was gutting the independent civil service protections and inspector-general oversight that historically made it harder for any administration to politicize agencies. 

Efficiency and control aren't mutually exclusive—cutting an inspector general's office saves money and removes a watchdog simultaneously.

Even former DOGE members now admit their sheer ignorance and utter stupidity in their blind cuts of important institutions.

Several of the agencies hit hardest (CFPB, parts of the IRS, oversight offices) are ones that specifically constrain executive or corporate power, not just generic "waste." Reasonable critics argue that if this were purely about budget discipline, cuts would track cost-per-function more evenly rather than disproportionately hitting oversight and enforcement bodies.

Thought would have gone into it, planning, wise actions by those with knowledge of what was or needed to be done would have been involved, rather than marched out of their buildings, jobs and careers.

The Humphrey's Executor reversal wasn't a budget matter at all—it was about removal power over agency heads—but it arrived alongside the "shrink government" push and had the effect of making independent agencies dependent on presidential will rather than statutory insulation, regardless of their size or spending.

Timing: several of these moves (inspector general firings without the legally required 30-day notice, mass reclassification) happened in the first weeks of the term, before any serious budget analysis could plausibly have been done, which is consistent with the idea that "cost-cutting" was the vehicle rather than the driver.

The complicating factors

Every administration frames cuts to agencies it dislikes as fiscal responsibility—that's not unique to this one, and it doesn't by itself prove bad faith. Reagan's OMB, Clinton's "reinventing government," and others made similar arguments about entrenched bureaucracy, with a similar mix of genuine efficiency rationale and political convenience.

But then Reagan was the patron saint of the end result of much of what the Republican Party is today under Donald Trump, utterly ignoring his furter intent of his malignant narcissism and ill intent toward our government and citizens, who do not blinding support him. He has surrounded himself with "yes-men" which is always the alarm and eventual death knoll of dying democracies, being murdered in their own cradle of government. 

It is also how autocracies self-immolate, eventually. 

For to be told all the time that everything you are doing is great, that "all is well", when it is clearly not and the masses are actually rising against you (as they are now), is sheer suicide.

Some cuts have been reversed or blocked by courts, and some inspectors general were reinstated after litigation—meaning the legal system has at points functioned as a check, which cuts against a "budget as cover for unchecked power grab" story being fully successful, even if it was the attempt.

We are thankful for our courts and judges who have stood against this move to autocracy, with little or no thanks to those toxically conservative Justices on SCOTUS today

Whether removing statutory insulation from agencies is itself illegitimate is actually contested on the merits, separate from motive—"unitary executive theory" is a real, decades-old legal position (not invented for this purpose) holding that this insulation was constitutionally dubious to begin with. 

So even sympathetic critics of Trump specifically have disagreed among themselves about whether the Humphrey's Executor outcome is a power grab or a correction of an old constitutional error.

Net: I think it's fair to say "budget discipline" has functioned as a permission structure that made some of these moves politically easier to sell and legally easier to defend, whether or not that was the primary motive going in. 

Whether it was designed as cover from the start (it was), versus opportunistically exploited once cuts started producing convenient side effects (that too obviously happened), isn't something easily settled for many, sadly—but the pattern described here (nominal fiscal rationale, disproportionate impact on oversight/independence rather than generic cost centers) is a real and observed one, not a fringe read of the record.

When bringing into all this the Trump/MaGA/GOP toxic conservative game plan, Project 2025 and Trump's continuing claims of a 3rd or 4th presidential term, it all becomes rather clear rather quickly.

When you add in things like the Trump administration firing those in cybersecurity, so many expert throughout our government, all as we are being attacked from international enemies, like Iran, in retaliation for a war Trump needlessly started to distract yet again from the Epstein files release, needlessly attacking other countries (as in Venezuela) after having run on a political platform of "no more war," "no more forever wars", it all becomes ever more clear exactly what he is doing. And who and what he is. 

A grifter. A career criminal. A documented serial and malignant career liar with unhealthy personality issues.

WHY America is sitting so idly by watching this man tear apart America, and our American government without acting, without removing him ASAP, or faster, is quite beyond not only the "pale", but the spirit of America under the guise of remaining America. 

Iran is attacking our water systems, remotely.

And Trump's claim is what? 

That state's Democratic leadership is incompetent.

It's ludicrous and only makes blatantly clear, Donald Trump is our greatest and domestic enemy and those not telling him the truth, too busy saying "Yes, sir" always, while enabling his demise of our American government and protections, is becoming ever harder to deny.

We are fooling ourselves. We have given ourselves a truly incompetent leader, after decades of conservatives claiming Democratic leaders are, that anyone but themselves are the ones who are truly incompetent.

We are being fooled. 

We are allowing it to happen.

We do not have to do that.

Not by a long shot.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

The "Rifle Shot" on a Calm Saturday Morning

I heard what sounded like a rifle shot this Saturday morning, and then all my power went out.

No wind. No storm. No branch down across a line. Just a sharp, flat crack from the pole outside my house, and then the particular silence of a home with no hum in it — no HVAC, no refrigerator compressor, no soft whir from the office down the hall. I've lived on the Kitsap Peninsula for nine years now, and this is the third transformer I've watched blow in that span. Three, on a property that isn't unusually large, isn't unusually loaded, and isn't served by some ancient spur line nobody's looked at since Eisenhower. Just an ordinary house that happens to sit under a piece of equipment that keeps failing.

The easy story — the one the utility will tell you if you call it in — is that this is weather. Old wiring, coastal damp, wind events, the occasional falling limb. And sure, sometimes that's exactly what it is, and there's not much to be done about a tree deciding to come down mid-gust. But a calm Saturday morning with clear skies doesn't fit that story. What blew today wasn't the weather's fault. Something inside that can finally gave out — insulation that had been quietly degrading for who knows how long, a connection that had been arcing in secret, a unit carrying more load than it was ever sized for. And nobody knew, because nobody was looking.

That's the part that should bother you more than the bang did.

Most pole-mounted transformers are dumb. No sensors, no telemetry, nothing reporting back to anyone. A utility typically finds out something's wrong in one of two ways: a scheduled visual inspection that might happen once every several years, or a customer calling in because their power just went out and their house sounded like a gun range for a second. That second method is, functionally, the maintenance plan. You are the sensor. Your blown modem is the diagnostic report.

And here's the thing — that's not because the alternative is impossible or even particularly expensive anymore. Retrofit monitoring points that track a transformer's temperature, load, and internal condition now run somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars per unit, no substation-grade infrastructure required. Utilities that have actually deployed this kind of monitoring at scale aren't finding it a wash — they're finding it saves money outright, because a proactive swap is a bucket-truck and an hour, while a reactive one after a bang like today's is an emergency dispatch, a longer outage, and often more damage to the hardware itself. 

One Texas utility that built a proactive monitoring program using data it already had access to caught thousands of failing units before they failed and credited the program with saving millions of dollars and avoiding millions of minutes of customer outages. This isn't speculative technology. It's being done, today, by utilities that decided the juice was worth the squeeze.

So why isn't it standard? Because of whose ledger the costs land on. The utility's replacement cost is visible, budgeted, and rate-based — spending on infrastructure is literally how regulated utilities get compensated. What isn't on that ledger is my modem, my router, whatever's plugged into the wall in the office that didn't get the chance to shut down gracefully, the reset clocks, the food in a freezer if the outage runs long enough, the afternoon lost waiting for a crew. None of that is the utility's expense. 

It's mine. It's yours. It's the neighbor's whose sump pump picked exactly the wrong week to need power. Add up nine years of that, times however many households sit downstream of aging equipment nobody's proactively checking, and the "cheaper to fix it when it breaks" math only works because most of the actual cost has been quietly handed to the customers standing under the pole.

Meanwhile the load on these systems keeps climbing. Every efficiency gain we get from newer appliances is getting eaten by more devices per household and, increasingly, an EV or two charging overnight on a transformer that was sized for a much smaller world. A unit that was marginal a decade ago may simply not be adequate now — and again, nobody's watching that shift happen in real time unless they've chosen to.

I don't think this is a mystery or a conspiracy. It's an incentive problem, plain and ordinary. The party that decides whether to monitor and replace proactively isn't the party that eats the cost of guessing wrong. Until that changes — through regulation, through customer pressure, through utilities deciding reliability data is worth collecting before the bang instead of after — a rifle shot on a calm Saturday morning is going to keep being the way I find out my transformer was tired.

Three for nine years now. I'd like a fourth to not happen.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

---

JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington. 

He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.

If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.

Trump Countdown Clock: Days Until Our GOP National Nightmare Ends

 

End of Trumpism, End of MaGAism

End of Toxic Conservatism in Power

End of this Toxic Republican Party

End of America's stupid experiment in Authoritarianism

Someone posted to this that we need action, not just dates.
True, this is merely something to shoot for. Sooner if possible.

But it helps to have a goal. A date. A time.

And then shoot for sooner.

Merely waiting for this to be over, does NOTHING.

Act.

Our national nightmare, on the clock...

Term's End

— — —

until noon, January 20, 2029

The Indictments

— — —

until DOJ leadership no longer answers to him, January 21, 2029

In this tine of "Corporate Thought" meaning no morals, no ethics, profit over all else, disinformation, post-truth, toxic conservatism, etc., our government no longer functions correctly due to having been set up with a consideration that people would not stoop as low as we have seen today's American conservatism and Republicans have. 

Thus, we bow need corrections.

Here's a rundown of the institutional reforms that necessary in a post Trump-era of toxic GOP governance and the current SCOTUS (and some conservative judges) have pushed, organized by branch. 

Presidency / executive power

• Codify limits on the pardon power for self-dealing or obstructing investigations into the president's own conduct
• Close the "major questions doctrine" and emergency-powers loopholes that let presidents bypass Congress via executive order
• Strengthen the Impoundment Control Act so a president can't unilaterally withhold appropriated funds
• Clarify and narrow presidential immunity after the Trump v. United States ruling, since critics argue it created near-blanket immunity for "official acts"
• Restore independence of inspectors general and agency heads (FBI, DOJ, intelligence community) with for-cause removal protections that can't be gutted by executive order
• Tighten the Hatch Act and anti-nepotism/emoluments enforcement with real penalties

Congress

• Restore the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act gutted by Shelby County v. Holder
• Pass federal redistricting standards to curb partisan gerrymandering
• Reform the filibuster for voting rights and basic governance bills (budget, debt ceiling)
• Tighten conflict-of-interest and stock-trading rules for members of Congress
• Restore and strengthen congressional oversight tools (subpoena enforcement mechanisms with teeth, since agencies currently can just ignore them)
• Campaign finance reform addressing Citizens United, likely via a constitutional amendment given the Court's current posture

Supreme Court / judiciary

• 18-year staggered term limits for justices, ending lifetime tenure
• A binding, enforceable ethics code (the current one has no enforcement mechanism)
• Some form of court expansion or jurisdiction-stripping on specific issues, though this is the most contested item even among reform advocates
• Stricter recusal rules tied to financial disclosures
• Reversing or legislating around specific rulings (Dobbs, Trump v. United States, Chevron's overturn in Loper Bright) through statute where possible

Broader democratic guardrails

• Insulate election administration and certification from partisan interference (building on the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022)
• Statehood or representation reform for DC and territories
• Independent redistricting commissions as a national standard

I wish us all well going forward once sanity returns and corporate thinking is back under control.

Power to the people, not power to only the powerful few.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!